0:00:03 When the sex falls away, it can become a serious problem.
0:00:06 And the largest study done on the quality of sex
0:00:09 with 70,000 people in 24 countries
0:00:11 found the differences between people who say they have a great sex life
0:00:13 and have an awful sex life
0:00:14 has to do with…
0:00:15 Really?
0:00:16 That’s right.
0:00:19 Doctors John and Julie Gottman are world-renowned psychologists
0:00:22 and researchers who have studied over 40,000 couples
0:00:23 written over 50 books
0:00:27 and helped millions of people find and stay in love for over 50 years.
0:00:30 People don’t know how to have good relationships.
0:00:32 So, they’ve got so many questions.
0:00:33 I’ll start from the top.
0:00:34 What are we getting wrong?
0:00:37 Well, first of all, most people are living under the myth
0:00:40 that you have to be compatible with a partner,
0:00:42 which is absolutely wrong.
0:00:43 And this is really interesting.
0:00:44 This is a t-shirt study
0:00:46 where women smelled t-shirts
0:00:48 that have been worn by men for at least two days
0:00:50 and selected the ones they thought smelled the best.
0:00:52 And they found that they were selecting the men
0:00:55 that were as most divergent from them genetically
0:00:57 rather than people who were like them.
0:01:00 Because we’re not really turned on by our clone.
0:01:02 And there isn’t a one.
0:01:04 Looking for the one is a big mistake.
0:01:07 What about how do I become the most attractive version of me
0:01:08 if I’m looking for a partner?
0:01:09 That’s a great question.
0:01:10 And this is what you do.
0:01:12 This is a difficult question to ask,
0:01:15 but have you ever seen cheating help a relationship?
0:01:17 Oh, very, very often.
0:01:18 Really?
0:01:19 When there’s recovery.
0:01:21 But can it be treated?
0:01:24 75% so far in our research.
0:01:25 Wow.
0:01:26 We developed a model.
0:01:28 And here’s what it involves first.
0:01:41 John, Julie, why do you both do what you do?
0:01:44 I love that question.
0:01:48 One has to define what we do.
0:01:49 And there are many things that we do.
0:01:51 First of all, I love to write.
0:01:53 That’s great.
0:01:55 I’ve been helping people since I was eight years old,
0:01:57 for some odd reason.
0:02:03 And I love, love, love connecting with people
0:02:05 and loving them through their pain.
0:02:08 That’s why I do what I do.
0:02:11 And would you call yourself as a clinical psychologist?
0:02:12 Isn’t that your official title?
0:02:13 Yes.
0:02:13 OK.
0:02:15 John, could you answer the same question,
0:02:17 which is why do you do what you do?
0:02:18 And I guess what do you do?
0:02:21 Well, to me, it’s really an interesting puzzle
0:02:25 to try to understand what makes relationships work
0:02:28 and what makes groups work,
0:02:32 what makes people be cooperative
0:02:35 versus competitive selfish and mean,
0:02:38 what makes them be altruistic and empathetic,
0:02:44 what makes relationships become sources of longevity
0:02:48 and health versus illness and loneliness and despair.
0:02:50 So for me, it’s a puzzle.
0:02:52 And it’s fun to work on a puzzle.
0:02:54 And what do you do?
0:02:59 I measure things accurately and reliably
0:03:04 and then really just kind of see where the data fall out.
0:03:10 So it’s really applying statistics and measurement
0:03:14 and good math to try to understand processes
0:03:15 that are going on between people.
0:03:22 With this really ultimate question of what makes relationships work
0:03:24 and what makes groups work,
0:03:29 what makes humans cooperative and magnificent at their best
0:03:34 versus selfish, greedy, and functioning at their worst.
0:03:38 So it’s curiosity that drives me.
0:03:38 That’s all.
0:03:42 And collectively, how many people do you think
0:03:47 you’ve studied, researched, treated, worked with
0:03:51 in your practice over the last however many decades?
0:03:54 Well, we’ve done research on 40,000 couples
0:03:58 about to start couple therapy using questionnaires
0:04:01 and then more intensely using physiology
0:04:05 and objective rating of emotional behavior
0:04:09 about 3,000 couples followed over time as long as 20 years.
0:04:13 And how many books have you collectively written, Julie?
0:04:18 I think we’re on 51, but I’m not sure.
0:04:20 I’ve lost that one.
0:04:24 Where I wanted to start with this conversation
0:04:27 is really with, I guess, the subjective relationships
0:04:30 but how we find and form them in the modern society
0:04:32 because when you look at the stats,
0:04:34 despite the incredible work you’ve done
0:04:35 over the last couple of decades,
0:04:39 it doesn’t seem that we’re better at finding
0:04:41 and keeping relationships than ever before.
0:04:44 Especially if you look at non-romantic relationships,
0:04:47 loneliness and isolation are at absolute all-time highs.
0:04:50 And the technology that was invented
0:04:52 over the last couple of decades came with a promise
0:04:54 which was that it was going to connect us,
0:04:56 but it doesn’t seem to have succeeded.
0:04:59 So I really want to start by answering this question
0:05:03 about how people find love and form those relationships
0:05:05 in the modern world and what the data says
0:05:08 and what our psychology says about where we’re going wrong.
0:05:12 I had some independent research that I found
0:05:15 that says according to the Euro Census Bureau,
0:05:18 nearly 50% of the US population are currently single.
0:05:21 According to the 2023 survey by Pew Research,
0:05:26 about 33% of men reported being single,
0:05:28 followed by 20% of women.
0:05:30 The average first marriage for men is 30 years old,
0:05:32 for women it’s about 28.
0:05:34 We’re having less sex than ever before.
0:05:37 We’re getting in relationships later than ever before.
0:05:41 Marriages still seem to break down, almost half of them.
0:05:44 And you probably know those numbers better than me.
0:05:48 And almost half of people are using dating apps,
0:05:50 but I think if you speak to anybody that uses a dating app,
0:05:53 they feel like they’re all having a bad time.
0:05:57 When we think about finding someone to love us,
0:06:00 or that we love, how much of our effort
0:06:03 should be about actively going out there
0:06:05 and putting ourselves out there, buying a new dress,
0:06:07 whatever it is, putting ourselves out there in the market
0:06:11 versus the internal work of building ourselves
0:06:13 into someone that is a magnet,
0:06:15 instead of a door-to-door salesman, you know what I mean?
0:06:18 Oh, beautiful, beautiful, yes.
0:06:25 I love your thought about developing ourselves internally,
0:06:27 because that’s what goes wrong,
0:06:29 that makes dating apps so terrible.
0:06:34 Many, many people suffer from terrible insecurity, right?
0:06:37 They feel shame, they may have been criticized a lot
0:06:41 as a kid or in their work, and as a result, they hide out.
0:06:45 They hide, and what they present to the world,
0:06:48 either through dating apps, this is very common,
0:06:53 or just even meeting people at a party, is something they’re not.
0:06:57 It’s something that they believe is the ideal,
0:06:59 but where are they getting their information?
0:07:02 They’re getting it from TV, from Hollywood,
0:07:07 from idealized heroes and heroines that are not real.
0:07:10 Also, they’re living under the myth
0:07:15 that you have to be compatible with a partner,
0:07:18 which is absolutely wrong, as Will talked about.
0:07:22 In other words, you have to have the same interests,
0:07:26 the same values, maybe the same background,
0:07:30 the same class you were raised in, and so on.
0:07:34 All of that is wrong, interestingly enough.
0:07:38 When you talk about building that internal world,
0:07:44 basically what you’re saying is, trust your own intuition,
0:07:49 trust who you are, people will come to you
0:07:52 if you are genuinely yourself, and if you’re not,
0:07:57 then people may mistake you for somebody else,
0:08:00 have an expectation of who you are,
0:08:04 and you’re inevitably going to fail that expectation,
0:08:07 which then gives you a negative experience
0:08:10 because you feel like this other person
0:08:12 is rejecting you and doesn’t like you.
0:08:15 But the reality is, they’re not rejecting you,
0:08:19 they’re rejecting this idealized portrait
0:08:23 that you tried to present to them, which is real.
0:08:26 I guess a lot of people would think when they hear that,
0:08:31 but Julie, if I show up as myself, no one’s gonna love me.
0:08:32 Yeah, that’s right.
0:08:33 Especially on a first date.
0:08:37 That’s right, that’s right, that’s the sadness.
0:08:42 People don’t believe, because of all that criticism
0:08:48 in the society, that they’re worthy of love, they don’t believe it.
0:08:53 They have to be, I don’t know what, Bruce Willis or something
0:08:58 in order to have somebody attracted to them,
0:09:01 have somebody really want to get to know them,
0:09:02 which isn’t true at all.
0:09:05 In fact, it’s the opposite.
0:09:07 What do you think of that, John?
0:09:10 Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this question of,
0:09:13 how do we find true love?
0:09:19 And part of the problem I think is that,
0:09:24 as you mentioned, loneliness is a very serious thing.
0:09:28 And so many people are lonely.
0:09:33 And part of what they haven’t done is build a friendship network
0:09:35 that can support them.
0:09:39 Friends are just so important as a precondition
0:09:41 for finding the love of your life.
0:09:46 Because the research that’s been done on strangers now shows that
0:09:54 people think that 97% of strangers, if they talk to them,
0:10:00 will be rejecting and will feel like they’re invading their privacy.
0:10:03 But the data shows that just the opposite is true,
0:10:08 that when you approach a stranger, almost 97% of the time,
0:10:11 they’re quite delighted to be contacted.
0:10:17 And they meet an initial contact with interest, enthusiasm.
0:10:22 And so talking to strangers turns out to be really a very important thing.
0:10:25 And turning a stranger into a friend,
0:10:29 turning your social networks into places that are not alienating,
0:10:35 that are places where you actually can enjoy you and company,
0:10:39 is an important prerequisite to dating.
0:10:44 So I would say you need to build that friendship network first.
0:10:46 And once you’re not lonely, you’re not desperate.
0:10:50 And then you can find somebody much more easily.
0:10:52 I think this is a really interesting point,
0:10:54 which is you finish there by saying,
0:10:56 if you’re not lonely, you’re not desperate.
0:10:59 And I was thinking as you’re talking about
0:11:03 what the most attractive version of me is to the world.
0:11:05 If I’m looking to find a partner, whether I’m a man or a woman,
0:11:11 it doesn’t sound like a desperate version of me is a very attractive version of me.
0:11:15 Right. So on this point of attraction, we’ll start with you, John,
0:11:16 and then we’ll go because we started with Julie last time.
0:11:21 What do we know about what makes people attracted to each other?
0:11:24 Like, how do I become the most attractive version of me to the world
0:11:25 if I’m looking for a partner?
0:11:28 I think everyone is really interesting and attractive,
0:11:33 as long as they’re with somebody who’s curious about them.
0:11:40 So if you’re with somebody who’s really snobby and condescending and superior,
0:11:42 nobody is at their best.
0:11:46 When you’re with somebody who’s really interested in you,
0:11:48 then you can really emerge.
0:11:51 And just about everybody is really interesting.
0:11:55 Their thoughts are unique and their background is interesting
0:12:00 and their goals and their struggles are really fascinating.
0:12:04 So I think it’s the social context
0:12:07 that makes the difference rather than the individual.
0:12:10 So the problem with dating apps, I think,
0:12:15 is that they create this very artificial situation
0:12:19 in which everyone’s being evaluated and assessed
0:12:22 and they’re swiping left, you know, all the time.
0:12:24 Well, at first, they’re not quite right, not quite right,
0:12:25 not quite right, not quite right.
0:12:30 The research of Eli Finkel shows that there’s nothing you can measure
0:12:35 in two individuals that will predict whether they like each other.
0:12:37 There’s nothing you can measure.
0:12:38 Nothing you can measure.
0:12:41 In fact, you can actually ask people
0:12:45 exactly what they’re looking for in a partner
0:12:48 and find that exact person in a large database.
0:12:53 And it’s very unlikely that they’ll like that person when they meet them.
0:12:58 Yet, if you randomly pair them with strangers,
0:13:01 22% of people like each other when they first meet.
0:13:08 I wonder about the role that self-esteem plays in attraction.
0:13:10 It’s kind of what we’re talking about with like being desperate.
0:13:12 Maybe they feel like a similar thing.
0:13:15 And I wonder if there’s any like data that supports this idea
0:13:18 that self-esteem or your self-perception
0:13:21 is this invisible force that makes you attractive or not attractive.
0:13:23 I’ve actually seen it in some of my friends, who I won’t name,
0:13:25 who started going to the gym.
0:13:28 And just because they started working on themselves,
0:13:31 it’s almost like they grew six inches.
0:13:33 Like they just were like different people.
0:13:37 A lot of attraction we think like go get the blow dry.
0:13:38 I’ll go get a better outfit.
0:13:41 But this goes back to this point about how much of it
0:13:42 is actually like do the internal work.
0:13:44 What do you think?
0:13:48 I think there’s a lot to be said for that.
0:13:48 Yeah.
0:13:50 If you have a group of friends,
0:13:54 you know, who really like you and you really like them,
0:13:57 then it’s easier to emerge.
0:14:02 And, you know, this dating situation is so artificial
0:14:06 that people are so terrified, you know, when they meet somebody.
0:14:11 And instead of approaching them with curiosity about them,
0:14:16 they’re worried that they won’t make a good impression.
0:14:19 And they’re so self-conscious of themselves,
0:14:22 rather than being curious and interested in the other person.
0:14:25 And because if they’re curious and interested in the other person,
0:14:28 you know, it doesn’t matter what happens, right?
0:14:32 I mean, you meet somebody new and you learn about them
0:14:34 and it’s an interesting experience.
0:14:36 And maybe they’re interested in you too.
0:14:39 So the dating experience is just kind of fun.
0:14:42 You know, it’s about exploring.
0:14:44 Two people exploring one another.
0:14:46 And then there’s no objective.
0:14:48 There’s no real goal there.
0:14:51 And then it’s much less artificial.
0:14:54 And then when you meet somebody you really click with,
0:14:56 that’s a wonderful experience.
0:15:02 And especially when you meet an outlier, like I met Julie,
0:15:05 I dated 60 women before I met Julie.
0:15:06 She’s number 61.
0:15:08 I had a database.
0:15:11 So I knew I met an outlier.
0:15:13 For me, she was an outlier
0:15:16 because I just loved interacting with her.
0:15:17 It was just so much fun.
0:15:23 And she was heading shoulders above any person I’d met before.
0:15:26 It’s interesting though, when people look at you too,
0:15:27 and when they look at other relationships,
0:15:29 they’ll go, okay, John, I get it.
0:15:30 So you’ve got to make a database.
0:15:32 You’ve got to wait till you find the one.
0:15:34 Right.
0:15:37 And this is often the cause of much procrastination
0:15:38 as it relates to love.
0:15:39 Everyone’s looking for the Julie.
0:15:40 You know, they’re like, come with Julie.
0:15:42 And there isn’t a one.
0:15:44 You know, that’s one of the other myths.
0:15:45 There isn’t a one.
0:15:49 And it’s funny because we’ve seen this in our research
0:15:51 on the opposite end of it.
0:15:52 And here’s what I mean.
0:15:58 Every pairing of people, no matter how wonderful they are,
0:15:59 no matter how much you love them,
0:16:04 the two of you will always have perpetual problems between you.
0:16:08 And those are based on either lifestyle
0:16:12 reference differences or personality differences always.
0:16:14 And at some point, those conflict.
0:16:18 And so, you know, what we saw in our research was,
0:16:22 you know, something like 69% of the conflicts
0:16:26 that couples suffer from or have are perpetual problems.
0:16:28 They never go away.
0:16:32 So, you know, when I have somebody coming into my office
0:16:37 that says, I want to find my soulmate, my soulmate.
0:16:39 It’s like, huh, what’s a soulmate?
0:16:44 You know, I mean, they’re you out of out of whatever in the US,
0:16:47 we have what, 350 million people.
0:16:51 There’s probably 500,000 of them
0:16:54 that you would find wonderful and attractive, right?
0:16:58 So looking for the one is a big mistake
0:17:04 because inevitably they snore at night or, you know,
0:17:06 they eat with their mouth open or, you know,
0:17:08 something that drives you crazy.
0:17:12 So, okay, so you’re not looking for the perfect person.
0:17:14 You’re not the perfect person.
0:17:16 And that’s what I was referring to earlier.
0:17:20 As, you know, let’s see each other as human beings.
0:17:22 There is no perfection.
0:17:24 We are all flawed.
0:17:27 We all have cracks in us.
0:17:31 And those can be seen as beautiful too.
0:17:34 We don’t have to be perfect to be loved.
0:17:39 Right?
0:17:39 Yeah.
0:17:40 Right.
0:17:43 It’s interesting because that marries to something
0:17:44 that I was reading about in your books
0:17:46 where you talk about how often attracted to people
0:17:48 who are very different from ourselves
0:17:50 and just the very nature that they’re different from us
0:17:52 means that there’s going to be that pretty much
0:17:53 constant conflict.
0:17:56 Why is it the case that we’re attracted to people
0:17:57 that are different from ourselves?
0:17:58 Is that true?
0:18:00 Because it doesn’t seem to make sense on the surface.
0:18:02 You’d think I would be attracted to someone
0:18:05 that likes Manchester United and, you know,
0:18:07 like my favorite food and my favorite stuff
0:18:09 because then we’ll get on like a house on fire.
0:18:11 But you’re telling me that we’re attracted to people
0:18:12 that like other things.
0:18:13 Yeah.
0:18:16 The research of Klaus Wettekin is so interesting.
0:18:19 This t-shirt study that he did
0:18:23 where women smell t-shirts that have been worn by men
0:18:26 for at least two days and selected the ones
0:18:27 they thought smelled the best.
0:18:31 They actually were selecting what Wettekin found
0:18:34 was they were selecting t-shirts of men.
0:18:38 Those pheromones were attractive.
0:18:42 The men were as most divergent from them genetically
0:18:45 just in the genes of the immune system.
0:18:49 Very divergent kinds of people
0:18:52 smelled really attractive to these women
0:18:55 rather than people who were like them.
0:18:57 And actually the experiment was done.
0:18:59 It showed they actually liked those men better
0:19:02 than other men they might have met.
0:19:04 So genetically different men.
0:19:06 Genetically different in terms of the immune system.
0:19:10 So here’s this evolutionary explanation
0:19:13 of why people are searching for somebody
0:19:14 who is really different.
0:19:17 Because we’re not really turned on by her clone.
0:19:20 We’re not turned on by people who are just like us.
0:19:22 Julie and I are vastly different.
0:19:29 She’s this adventurer, this outdoors person.
0:19:33 She loves the trees and hiking up mountain trails.
0:19:34 I’m an endorsement.
0:19:38 I like sitting in my chair and reading books on mathematics
0:19:41 and quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.
0:19:43 He’s a consummate, endorsement.
0:19:44 So we’re very different.
0:19:47 What’s the evolutionary reason then, do you think,
0:19:49 for why we like people that are different?
0:19:52 Oh, the genetic immunity.
0:19:57 So remember, it’s all about reproduction, right?
0:20:02 So if you’ve got two very divergent sets of genetics
0:20:04 in terms of the immune system,
0:20:10 that child is going to have a broader genetic base
0:20:12 as their immune system,
0:20:17 as opposed to two identical or close to it,
0:20:22 where they’d have a very narrow genetic base for immunity.
0:20:24 Is there anything else that if you were advising me,
0:20:26 if I was a single man and I was saying,
0:20:28 okay, how do I find a partner?
0:20:30 What should I be doing or looking for?
0:20:33 Should I make a list of things that I’m looking for?
0:20:36 Should I be, I don’t know.
0:20:38 You said earlier about being my authentic self
0:20:39 as much as I can be,
0:20:41 because you don’t want people to be attracted to your mask.
0:20:44 But should I be making a list?
0:20:46 Like what should I be going for?
0:20:48 Is there qualities that are enduring
0:20:51 as it relates to success in romance
0:20:52 that everyone should be looking for?
0:20:54 Should I lower my expectations?
0:20:56 It’s not about qualities.
0:20:59 It’s about, well, I hate to say it,
0:21:01 but it’s more about behavior.
0:21:05 So for example, and I have so many,
0:21:08 particularly women who’ve been divorced
0:21:11 and now they’re dating and they ask that question,
0:21:14 and here are several of the things that I always tell them.
0:21:19 One is, does the person, male or female,
0:21:24 ask you questions about yourself or do they broadcast?
0:21:26 Did they just tell you who they are?
0:21:29 Oh my God, my boss just gave me a promotion.
0:21:31 Oh my, you know, aren’t I cool?
0:21:33 Or I just won this athletic competition.
0:21:38 No, are they asking you questions about yourself?
0:21:42 And not only that, but listening to the answers, right?
0:21:44 And taking in the answers.
0:21:45 And oh, that’s interesting.
0:21:47 That’s one.
0:21:54 Another is, you know, our society is very striated, right?
0:22:00 So how do they treat people who have, let’s say,
0:22:03 less social status than they do?
0:22:08 How do they treat the waitress who comes to their table?
0:22:11 Do they treat them with disdain or scorn?
0:22:13 Or, you know, the steak is terrible.
0:22:14 Take a bet.
0:22:16 Or are they kind?
0:22:18 Do they treat them like human beings?
0:22:21 That’s another thing.
0:22:28 Do they treat people equally or do they only treat a certain group
0:22:30 with respect and the others not?
0:22:32 That’s number two.
0:22:34 Number three is, are they reliable?
0:22:39 Do they do what they say they’re going to do?
0:22:42 If they say they’re going to call you, do they call you?
0:22:46 If they say I’ll pick you up at eight, are they there at eight?
0:22:49 So reliability is a big deal.
0:22:52 And of course, nobody can be perfectly reliable.
0:22:54 You know, life happens.
0:22:58 But do they call you to let you know, oh, I ran into heavy traffic,
0:22:59 so I’ll be 20 minutes late?
0:23:05 So, you know, there’s a consideration there of your time,
0:23:13 of your energy, curiosity, as John pointed out, as to who you are.
0:23:22 And also, there are so many people who, as you have been talking about,
0:23:24 are so terribly lonely.
0:23:26 Watch out for this.
0:23:31 Watch out for people saying, in the first date, oh my god, you’re it.
0:23:32 You’re the answer.
0:23:35 Oh my god, you’re fantastic.
0:23:36 I think I love you.
0:23:45 You know, that kind of rush into let’s have an intimate relationship right now.
0:23:47 I want to marry you and I’m going to ask you tomorrow.
0:23:55 No, you know, people need to take their time to get to know one another
0:24:01 and peel away the layers slowly and carefully to build trust.
0:24:07 Do you think that speed to rush into a relationship is a sign of something else
0:24:10 further upstream, maybe security or?
0:24:12 You bet, needy there.
0:24:17 And I don’t like the word needy because everybody has needs.
0:24:18 We’re pack animals.
0:24:19 You know, we need each other.
0:24:20 We depend on each other.
0:24:28 But somebody who can contain themselves, as you were pointing out.
0:24:29 With or without you energy.
0:24:30 That’s right.
0:24:36 And have done that internal work so that they’re not looking to you
0:24:38 to answer every problem they have.
0:24:44 You know, I would give different advice to a male who’s dating.
0:24:47 I would say, you know, just have fun.
0:24:51 You know, meet people like when I was creating my database.
0:24:53 You know, I met a woman who is a survivalist.
0:24:58 She had a 38 magnum pistol right by her bedside.
0:25:04 And she spent thousands of dollars on gallons to go to opera because she loved opera.
0:25:08 And I remember sitting there in her house and saying, you know,
0:25:09 God, this is really interesting.
0:25:13 You know, I don’t know if I like this person or I could be with this person.
0:25:15 But she’s fascinating.
0:25:18 You know, it’s kind of fun getting to know her.
0:25:23 And then at a certain point, there’s somebody you meet, like I met Julie.
0:25:26 And everything feels right.
0:25:33 The world just kind of opens up when you talk and your heart opens and it’s very different.
0:25:34 It’s not just interesting.
0:25:40 It’s really there’s potential there that you don’t feel with anybody else.
0:25:42 Were you desperate when you met Julie there?
0:25:44 I don’t think I was.
0:25:46 Oh, I don’t think I was desperate.
0:25:52 I’ve been divorced for about seven years and I was looking to meet somebody close to my age
0:25:55 who was an interesting person.
0:26:00 And I met a lot of interesting people, but she was different.
0:26:03 I asked this question in part because I wonder if someone’s ever done a study
0:26:07 where they take a group of people who are looking to find someone
0:26:10 and then they take a group of people who aren’t really looking
0:26:12 and they see who has the most success.
0:26:17 And when I say looking, I mean, some people are literally looking for a husband
0:26:21 and they feel like they need to find one within six months.
0:26:25 Because, you know, biological clocks and goals they might have for their lives
0:26:30 and all these kinds of things versus a group of people that are just open to it.
0:26:31 And I wonder who’s more attractive.
0:26:33 I think either one can work.
0:26:38 I don’t think there has to be a magic formula.
0:26:43 So I think if you approach the whole situation with curiosity and wonder,
0:26:48 you know, and just kind of see who you meet and see what happens.
0:26:52 But that sounds more like this group here, you know.
0:26:53 That’s right.
0:26:53 I agree with you.
0:27:01 What you’re describing is that being confident in yourself and just being curious.
0:27:04 As opposed to, I really have to find somebody.
0:27:06 I need to find somebody.
0:27:09 Very, very, very different.
0:27:14 I think about this in part in the context of business as well.
0:27:19 Because as an investor, you get an energy from the entrepreneur that’s trying to get investment
0:27:24 from you as to whether they need you or whether you’re an option.
0:27:32 And it’s so remarkable how much more likely you are to invest in a founder
0:27:34 who makes you feel like an option.
0:27:37 And I think because, and then you have these other founders,
0:27:39 when I can literally think of one example that popped to my mind from
0:27:44 the last couple of weeks where they were so desperate that it was almost rude.
0:27:46 Wow.
0:27:47 How did that manifest?
0:27:53 As in the way that they sent their emails and the way that they were like demanding
0:27:56 and how urgent they wanted to speak to you and all these kinds of things
0:28:05 and how like low key expectant they were from you made me feel like their business wasn’t doing well.
0:28:10 Whereas, and I think about this in the context of relationships,
0:28:13 whereas the founders and entrepreneurs that message me where they’re more patient,
0:28:17 they’re maybe a little bit busier.
0:28:19 The ones that have that like, I’ll keep going back to that phrase,
0:28:22 like with or without you energy where you’re an option to them,
0:28:23 you’re much more likely to invest.
0:28:25 You feel like it’s a privilege to invest.
0:28:27 And I think about this from the context of the question I just asked.
0:28:32 If someone’s like, I need a husband now versus someone’s like, I’m open.
0:28:32 I’m curious.
0:28:36 I’m willing to go on the date and see if we’re right.
0:28:40 Because I realized that me saying yes to you is a huge investment.
0:28:44 So I need to take my time to figure out if that investment is going to be worthwhile
0:28:45 because I respect myself.
0:28:47 Yeah, maybe you’re right.
0:28:48 Right.
0:28:53 Maybe it’s better if you’re just kind of confident and not so desperate.
0:28:55 Any fake confidence, truly?
0:28:57 This is the problem.
0:29:01 No, you know, as a matter of fact, when people try to fake confidence,
0:29:05 they often overstep it, right?
0:29:10 And, Kali, I know I’ll never forget this fellow in high school.
0:29:15 He would brag about himself without knowing that he was bragging.
0:29:18 He would boast and boast and boast and boast.
0:29:24 And I realized, oh my God, I cannot stand this, you know, because it was so fake.
0:29:34 But important thing, I realized that the extremity of my negative attitude towards him
0:29:39 was because there was a part of me that was just like that, that felt insecure,
0:29:45 that wanted to present, you know, this perfect image to people that I wasn’t,
0:29:48 which is what he was trying to do.
0:29:54 And so then it’s like, oh, I’ve got little work to do on myself.
0:29:59 Well, you know, one thing about this dating situation that’s interesting is,
0:30:05 even though there’s nothing you can measure in individuals that will predict that they like
0:30:12 each other, once they get together and start interacting, our lab can measure if that interaction
0:30:14 has promise or not.
0:30:15 Wow.
0:30:23 Really, we measure openness, the emotional connection, the fact that people are either
0:30:28 connecting with one another, communicating with one another or not.
0:30:30 We measure tension versus relaxation.
0:30:36 We measure curiosity and interest and all of those things.
0:30:37 Yeah.
0:30:43 So can you give me really specifically exactly how a couple would show up really specifically
0:30:47 if they were, if they had promised to last and be successful together?
0:30:51 So if you watch their videotape and they had promised,
0:30:58 you’d find them laughing together, you know, mirroring each other, smiling,
0:31:06 asking questions, being open, wondering about things, and you’d have this real sense of
0:31:14 exploration and openness and curiosity and interest in one another.
0:31:19 Whereas in a couple that wasn’t doing very well, you’d sense this tension,
0:31:30 sarcasm, a lot of negativity, bragging about themselves, talking about themselves rather
0:31:32 than being interested in the other person.
0:31:33 Body language?
0:31:39 Body language, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in those couples would be much less
0:31:45 than one, whereas it would be three to one or five to one among couples who are really
0:31:51 getting along very, very well with this potential, this openness and potential.
0:31:53 What’s the difference in body language?
0:31:54 Let me, let me demonstrate it.
0:32:00 So somebody who’s overconfident, pretend he’s not sitting here, is just going to be doing it.
0:32:05 So that, for people that aren’t watching, laying back on-
0:32:11 Laying back, your arm, you know, stretched out over the top of the chair next to you,
0:32:18 you’re leaning back, you know, which is come to me, come to me, you know.
0:32:22 It’s all about me and I’m so cool.
0:32:29 And somebody who is really engaged is going to be more kind of leaning forward
0:32:38 and making eye contact, being fairly relaxed, you know, not, not hunching their shoulders
0:32:44 inwards, which shows they’re probably depressed, they’re insecure, they’re hiding out.
0:32:51 But, you know, just relax, their shoulders are, you know, not up to their ears.
0:33:01 They’re allowing their eye gaze to look away as they think about something,
0:33:03 and then they look right at you and they answer the question.
0:33:06 All of those indicators.
0:33:14 That ratio of eye to other, I mean, mine, you know, predominates
0:33:18 conversations where there’s all this tension.
0:33:19 Say that again, sir.
0:33:24 Is where, you know, the conversation is really about just myself.
0:33:31 I’m sort of putting myself in the center versus being interested in you, being interested in us,
0:33:38 being interested in we, and that emerges, that openness emerges in language as well.
0:33:46 There’s also a reciprocity in the sense that, let’s say you and I are meeting,
0:33:50 you ask me some questions about myself.
0:33:55 I’ll answer those questions, but then I’ll ask you, I’ll come back and ask you questions about
0:34:01 yourself as opposed to, go ahead, ask me more questions and more questions and more.
0:34:06 I’m only happy when I’m talking about myself.
0:34:08 Right, right.
0:34:14 So, you know, you’re going back and forth exhibiting that curiosity as opposed to
0:34:23 just adoring somebody being curious about you, but not reciprocating by being curious about them.
0:34:28 I, it’s funny because you were talking about body language a second ago,
0:34:34 and many people will click on episodes on YouTube or podcasts that try and teach us body language.
0:34:39 But I think, okay, you can learn some of the things, but really, again,
0:34:42 I think body language is a symptom of what’s going on inside.
0:34:45 How do you build confidence is really the question.
0:34:52 You know, especially when you begin, let’s say in a family or with caretakers,
0:34:55 who are critical and contemptuous of you.
0:35:01 And when you have that from practically the ground up, as I did,
0:35:10 you internalize that and you believe you’re worthless because you were treated as worthless.
0:35:13 So, how do you build the confidence, right?
0:35:24 So, either through maybe therapy, through looking at yourself in the mirror and saying,
0:35:28 all right, this is who I am, this is who I am, this is who I am.
0:35:38 You know, one of us, I used to, like almost every single woman, no matter how beautiful you are,
0:35:44 you will always measure yourself as inferior to somebody else, always as a woman.
0:35:50 I mean, you’ve seen already six million images of idealized women by the time you’re 18.
0:35:57 Think about that. So, how do you build confidence in what you look like?
0:36:06 Go to a locker room where women are undressing and look at their real bodies and notice the
0:36:15 variety. Notice, you know, the whatever, a woman that’s larger than the standard, thinner than
0:36:25 the standard, women come in all shapes and sizes, so do men. And just seeing the reality,
0:36:32 the reality as opposed to the photo shot, you know, that’s the thing that’s so difficult about
0:36:39 technology is that these days, you know, especially with dating apps and so on, people are photoshopping
0:36:45 their images or they’re taking an image of themselves 30 years ago and there here is what I
0:36:54 am and I actually still have hair. It’s the reality that it’s not really about the appearance,
0:37:02 it’s not even about, you know, the IQ or whatever or the education, it’s really about, well, here we
0:37:09 go, it’s about the heart. It’s about the heart. Is this a kind person? Is this a caring person?
0:37:14 Is this a person who exhibits compassion, who treats people equally and so on?
0:37:18 A dating app wouldn’t work on that basis, would it?
0:37:23 No, and most people are lying on dating apps, too. That’s right.
0:37:30 Is there a difference in what men and women look for in a partner as it relates to attraction
0:37:35 when they first meet? Well, you know, that’s an interesting question because I remember reading
0:37:43 this paper by Eli Finkel. He says in the introduction, you know, generally the dating research suggests
0:37:50 that men are looking for physical beauty and women are looking for occupational competence
0:37:57 and wealth, but actually when he does this really elaborate speed dating study,
0:38:05 none of that actually manifested in people’s preferences. The preferences were all in terms of
0:38:12 what it felt like to be together, and both men and women were really similar. So when you interact
0:38:18 with somebody, you’re going to interact with them for five minutes in this speed dating situation.
0:38:22 What made the difference was how much fun it was to interact with them for five minutes,
0:38:30 how enjoyable it was, and men and women were the same. So the social context of dating
0:38:39 is so important because if it’s this very tense, you know, evaluative context, nothing is going to
0:38:47 work. But if it’s this relaxed, sort of interested, curious context, almost everything’s going to work.
0:38:54 Now, a lot of dating happens these days with alcohol in a nightclub or with alcohol at maybe
0:39:00 dinner or at a bar. Is there a better place to conduct a first date? And if so, why?
0:39:08 Well, first of all, alcohol distorts everything. Drugs distort everything. You know, there’s a
0:39:16 reason they say intoxicated, toxic. Alcohol is toxic. So it shuts down certain parts of the brain,
0:39:24 shuts down to some degree, your ability to judge, your ability to sense, your reflexes,
0:39:33 your intuition. All that stuff is shut down to some degree. And so, wow, she’s really high.
0:39:38 Time to go for her. You know, you’re not picking up that, you know, she’s wearing a wedding ring,
0:39:43 she’s sitting with a man who has a matching wedding. You know, you’re not picking up all that stuff.
0:39:53 So, probably a coffee shop is nice where we met. Yeah. Well, I think it needs to be a context
0:40:00 that is not evaluative. You know, I think it has to be some kind of relaxed context where you’re
0:40:07 just kind of getting to know one another and seeing what it’s like to meet this person.
0:40:15 So it’s the judgment that makes it tense and uncomfortable. And so people need alcohol
0:40:20 to get relaxed. And of course, then they’re, you know, when they get high and they’re laughing
0:40:26 at everything and nothing. And there’s no connection. There’s no real connection.
0:40:35 So the evaluative context is kind of like the antidote to love.
0:40:39 When you have an evaluative context, you know, you’re trying to be at your best,
0:40:44 the other person’s trying to be at their best. But, you know, there’s no real interest in one
0:40:48 another. When you say evaluative context, it means that we’re evaluating each other. It’s really,
0:40:53 really a very clear… That’s right. It’s like an interview, basically. Yeah. It’s like a job interview.
0:40:56 Interesting. Never gonna work.
0:41:03 Is there a certain age where if you get together with someone, you’re more likely to be successful?
0:41:10 I was talking to my friend about this actually this weekend because he is approaching 40 and his
0:41:16 partner is significantly younger. It’s my friend that lives in America, New York. And he was telling
0:41:21 me that because she’s sort of 23, he’s struggling a little bit because he wants to settle down and
0:41:26 he wants to think about kids now. And she’s still trying to figure out life. So it made me wonder
0:41:29 if maybe he should be aiming at people that are at least that sort of 30 age where you start,
0:41:35 you know. I don’t know if there’s any research to… You know, I don’t know about the research,
0:41:42 but what I’ve seen clinically is that people who date others that are very, very different
0:41:50 in age from them have a problem, typically. Because first of all, the social history in
0:41:58 which they were raised is different, right? So for example, John and I, though we’re not
0:42:04 the same age, we’re about nine years apart, but we both went through Vietnam. We both went through
0:42:09 all the assassinations in the US. Civil rights movement. The civil rights movement, you know,
0:42:17 I got arrested. He didn’t. I was unlucky, you know, in the protesting stuff. But that context,
0:42:25 you know, understanding a period of history that you grew up in is really important and also
0:42:32 internally in the sense that there are really phases of development that you go through
0:42:39 as you get older. And you’re absolutely right, Stephen, in that a 40-year-old who wants to now
0:42:45 settle down, create a home, create a family, and a 23-year-old are incredibly different
0:42:52 developmentally. So their goals will be different, their values will be different. If you will,
0:42:59 their maturity will be different. Their interests also may be strikingly different.
0:43:08 There may be a real difference in valuing commitment, you know, and so on. So I’ve seen
0:43:15 relationships work with that kind of disparate age. But typically, that can happen more easily
0:43:21 when you’re older, when you’ve already created your identity, you’ve already identified what
0:43:28 profession or line of work you want to do, whether or not you want to have kids or if you’ve already
0:43:37 had kids and so on. So like a 40-year-old and a 50-year-old or a 55-year-old would be very
0:43:45 different than a 40-year-old and a 23-year-old. Good enough relationships. Should I be looking for,
0:43:49 is this good back to what I was saying earlier about, you know, looking for the one, looking for
0:43:56 your Julie? Or should I be looking for a relationship that is good enough and then try and build it to
0:44:01 be a great relationship? Because there’s a lot of people that are maybe over 30 years old, over 40
0:44:08 years old, who are single, struggling to find someone that’s great. And so their friends or
0:44:12 their partners or, you know, the people around them are saying, just, you know, that person’s good
0:44:17 enough. That person’s good enough. Just, you know, give them a chance and go on the date and…
0:44:26 Yeah, I think there’s a lot to that point of view, because when, you know, when you’re looking for
0:44:34 the perfect relationship that’s good in every dimension, you’re going to be disappointed. And
0:44:43 I think it makes some sense to look for what’s good enough. And so, you know, what’s good enough
0:44:48 for one person is not the same as what’s good enough for another person. I know, you know,
0:44:54 what’s good enough for me is having somebody you can really trust and really feel a sense of
0:44:59 commitment toward. And those two dimensions are absolutely critical.
0:45:05 Is that… Did you have non-negotiables, both of you? Was there anything on your list of things
0:45:12 that were mandatory in finding your partner? Yeah, for me, it was wanting children.
0:45:18 So that’s a non-negotiable for you. Yes. Was there anything else that was non-negotiable?
0:45:22 Monogamy. Okay, yeah. For me. Yeah.
0:45:33 Sense of humor was really important. I think another thing too is, do you get bored talking to them?
0:45:39 Or not? Or are they continually interesting to you?
0:45:46 But I think one of the most important things is, how do they make you feel about yourself?
0:45:53 Not just, you know, you’re attracted to them or whatever, but how do they make you feel about
0:46:08 yourself? If they make you feel dumb or unkind or too needy or whatever, not cool. On the other hand,
0:46:14 if they make you feel like the most gorgeous thing in the world and the most brilliant person in the
0:46:23 world, etc., and you know you’re not, that’s not it either. So do they recognize you? It’s almost
0:46:30 like that. Do they recognize you in your fullness of humanity? And that takes time, of course. You
0:46:40 have to get to know one another. But let’s see. Non-negotiables. I know very quickly,
0:46:49 I think we both realized that whenever we spend time together, it’s always interesting and fun.
0:46:56 That’s true. Talking over anything. That’s true. And everything that you said, everything that came
0:47:03 out of your mouth was so frigging fascinating. I knew I would be learning from him the rest of my
0:47:09 life. Yeah, I felt the same way about you. You know, a road trip was an opportunity. It was
0:47:15 really, you know, a time to talk about our dreams and our hopes about the world. Yeah.
0:47:22 What about sex and the role that plays in attraction? I asked this question because
0:47:27 I had a relationship when I used to live in New York and I really, really liked this person.
0:47:31 We got on all the things you described, the road trips, everything was fun. And then when it came
0:47:39 to the point where we had sexual intimacy, it just wasn’t there. Yeah. And it was it was crushing for
0:47:47 me because this person was perfect in every conceivable way. Smart, kind, fun, everything. I
0:47:53 just and then the minute we moved to the next stage, it just wasn’t there. I just wasn’t sexually
0:47:59 attracted to that experience too. And so it made me add to my list of non-negotiables a third thing
0:48:02 at the time there was two things on that list. The first was they kind of helped me become a
0:48:06 better version of myself and however I want to define that. The second was this intellectual
0:48:10 stimulation, the ability to converse and be interested in them and them interested in me.
0:48:15 And the third became not about appearance at all. It was purely a sexual connection
0:48:23 because yeah. And so I just wonder what the role that sexual intimacy and sexual attraction plays
0:48:28 in having a good relationship with someone. Yeah. You know, I think that really varies, Stephen,
0:48:37 because there’s a huge range of the importance sexuality plays in individuals. You know,
0:48:44 some people are practically asexual. Other people, you know, it’s been a really long time if they
0:48:52 hadn’t had sex in four hours. So and everything in between. So I think to some degree, that’s
0:49:02 an individual choice as to how important is sexuality to you and having a wonderful sexual
0:49:08 connection as opposed to who cares? You know, I just want to have a cup of coffee and a pastry.
0:49:17 You know, so every individual needs to decide that for themselves how important it is.
0:49:25 And then, you know, if it is important, even of average importance, it’s really important.
0:49:31 Yeah. But the other thing too, that’s interesting, I mean, we’re talking about dating, but I’ve also
0:49:41 seen relationships that have been together for a long time. And the sex falls away. But it’s much
0:49:48 more important to one person than the other. And they diverged. And it becomes, you know,
0:49:55 a pretty serious problem. It didn’t start off that way. But it can become that way.
0:50:00 And what happens in those scenarios? Well, you know, typically, it’s really interesting.
0:50:09 Of course, in second, well, second marriages or relationships at, let’s say over 40 or so,
0:50:17 women, especially women going through perimenopause, you know, finishing with menopause,
0:50:27 sex hormones go way down. They go way down. And so, are they still interested in having sex?
0:50:39 Well, they may not be so interested in it that they want to initiate sex. But we’re all hard wired,
0:50:45 in particular ways. So you touch there, you lick there, you know, you stimulate here.
0:50:54 And that wiring is going to kick in. And the sexuality will kick in again. And the sexual
0:51:04 responsiveness will kick in. So you can work on that angle, number one. But number two, oftentimes,
0:51:12 there have been big emotional injuries that have broken trust, that have broken emotional connection.
0:51:25 And okay, so two theories. One, most men in Western culture are not, they don’t accept
0:51:34 themselves if they just want to cuddle. That’s not masculine, right? So everybody needs touch.
0:51:42 But for many, many men who bought into that, the only way they can get touch is through sex.
0:51:51 They can’t just say, “Please just hold me.” Women can, because women are considered, you know,
0:51:59 more vulnerable and softer. And it’s okay for them, you know, to ask to just be held, but not for men.
0:52:07 So, you know, sex becomes a difficult thing there, too, especially with an ultra masculine
0:52:16 man, where he’s just come back from war. He wants to just be held, but he can’t ask for that.
0:52:21 He’s got to be tough and strong and sexy. Therefore, he’ll go for sex.
0:52:32 Any thoughts on that, John? I think I agree with you. It’s not negotiable. You know,
0:52:39 it’s one of these intangible things that, you know, if it’s not there, it’s not going to work
0:52:47 very well. In the beginning. If it’s not there. That’s right. I mean, I think it needs to be there.
0:52:52 Because it goes on a journey, all relationships. It’s funny because from doing this podcast and
0:52:58 speaking to a lot of sort of sex therapists or couples therapists, one of them said something
0:53:02 to be one day, or maybe two of them said the same point. I think two or three of them said the same
0:53:11 point, which is much of what makes sex so, you know, arousing is the spontaneity and the novelness,
0:53:15 the newness of it, the excitement of it, all these kinds of things. And they said to me that love
0:53:21 is in many respects the opposite of that. It’s the opposite of spontaneity and love is like security
0:53:30 and trust and dependability. And it’s, you know, knowing someone. So I’ve spoken to a few of my
0:53:34 friends, in fact, about this balancing act between like, I really love this person, I know them and
0:53:40 I’m there for them. And we know everything about each other. And then like, having to fight to also
0:53:47 create this excitement, like how do I, how do I love you like we’ve known each other for 10 years,
0:53:53 and you can trust me and depend on me. But then how do I have sex with you like we’ve just met?
0:54:03 So we call it the Coolidge effect. If you’ve heard of this, Calvin Coolidge was president
0:54:12 of the United States. And he and his wife were visiting a farm. And as the president was led
0:54:23 past these chickens and roosters, the farmer said, Oh, this rooster has sex 17 times a day.
0:54:29 And Mrs. Coolidge wanted me to point that out to you, Mr. President, when she came by here,
0:54:36 because we pointed out that rooster has sex 17 times a day. And Calvin Coolidge said, with the
0:54:43 same hand. And the farmer said, no, always a different hand. And he said, and president said,
0:54:51 tell that to Mrs. Coolidge. So the Coolidge effect is that it has to be novel. It has to be exciting
0:55:00 to be erotic, right? And familiarity, you know, which creates security and relaxation and openness
0:55:07 is antithetical to the novelty that creates sexual excitement. But the truth is actually not so
0:55:17 simple, because eroticism often really results from really creating an erotic situation
0:55:24 together and making it an erotic situation. And for women, especially feeling safe and feeling
0:55:32 emotionally connected is a prerequisite for feeling really attracted and feeling that
0:55:38 this is an erotic situation, that emotional connection is necessary for many women. Because
0:55:46 women have such a strange relationship to safety and fear compared to men. The world is so much
0:55:52 more dangerous place for women than it is for men. Women really need that emotional safety and
0:55:59 connection in order to feel that the situation is erotic at all. It’s important for your audience
0:56:07 to realize that the largest study done on the quality of sex with 70,000 people in 24 countries
0:56:13 found that the differences between people who say they have a great sex life and people say
0:56:18 they have an awful sex life has to do with affection and emotional connection. The people
0:56:25 have a great sex life, say I love you every day and mean it, kiss each other passionately for no
0:56:32 reason at all, cuddle, they’re affectionate even in public, they have romantic dates. So affection
0:56:39 and emotional connection for most people all over the planet are connected rather than there being
0:56:45 this dichotomy between if you’re close and if your friendship is good, sex is going to be terrible.
0:56:54 And if you’re distant and, you know, and it’s novel, sex is going to be great. Just not true.
0:57:01 That’s right. And is there a certain amount of, because a lot of couples fall into this trap of
0:57:05 sort of fake embarrassing, whether it’s social media or movies, where we think okay, if we’re not
0:57:09 having sex three times a week, something’s wrong, I need to raise it, we need to argue about it,
0:57:17 we need to fix it. Is there any merit to the quantity resulting in, you know, happiness?
0:57:24 No. No relationship between quantity and happiness. Convolity, yes.
0:57:34 Well, with the caveat, with the caveat that if you have two people paired together, one who is
0:57:43 extremely sexual and, you know, really does need sex frequently, and the other one, the opposite,
0:57:50 who is more asexual and, you know, could take it or leave it, wants sex, maybe wants a month.
0:57:53 That’s not going to work. That’s not going to work.
0:58:00 One of the things me and my friends have been deliberating about is the importance of what we
0:58:06 call desire management, which is if someone is like around too much, and they’re there every
0:58:13 second of every day in the house when I get home, you know, everywhere, does that not to some degree
0:58:17 start to kill the desire a little bit? One of the best things that I think I found in my relationship
0:58:21 is that my partner’s always working away, that I’m working away. And so when we see each other,
0:58:27 it feels special and interesting. But I personally don’t know that if we were both in the house seven
0:58:35 days a week, and I worked from home with her, whether the desire would be the same. I don’t know.
0:58:42 You know, I think that, for example, John and I are around each other seven days a week, and we
0:58:48 have been for, you know, most of our marriage, but it doesn’t matter. Is that because of my
0:58:54 attachment style, maybe? Because, you know, I wondered, yeah. Yeah, it could be, could be.
0:59:01 I need a lot of shallow, too. Yeah. But you all around each other? Yeah.
0:59:06 But you’re around each other most of the time? Well, we are. But, you know, in a house where
0:59:14 there’s enough space in the house to not be in visual contact with the other person all the
0:59:20 time. Right. You see, so he’s downstairs, I may be upstairs, something like that. Or I can
0:59:25 maybe hear him, maybe not. He can hear me, maybe not. You know, so…
0:59:36 I think there is something wonderful about being apart and then coming together, that reunion,
0:59:41 after you’ve been apart for a while, is really quite delicious. You know what, though? This is so
0:59:50 interesting. I am working with an individual right now, and they’re both artists. They both travel
0:59:57 a whole bunch all the time. And whenever they reunite after one of them is gone,
1:00:04 nothing. There’s nothing for about two or three days, and then they have to get into the same
1:00:11 rhythm again. Someone said to me on this podcast, they said, “You have to spend 90 minutes a week
1:00:15 talking to your partner.” And if you don’t, the person actually said to me, “If you don’t get
1:00:18 that into your dumb skull, you’ll be spending much more time with them in divorce court.”
1:00:27 And I know it was a brash thing to say, but I reflected on it, and it really helped me because
1:00:31 I think… I don’t know, I’m speaking as a man, so I can’t speak for all men, I can’t speak for
1:00:36 women, but speaking as a man myself and also on behalf of my friends with my own attachment style,
1:00:45 I think that’s important to add. I struggle naturally with conflict resolution, because conflict
1:00:50 resolution to me sounds like blame. So when my partner says, “We need to talk,” I’m like, “Oh,
1:00:57 my fucking God, what have I done now?” That’s right. “What have I done now?” I sit there like a…
1:01:03 I feel like it’s a kid in school being told off by their headmaster or a child being told off by
1:01:07 their mother. I’m like, “Go on, tell me all the ways that I’m inadequate.” But the framing of
1:01:10 this idea of, “You’re going to have to spend 90 minutes a week sitting with each other and talking
1:01:16 regardless,” helped me because he then went on to say, “Because if you do that, then you can get to
1:01:22 play.” Well, here’s my invention. I have a notebook in my back pocket. Oh yeah, interesting.
1:01:29 And it’s just designed for when Julie says, “We need to talk.” And I take out the notebook and a pen,
1:01:35 and I say, “Okay, talk to me. I’m taking notes. I want to know what’s going on.” And she’ll tell me,
1:01:47 “I’m disappointed in you or angry.” I write it down and reflect it back and see if I understand
1:01:54 what she’s saying. So I think it’s not just 90 minutes. It’s 90 minutes when you’re willing
1:02:01 to listen non-defensively. Which is not easy. That’s not easy. That’s really the work in
1:02:06 relationships is being non-defensive. But that’s why we wrote “Fight Right,”
1:02:19 and when we gave “Talk.” It’s really so important to not do that you, you, you, you. Blaming.
1:02:31 That blaming. It’s, “I feel about what’s the situation, not the way you fail me.” It’s the
1:02:36 situation. Julie, is it morphed in men or women that are saying that I feel?
1:02:45 Are you kidding? Men are catching up, but it’s hard. It’s hard for men to do that. Women, I mean,
1:02:55 you go to mental health expertise and all the characteristics of a man that are considered
1:03:04 mentally healthy, autonomy, independence, strength, resilience. You know, all the stuff that’s
1:03:15 autonomous. For women, vulnerability, sensitivity, empathy, expressing emotion. So, you know, there’s
1:03:24 only one emotion that men are allowed to really openly express, anger. Right? Can they express fear?
1:03:32 Oh my god, I’m so scared of going in there tomorrow. Or sadness? Or, you know, the more
1:03:43 vulnerable emotions, it’s, think about it, it’s seen as effeminate. And that’s supposed to be bad.
1:03:55 Why is that bad? Because women are second-class citizens, right? So, to be allegedly like a woman
1:04:02 and express vulnerable emotions is a bad thing, because you shouldn’t be like a woman.
1:04:12 Why not? I mean, so, expressing vulnerable emotions, I think men are starting to catch up, you know.
1:04:20 Do women like strength? Yes and no. They like strength, but the problem is that
1:04:30 they also want to be empathetic, too. They want to be, you know, nourishing to their partner.
1:04:36 And if their partner is always presenting this facade of strength, they can’t get close to them.
1:04:41 It’s like the opposite of connection. Yeah. But, you know, we observed eight-year-olds
1:04:50 in playgrounds. And if you look at eight-year-old boys, they’ll do run-and-chase games over a very
1:04:56 large distance. And if an emotional event happens, if somebody gets upset, you know, say, “What’s
1:05:02 the matter, Brian?” says the leader of the group. He said, “I never get the ball. Okay, toss the ball
1:05:07 to Brian.” Brian gets the ball and they’re off and running. They keep the game and play, manage
1:05:15 conflict quickly. Look at two, look at girls. They’re playing in groups of two or three close
1:05:21 to the school building and they’re talking about their feelings over and over again. You know,
1:05:27 you said that I was a baby, you know, because I had those barrettes. That really hurt my feelings.
1:05:33 Yeah, well, you know, I only wear barrettes when I was little and now I don’t wear them,
1:05:38 you know. But that hurt my feelings when you said that. So, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.
1:05:44 They’re talking about emotions constantly. And it’s like the hopscotch or whatever game they’re
1:05:50 playing is just an excuse for talking about emotions. For the boys, the most important thing is
1:05:56 keeping the ball in play and conflict gets in the way of that. They resolve it quickly. They’re
1:06:02 socialized so differently. Is this part of the reason why it feels for many men that they are
1:06:08 being held off all the time? Because it actually what’s happening is that their wife is just expressing
1:06:12 their emotions and the man never really expresses it. You know, that old sort of slightly problematic
1:06:17 phrase, which is happy wife, happy life. That’s right. The reason why that phrase exists, I would
1:06:22 assume, is because the man thinks as long as I can keep her from expressing more problems to me,
1:06:28 then I’m happy. He like thinks of his responsibility as just like… Yeah, ask a man how he’s feeling
1:06:35 and says, “Well, I’m not hungry. I’m not horny. I’m okay.” Ask a woman how she’s feeling. She says,
1:06:40 “Well, I don’t know. There’s, you know, the children and there’s this and the house and,
1:06:46 you know, and there’s this tangle of questions that really she has to address when you ask her,
1:06:52 she’s feeling. There’s so many things and for a guy, it’s so much easier.” But John, as men,
1:06:57 I think we can both agree that although… Well, I’m speaking to myself here, but although in the
1:07:02 moment, going through that conflict resolution, the 90 minutes a week, getting out your notepad,
1:07:08 listening is annoying in the moment. When we zoom out, we realize that if they didn’t raise these
1:07:13 issues, if they didn’t express these issues, this relationship wouldn’t be so good. That’s right.
1:07:18 And we’d be in serious problems. That’s right. They’re the managers of intimacy. Yeah. We need them.
1:07:30 Yes. We need them to say, “Steven, we need to talk.” Yeah. Did you see Steven’s face? That was so cutie.
1:07:37 I realized that this is serving a purpose, which is helping me, you know, and it’s helping us.
1:07:43 That’s right. So I sit there and I’ll listen to, you know, the things that aren’t right,
1:07:48 but you’re right. My brain is just like, me and my friends can sit in silence for eight hours,
1:07:52 sat right next to each other and we’ll meet each other, sit in silence for eight hours,
1:07:59 leave. Great evening. We’re both doing our own thing, but it’s just, I think,
1:08:05 men are such simple creatures most of the time. Oh, you are not. That is so not true. You know,
1:08:11 one of the things that I’ve certainly seen in my work, you know, I’ve been doing clinical work
1:08:20 for 50 years. And what I see is that men have exactly the same emotions. They do. They just try
1:08:26 to bury them because it’s not okay for them to express them. So they just try to shove it down,
1:08:34 but open a little door, crack and up it comes. Lionel Tiger, who studied men’s friendships and
1:08:41 women’s friendships, said, “With alcohol, men get together, they’re very physical,
1:08:47 and they talk about their feelings, an enormous amount. Takes a little alcohol to make it happen.”
1:08:55 Two women said to me last night that I was speaking to on WhatsApp. People that I work with
1:08:58 in a different company, they were saying to me that their partners often express how they’re
1:09:03 feeling by just sending songs out of the blue. Sending songs? Sending songs out of the blue.
1:09:09 One of them said it, and the other woman said, “Oh, my God, my partner does that too,” which is,
1:09:14 instead of like telling me how he feels, he’ll send me a song, which is basically a way…
1:09:19 And some of those songs are very romantic, and it’s like, “I love you. You’re the best person
1:09:24 I’ve ever found.” But instead, he can’t vocalize it to her. So he has to send her a Spotify link
1:09:31 and say, “Listen, listen to us.” But it’s the same thing, right? It’s the inability to vocalize,
1:09:39 which is difficult for men. Keep working on it. I am, yeah. I’m like progressively getting better,
1:09:45 but sometimes I have little relapses. If I am very busy in my mind, and then I have to have one
1:09:48 of those, “We need to talk chat,” so I think you’re right. There needs to be a bit of a ritual
1:09:54 around like, “Is this a good time?” That’s right. Yeah. Well, I have your attention,
1:10:00 being in a different environment. Well, you can make a date to have a talk like that.
1:10:07 When we are giving couples workshops at the very end of it, we always give recommendations for
1:10:13 ways of preserving the changes you’re making in the relationship, the improvements. And one of them
1:10:22 is called the “State of the Union” meeting, where you start with five appreciations of each other.
1:10:29 Things you haven’t said before that you’ve noticed that your partner is doing right and express your
1:10:38 gratitude or thanks or your admiration. Then you go into, “Okay, so what do we need to change?
1:10:46 What do we need to improve?” And then you finish up with this beautiful question. I just love
1:10:53 this question. “How can I make you feel loved this week?” And that’s closure.
1:10:59 You mentioned the word there, gratitude. Yes.
1:11:05 Why is gratitude so important? Being grateful for them and expressing it. It’s something that
1:11:12 you two both do to each other. I think it’s indicative of a habit of mind that’s really
1:11:18 much more important. A habit of mind where you’re noticing what’s going right and feeling
1:11:23 appreciative for it. And I know I wake up every morning lying next to Julian and think,
1:11:34 “I’m one lucky guy. I’ve got this wonderful woman and life is good. I go through my checklist.
1:11:42 Everybody’s okay. All the people I love are right and I’m with her and I get to see my grandson
1:11:51 and my daughter. Life is good.” Yeah. I think gratitude brings you into the moment.
1:12:01 Brings you into the moment. As John pointed out, you’re not just looking for what’s wrong
1:12:06 or what your partner’s doing wrong. You’re looking for what your partner’s doing right.
1:12:11 There’s been studies, who was at Christ in Robinson, I guess,
1:12:19 who looked at unhappy couples versus happy couples. It wasn’t that they weren’t doing
1:12:28 things for one another, but unhappy couples only saw 50% of what their partners were doing.
1:12:34 Of the positivity. Right. Whereas happy couples were seeing it all the time.
1:12:36 It’s like they’re wearing different sunglasses or something.
1:12:39 Yeah. Exactly. Different filters.
1:12:46 And the negative habit of mind really puts you in a state of being irritable and grumpy all the
1:12:54 time. You’re noticing other people are driving badly and being careless and making mistakes
1:13:02 all the time. That’s what you see. This gratitude puts you on a different frame of mind. Notice,
1:13:08 actually, all the good stuff that’s going on. Right. Let me draw it parallel.
1:13:14 One of the things that I’ve done in my private practice I still do is treat cancer patients
1:13:23 in our families. Cancer patients, of course, often are facing the possibility of death.
1:13:34 So, one of the questions, and oftentimes, I mean, the ones who deal with their diagnosis best
1:13:41 are people who say, “Okay, I don’t have that long to live. I’m going to reprioritize my life.
1:13:46 I’m going to really think about what’s most important to me for the six months I have left.”
1:13:56 So, one of the things that I do in my practice with couples who are just racing through life
1:14:08 together on parallel tracks, not connecting at all, is to ask them, “Okay, if you had six months left
1:14:17 to live, how would you want to spend it? Who would be the most important people that you would want
1:14:25 to draw close to? Who would you not value as much? How would you want to spend that six months?”
1:14:33 And I first kind of take people into a very relaxed state, so their minds are really free to imagine.
1:14:39 And what’s that doing? Is it helping to crystallize whether they should be with this person?
1:14:48 Sometimes, but it’s more that, “Oh, my God, I’m wasting my life trying to make more money.
1:14:55 Why am I doing that when I’ve got this love right here? What’s more important to me,
1:15:03 making more money or creating more love between us?” That’s what it comes down to oftentimes.
1:15:12 How do you know when to quit a relationship? How do I know if the relationship I’m in
1:15:17 is bad, is not good? Because relationships are incredibly tempting. They tempt us back.
1:15:23 They offer comfort, which sometimes necessarily isn’t healthy comfort, but they’re very hard
1:15:27 to leave. And I actually had a conversation with one of my friends recently. I always talk about
1:15:30 my friends because it’s the only way I know to draw in case studies. So instead of me just
1:15:35 hypothetical, coming with something hypothetical, I think about the challenges my friends face and
1:15:38 got a particular friend who’s been in a relationship for many, many years, seven, eight years.
1:15:47 Relationship is broken down. And he naturally, because the relationship is broken down,
1:15:55 is like jumping to repair. But I wonder if he should even repair because they’ve broken up
1:16:00 six times. They’ve gone through this cycle six times. So I’m like, are they just rushing back
1:16:08 together for the comfort of the relationship? Or should they, you know, take a moment to say
1:16:12 is this even right? But this also, the answer here applies to people that are in relationships that
1:16:16 have those thoughts in their mind. Is this the right one? How do you know? How do you know if
1:16:20 this is a problem we can solve and should solve? Or this is just the wrong person?
1:16:27 Therapy helps. Has your friend gone to therapy? Wouldn’t therapy?
1:16:34 Not with their partner, no. Then they don’t know. You know, in other words, a lot of people
1:16:42 don’t know how to deal with conflict, for example. Nobody’s taking relationships one-on-one in high
1:16:49 school, right? To learn how to deal with conflict or to learn how to be more vulnerable to somebody
1:16:55 else and be more open and so on. So people don’t know how to have good relationships.
1:17:02 That’s part of what drives the work that John and I do. People just don’t know how to do it.
1:17:09 And if they did know, they could change those patterns. And so, you know, with your friend,
1:17:14 for example, oftentimes, you know, when people have been together for over, you know, a couple of
1:17:22 years, they create patterns that are like dark holes. You know, they’re like black holes that have
1:17:30 this tremendous gravitational pull. And so they keep sinking down in the same patterns over and
1:17:38 over and over and over again, right? Exactly what happens. But you can change those patterns.
1:17:43 Once you know and practice what the alternatives are.
1:17:50 I think it’s not the partner, the pattern. An alternative pattern.
1:17:55 Yes. I think when that fondness and admiration system, you know, the system of affection and
1:18:03 respect, love and respect is gone and gets replaced by denigration, belittling, contempt.
1:18:10 That’s the time to bail. And you’ve seen this in your work. This is like much of what you guys,
1:18:13 you know, are known for is this. And whenever I hear people talking about the Gottmans,
1:18:16 they’re always talking to me about the idea of contempt and the Four Horsemen.
1:18:25 See, those things can change too. Those things can change too. That often is what constitutes
1:18:32 the bad pattern. Or there’s been so much of that that now they avoid each other altogether.
1:18:36 And there’s huge emotional distance. What are the Four Horsemen then,
1:18:39 before we talk about how we would go about changing, if possible,
1:18:42 these things? For anyone that doesn’t know, and how you found these Four Horsemen.
1:18:51 Well, Bob Levinson and I, when we were doing our research, the first thing we looked at was what’s
1:18:57 the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a conversation? So how did you conduct this experiment?
1:19:02 Really just observing couples, talking about how their day went. How do you observe a day?
1:19:06 Wait, wait, wait. Bring them into the lab. First of all, what’s the lab?
1:19:16 The lab was a room where they sat facing one another. There were video cameras here and there
1:19:23 that were focused on each individual and their faces and their body language.
1:19:28 There was what was called a giga-lometer, how much they moved in their chairs,
1:19:35 how much the chairs moved. Physiological measures, what was happening to their heart rate as well.
1:19:43 Velocity, respiration, and conductance. And all of that data that was pulled from those
1:19:51 measures was all synchronized, 100th of a second by 100th of a second. And they would talk for,
1:19:57 let’s say, 15 minutes about the events of the day. And then they were asked to talk about
1:20:05 a problem they hadn’t solved and to try and solve it or talk about it. So that ends up being conflict.
1:20:12 And then a positive topic. And then a positive topic. Or in the apartment lab, they just hung
1:20:19 out for 12 hours before they went to sleep and the cameras just rolled while we collected physiological
1:20:25 data. So we didn’t spy on them. We really spied on them, right? Except they knew they were bees.
1:20:30 For 12 hours, you watched them just sort of chill and hang out together couples. That’s right.
1:20:34 How many couples have you done? 130. And how many couples have been in the lab in total?
1:20:41 3,000. 3,000. And they were followed. So then they’d be brought back every couple of years,
1:20:49 to see how the relationship changed. Right. So the procedures would be repeated every couple of
1:20:57 years for as long as 20 years. And what did you find? So that initially that ratio of positive to
1:21:03 negative interaction, even talking about how their day went, or especially during conflict,
1:21:10 for people who are in happy, stable relationship, it averaged five positives for every negative.
1:21:15 Positives about the other person or about what? No, just positive emotion. Like let’s describe
1:21:23 positives. So a positive can be nodding your head. It can be smiling. It can be asking a question.
1:21:26 Infection, humor, validation. Showing interest.
1:21:32 Interest in the other person. Negative would be anger, irritability, disappointment, hurt,
1:21:40 disgust, contempt. Shared humor was another big positive that turned out to be very important.
1:21:47 So that ratio of positive to negative averaged five to one in relationships that were stable
1:21:54 and happy. During conflict. During conflict. And point eight to one in relationships that were
1:22:01 headed for disaster, either splitting up or being together unhappily. But certain negatives were
1:22:09 much more predictive of relationship demise. And they were criticism, defensiveness, contempt,
1:22:17 and stonewalling. So let’s define what those are. So criticism means blaming a problem on a
1:22:23 personality flaw of your partner. Like you’re so lazy, you’d never think to clean up the kitchen,
1:22:29 wouldn’t you? Or kind of you’re thoughtless. You didn’t even call me when you were going to be late.
1:22:35 You know, thoughtless, lazy, inconsiderate, selfish. Always, never. Okay. So making it about their
1:22:41 personality and their character. That’s right. That’s a criticism. Contempt is the worst. That’s
1:22:50 sulfuric acid for a relationship where you’re looking down your nose with disgust, as well as
1:22:56 criticism of the partner. Superiority. So give me an example of that. You’re such an idiot.
1:23:05 You just never get things right. You’re just not like me. I’m thoughtful and
1:23:13 considerate. You’re just… You’re a narcissist. Right. So there’s the criticism,
1:23:20 but it’s making yourself superior to that other person. And there’s a little disgust in it,
1:23:28 you know, my kind of stuff. Sarcasm is a good example. Mockery. Especially in front of people.
1:23:35 Yeah. Right. Awful. So the person says, “Well, I really care how you feel. You really care
1:23:44 how I feel.” So that’s contempt. Stonewalling is really emotional. Don’t forget defense.
1:23:51 And defensiveness. Yeah. So every… defensiveness is the one we all have. It’s so hard to get over,
1:23:56 which is, you know, you either kind of whine like an innocent victim. You know,
1:24:03 I did two pay the bills on time. What do you mean? I’m thoughtful. I’m thoughtful. I am thoughtful.
1:24:07 Don’t you remember blah, blah, blah? Or it’s counterattack. Oh yeah?
1:24:13 You’re so perfect, huh? You never clean up the kitchen. You know, it’s that counterattack.
1:24:18 Do you find that insecure people are more defensive? Sure. I have this like theory that if your
1:24:24 self-esteem and your self-perception of yourself is fragile, then anyone poking at it at all
1:24:30 causes such extreme pain that you live in this state of like, “I have never done anything wrong.
1:24:33 I can’t possibly do anything wrong.” And if someone points out something you’ve done wrong,
1:24:37 it’s so painful if you’re insecure, right? You’re walking at anything else.
1:24:40 Yeah, exactly. It’s like playing with like an open wound. Yeah.
1:24:46 It’s like you’re a walking burn victim. You know, the way I like to describe it,
1:24:54 because I’ve been there, I know what that’s like, is, you know, the earth, if you take a picture
1:25:00 of the earth, and the earth has this very thin crust on it, and then you go down some layers,
1:25:08 and in the center is this boiling hot lava, you know, that burns you to death. Well,
1:25:16 somebody says to you, “Why didn’t you pay the bills on time?” And the earth opens up. You fall
1:25:25 through that crack and straight down into that hot lava of self-loathing that is agony. Absolutely.
1:25:32 And you feel like you’re getting burned to death. So, you can’t allow yourself to step into that
1:25:41 crack and say, “Oh, God, you’re right. I didn’t.” So, you defend. You defend. “Oh, yeah? Well,
1:25:46 I’m the one who does all the bill paying. What are you doing?” You know, it’s defensiveness.
1:25:49 Well, in that case, it sounds like that’s fundamentally linked to some kind of trauma,
1:25:52 because paying the, you didn’t pay the bills to the average person would be,
1:25:56 you know, “I know. Sorry, my bad.” But if that’s linked to maybe, I don’t know, your childhood,
1:26:00 where your father or your mother or the bullies on the playground told you that
1:26:05 you’re so forgetful, Steve or Julie, you’re the most forgetful person ever, and then they punched you.
1:26:15 You could get to 40 people. Yeah, can be. And then stonewalling. This was one that was so fascinating,
1:26:23 because you could have, you know, a pair of people sitting just like this looking perfectly normal.
1:26:32 But you notice that one is completely shutting down, not showing anything on their face,
1:26:38 in their body, maybe looking away or just glazed, you know, looking and not saying a word.
1:26:46 And that’s not for seconds, it’s for minutes. And what’s actually going on, because these guys,
1:26:52 you know, John and his colleagues, measured physiology, is that they feel so attacked that
1:26:58 their heart rates are just zooming up above 100 beats a minute, which just sitting here?
1:27:04 Yes, the critical cortisol on adrenaline massively, and so they’re shutting down.
1:27:11 Yeah, it’s a terribly, it’s going into flight, only you’re not facing a saber-tooth tiger,
1:27:16 you’re facing your partner. You said there, Julie, that you could go into that state for
1:27:21 minutes or even longer. Yes. But as you were saying that, I was thinking about my friend’s
1:27:25 relationship, which kind of started this conversation, and whether they should get back
1:27:27 together or not. You were totally right when you said, there’s clearly a pattern,
1:27:31 because the fact that they’re getting back together, then breaking up, then getting back
1:27:35 together, then breaking up, then breaking up, shows that they don’t have the tools to resolve
1:27:43 whatever issue they keep smashing into. Right. But much of why I think from what I’ve heard,
1:27:48 or at least the symptom of their relationship is stonewalling, but it’s not minutes.
1:27:54 One of them, it’s months, I think. I think basically, I only know this because I was
1:27:58 showing some text messages, and I looked at the text messages, and I was like, oh my god,
1:28:02 there’s like, whenever you talk about something that might be a little bit challenging or whatever,
1:28:08 or you even ask, how do you think the relationship’s going? The other partner is like
1:28:14 vacant. Like vacant, nothing. It’s like, they’re not expressing their needs. They’re not saying
1:28:19 what they feel. They’re spiraling in their own mind, and then they’re just breaking up with you.
1:28:22 You know, it’s kind of, I don’t know whether that’s stonewalling, but it’s also what you were
1:28:27 saying about lacking the tools. That was at the heart of the relationship, is one partner spirals
1:28:32 independently, and then without you even knowing it, you thought everything was okay,
1:28:37 breaks up with you. To give more context, well, this is a homosexual relationship between two men.
1:28:42 So, you know, we talked earlier on about the women, sometimes the instigator of expression of
1:28:53 needs. Oh, that’s so sad. You know, so it sounds like both of them have terrible difficulty making
1:29:04 themselves vulnerable to the other and saying what they feel. And it may be that if they tried that
1:29:12 early on in the relationship, the other one said something very negative to them back that felt
1:29:22 punishing in terms of expressing their emotion. And so they made a choice, oh God, I can’t make
1:29:26 myself vulnerable. I’m going to get hurt if I do that. So they shut them.
1:29:31 But this point about men not being very good at expressing their feelings, do we, you know,
1:29:36 with that in mind and with the knowledge that expression of feelings are good for building
1:29:43 connection, how come homosexual relationships with men work? And I don’t know, is there any data
1:29:49 to show that they last less longer than a relationship where a woman is stereotypically
1:29:54 more likely to, you know, talk about the challenges and the issues and bridge the connection?
1:29:57 Someone’s got to have done the research on this subject.
1:30:01 Well, you know, we’ve studied gay and lesbian couples and compared them to
1:30:08 heterosexual couples as well. For 12 years. Generally, they’re less defensive.
1:30:17 They have a better sense of humor and they’re much more gentle in the way they bring up an issue
1:30:20 with one another. Men or women in those homosexual relations?
1:30:28 Men and women together. Gay men and lesbians are better than heterosexuals and they’re much less
1:30:36 possessive and domineering as well. Much more of a sense of equality in their relationships.
1:30:46 Well, especially, you know, pre, well, weight pause, pre-aids, you know, men gave each other much
1:30:54 more autonomy to have sex outside the relationship, right? But then AIDS kicked in and a lot of that
1:31:02 shut down. Now it’s opening up again. So they’re giving themselves sexual freedom as long as there
1:31:07 isn’t a lot of emotional connection and falling in love with the third party.
1:31:21 Women don’t do that nearly as much. They tend to feel very insecure around polygamy, let’s say,
1:31:29 or polyamory and so they really are more wanting monogamy with their partners.
1:31:36 So, am I right in thinking, John, that you’re saying that homosexual relationships are better
1:31:41 than heterosexual relationships? Yeah, they are. They are better in general. They’re better.
1:31:46 Do you know if they last longer? I don’t know that there’s data on that. I don’t think there are
1:31:51 differences in how long they last. Is that right? I don’t think there’s any differences.
1:31:57 You know, there’s another thing too. I mean, again, it depends on what period of history
1:32:06 you’re talking about. But because being homosexual has been so stigmatized in the past,
1:32:10 you know, and there’s so much prejudice against homosexuality,
1:32:19 there’s, first of all, there’s more of a sense of community amongst gay men and gay women. You
1:32:26 know, they’ve connected with one another, not just as couples, but as community in order to
1:32:36 survive the kind of prejudice they endure out in the heterosexual society. And it’s been shown,
1:32:41 actually, the research has shown this, that when the community really supports the relationship,
1:32:49 the relationship does better. So if you’ve got a community around you, that’s a consistent
1:32:54 community that’s really supporting the relationship, that’s really going to help you sustain that
1:33:00 relationship. And on these four horsemen, a word you didn’t mention, but I wonder if it fit in there
1:33:06 somewhere, is the word gaslighting, which has become quite popular in society. What is gaslighting?
1:33:14 How does that show up? So in physically violent relationships that are characterologically
1:33:21 violent with as a perpetrator and a victim, those kinds of domestic violence, quite often the
1:33:31 perpetrator is communicating to the victim that everything about the reality is wrong. They never,
1:33:37 they never raised their hand against this person. You know, it’s just all imagined. They’re basically
1:33:44 doing, you know, what happened to Ingrid Bergman in that movie, Gaslight, where she’s married to
1:33:53 this guy who tries to convince her that she’s mentally ill, that her whole sense of reality
1:34:02 is wrong. So he does things like change the order of the pictures and, you know, in the home,
1:34:13 steal jewelry that he’s given her that, you know, that he says comes from his mother and grandmother,
1:34:20 he steals it. And then he says, you know, where is it? You know, you lost it? You’re so forgetful.
1:34:26 And he’s constantly sort of making you feel like she’s gone crazy. There never was a painting there.
1:34:32 What are you talking about? You’ll say we’re a painting there. And you know, and he’s actually
1:34:37 removed it or he’s changed the order of the pictures. He’s trying to make her think she’s crazy.
1:34:44 And even her sense of reality needs him to determine what’s real and what’s not real.
1:34:49 And that’s what Gaslight comes from. Let me mention something because that word,
1:34:54 you’re right, it’s really being bandied about commonly and people have got it wrong,
1:35:03 speaking of Gaslight. So people, for example, who have a conflict and they have totally
1:35:09 different points of view about what happened during the conflict, two of our members are better,
1:35:16 you know, and one will say, well, you said this. No, I didn’t. I never said that.
1:35:25 That they’re calling Gaslighting and it’s not that is not Gaslighting. So it’s being misused
1:35:32 in the culture all the time because people always have two points of view about different
1:35:38 perceptions and any situation. That’s right. They have, you know, everybody has their own
1:35:42 individual filters. And so they’re going to hear some things, not hear other things and
1:35:48 distort things and so on. Memory isn’t perfect. And so they’re always going to have two points of
1:35:58 view. And people can get locked into struggles over, no, this is the absolute reality of what
1:36:05 happened. No, it isn’t. This is. And there is no absolute reality. It’s all about perception.
1:36:12 So people are calling that Gaslighting and it isn’t. That’s not what Gaslighting is.
1:36:15 At what point does it become Gaslighting? Is that when you’re intentionally trying to
1:36:20 make the other person crazy? Okay. Believe that they’re crazy so they don’t trust themselves.
1:36:26 And these violent relationships that, you know, that they will slap the woman across the face
1:36:29 and says, God damn it. You just hit me. I never hit you. I never touched you.
1:36:36 Yeah. I spoke to a domestic violence victim once who told me that her partner, when after
1:36:41 like love bombing her, so immediately like, you know, throwing all this affection onto her and,
1:36:46 you know, very, very quickly, he would then start like hiding her stuff. So he put her car keys in
1:36:51 the fridge and he’d be like, I didn’t, why did you put your car keys in the fridge? That’s Gaslighting.
1:36:55 Yeah. That’s Gaslighting. Perfect description. Then she thinks she’s going crazy. So he goes,
1:36:59 well, I’m going to have to take your car keys. And then she can’t, she’s lost her car. That’s
1:37:06 often done in the service of extreme jealousy and socially isolating the victim. Yeah.
1:37:15 We’ve treated domestic violence a lot. And God, I’ll never forget this one guy who had put
1:37:23 a mark on the tire and a mark on the driveway that matched up, that lined up. And at the end of the
1:37:31 day, if those marks didn’t line up, he’d beat her up. Even if she just went to the grocery store,
1:37:40 it didn’t matter. Who did you fuck to me? Right. Where’d you go? Nowhere. Oh, yeah. Right. You liar.
1:37:49 You roar. You, yeah. This is the typical and naive question people ask when they hear a story
1:37:54 like that. Their head goes, I would never stay with someone that did that to me. Blah, blah, blah.
1:38:00 Not true. Yeah. Not true. You know, first of all, it doesn’t happen all.
1:38:08 Secondly, oftentimes the victim usually, you know, in a hetero, it’s a woman.
1:38:17 Has her confidence beaten down? So it’s not just physical. It’s also mental abuse. God,
1:38:23 you’re an idiot. Man, are you stupid? And she starts doubting her own judgment,
1:38:29 her own intuition. Plus, you know, I don’t think you could survive out there. Nobody else is going
1:38:38 to want you. And she starts to believe it, starts to believe it. And she also has a dream that
1:38:45 he’s going to change. Yeah. Because he’s so remorseful of what he did to her. He promises
1:38:50 he’ll never happen again. And he loves her and he’s going to get this under control.
1:38:56 Is he a narcissist or is it possible that someone who isn’t a narcissist can
1:39:00 perform that behavior? Or is the word narcissist another word that’s just thrown around too much?
1:39:10 Very good. A plus. Yeah, yeah. It’s another word. You know, everybody is narcissistic, Stephen.
1:39:17 Everybody is. You know, narcissism basically comes from the instinct for self-preservation.
1:39:23 You know, you’re thinking about, okay, me, what do I need? What do I need? How am I going to get it?
1:39:29 And so on. I’ve got to really, you know, think about taking care of myself sometimes. I mean,
1:39:38 they call that a narcissist. But the way it really is meant is shorthand for a narcissistic
1:39:49 personality disorder, which is extreme narcissism, where there is no empathy whatsoever. The person
1:39:58 has no conscience whatsoever. They can hurt you. They can do everything that damages you.
1:40:07 And they take absolutely no responsibility for it and blame you for it. Blame the victim.
1:40:18 So somebody who, you know, says, “I didn’t fail. You made me fail. This is what you did that set me up.”
1:40:29 You know, blah, blah, blah. So everybody around them is a reflection of who they are themselves.
1:40:34 And so they only see people, other people, in two dimensions.
1:40:39 How do you go about, you said you spoke to couples and women who have been through domestic
1:40:43 abuse. And, you know, how do you go about helping them?
1:40:52 Okay. There’s two types of domestic violence. John mentioned characterological domestic violence.
1:40:57 That’s when there’s a clear perpetrator, clear victim. Nothing the victim can do
1:41:09 will change violence. There’s major injury. So what has to happen there is the victim has got to get
1:41:15 out of the relationship because she could be killed. Easier said than done right.
1:41:22 It is. That is correct. It is very, very hard. It has to be secretive. It, you know, she’s got a
1:41:30 planet, especially if they’re kids and so on. But there’s also, that’s only 20% of the domestic
1:41:38 violence out there. Only 20%. 80% of the domestic violence is what we call situational domestic
1:41:51 violence. And in that kind, both people tend to be violent. Both. The violent is not a seriously
1:41:59 injuring of the other person. It’s a slap. It’s a push. It’s a holding, you know, holding them
1:42:05 from moving, you know, that kind of thing, pushing them down, breaking things, breaking things,
1:42:14 throwing things at them and so on. And that results from moving into that flooded state
1:42:21 we described earlier, where you’re in conflict, your heart rate is jumping up over 100 beats a
1:42:29 minute. You go into fight or flight and when you do that, you lose access to your ability to problem
1:42:38 solve, your ability to listen, actually, to really take in what the other person is saying.
1:42:45 You hear attack, attack, attack, no matter what the person is saying, because it’s like
1:42:54 your frontal cortex, your prefrontal cortex is offline. So both people typically are getting
1:42:59 flooded during conflict. So those people, we can really, really help. So we’ve done a randomized
1:43:04 clinical trial treating those people. Right. And even a year and a half after treatment has ended
1:43:12 when they discuss a conflict on videotape in their home and we measure physiology,
1:43:17 physiology stays low. So the therapy is really effective compared to a controller.
1:43:23 As an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for ways to connect and to create. And that’s why I decided
1:43:28 to launch the conversation cards. I turned to Shopify, who also sponsored this podcast. And
1:43:34 Shopify made it so easy to set up an online store and reach all of you, no matter where you are in
1:43:38 the world. I remember the challenges we faced when we first launched the Diary of a CEO conversation
1:43:43 cards, managing inventory, ensuring a seamless checkout process and reaching our audience.
1:43:47 Shopify stepped in and made everything so straightforward and efficient. It was like
1:43:52 having an entire team of experts by our side, allowing us to focus on creating content and
1:43:56 connecting with you. What I love about Shopify is, no matter how big you intend to grow your
1:44:01 business, they give you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next
1:44:04 level. And to say thank you for listening to this podcast, we’re giving you a trial,
1:44:10 which is just $1 a month. And you can sign up by going to shopify.com/bartlet. The link is in
1:44:16 the description below. Is this part of the reason why you’re in the UK at the moment? You talked
1:44:22 about your trauma. Oh, it’s trauma. It’s trauma at Oxford. Yeah, we’re talking about trauma.
1:44:27 And also affairs, your affairs, talking about affairs, you’re talking about treating affairs.
1:44:33 Right. That’s right. I’ve never really heard the phrase “treating affairs” as if it’s a
1:44:42 condition, per se. But if there has been an affair or some form of infidelity, can it be treated?
1:44:52 75% so far in our research. True rate. And when you say “affair”, what are you throwing in that
1:44:56 bucket in terms of the definition of an affair? Is that a text or is that…?
1:45:00 Can it be an emotional affair as well as a physical affair?
1:45:02 A physical affair. A physical affair.
1:45:10 Yeah, usually. So it can be emotionally falling in love with somebody else without physical
1:45:19 consummation or physical consummation with somebody that you’ve fallen in love with,
1:45:26 or just having sex outside the relationship, not an emotional connection, but just having sex
1:45:32 when the agreement is melogamy. So it almost always involves deception.
1:45:41 Right. Always. It always does. Yeah. That’s a big part of it, is the deception and broken trust.
1:45:51 What affairs do is they turn the hurt partners world upside down. Everything they believed
1:46:00 about the partner is wrong. Everything that they thought they shared in terms of values is wrong.
1:46:10 So you can trust what the person says. No, you can’t because they weren’t staying at work late.
1:46:15 They were going to so-and-so’s apartment. It’s like I didn’t know this person.
1:46:18 Yeah. I didn’t know this. Who are you?
1:46:24 Who are you? And relationships are really oftentimes, especially committed ones,
1:46:30 are the foundation for our whole life. We build everything around that oftentimes,
1:46:36 our sense of family, even our sense of work sometimes, what work we choose, how we live
1:46:45 our lives, purpose and meaning that we give our lives together. And when there’s betrayal like that,
1:46:53 and the person that you thought your partner was, isn’t, then that whole thing cracks and falls to
1:47:02 the ground. It shatters. And how many people, how many couples cheat in any of those definitions
1:47:11 that you’ve described? Well, we don’t really know, but probably around 30% of all couples
1:47:19 is a conservative estimate. Conservative, really? I’ve heard 15%
1:47:27 of men and women. And the thing that’s interesting is that the stance for women having affairs
1:47:37 has pretty much caught up to men now. But here’s why. When, before the ’70s and women’s,
1:47:43 the women’s liberation movement, women were stuck at home. They weren’t out in the world
1:47:52 working. They didn’t have access to other things. The milkman and the plumber.
1:48:00 And the mailman, maybe. So they were stuck at home having coffee around their kitchen table
1:48:05 with their neighbor woman, whoever. But once they entered the workforce,
1:48:12 then they had access to a whole field of our potential people out there.
1:48:19 And so they caught up. It’s interesting as you say that, Julia. I was thinking through all the
1:48:25 implications of what would happen in a woman’s life when she went out to work. And one of the other
1:48:29 things is she would become more independent in every sense of the word. Yeah, exactly. That’s
1:48:34 right. She doesn’t have to stay in the marriage. She can support herself financially.
1:48:41 So how do you treat an affair? So we developed a model based on our research
1:48:52 called the Tone Attune Attach, A-A-A model. And here’s what, in a nutshell, here’s what it involves.
1:48:58 Again, it has to be done in therapy. You really can’t do this stuff at home. It’s too intense.
1:49:08 First, the person who did the betraying needs to respond totally transparently to every question
1:49:19 the Hurt Partner asks them. However, the Hurt Partner shouldn’t probably ask about the kind of
1:49:26 sex they had. And here’s why. I mean, it’s an important thing. Almost every person who suffered
1:49:33 through an affair has PTSD from a post-traumatic stress disorder. And part of post-traumatic stress
1:49:43 disorder is having these images or flashbacks, if you will, come into your mind unbidden. You
1:49:51 don’t want them there, but they come in anyway. And traumatic memory is different than regular
1:49:56 memory. Regular memory, you have a few little fragments, something said, and so on. Traumatic
1:50:06 memory, everything comes up at one time. The images, the smells, the sounds, the adrenaline,
1:50:14 cortisol, and so on. So when a woman asks questions about sex and then gets the answers,
1:50:23 guess what? So her images now are like flooding her mind with the kind of sex they had,
1:50:32 the partner and the affair partner, that plague her to an even greater degree and it’s horrible.
1:50:43 So a tone, answering the questions, and then saying, “I’m sorry a thousand times,” and really
1:50:52 meaning it, really, really meaning it. I’ve had many, both men and women who’ve cheated on their
1:50:59 partners or had affairs who end up crying during that phase, even the strongest of men will cry
1:51:08 when they realize how hurt the woman is or the man. The other thing that the betraying partner
1:51:16 needs to do is to listen to the other partner’s feelings without defensiveness. Just listen.
1:51:28 But in the therapy, a lot of times what happens is that the therapist has to help shape the hurt
1:51:35 partner’s expression of emotion to take it out of criticism and out of contempt into
1:51:44 “I feel destroyed.” “I feel like my world has fallen apart.” “I feel so empty, so abandoned,
1:51:53 so rejected.” So she has to describe or he has to describe their own feelings, not how bad the partner
1:52:01 was, which is typically what happens at home. So that’s the atonement phase. A tune and this has
1:52:08 to come after atonement, not as the first thing. They start looking at the actual marriage or
1:52:16 relationship itself and what was wrong with it. And a lot of times what you see are couples who,
1:52:22 at first, might have had terrible conflict. It was so bad they started avoiding conflict.
1:52:28 Once they avoided conflict, they got more mostly distant. And the person who did the betraying
1:52:37 got lonely, got lonely. So oftentimes the affairs are not about just getting more sex.
1:52:45 They’re about loneliness and beginning to talk to somebody else about how unhappy they are.
1:52:53 And then the third phase is attachment. So it’s like reattaching to your partner. That second
1:53:02 phase is really rebuilding trust. And the third phase is recommitting to the relationship.
1:53:11 This is not always true. I’ve seen the opposite. But in many cases, the sexual relationship doesn’t
1:53:19 resume until phase three, especially if the woman is the one who’s been betrayed.
1:53:26 But there are some where the woman will kind of throw herself at the man sexually
1:53:34 to compete with the affair partner and be better than the affair partner. So it can be both.
1:53:38 I mean, I’ve got so many questions there. So the first phase was the atonement,
1:53:43 attunement and then attachment. So many questions at different phases in that.
1:53:48 I mean, say many of them. I’ll start from the top, which is how many times do you apologize?
1:53:54 A thousand. Because is it true that at some point you’ve got to kind of move on?
1:53:58 You know, you have to know what you’re apologizing for.
1:54:05 Well, that’s important. But here’s why. And probably some of your audience,
1:54:10 especially therapists may disagree with this, but I’ve treated it for 50 years.
1:54:21 PTSD doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t disappear. It can get episodes of getting triggered can be
1:54:30 much less frequent over time or maybe not as intense, but it never disappears. So for example,
1:54:36 you may apologize a lot during the therapy. Things get better, better, better, better, better.
1:54:40 And then, you know, a couple months later after you leave therapy,
1:54:48 the man is late home from work and doesn’t call. Well, guess what happens? Boom. She goes into full
1:54:56 blown PTSD reenactment basically where it’s gotten triggered again. And oh my God, he’s doing it again.
1:55:05 You see, that’s why you can’t stop apologizing and just put it behind you. You don’t put PTSD
1:55:14 behind you. You see. Interesting. I guess that’s the cost of cheating, is the person will never be
1:55:20 the same again. It’s a high cost. It’s a very high cost. That’s right. Yeah. I wrote insecurity as
1:55:25 you were talking as a note. And I think what I meant when I wrote that is being cheated on must
1:55:30 create a huge amount of like lasting insecurity. And it kind of links to the second thing I was
1:55:36 writing down, which is this whole question of like, why did you cheat on me? And it must be,
1:55:40 for a lot of people, difficult to answer that question. Because if it’s, and also I was thinking,
1:55:45 some people don’t even know, they don’t actually, so they might try and hazard a guess and do even
1:55:50 more harm. Right. Well, I think it’s because you gained some weight or I think, well, you,
1:55:56 I think you, you smell or you know what I mean, when actually it’s something much deeper. So like,
1:56:01 that’s right. You know, is that a useful question to even ask in that setting?
1:56:09 It is. But again, in the setting of therapy, in the setting of therapy, you need the safety,
1:56:15 hopefully with a good therapist, you need the safety that the therapist provides.
1:56:24 Where, you know, why did she cheat? Well, because you’re an asshole. You know, no, that’s not
1:56:34 going to work. You know, so I once treated a couple where he had had 57 affairs. And they’d only been,
1:56:43 they had three children under the age of 10. And he’d had 57 affairs. And three of them,
1:56:52 he actually fell in love with. Okay. So, you know, you can, you can easily say, oh, because the guy
1:57:02 has a sexual addiction or blah, blah, blah. No, not true. The real reason was that he had been
1:57:11 raped as a kid. And he feared, oh my God, maybe I’m a latent homosexual, which in his culture
1:57:19 was the worst in the world, you know, in the worst way. So he had to keep proving to himself
1:57:24 that he was heterosexual, heterosexual, heterosexual, over and over and over again.
1:57:33 And as soon as he, you know, we put that together, because he just completely blocked it out for the
1:57:41 most part, boom, the affair stopped. Well, it just goes to show how complex it can be.
1:57:47 That’s right. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. And it’s a tone that not, not forgiveness.
1:57:55 Right. The difference there. Because when, when carapace emphasized forgiveness in this affair,
1:58:02 situation, they would blame the betrayed partner for not forgiving.
1:58:07 Is acceptance important? Acceptance of what? The situation you find yourself in.
1:58:20 No. No. That’s bad. Because you’re accepting something that’s hurtful, that’s terribly hurtful.
1:58:22 The reason I asked that particular question is because I was thinking about my friend who’s
1:58:28 going through this breakup. And much of the agony that I see himself in is because he’s like
1:58:32 refusing to accept the situation, it seems. And all the resistance. What’s the situation?
1:58:35 The situation is easy, but basically someone’s broken up with him. Oh.
1:58:40 And so it’s this constant rumination of maybe if I do this, I can change it, or maybe if I go,
1:58:45 almost like thinking back in time to see, see if he could time travel and fix all his mistakes.
1:58:48 And I was, and I was saying to him, and this might be bad advice, but saying to him like,
1:58:51 I think the first thing is we have to accept that this is the situation you find yourself in.
1:58:55 And then we’ll work from here. Oh, oh, oh, oh, that’s, yeah, that’s a whole different meaning
1:59:01 of acceptance. Yeah. I don’t mean except the fact that they cheated on you. Right.
1:59:08 That’s, that’s how I interpreted it at first. But yes, acceptance, you know, I would call
1:59:16 that grounding in the reality of what you have right now. And then, you know, really grounding
1:59:27 in it. Okay, I really have made all these mistakes. And, you know, if, if the partner maybe, maybe,
1:59:36 you know, tiny little teeny weeny spark left, I call it an ember that in therapy, it could be
1:59:43 blown on, you know, to bring back the fire and the passion and the relationship array. But as
1:59:51 John was pointing out, sometimes the person is only feeling the ashes of the past relationship.
1:59:57 There are no embers left. This is a difficult question to ask, but have you ever seen cheating
2:00:03 help a relationship? Oh, every time. Really? When there’s recovery.
2:00:13 Every time. Not every time, but very, very often, very often when they get help, when they get help,
2:00:18 if they don’t get help, it’s not going to, you know, it’s worse. But when they get help,
2:00:29 the help can help them change all the patterns in the relationship and help them learn who the
2:00:38 other person really is, what their needs really are, how they want you to turn up in the relationship
2:00:46 that they had no idea of before. So it can create more intimacy, different kind of trust,
2:00:54 of course, but more intimacy and more connection. The trail is always implied prior
2:00:58 conflict avoidance. Instead of talking to your partner about what’s wrong,
2:01:02 you talk to somebody else about what’s wrong with you, with the partner.
2:01:07 What are some of the, so you’re telling me that 74% of the time
2:01:11 affairs can be treated, 75% of the time affairs can be treated, roughly.
2:01:19 What are some of the revelations or realizations that you’ve had over the all the years of your
2:01:24 work about the nature of humans and relationships and love and dating and all these things that
2:01:28 always stick front of mind for you? I’m going to ask you first, John, from a research perspective,
2:01:32 is there any particular research which you’d consider to be your favorite research
2:01:35 that was most pivotal for the way you think that you haven’t mentioned yet?
2:01:44 I think that relationships can be great sources of longevity, health,
2:01:53 great context for raising children. And so they can have this wonderful magic
2:02:04 is health giving, longevity giving, and it just requires certain conditions to be met.
2:02:07 And those are the principles that make relationships work.
2:02:12 Is there a particular piece of research that you’re most fond of?
2:02:16 That he’s done or somebody else has done?
2:02:17 Eve, both.
2:02:24 Yeah, I mean, I think this whole field of social epidemiology is,
2:02:32 which has emerged in the last 50 years, really shows that relationships are life giving and
2:02:39 longevity giving, given today’s level of medical treatment of chronic illness.
2:02:44 It’s really relationships that make the difference and really make the difference in raising kids.
2:02:49 The last thing I want to talk to you about is this idea of bids for connection,
2:02:53 because it’s a very popular topic and there’s lots of people online and on TikTok
2:02:59 discussing the importance of bids for connection. What are bids for connection?
2:03:08 Well, in this apartment lab that Julie and I built, there were three cameras and
2:03:16 at the time it was only possible to technologically merge two of them in a split screen.
2:03:24 So people in the control room had to use the cameras in a particular way so that they had a
2:03:30 split screen. And they very quickly saw that quite often one person was trying to get the other
2:03:35 person’s attention or interest. And so they would focus on that person who was saying,
2:03:41 “Oh, look at that beautiful boat going by.” And then they focused the other camera on the partner
2:03:53 and see the response. And so this, you had this sort of two-step interaction. One,
2:03:57 attempting the other person’s attention, making a bid for connection. And the other person,
2:04:04 either responding or not responding or responding irritably, turning toward or turning away or
2:04:11 turning against. And it turned out that six years later, the couples who eventually divorced,
2:04:17 when they looked back six years earlier, they had turned toward these bids an average of 33% of
2:04:22 the time. Whereas the couples who were still married, they looked back six years later,
2:04:29 they had turned toward their partners bids 86% of the time. So this huge difference, 33% versus
2:04:34 86%. You mentioned three responses to a bid for connection. So my partner comes up to me, she
2:04:38 goes, “Babe, look at this.” You mentioned they turned toward them, which is me turning towards
2:04:44 my partner and saying, “What is it, babe?” It’s not physical, mind you. Well, it could be. No.
2:04:49 What I’m trying to say is that a lot of people interpret turning toward us. “Oh, you turn
2:04:56 your body toward your partner.” No, it’s not. It’s just responding to your partner’s
2:05:04 desire for interest or attention. Okay. Yeah. And then turning away is me not responding.
2:05:08 Not ignoring them. Then turning against would be an irritable kind of response.
2:05:11 Stop interrupting me. I’m working. Okay. Yeah.
2:05:18 So 86% of the couples that stayed together were those that turned toward,
2:05:24 I, they acknowledged the bid for connection. The couples who stayed married had turned toward bids
2:05:31 and 86% of the time. So when their partner tried to get their attention, probability of them turning
2:05:38 toward was 0.86. Okay. 86% of the time they turned toward. The other thing that was interesting was
2:05:46 that people who turned toward a lot tended to have a sense of humor together during conflict,
2:05:52 which reduced physiological arousal. So how do you get people to laugh together when they’re
2:05:57 disagreeing? And it turns out that if you increase turning toward,
2:06:03 people spontaneously develop more of a sense of humor about themselves during conflict.
2:06:08 That was a really amazing finding of one of my graduate students, Dennis Driver.
2:06:11 You can teach people to turn toward, acknowledge those bids.
2:06:14 Yeah, you can. You know, just increase awareness.
2:06:17 I’ve struggled with that in my relationships. I’ve not been very good at turning towards,
2:06:20 i.e. when my partner makes bid for connection, I’ve not been greater.
2:06:24 I often saw it as like an interruption, or you knew I was busy, or like you,
2:06:29 but from doing this podcast, in fact, and speaking to lots of great people like you guys,
2:06:37 I’ve, in those moments, I guess, Steve, fuck the laptop. Just turn and maybe email,
2:06:44 what’s that, you know, and it helps. Let me give you a suggestion, you know,
2:06:49 because all of us have times when we can’t turn towards, right? Because we’ve got a deadline,
2:06:53 or we’ve got something. But what you can do is say, honey, I would really love to listen
2:06:59 to you right now, but I’ve got to finish this project. After I do another hour of work,
2:07:06 can we then talk? Yeah, you see. So you’re putting a bookmark in there that says I want to talk to
2:07:14 you, but I’ve got this competing goal that I have to finish. And, but then we’ll talk.
2:07:19 My partner says to me, it’s how you say it. Oh, you know, so I’ve just got to be,
2:07:25 like, actually turn my body language. So I’m acknowledging the person, not like saying it
2:07:29 while without missing a keystroke, turn my body and say it in a way that’s loving,
2:07:34 not just one second, I’m just working on something. It’s not, it just, you know,
2:07:38 because it’s not gonna work. It doesn’t do it. It’s not gonna work.
2:07:42 Or even worse, it’s just at one second. Good try, you know, C minus.
2:07:50 If people want to learn more about all the work that you do, how do they go about finding you?
2:08:01 Well, a couple of things. They can go to gotman.com, G-O-T-T-M-A-N.com, internet site.
2:08:06 There’s a whole bunch of stuff there. Or they can go to our books.
2:08:13 And the last one, especially if you’re dealing with conflict, the last one is called Fight Right.
2:08:24 But we also have one that is eight dates, essential conversations for a lifetime of love.
2:08:27 And that’s a great one too. And there’s also a website we’ve created called
2:08:33 Gotman Connect, where people can actually go and take questionnaires and evaluate the strengths
2:08:39 and challenges in their own relationship, in the privacy of their homes, and then access
2:08:46 37 video modules that Julie and I created for improving how you deal with conflict,
2:08:50 how you improve intimacy, sexual connection, and so on.
2:08:52 We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest lives,
2:08:57 leaves a question for the next. I’m going to start with Julie. Tell us about a paranormal
2:09:08 experience you’ve had. Okay. These always, I have visions now and then. And they always happen
2:09:14 when I’m driving, for some odd reason. So I was driving across the Mojave Desert,
2:09:19 and I felt a very strong urge to pull over. Okay, I always listened to those pulled over,
2:09:29 walked into the desert to whatever felt like the right place, sat down, started to meditate, and
2:09:45 felt myself inside a huge golden mountain that was just glowing. And it took the form of a huge
2:09:55 golden Buddha. And I was sitting, a tiny little being, in its hands, and it lifted me up off the
2:10:13 ground. And I heard many truthful things about reality that form my very foundation.
2:10:30 Can you give me one? Everybody suffers. Everybody. And nobody suffers more than anybody else. Everybody
2:10:38 has their own suffering, and everybody has their own path to move through that suffering
2:10:52 and to heal. And people do heal. But life is full of suffering. That’s normal. It’s not a
2:10:59 sense of duality. Suffering is part of the perfection of our existence.
2:11:05 It really does change your perspective on yourself and others when you hear that
2:11:12 point about suffering being unavoidable. Because then, at least, you don’t treat
2:11:17 yourself as such a victim to suffering. You realise that it’s part of, it’s fundamentally
2:11:23 attached to all the things that I love as well. What about you, John? Have you ever had a paranormal
2:11:32 experience when the numbers just came together perfectly? I don’t know if this is a paranormal
2:11:39 experience, but I was once driving through the University of Washington Arboretum,
2:11:50 and I was really, really sick. And I was driving toward my office because I had a client
2:11:58 who was suicidal, and I hadn’t been able to reach her to cancel the appointment. And I cancelled
2:12:03 a little of the other appointments. But as sick as I was, I just didn’t think I could
2:12:10 just not show up. So I had to show up and at least say, “I’m really too sick physically to see you,
2:12:19 but I care about you.” And as I was driving through the Arboretum, I had a fever and I was
2:12:29 sneezing and coughing. I felt the presence of my parents in the car, both no longer living.
2:12:36 I felt my mother on this cheek and my father on this cheek. And it was really very sweet.
2:12:41 I just, because of Julie’s experiences, I kind of said, “Well, maybe this is real.”
2:12:51 By the time I got through the Arboretum, all my cold symptoms were gone. And it was important for
2:12:58 me to be there for that client. And I was healthy enough to actually have a session with her so
2:13:04 that I don’t have to constitute the paranormal experience. But it’s pretty weird. She was okay.
2:13:11 Thank you so much. I’ve continued to learn so much from your wonderful,
2:13:15 lovely work. And our last conversation was such a smash it with my audience that
2:13:18 everywhere I went, people would stop me and say, “Oh my God, I love that episode with the Gottmans.”
2:13:26 I think it’s both your wisdom, your knowledge, but also the pair of you together formed such a
2:13:31 diverse set of perspectives, which is useful in sort of taking on some of these problems
2:13:34 that we’ve discussed today, which is really nice because you do have very different perspectives
2:13:38 and you come at things differently. And I think that helps complete the whole picture.
2:13:41 And thank you more broadly for the work that you’ve done on relationships and love over the
2:13:45 last couple of decades because people cite it everywhere I go, not just in the context of love,
2:13:50 but they cite it in the context of business. I’ve used your work on stage when I did a tour of
2:13:54 Australia recently. I’ve gone to conferences in Colombia and I’ve heard people talk about your
2:13:58 work on the Four Horsemen and contempt and all these kinds of things in your love lab, as they
2:14:03 call it. So you’re doing incredibly important work that really targets the most important thing,
2:14:06 which is keeping humans together. So thank you for all that you do. And thank you for being here
2:14:13 again. Thank you, Steven. And thank you very much for being the, again, the best interviewer we’ve
2:14:23 had in 30 years. Isn’t this cool? Every single conversation I have here on The Diary of a CEO,
2:14:30 at the very end of it, you’ll know I asked the guest to leave a question in The Diary of a CEO.
2:14:35 And what we’ve done is we’ve turned every single question written in The Diary of a CEO
2:14:41 into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you’ve got every guest we’ve ever
2:14:49 had their question. And on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person
2:14:55 who answered that question. We’re finally revealing all of the questions and the people that answered
2:15:02 the question. The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the
2:15:07 conversationcards.com. They’ve sold out twice instantaneously. So if you are interested in
2:15:12 getting hold of some limited edition conversation cards, I really, really recommend acting quickly.
2:15:36 [Music]

0:00:10 The sources of your, of stress in your life, we call them a ton of stress, T-O-N-N, right?
0:00:15 And you know, trauma, obsessions, nuisances and noise.
0:00:19 Trauma happens from outside, it’s a major change in your life and it hits you so hard
0:00:28 and it breaks you for a short time, but believe it or not, 91% of people will face at least
0:00:35 one, but often several, PTSD inducing traumatic event in their life.
0:00:39 That’s like the loss of a loved one or, you know, losing your job so unexpectedly to the
0:00:45 point you have to suffer or whatever, okay, being in a war zone and so on.
0:00:49 Believe it or not, 93% of them will recover within three months.
0:00:52 Trauma is not what breaks us, right?
0:00:58 The interesting stuff that breaks us is the long application of obsessions, nuisances and
0:01:00 trauma and noise.
0:01:04 Obsessions are macro issues that you tell yourself.
0:01:07 Don’t exist in the real world at all, okay?
0:01:11 Like I have a belly, a little belly, so no one will ever love me.
0:01:16 You can, you can obsess about this for the rest of your life, right?
0:01:21 And make it your life story and basically create a lot of stress as a result of that
0:01:23 script that you told yourself, okay?
0:01:28 You know, nuisances are the little ones, the little forms of that, you know, things that
0:01:34 are triggered every day by you passing in front of the mirror as you walk out of the
0:01:38 door and you go like, oh man, you’re still that or whatever, right?
0:01:44 Believe it or not, most of our stress, however, comes because of what we call nuisances.
0:01:48 Nuisances are stressors that don’t break you, they’re not trauma, okay?
0:01:53 But there are so many of them that you include in your life, so many of them.
0:01:58 When Alice wrote, you know, the limit bit of the chapter, she wrote a beautiful script
0:02:04 about the first five minutes or 10 minutes of your day and she started to count the stressors
0:02:10 that you trigger in your life in those minutes from the very loud alarm, right, to the, you
0:02:16 know, opening your social media and seeing something upsetting or, you know, opening
0:02:19 WhatsApp and getting a message you don’t like and so on and so forth, right?
0:02:24 And this is five minutes, 10 minutes, before you even had your coffee, you get 10, 15 stressors.
0:02:30 The trick is how beneficial for your life have those been.
0:02:35 And if we’re aware, if we’re able to look at those stressors and say, hold on, I’m going
0:02:39 to take an inventory of all of the things that stressed me last week, okay, a genuinely
0:02:44 honest inventory and I’m going to tell myself, oh, by the way, I don’t need this, I don’t
0:02:46 need this, I don’t need this, I don’t need this, right?
0:02:51 My commute, if I leave 10 minutes early, would it be easier?
0:02:53 If I leave 10 minutes late, would it be easier?
0:03:00 If I take music or the diary of the CEO podcast with me, would it become easier, right?
0:03:07 And if you actually attentively, deliberately look at all of the new senses in your life,
0:03:09 how many of them can you limit?
0:03:10 Countless.
0:03:14 I promise you, you can limit countless new senses.
0:03:17 You can remove that friend that’s annoying you, okay?
0:03:22 By simply texting them and saying, I don’t want to be your friend anymore, or simply winding
0:03:27 down the conversations, or when they send you something or talk to you about something,
0:03:30 you go like, oh, very interesting, right?
0:03:37 Instead of engaging in those things, can you limit the amount of junk food you let into
0:03:38 your life?
0:03:42 Can you limit the amount of restrictions and control that you apply to yourself in your
0:03:45 life and millions of little things?
0:03:50 Practically, though, how does someone who’s listening to this now that has built that
0:03:55 life where they’re in the corporate world and they’re the managing director of this
0:03:58 fund or whatever they are, they’re listening to this now, they’re on the way to work on
0:04:03 the tube or the plane or the train or whatever, and they’ve built up all of these commitments,
0:04:06 so they’re getting the WhatsApps, they’re getting the emails, they’re getting the Pilates
0:04:11 instructor checking you, they’ve built that noise into their life.
0:04:15 How do they set about unpacking it without, like, destroying their life?
0:04:19 You can do it granularly or you can do it at macro levels, right?
0:04:21 So limit, remember, limit, learn and listen.
0:04:26 Limit the first module, the first ability is what can I limit?
0:04:31 80% of that person’s life is not needed, okay?
0:04:37 80% of the money, unless you give your money to charity, is a waste of resources because
0:04:40 you cannot buy, you cannot enjoy two cars at the same time, you cannot enjoy two beds
0:04:44 at the same time, you cannot, simple, really, huh?
0:04:51 And the trick is this, you can add the micro level, tell yourself, I met, when I was in
0:04:59 my chief business officer of Google X, I met this wonderful CEO who basically appeared
0:05:02 so chill, and I asked him and I said, “How are you so chill?”
0:05:09 And he said, “I do only four meetings a day at most, each is an hour, okay?
0:05:11 Doing less, nothing more.”
0:05:12 And I said, “How?”
0:05:14 And he said, “I’m a CEO.
0:05:20 If I do meetings that are shorter than an hour, they’re too operational, okay?
0:05:24 If I do meetings that are longer than an hour, they haven’t figured it out yet, okay?
0:05:31 I’m so sorry, Steve, but how much of your business can be run by Oliver, okay?
0:05:35 You know, your CEOs should run that business.
0:05:40 But again, I don’t want to limit this to the top business people of the world.
0:05:48 How much of your life as a salesman, so my sales team would work, would walk into my
0:05:53 review meetings, and they would present 12 opportunities every week.
0:05:57 And I would go like, “Okay, I’m gonna focus on number one, and number four, don’t talk
0:05:58 to me about the other 10.”
0:06:00 They go like, “Why?
0:06:02 This is like a billion dollars of business.”
0:06:05 And I’m like, “Yeah, but this is enough.
0:06:06 Those are more difficult.
0:06:07 Those customers are interested.
0:06:09 We can serve them better.
0:06:13 If you serve them better, you’re gonna close the deal, right?
0:06:14 Go do two.
0:06:18 And by the way, if there are 12, we should hire more salespeople.
0:06:22 But if you focus on two, you’ll do 110% of your target.
0:06:24 What’s better than that?
0:06:28 And normally what ends up happening is they focus, they continue to focus on all 12.
0:06:30 And you know what happens?
0:06:32 That portfolio approach?
0:06:33 Reality hits.
0:06:38 They’re running a portfolio so that 10 of them will fail and two will run, will happen.
0:06:39 You lose the 10.
0:06:41 That’s the reality, right?
0:06:46 You’re spreading yourself so thin that 10 of them are not getting your attention anyway.
0:06:50 They’re just bothering you in the back of your mind, and you lose the 10.
0:06:53 Instead of two, run three, 50% buffer.
0:06:54 Okay.
0:06:56 Devil’s advocate again here.
0:07:00 I’m thinking about the listener who every entrepreneur that they admire, every person
0:07:04 they admire, lies.
0:07:06 It’s lies and you’re contributing to it, my friend.
0:07:10 But I’m trying to, I’m really trying to, how many of those people we know all of them?
0:07:11 How many of them are happy?
0:07:12 Oh my God.
0:07:13 That’s a different question.
0:07:17 How many of them are well?
0:07:22 So here’s what I was going to say is when you hear about the people you admire and that
0:07:28 first year or two, in starting the thing that they went on to do that, maybe even gives
0:07:33 them fulfillment now, all of those people will say there was no work-life balance at
0:07:34 the start.
0:07:37 We had to work really hard, and that’s just the way it is.
0:07:41 I was working in a call center, I was building my business on the side, I had to work until
0:07:44 midnight or else I wouldn’t have left the call center.
0:07:45 I respect that.
0:07:46 I respect that.
0:07:47 That’s me.
0:07:48 That’s why I tell people.
0:07:49 You’re not working in the call center anymore.
0:07:50 I’m not.
0:07:51 No.
0:07:52 But for that first year or two.
0:07:53 Fine.
0:07:55 If you want to do year or two, fine.
0:07:56 Okay.
0:07:57 Okay.
0:07:58 Fine.
0:07:59 It’s never ending.
0:08:04 I told you openly, for every one of us, not just you, there’s no ceiling.
0:08:07 There’s no preview.
0:08:13 There’s no pre-plan of when I reach this, it’s enough, 20 trips is enough.
0:08:17 You know what happens when you limit yourself to 20 trips?
0:08:18 Your value becomes higher.
0:08:19 Yeah.
0:08:23 You make the same amount of revenue.
0:08:26 You know what happens when you limit yourself to two deals?
0:08:28 You serve the customer better.
0:08:31 You know what happens when you limit yourself to five friends?
0:08:32 They become real friends.
0:08:34 You go out and meet them instead of texting them.
0:08:38 So you’re saying cancel the third podcast a week, who are going to launch?
0:08:40 Are you going to do a third podcast a week?
0:08:46 Oh my God, I struggled with that too because I’ve been trying to build an Arabic podcast
0:08:47 for a while.
0:08:48 Yeah.
0:08:49 Which I have to say is needed in the region.
0:08:50 Yeah.
0:08:51 Okay.
0:08:56 Really needed the region of 350 million people and in reality, I’m one of the few that can
0:09:00 run an Arabic podcast that’s as successful as slow mo, right?
0:09:03 But the cost of that podcast is my health.
0:09:07 So there will be a moment in my life where one of my projects will be handed over and
0:09:09 the Arabic podcast will show up.
0:09:16 But I sat with the person that I was working on this with and I said, look, just it’s not
0:09:25 going to be right if I do it now, 52 more episodes a year beyond my capabilities.
0:09:32 Think about one kick ass diary of the CEO a week.
0:09:34 Does that slash your sponsorship revenue by half?
0:09:38 I wouldn’t even know.
0:09:39 I wouldn’t even know.
0:09:41 This is the truth.
0:09:46 People might not believe it’s the truth, but the sponsorship revenue is inconsequential
0:09:47 in the grand schema things.
0:09:50 I think when we started for the first three years, I said to the team, the team know this
0:09:52 because they all get to see the bank accounts and stuff.
0:09:55 I said to them, if we make any money from this, we put it back into the show.
0:09:58 Now we’ve obviously, we make more money than we can put into the show.
0:10:01 So it’s like, I see the message in our Slack channel that we’ve made this much money from
0:10:03 the podcast or whatever else.
0:10:11 But obviously the impact of that is, I mean, what does it mean?
0:10:12 We can hire more people.
0:10:14 We can have a studio in LA and in America at the same time.
0:10:17 We can buy a big boat or buy a fleet.
0:10:19 I’m never going to buy a boat because I’m so busy.
0:10:21 I’m talking about the fishermen.
0:10:22 Oh, right.
0:10:23 Yeah.
0:10:24 Yeah.
0:10:32 So the real question is, if you allowed yourself to measure a different objective, not the
0:10:42 number of listeners, but the impact on every listener, not the number of guests, but the
0:10:45 quality of guests, right?
0:10:50 Not the number of topics, but the topics that you believe in.
0:10:51 And how does that look over the long term?
0:10:55 So you’re saying you’d get to the same place over the long term?
0:10:58 You’ll not become Steve Jobs.
0:11:04 When I say get to the same place, my rebuttal in my brain was like, because we built a platform,
0:11:09 people like you, when you’ve got something good to talk about, like your books, you came
0:11:14 and we had that incredible conversation, episode 101, my favorite conversation of all time.
0:11:19 That was a byproduct of us fighting hard to build a platform where you felt or whoever’s
0:11:20 decision it was.
0:11:28 So you’re saying that because you’re doing two episodes a week, by the way, when I did
0:11:30 101, it was one episode a week.
0:11:36 But because you’re doing two episodes a week, you’re enabling more people to have a channel
0:11:38 to speak, right?
0:11:41 There are 62,000 books written last year.
0:11:45 You need to step up your game if you want to serve all books.
0:11:46 No, I don’t want to sell all books.
0:11:47 I just want the best ones.
0:11:53 So the question really is, again, what’s the ceiling?
0:11:57 How many good books can you spread a year, right?
0:12:00 I mean, when you look at slow-mo, I do the opposite of what you do.
0:12:06 So a very interesting part of what I do with slow-mo is I rarely ever get a celebrity.
0:12:11 It’s a podcast by the people, for the people, if you want, sort of, like a lot of people
0:12:13 will listen and say, I can relate to this.
0:12:15 This is part of my story.
0:12:22 And the game here is that 7.8 million possible guests, billion, sorry, right?
0:12:25 It’s impossible, impossible, OK?
0:12:32 The question truly is, what do I want to stand for?
0:12:39 I mean, there are so many ways I can grow slow-mo.
0:12:40 Is that what I stand for?
0:12:42 Why do I want to grow it?
0:12:45 I mean, look at my Instagram and your Instagram.
0:12:48 This is a very interesting conversation.
0:12:52 My Instagram, I think, is 150,000 people or something.
0:12:53 Yours is what?
0:12:58 15 million, gazillion, gazillion, something like that?
0:12:59 I don’t know.
0:13:03 That’s a very large number, right?
0:13:04 What difference does it make?
0:13:08 Well, you said to me, you said you want to make a million people unstressed, a billion
0:13:09 people happy or whatever it was.
0:13:13 That’s my ambition, but do I have to do that?
0:13:20 Or do people listening to this, are people listening to this going to tell other people
0:13:24 about this so that they come and listen to this, right?
0:13:29 But if this podcast had six listeners, you probably wouldn’t have chose it for your book
0:13:30 tour.
0:13:32 I would have chosen a thousand of them.
0:13:38 No, but the question really is very straightforward.
0:13:41 The question is, you’re there already.
0:13:42 Yeah.
0:13:43 I understand that.
0:13:46 This is why I ask what’s the bullshit I’m telling myself, because I do realize that
0:13:51 there’s some kind of bullshit I’m telling myself at a deep level about why I need to
0:14:00 work hard, and it’s clearer to me now more than ever that the cost is significant and
0:14:02 the reward is not clear.
0:14:03 It’s diminishing.
0:14:04 Yeah.
0:14:05 I don’t even know what the reward is.
0:14:07 The most rewarding thing I do you’ve identified is this.
0:14:11 This is the most impactful thing I do, so I think you’d appreciate the most.
0:14:12 Open so many minds.
0:14:14 It’s a wonderful part of people’s life.
0:14:15 It is this.
0:14:19 So I ask myself, why don’t I just do this?
0:14:24 Because there are 40 other companies that I’m involved in as an investor, or six or
0:14:30 seven that I founded, and before you were sat there today, there was a founder, an hour
0:14:34 before you arrived of another business that I’m involved in, and I’m a co-founder of.
0:14:38 And we were talking about funding in this plan, in this plan, in this plan, and I do
0:14:40 go, what insanity is this?
0:14:42 And I know it’s not just me.
0:14:48 It’s a lot of people out there that have engaged in this voluntary insanity of overstressing
0:14:51 their lives, the addiction of stressors you describe it in the book.
0:14:58 And a lot of us, as I said earlier, we know it’s insanity when we zoom out and think about
0:15:03 it on a piece of paper, but there’s something so tempting about the addiction.
0:15:05 It’s the only script that you know.
0:15:06 Yeah.
0:15:12 So I keep telling myself, when there was a time, if you really dig deep back in probably
0:15:17 2009, I did a public talk somewhere, and it was filmed.
0:15:21 And they asked me, what is your life’s purpose?
0:15:28 And I said, my life’s purpose is to help startups build technology that is as complex
0:15:31 as Google outside the Western world.
0:15:40 So specific, you very, very interesting thinker, truth is, I am not that person.
0:15:41 Right?
0:15:42 Why did you say that?
0:15:47 Because at the time, I was in a system where I was very good at helping startups, but it
0:15:49 wasn’t my life’s purpose.
0:15:50 Okay?
0:15:53 And as a result, I coached 50 startups a week.
0:15:58 When I used to go to California, I used to tell, from the number of startups that needed
0:16:02 my time, I used to say, I’m going to be in Blue Bottle Cafe on University Avenue between
0:16:09 11 and 6 p.m. or 5 p.m. on Sundays, come over, catch me, and I’ll try to help you.
0:16:14 And I would meet 15, 20 of them every single week.
0:16:15 Right?
0:16:16 Why?
0:16:19 It’s not my life’s purpose at all.
0:16:27 I focus my life now on things that are very different, happiness, well-being, and it wasn’t
0:16:29 me that chose this path, by the way.
0:16:39 That purpose was, chose me, by Lali leaving the world, and at a moment where I was ready.
0:16:40 Okay?
0:16:42 That’s what, and what does that mean?
0:16:48 It means that I had to leave Google X, I had to leave a career around being an angel investor
0:16:52 and being this and being that, and now people text me and say, “Mo, I have this new startup
0:16:57 and I really need you to invest,” and I say, “I don’t invest,” period.
0:16:58 Why?
0:17:01 Because investment is not giving someone some money.
0:17:06 Investment is a call every four hours, “Hey, we have this opportunity, we have,” who wants
0:17:07 that?
0:17:08 Okay?
0:17:14 And the real question is, and I say it with worry that a lot of people might have already
0:17:17 switched off the podcast by now, okay?
0:17:25 It’s a big lie, the whole endless cycle of growth and progress is a big lie.
0:17:30 It’s the reason why we’re allowing AI into our life without thinking of the dangers
0:17:34 of AI, because it’s a big lie.
0:17:39 More is better, faster is better, more progress is better, is it?
0:17:44 Thank you.

0:00:05 Doing this at home will give you phenomenal overall results with not so much time investment.
0:00:08 It’s not so difficult. We’re talking about a sum total of…
0:00:10 Really? Yeah, yeah, I’m doing that.
0:00:13 Per week will radically transform your body.
0:00:18 Dr. Michael Isretel is a leading sports scientist who provides no nonsense, science-based strategies
0:00:22 on muscle building, fat loss, and helping people maximize their fitness potential.
0:00:28 My mission is to get everyone in as good of shape as possible with minimum time investment.
0:00:30 So, where do we start?
0:00:32 So, it’s the consistency that matters.
0:00:35 Doesn’t matter if it’s two hours a week or if it’s 18 hours a week.
0:00:37 If you’re consistent, you can get amazing benefits.
0:00:41 And then there’s specificity, which is the most important principle in all of exercise science.
0:00:43 It’s telling yourself, “Okay, I want bigger biceps.”
0:00:48 And then focus on that and also every real working set should be challenging.
0:00:50 Is there a perfect amount of repetitions to do?
0:00:52 There is. It’s a trade secret. But it’s…
0:00:56 How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I’ve gained if I don’t go back to the gym?
0:00:58 After about two weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle.
0:01:02 But most people think, “Oh, my God, another eight months just to get back to where I started?”
0:01:07 But when you gain an initial amount of muscle, it never goes back to the same size as when you started.
0:01:08 It’s just always going to be bigger.
0:01:10 And then I’ve got a couple of hours of weight.
0:01:12 I just want to get a bit leaner and I want to gain some muscle.
0:01:15 Okay, the first thing we do is go to Michael.
0:01:17 Are there any supplements you suggest I take?
0:01:18 Whey protein, casein protein.
0:01:20 What about steroids?
0:01:22 Jesus Christ, I’m really going to say this.
0:01:25 He’s recently on like a boatload of steroids.
0:01:26 There are a few downsides.
0:01:28 What are the downsides that no one’s talking about?
0:01:29 They’re unspeakable.
0:01:30 Do you really want to know?
0:01:43 Dr. Michael, what is the mission that you find yourself on in this phase of your life?
0:01:52 For those who would like to get everyone who would like in as good of shape as possible,
0:02:03 with as minimum of a time investment, injury probability, and inconvenience in general as
0:02:07 possible, and the highest likelihood of best results, while trying to completely excise
0:02:13 doing anything that is pointless, and also, I’m going to say this politely,
0:02:16 telling people things that aren’t true.
0:02:23 We’re trying to get as many people fit, leaner, more muscular, more flexible, healthier, etc.
0:02:27 as humanly possible, to the extent that they are interested in that sort of thing.
0:02:28 Because not everyone’s into fitness.
0:02:29 I understand that.
0:02:33 I mean, I think I look kind of freaky and it scares certain people.
0:02:34 So I have a lot of time for that.
0:02:37 But if you want to get fit, we’re trying our best.
0:02:42 What are the big myths that end up standing in the way of most people?
0:02:48 When they hear this conversation now, what are the most frequent rebuttals that you’ll get
0:02:53 when you say that someone can get in shape and be lean with limited time?
0:02:59 Two super common ones are, I don’t have the time to work out.
0:03:03 And into that time to work out is included.
0:03:08 I don’t have regular gym access, or I technically do, but I’d have to drive to the gym.
0:03:11 I just don’t have the time of the bandwidth where I don’t have the scheduling,
0:03:13 positioning in my life to do this sort of thing.
0:03:19 And baked into that is the assumption that getting much healthier and much leaner and
0:03:22 much more muscular takes an inordinate amount of time.
0:03:25 What are the most common questions I get out in the real world
0:03:27 when people happen to look in my general direction?
0:03:29 Because usually people just kind of go like, what the hell is wrong?
0:03:29 That guy’s had.
0:03:36 But one of the most common questions I get is, how many hours a day do you work out?
0:03:37 Or how many days a week do you work out?
0:03:42 And every single person is expecting an answer that is kind of like asking
0:03:45 the tallest basketball player you’ve ever met, how tall they are.
0:03:47 You want an answer that’s like two and a half meters.
0:03:49 You want something meaty.
0:03:51 And if they tell you like, I’m a meter 90, you’re kind of like,
0:03:53 isn’t that cool?
0:03:56 And every time I tell them how much I work out, which is really like,
0:04:01 it might really like trying to be as good as bodybuilding as possible.
0:04:02 It is really eight hours a week.
0:04:09 And this is to do this insane thing for people just trying to be fit and healthy, etc.
0:04:15 We’re talking about a sum total of one hour per week split into two or three,
0:04:17 20 ish minute sessions.
0:04:24 Something we’ll be trying later on is such a huge stimulus and can radically transform your body,
0:04:26 especially if you have attention to nutrition.
0:04:28 And that’s the second thing that’s a big dog.
0:04:34 My big myth is people have ideas about what comes in to nutrition
0:04:40 and nutrition for being more lean, more muscular and healthier.
0:04:42 They have all these kind of a constellation of ideas.
0:04:46 Economists and philosophers, Thomas Sowell calls them notions.
0:04:50 So if you have a hierarchy of understanding, you have theory at the top,
0:04:54 which is like gravitation evolution, things super, super confirmed.
0:04:57 Just beneath that, you have model, like the standard model in physics.
0:04:59 It’s not quite good enough, quite good enough support, be a theory,
0:05:02 but it’s a very well understood space with a few mysteries.
0:05:04 Under that, you have a hypothesis,
0:05:08 which is you have a real good idea formally phrased.
0:05:10 And underneath that, you have a notion.
0:05:13 And a notion is just things people say and people are like, uh-huh.
0:05:16 And no one even asks or answers about, is this really true?
0:05:18 And so when you talk to people about nutrition,
0:05:21 or they talk to you about why they’re not in such great shape,
0:05:24 another thing I get is when you’re pretty jacked and lean
0:05:25 and you sit next to someone on a plane,
0:05:28 they treat you almost like a religious figure, like a priest or a mom.
0:05:30 And they’re like, apologize.
0:05:32 They’re like, cool, you look like you’re in good shape.
0:05:33 I just have men in the gym.
0:05:36 And I’m like, I love you as a human being, no matter all the time.
0:05:37 Really? All the time.
0:05:38 They apologize for the state they’re in.
0:05:39 More or less, yeah.
0:05:40 Well, they’ll see me eat a protein bar
0:05:42 and they’re getting like the food on the plane.
0:05:43 And they’re like, this is bad for me, huh?
0:05:44 And I’m like, no, it’s actually quite fine.
0:05:46 And they’re always a little bit confused.
0:05:50 So all these ideas people have about nutrition, organic,
0:05:55 artificial sweeteners are bad, gluten-free, GMOs.
0:05:59 You have to have very meticulously well-prepared meals.
0:06:01 There is a ton of food that’s huge,
0:06:04 laundry-less of food that’s unhealthy and bad for you, makes you fat.
0:06:06 There are other foods that are a little bit more nuanced
0:06:08 and difficult to find that are super health foods
0:06:09 and will radically transform you.
0:06:11 I can go on for hours about these myths.
0:06:14 But people come in with these myths as notions,
0:06:17 as things they believe that they’re like, this is how it is, right?
0:06:19 And when you tell them like, actually, that’s not true.
0:06:23 A lot of them are like, no way.
0:06:24 Because maybe that’s the first time they’ve heard about it.
0:06:28 So you tell people working out doesn’t have to last forever.
0:06:31 If you do it intelligently, which is what we specialize at RP
0:06:34 about teaching people how to do and demonstrating digital products,
0:06:37 you can get into really, really good shape
0:06:38 with not so much time investment.
0:06:39 It’s not so difficult.
0:06:42 It’s difficult in the moment, as far as you’ve got to try hard.
0:06:45 But an hour of trying hard a week is not the end of the world.
0:06:47 And then an nutritional front, they come in
0:06:50 and they think it takes all these crazy special things.
0:06:53 Like people will watch me eat regular food
0:06:55 and they’ll be like, you eat that?
0:06:56 I’m like, yes.
0:06:57 Like, but I thought that, you know,
0:06:59 but you need the super special food.
0:07:00 I think that’s never been true.
0:07:05 But people come in with their stack of ideas.
0:07:10 And these, there’s just dozens and dozens of myths on both ends.
0:07:13 We’ll go through all of those myths.
0:07:15 But my last question before we get into it
0:07:17 is why does it matter to be in good shape?
0:07:20 And this is, I’m asking you here
0:07:22 to really draw on some of the case studies
0:07:24 that you’ve probably been exposed to,
0:07:26 where people have turned their lives around.
0:07:28 What is the net benefit of someone who’s listening right now,
0:07:30 who’s maybe heard about fitness stuff before
0:07:33 and has heard from personal trainers and bodybuilders
0:07:34 and whoever else,
0:07:35 but for whatever reason,
0:07:37 they just haven’t been able to get off the sofa
0:07:38 and get into action.
0:07:38 It’s difficult.
0:07:41 You know, what is, why should they?
0:07:42 Why should they care?
0:07:42 I love that question.
0:07:48 The first thing I’ll say is maybe not a surprise
0:07:50 to many of the people that know me.
0:07:53 Politically, I’m like super pro freedom,
0:07:54 freedom of all kinds, inclusion.
0:07:57 And that means to me also
0:07:59 that if someone doesn’t want to pursue fitness,
0:08:00 as a human being,
0:08:02 you have the same love and respect,
0:08:03 at least for me,
0:08:05 that anyone who’s fit would have.
0:08:06 And so as far as like,
0:08:08 it’ll just make you a better person
0:08:09 and you’ll go, how to get fit?
0:08:12 People will see people that are obese
0:08:15 and they’re like, like lazy and how do they live with themselves?
0:08:17 I don’t ever think things like that.
0:08:18 Not because I’m a good person.
0:08:19 I’m not a good person at all.
0:08:22 But what fitness won’t give you
0:08:24 is it won’t elevate your status
0:08:26 as a better person in some way.
0:08:31 However, the other benefits of fitness,
0:08:34 we could have a 10 hour podcast
0:08:35 where I just go through them one at a time
0:08:37 and we would never get through all of them.
0:08:38 I’ll give you a couple of samplings
0:08:39 and kind of the big hitters.
0:08:42 One is health straight up.
0:08:46 So if you reduce your body fat substantially
0:08:48 and you increase your muscularity substantially
0:08:52 and you adopt a lifestyle of moderate to moderately high
0:08:54 physical activity quite regularly,
0:08:57 this is about as close in real life
0:09:00 as we have so far to a panacea, a cure-all.
0:09:01 It isn’t cure-all,
0:09:03 but the degree of preventative,
0:09:07 you won’t get really sick very soon.
0:09:10 The fact that has is just radical.
0:09:14 I just coming off of them,
0:09:15 but if it’s okay to say,
0:09:18 it was recently I’m like a boatload of steroids.
0:09:19 It’s like the worst ones.
0:09:22 Got blood work right in the middle of that
0:09:24 because I was a very lean
0:09:26 and very physically active and very muscular.
0:09:27 My blood works stellar.
0:09:30 Just being leaner and more muscular and more active
0:09:33 just cleans your blood work up like crazy
0:09:36 and makes your long-term,
0:09:39 it increases your longevity considerably,
0:09:40 but it does something I think is
0:09:42 pretty close to equally important.
0:09:46 It increases the kind of time you’re having in your life
0:09:47 while you’re alive.
0:09:50 It makes it way better.
0:09:51 It reduces the morbidity.
0:09:53 And so because you can be around a long time
0:09:55 living in an assisted care facility
0:09:57 and like on machines to keep it.
0:09:58 That’s you’re alive, sure,
0:10:00 but it’s not missing there.
0:10:02 But if you have more muscle,
0:10:04 less fat and more physical activity,
0:10:05 you ever see like an 80-year-old
0:10:07 that’s like cardio walking down the street
0:10:10 and you’re like, my man, it’ll give you that.
0:10:11 So that’s a big deal.
0:10:13 So health, it’ll give you,
0:10:16 usually people experience a perception of wellness
0:10:17 that’s psychological.
0:10:19 They just feel better.
0:10:20 They feel cleaner.
0:10:22 They feel more energy.
0:10:25 The cognitive benefits of health and fitness
0:10:27 are now being addressed seriously in the literature
0:10:28 and they have been for a little while,
0:10:29 but it’s kind of swelling.
0:10:33 It’s unequivocally true now to say
0:10:35 that regularly engaging in fitness
0:10:38 makes you literally smarter just straight up.
0:10:43 And it conserves your brain’s cognitive health
0:10:47 for decades into the future as you do it consistently.
0:10:48 It’s just wind all the way across.
0:10:51 What is your background
0:10:54 in terms of your academic qualifications
0:10:57 and experiences that you’ve had
0:10:59 that feed into everything that you know?
0:11:00 This sounds so pretentious.
0:11:02 I can’t believe I’m using this nomenclature,
0:11:04 but I did my undergraduate work
0:11:06 at the University of Michigan
0:11:10 where I met my fellow co-founder of RP, Nick Shaw.
0:11:14 And that was in kinesiology,
0:11:17 specifically a subset of something called movement science.
0:11:20 I then went on to do a master’s
0:11:22 in technically strength and conditioning
0:11:25 but exercise science at Appalachian State University.
0:11:28 Then I went for one year to go work in New York City
0:11:30 with Nick as a personal trainer.
0:11:32 At the end of that process,
0:11:34 I realized that for my own personal vibe,
0:11:37 I just didn’t know enough and I wanted to know more.
0:11:40 And so I got accepted to a PhD program
0:11:41 at East Tennessee State University
0:11:43 under the great Mike Stone,
0:11:45 who’s probably one of the most well-published
0:11:47 sports scientists of all time.
0:11:49 Definitely in the conversation
0:11:51 for the greatest American sports scientist of all time.
0:11:54 And I went to that PhD program
0:11:56 and that was in sport physiology.
0:11:57 And the best way we had of summarizing
0:11:59 what it is we were learning is
0:12:00 the thing we’re learning best here
0:12:02 is how to take good athletes and make them better.
0:12:05 And so I did three years of that.
0:12:06 It sounds like a prison time.
0:12:07 I did three years in ETSU.
0:12:11 And that was the conclusion.
0:12:12 As a terminal degree,
0:12:13 I got a PhD in sport physiology.
0:12:15 And then I spent, oh, geez,
0:12:18 10 years in various professorships,
0:12:20 teaching and doing some research
0:12:21 and all this other stuff.
0:12:23 I’m no longer a college professor,
0:12:26 mostly because there’s only so many things
0:12:28 you could do at the same time.
0:12:29 Well, and it was kind of like,
0:12:31 this YouTube thing is getting kind of insane.
0:12:32 So I was kind of a pivot to that.
0:12:35 But I’m still actively involved in research,
0:12:37 our company funds research.
0:12:38 I still look at manuscripts.
0:12:38 They still co-authors.
0:12:40 I’m still involved in that capacity as well.
0:12:42 So I want to start with a start.
0:12:44 If someone’s listening to this right now
0:12:46 and they have walked into your,
0:12:48 this is your practice.
0:12:50 This is your hypertrophy practice,
0:12:52 let’s say, this table.
0:12:53 And they sit there and they say,
0:12:56 I would like to gain more lean muscle mass
0:12:58 and I’d like to lose some weight.
0:13:00 I live a busy life.
0:13:02 Where do we start?
0:13:03 What’s step one?
0:13:04 And you know, like,
0:13:06 I’m actually going to hazard a guess at step one
0:13:07 and to see if I’m correct.
0:13:10 But for me, step one is quite psychological
0:13:11 because it’s all well in good.
0:13:14 Me having the tactics and strategies and the information.
0:13:16 But if I don’t have the motivation,
0:13:18 none of it’s going to matter anyway.
0:13:22 So is step one psychological in some way?
0:13:23 Absolutely. My God.
0:13:25 You should just be taking my job at this point.
0:13:26 No, but okay. I thought so.
0:13:28 I thought that was so what would you do for me
0:13:31 to get me in the right psychological mindset?
0:13:34 I would even take a step back before that.
0:13:34 Okay.
0:13:38 The first thing we do is called the needs analysis
0:13:40 and formal sport science.
0:13:46 A needs analysis is what do you want specifically?
0:13:48 Do you want bigger arms?
0:13:50 How much muscle are you trying to gain?
0:13:51 It’s a very different conversation
0:13:53 if someone weighs 150 pounds.
0:13:57 And they’re like, I want to be 155 but leaner versus
0:13:58 that way 150 pounds.
0:14:01 And I want to be 200 ripped different timelines,
0:14:03 different approaches, different trade-offs.
0:14:06 Okay. Give me the typical answer to that question.
0:14:09 Most people just open-ended to be completely honest.
0:14:09 Really?
0:14:11 I just want to get much leaner.
0:14:14 Some of them will say I also want to put on a lot of muscle.
0:14:17 The muscle thing is a lot of times with females,
0:14:18 they just want the leaner part,
0:14:20 but they understand in many cases that
0:14:23 if they just jettison their muscle entirely,
0:14:25 they end up looking more sick than healthy.
0:14:28 But a lot of the males leaner is important,
0:14:30 but also getting super jacked is important.
0:14:34 But how jacked and how lean that’s the conversation
0:14:36 is if they come in with totally open-ended concerns,
0:14:37 it’s kind of like walking into a car dealership
0:14:38 and be like, I want a car.
0:14:39 Like you’re going to have to be a little bit,
0:14:40 we’ll sell you whatever.
0:14:42 But you’re going to have to tell me a little bit more
0:14:43 about what your use cases are,
0:14:45 about what your budget is.
0:14:46 So that’s another big thing.
0:14:47 And an even analysis is,
0:14:50 how much time can you give to this?
0:14:52 Because if someone says,
0:14:55 I want to eventually be a professional bodybuilder,
0:14:59 and I’ve got nothing but time in my week to do the thing,
0:15:02 they’re getting a very different plan than someone that’s like,
0:15:06 I just want to be able to see my man down there again,
0:15:09 and just not die soon.
0:15:15 And I have two hours a week to give you very different plan.
0:15:18 So I’ve got, let’s say, I’ve got a couple of hours a week,
0:15:21 so two, three hours a week that I could probably spare,
0:15:22 maybe four.
0:15:24 And I just want to get a bit leaner,
0:15:26 and I want to gain some muscle.
0:15:26 Yeah.
0:15:30 I also ask, what have you been doing so far?
0:15:32 Tell me about your approach to fitness.
0:15:35 And the answer could be, I don’t have one.
0:15:36 I’ve never tried to do anything.
0:15:38 Once we get a lot of that information,
0:15:40 I don’t want to say the plan writes itself,
0:15:42 but sort of almost,
0:15:46 now we really, really, really have all the details
0:15:47 to fill in the blanks.
0:15:48 And then from there,
0:15:50 once you’ve done that sort of needs analysis
0:15:51 and you’ve understood the investment
0:15:52 that they’re willing to make,
0:15:54 you understand what their goals are,
0:15:56 you understand their current approach to fitness,
0:15:58 what becomes step two?
0:16:00 So again, I’m trying to embody the viewer here
0:16:01 who’s trying to change their life.
0:16:02 Yeah, yeah.
0:16:02 And get going for…
0:16:05 Step two, oftentimes, just to keep it cool,
0:16:07 we can definitely do nutrition, if you’d like.
0:16:09 So please come in for that,
0:16:11 but I’ll just use training as a quick example here.
0:16:16 A big one is, do you go to a gym?
0:16:18 Can you make it to a gym?
0:16:19 Or are you going to be training at home?
0:16:23 Because training at home is a bit of a different world.
0:16:25 You can get amazing results at home.
0:16:27 But we need to make sure you have the right equipment.
0:16:28 And it’s super minimal.
0:16:31 Two 20-pound dumbbells.
0:16:32 I like that you’re looking over at the dumbbells like…
0:16:34 At least 20 kg dumbbells.
0:16:36 They’re 20-pound dumbbells.
0:16:37 Is that what I need at home?
0:16:40 For many people, like adult males,
0:16:42 bright spry like yourself,
0:16:43 20-pound dumbbells at home
0:16:46 will give you phenomenal overall results.
0:16:46 Yeah.
0:16:50 What is that, nine kgs or something?
0:16:50 Oh, here we go.
0:16:53 Your assistants are quite strong, by the way.
0:16:54 Thank you.
0:16:55 Do you fight crime in your spare time?
0:17:01 Okay, so these are 20-pound dumbbells.
0:17:02 You’re just showing off now.
0:17:05 But these are what I need at home to do a workout?
0:17:08 Yes, somewhere between 10 and 20 pounds,
0:17:10 10 for smaller, lighter females,
0:17:13 20 for larger, more strong males,
0:17:14 somewhere between that.
0:17:16 Two of those dumbbells at home
0:17:18 and a little bit of floor space
0:17:21 can be the beginning of an absolutely revolutionary workout program.
0:17:22 Really?
0:17:22 Yeah.
0:17:28 So give me the starting position and the end position
0:17:31 that I could get to just with these dumbbells at home.
0:17:34 If you properly control your diet
0:17:36 and you haven’t really lifted weights before,
0:17:39 and you’re, let’s say, 30, 40, 50 years old,
0:17:41 in a six-month time span,
0:17:47 we can reliably get you to gain five to 10 pounds of muscle,
0:17:48 which if you go to the store,
0:17:49 what is that like?
0:17:53 Five, let’s say, two to five kilos of muscle.
0:17:55 You ever buy two to five kilos of meat at the store?
0:17:57 That’s a lot of meat.
0:17:58 That’s going on your body.
0:18:03 And we can reliably get you to lose, oh gee,
0:18:06 five to seven and a half kilos of fat
0:18:08 in a six-month time frame,
0:18:10 just by being intelligent about your diet
0:18:15 and doing two workouts per week at home with your dumbbells
0:18:18 and the workouts each take roughly 20 minutes.
0:18:21 So that’s 40 minutes a week.
0:18:22 Oh, yeah.
0:18:25 Now, that’s if you’re unaccustomed and unadjusted.
0:18:26 If you have already,
0:18:28 and that’s why those intake questions are important,
0:18:28 because if you’re like,
0:18:30 “Look, I go to the gym six times a week.
0:18:31 I spend two hours at the gym,”
0:18:34 like dumbbells can keep you in pretty good shape,
0:18:36 but they’re not going to elevate your shape very likely.
0:18:38 At the very least, it’ll be highly inefficient
0:18:40 and incredibly discomforting
0:18:41 for what you’d have to do with such dumbbells.
0:18:44 So what is step three then?
0:18:46 So if we’ve got the equipment part figured out,
0:18:48 and I guess the complicated element of that
0:18:51 is some people have anxiety as it relates to going to the gym.
0:18:52 I’ve got a lot of friends that,
0:18:54 because they’re so inexperienced
0:18:56 with weightlifting or the machines,
0:18:59 they feel embarrassed to go to the gym.
0:19:01 So, well, at least that’s what they tell me.
0:19:03 Now, I don’t know whether they’re biasing themselves,
0:19:05 but they tell me that they have gym anxiety.
0:19:06 Yes, that’s amazing.
0:19:07 And actually, I can relate.
0:19:08 You walk into a gym,
0:19:11 especially if I get to like a bodybuilding gym,
0:19:12 and I do look around and I go,
0:19:14 “Okay, everyone here knows what they’re doing more than I do.”
0:19:17 Ooh, that’s already wrong, but we’ll get to that a bit.
0:19:18 And are they looking at me?
0:19:21 Do they know that I don’t know how this machine works?
0:19:22 And if I don’t know how a machine works,
0:19:25 and there’s nothing, you know, no label to tell me,
0:19:26 sometimes I just avoid the machine.
0:19:27 If I’m in like a bodybuilding gym,
0:19:31 because if I can help, I don’t know how to do my wrist muscles.
0:19:33 Yeah, I just look like a doofus,
0:19:34 and everyone’s making fun of me in their head.
0:19:35 That’s kind of what I think sometimes,
0:19:37 if I go to like a really elite gym.
0:19:37 So, yeah.
0:19:40 So, first of all, I think people’s gym anxiety
0:19:41 is absolutely real thing.
0:19:43 I can speak to that at length.
0:19:46 The next step would be to say,
0:19:49 “Hey, listen, based on all the information we’ve collected
0:19:51 on your limitations, desires, abilities,
0:19:54 we’ve cultivated a plan for you.
0:19:56 It’d be diet plan, and then just stick
0:19:57 into the muscle growth stuff.
0:20:02 Here’s your plan for your training.”
0:20:06 And we actually have an app for this sort of thing
0:20:07 where we would say,
0:20:10 “Okay, here’s how you type in all your stuff in the app.
0:20:12 The app will create a plan for you,
0:20:15 and it’ll tell you here’s what to do for warming up.
0:20:16 Here’s, you know, you pick a weight,
0:20:18 it tells you how to pick your weights,
0:20:20 and then it programs the rest of your two months
0:20:22 of training for you.
0:20:23 You fill in the, how do I feel?
0:20:24 How am I recovering?
0:20:25 It’ll take care of everything else.”
0:20:29 And if you ever get confused, you click on the exercise,
0:20:33 and it opens up a video with an audio demonstration
0:20:34 of how to do it.
0:20:36 And of someone, a professional bodybuilder,
0:20:38 doing the thing, and you go,
0:20:39 “Oh, that’s what bicep curls was.
0:20:40 Okay, got it.”
0:20:41 So, now you have all the answers,
0:20:44 and you don’t have to have our app.
0:20:44 We think it’s nice.
0:20:45 You don’t have to have it.
0:20:47 Just whatever kind of plan you have,
0:20:50 that’s your little map of the Caribbean Sea
0:20:52 with the exes and the pirate ships.
0:20:54 And you know exactly where to go.
0:20:56 And it’s you, your app,
0:20:58 or your map of how to train your program,
0:21:02 and everyone else, like in the Avengers movies,
0:21:04 just floats away.
0:21:05 There’s no one else.
0:21:06 There’s not even any other machines.
0:21:08 It’s you and the bicep curl machine,
0:21:10 and the hypertrophy app says,
0:21:13 first set is 12 reps at 50 pounds.
0:21:15 I take the select dry stack, I go to 50,
0:21:17 and I’m nice and warmed up, and I do 12 reps.
0:21:19 And that’s as far as you have to think about it.
0:21:21 Comparisons, whatever everyone else thinks,
0:21:22 without a plan.
0:21:24 Oh boy, you second guessing yourself.
0:21:26 With a plan, you don’t have to second guess anything.
0:21:27 Most of those people don’t have a plan.
0:21:28 They’re just in there on vibes.
0:21:30 They feel like my delts are going to grow today
0:21:31 if I do this, like, thanks.
0:21:33 Thanks for that intellectual opinion.
0:21:36 You said there’s two types of effective training.
0:21:39 One of them’s high, I can’t say this word.
0:21:40 One of them’s hypertrophy.
0:21:41 Very good.
0:21:42 And the other one is,
0:21:43 periodization.
0:21:48 So periodization is the scientifically based
0:21:51 organization of any kind of training that you want.
0:21:51 Okay.
0:21:54 Hypertrophy training is a type of training.
0:21:55 It’s just muscle growth training.
0:21:57 It’s like a fancy fucking science word for
0:22:01 just getting more jacked, putting on muscle.
0:22:04 That’s the technical definition of hypertrophy.
0:22:05 And when you train for hypertrophy,
0:22:07 you can do it kind of like by feel
0:22:08 and more or less at random,
0:22:10 and you get pretty good results in most cases.
0:22:11 But to get your best results,
0:22:13 you want that training to be periodized.
0:22:16 Periodization is the scientific approach
0:22:18 to how to organize your training
0:22:20 to get sort of roughly three things.
0:22:22 Some of these are a bit more for athletes
0:22:23 and not regular people.
0:22:25 Get the best results that you can,
0:22:28 peak at an appropriate time, abs for summer,
0:22:31 and minimize injury risk.
0:22:33 And taking all the science that we know,
0:22:35 that plan that you’ve made
0:22:38 because you did it in evidence-based fashion,
0:22:40 that is now what is considered a periodized plan.
0:22:43 So that’s how those two concepts relate to each other.
0:22:45 What do I need to know about hypertrophy
0:22:47 in order to be able to achieve it?
0:22:49 Is there anything really foundational?
0:22:52 Because I think everyone wants a bit of muscle growth.
0:22:54 I think it’s been too long in the gym.
0:22:57 I think I could be much more efficient when I’m training.
0:23:00 What would you recommend that I start thinking about
0:23:02 as foundational principles
0:23:04 when it comes to hypertrophy, muscle growth?
0:23:06 One is specificity.
0:23:08 It’s the most important principle
0:23:11 in all of sport, painting, and exercise science
0:23:14 is what am I here for?
0:23:14 What do I want?
0:23:18 Because you can do a bunch of exercises in the gym,
0:23:20 and you’re like, “That was great.”
0:23:21 And someone’s like, “Are you getting the results you like?”
0:23:24 And you’re like, “Well, what I want is a bigger bicep.”
0:23:25 Like, how many bicep exercises do you do?
0:23:27 Like, “I think upright rows, maybe.”
0:23:29 So I want a bigger bicep.
0:23:31 We just focus on getting Steven Bartlett
0:23:32 a bigger left bicep.
0:23:36 So specificity is telling yourself,
0:23:37 “Okay, I want bigger biceps,”
0:23:39 and whatever XYZ other muscles.
0:23:43 Then we move in to the principle of overload,
0:23:46 which means you have to challenge yourself.
0:23:52 If most of your sets, someone else watching them,
0:23:53 can’t tell if you’re warming up
0:23:54 or doing what’s called a working set,
0:23:56 like a real set, you have a problem.
0:23:59 So towards the end of all of your sets,
0:24:01 either the weights are slowing down
0:24:05 or even if it’s the same speed to you,
0:24:07 they feel perceptively harder.
0:24:08 You know, you do this, this, this,
0:24:09 and in a couple of reps, you’re like,
0:24:12 “That’s what you want.
0:24:15 Every real working set should be challenging.
0:24:17 You should be approaching every real set
0:24:20 with just a teeny, teeny dose of trepidation.
0:24:22 Like, “Oh boy, here we go.
0:24:24 I’m going to have to try.”
0:24:26 Once you have that.
0:24:29 And a set is a group of repetitions.
0:24:29 Correct.
0:24:32 So if I do 10 repetitions, that’s one set.
0:24:32 One set.
0:24:33 Yeah.
0:24:36 And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy.
0:24:40 Anything between roughly five reps per set
0:24:43 and 30 reps per set, where the last few reps
0:24:44 are getting close to you not being able
0:24:48 to use good technique and lift the weights, check plus.
0:24:49 So there’s not a set,
0:24:51 a perfect amount of repetitions to do?
0:24:52 There is.
0:24:54 It’s a trade secret and I’d have to say it off-camera to you.
0:24:55 MDA to side.
0:24:56 Okay, we’re off-camera.
0:24:57 All right, great.
0:24:58 So it’s 17.
0:25:03 There is, so there’s just tons of, tons of contextual
0:25:04 nuance kind of stuff.
0:25:07 Some people, some of their muscles will seem to respond better
0:25:09 to sets of five to 10.
0:25:11 Other folks, even the same person could have muscles
0:25:14 in their body that really respond better to sets of 20 to 30
0:25:15 and everything in between.
0:25:19 But generally you get in the exercise science data,
0:25:21 you’ll have a group of people training for sets
0:25:24 of roughly five reps and another group training
0:25:25 for sets of roughly 30 reps.
0:25:29 And their change in muscle growth over 8, 12, 16 weeks
0:25:31 is statistically undifferentiable,
0:25:32 which means if I delabel the groups
0:25:33 and you don’t know which ones which,
0:25:35 you can’t actually tell me who trained with higher reps
0:25:37 or lower reps, for muscle growth, it’s roughly the same.
0:25:39 That’s so crazy.
0:25:40 We’re using the same weight.
0:25:42 I’m guessing different weights.
0:25:42 Different weights, yeah.
0:25:44 Weight that is challenging for five reps
0:25:46 is much heavier than a weight that is challenging for 30.
0:25:47 Okay, so I do wonder this all the time
0:25:48 when I go to the gym.
0:25:50 I wonder if I should be doing, I don’t know,
0:25:52 30 reps of 10 kg on my bicep
0:25:55 or I should be doing 10 reps of 20 kg.
0:25:58 They’re both right answers, no wrong answers there.
0:26:01 And they both have the same chance of growing my muscles
0:26:05 as long as the strain that I experienced subjectively
0:26:07 is difficult at the end of those sets.
0:26:07 Correct.
0:26:08 Okay, interesting.
0:26:09 Which is really good news
0:26:11 because that’s like another thing you don’t have to worry about.
0:26:14 Which means at home I can get any range of weights
0:26:16 versus having to get really, really big ones to grow my muscles.
0:26:19 As long as they’re not so tiny that you’re on rep number 45
0:26:21 and you’re like, I could just do this for forever.
0:26:22 Or if they’re not so enormous that you’re like,
0:26:24 I can’t really even do two reps of this.
0:26:27 Anything between roughly five and roughly 30 reps,
0:26:28 challenging is really, really good.
0:26:32 How many sets and how often do I have to visit the gym
0:26:35 to get this bicep to grow?
0:26:38 That answer depends on how much you’ve been doing before.
0:26:40 But if you’re new to the gym,
0:26:46 two sessions a week with two to three sets per session
0:26:49 for your biceps is something that’s going to cause
0:26:52 months and months and months of consistent progress.
0:26:52 Really?
0:26:53 Can you do more?
0:26:54 Yes.
0:26:56 Do you have to do as a beginner?
0:26:57 No.
0:26:59 Eventually as a more advanced person,
0:27:01 do you need to do more sets and perhaps more sessions
0:27:03 to get consistently better results?
0:27:03 Yes.
0:27:05 But for beginners who haven’t been to the gym very much
0:27:10 or at all, the minimal effective dose is profoundly small,
0:27:11 which is why I can say things like,
0:27:13 if you work out for 20 minutes twice a week,
0:27:14 you’re going to get great gains.
0:27:19 What if I go to the gym and I do six sets on my biceps
0:27:21 and I just go to the gym once a week?
0:27:23 Does the distance between the workout
0:27:25 in a muscle group have an impact?
0:27:26 Yes.
0:27:29 Once a week training gives you good results,
0:27:32 but twice a week training for the same muscle
0:27:34 gives you notably better results.
0:27:38 Training three times a week versus twice,
0:27:41 training four times a week versus three times,
0:27:43 training five times a week versus four times
0:27:47 is an exponentially deescalating amount
0:27:49 of impressive differences.
0:27:52 So one time a week works, it’ll get your results.
0:27:55 Two times a week gets you like one and a half times
0:27:58 the results like way better, better.
0:28:02 Three times a week is like another little bit more results,
0:28:03 still notable.
0:28:05 Four times a week is like you got to be training for a while
0:28:07 to notice the difference between three and four.
0:28:10 Four and five is contextual and nuanced
0:28:11 and I can’t actually tell you
0:28:13 that categorically five days a week is better than four.
0:28:15 There are some things I would have to know
0:28:17 about your plan and everything else to make that conclusion.
0:28:19 So really I want to be aiming at twice a week per muscle group.
0:28:20 Twice is our minimum.
0:28:22 Two to four times a week is what I say
0:28:25 is kind of the best overall recommendation per muscle group.
0:28:27 And if you train all of your muscles together
0:28:29 at the same time a whole body workout,
0:28:31 which most people in the realm of just I’m busy
0:28:32 and I can’t train a lot,
0:28:35 it would be all of the major muscles of your body
0:28:40 in the same session, twice or three times or four times a week.
0:28:42 And that is an awesome beginner fitness plan.
0:28:44 What’s going on in my muscles?
0:28:47 That’s encouraging them and making them grow.
0:28:48 And when are they growing?
0:28:49 Is it when I go to bed at night?
0:28:53 Is it when do they grow the minute that I curl the dumbbell?
0:28:54 What’s actually going on?
0:28:57 Because sometimes understanding what’s actually going on inside
0:28:59 helps me to think through and change my behavior.
0:29:04 Yeah, so the primary stimulus for muscle growth
0:29:08 is there are molecular machines in your muscles,
0:29:09 in your muscle cells,
0:29:14 and they are designed to detect the presence of tension.
0:29:17 And when your muscles generate tension,
0:29:18 the molecular detector machines go,
0:29:20 “Oh, we got tension here.”
0:29:23 And they start saying to other parts of the cells like,
0:29:25 “Hey, let’s get this muscle growth thing started,
0:29:27 started, not happening, started.”
0:29:29 It’s a stimulus of muscle growth.
0:29:30 There are a couple of other mechanisms
0:29:34 which might/probably have an effect.
0:29:37 And that, a couple of them are metabolite sequestration,
0:29:40 which is a very fancy way of saying the burn.
0:29:41 You know at the end of a set, you’re like, “Ahh!”
0:29:46 The metabolites, the byproducts of training,
0:29:47 if they accumulate to high levels,
0:29:49 it’s been shown in tons of animal studies
0:29:52 and a few human studies that mechanistically,
0:29:54 they might also tell the molecular machinery
0:29:56 that grows muscle for you again later
0:29:59 to, “Hey, get the muscle growth process.”
0:30:00 Another one is the pump.
0:30:01 So, you know, you do a couple sets of biceps,
0:30:03 you’re like, “Oh my God, what’s going on here?”
0:30:06 Baby, flash it at some girl, she runs away as usual.
0:30:09 And the actual cell swelling itself
0:30:12 might play a causal mechanistic role
0:30:13 in generating more muscle growth.
0:30:15 But we know it’s probably at least,
0:30:19 at least 80% of the muscle growth anyone will see
0:30:21 is because of those receptors for tension.
0:30:26 Muscle growth, as soon as you leave the gym,
0:30:28 is a negative because the gym is catabolic,
0:30:30 it breaks down your muscle.
0:30:33 Actually, training breaks down more muscle than it builds.
0:30:37 However, as you go home when you start eating food,
0:30:41 protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day,
0:30:45 and you’re resting, when the food’s coming in,
0:30:47 several hours after training begins,
0:30:49 if you measure muscle growth consistently,
0:30:50 which is really difficult to do,
0:30:51 they don’t do it super often.
0:30:53 You have to keep people in the laboratory,
0:30:54 you have to do radioactive tracers
0:30:55 and measure all this weird stuff.
0:30:58 Every couple of hours they measure,
0:31:01 the amount of muscle growth that’s going on in the biceps
0:31:02 goes up and up and up and up.
0:31:05 And it usually peaks about half a day
0:31:07 to a day and a half after you lift,
0:31:09 depending on how hard you went.
0:31:10 If it’s a pretty easy workout,
0:31:13 it peaks a little sooner and drops off
0:31:15 about a day or two later.
0:31:17 If you train really crazy hard,
0:31:19 it’ll peak like a day, day and a half later,
0:31:20 and then half a week later,
0:31:22 it’ll drop off back to baseline levels.
0:31:24 But it’s this really smooth curve,
0:31:27 and you’re growing muscle at every single point
0:31:28 under that curve.
0:31:30 So when you say, “Is it while I’m sleeping?
0:31:31 Is it while I’m eating? Is it while I’m resting?”
0:31:35 The answer is all of those, except it’s not at the gym.
0:31:36 You don’t grow muscle at the gym,
0:31:39 you give yourself a signal to grow muscle at the gym.
0:31:40 And what you do outside of the gym matters,
0:31:41 so some people train really hard,
0:31:44 they don’t eat right, they don’t eat enough protein.
0:31:47 Their sleep is total insert bad word here,
0:31:50 and their stress levels are just totally psychotic.
0:31:52 They train hard, and then week after week after week,
0:31:55 they’re like, “I’m not seeing any results.”
0:31:56 Well, the results are actually created
0:31:59 when you’re resting, when you’re sleeping,
0:32:00 when you’re eating nutritious food.
0:32:02 They’re stimulated in the workout,
0:32:04 but that’s just phase one.
0:32:06 Phase two, the actual growth occurs outside of the gym,
0:32:09 and it occurs not at any specific time point,
0:32:12 like a magic window of two hours after the gym,
0:32:13 like that’s when all the growth occurs.
0:32:15 It’s actually when it just starts to go up.
0:32:17 It’s four days afterwards.
0:32:19 So if you train twice a week, you train on Monday,
0:32:21 you’re growing a lot of muscle on Monday night,
0:32:24 Tuesday and Wednesday, back towards the end of Wednesday,
0:32:26 you’re just not really growing much more muscle.
0:32:29 You go back to the gym Thursday, you hit it hard again,
0:32:31 you hit that curve up by Sunday,
0:32:33 you’re totally relaxed during Sunday,
0:32:34 you’re not growing any muscle,
0:32:37 your body’s really recovering a lot of that fatigue,
0:32:39 and then by Monday, you’re fresh as a pickle,
0:32:40 and you’re ready to go at it again.
0:32:43 How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I’ve gained
0:32:45 if I don’t go back to the gym?
0:32:46 So again, focusing on this bicep,
0:32:49 I train it, I do two times a week, I get it nice and big.
0:32:52 How long before it vanishes?
0:32:54 Great question.
0:32:55 Two-part answer.
0:33:02 Part one is within about two weeks of not training it,
0:33:08 the first reduction in muscle that is detectable
0:33:09 by modern machinery occurs.
0:33:12 So if you don’t lift for two weeks,
0:33:15 and we put you in an MRI scanner or a dexa scanner,
0:33:19 let’s say a week and a half you don’t lift, I can’t tell,
0:33:21 you’re not really losing any muscle yet,
0:33:22 you’re just going insane.
0:33:24 And so me personally, I’m addicted to lifting,
0:33:26 so if I don’t lift for a week, I’m like, oh my god, oh my god,
0:33:27 all the muscle’s gone.
0:33:30 There’s some kind of intuitive truth to that,
0:33:32 because when you don’t stress your muscles,
0:33:35 when you do stress your muscles,
0:33:38 they get a little bit inflamed and they bulge up a little bit.
0:33:41 So when you’re not training for half a week to a week,
0:33:44 your muscles look smaller, like they’ve lost weight,
0:33:46 but it’s really just all water that they lost.
0:33:49 You do one gym session, thinking like, oh my god,
0:33:50 my biceps are gone a week and a half later.
0:33:53 You do one session at the end of that, you flex,
0:33:55 and you’re like, oh my god, I’m the biggest I’ve ever been.
0:33:56 I was just delusional that whole time,
0:33:58 because that stuff comes back super quick.
0:34:02 After about two weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle,
0:34:04 but it happens really, really slowly,
0:34:06 and takes weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.
0:34:09 After several months of not lifting,
0:34:12 you’re going to look considerably smaller in your biceps.
0:34:15 But probably not as small as when you started lifting,
0:34:19 because your muscles have a certain memory, if we can call it that.
0:34:20 Is that true?
0:34:20 That is a memory thing.
0:34:22 Very true. Oh yeah.
0:34:24 And so a lot of times when you gain an initial amount of muscle,
0:34:27 especially if you’ve been at it for years,
0:34:29 it just never goes back to the same size as when you started.
0:34:31 It’s just always going to be bigger,
0:34:33 until you reach your 80s or something like that.
0:34:38 That being said, yes, you will notice reductions in size.
0:34:40 So two weeks is the direct answer there,
0:34:43 and it’s going to take weeks and weeks and months and months to recede.
0:34:45 However, here’s part two, and this is awesome news.
0:34:48 Because of that muscle memory situation,
0:34:52 however long it took you to gain the muscles initially,
0:34:57 it’s going to take you an order of magnitude,
0:35:00 a factor of 10-ish or so less time to get it back.
0:35:04 If you’ve been more jacked before, if you’ve had bigger muscles,
0:35:07 they come back to their old size.
0:35:12 You lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep.
0:35:14 And you stopped lifting for three months.
0:35:16 And it looks about the same as when you started.
0:35:18 If you’re really careful, it gets a little bit bigger,
0:35:19 but really it’s just back to square one.
0:35:23 Most people think, oh my god, another eight months?
0:35:26 Just to get back to where I started, forget the gym.
0:35:29 The truth is after roughly about a month,
0:35:31 maybe as little as three weeks,
0:35:33 you’re going to have the same size biceps that you did in your peak.
0:35:37 Because the degree to which your tissue grows,
0:35:39 if it’s been a certain size before,
0:35:42 especially if it was notably bigger than normal,
0:35:45 and you held that around for a few months and a few years,
0:35:49 it comes back in a way that is so fast,
0:35:52 if you experience it yourself,
0:35:55 you don’t believe that it’s happening to you.
0:35:56 You came back.
0:35:58 Have they been able to scientifically test this?
0:35:59 Oh yeah, all the time.
0:36:00 Yeah, retraining studies, detraining, retraining.
0:36:04 Oh yeah, they’ve done studies where they purposefully lift for a while
0:36:06 and they stop lifting for a long time
0:36:07 and they see how long it takes to get back.
0:36:11 And there’s one study I’m familiar with offhand
0:36:15 that is a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks.
0:36:20 And there’s another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks
0:36:22 and then took two weeks completely off in the middle
0:36:25 and then just started retraining again for a few weeks later.
0:36:29 Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle
0:36:30 at the end of the study.
0:36:33 And so we were like, okay, so that group that trained consistently
0:36:34 never took two weeks off.
0:36:38 Could we say that they purposefully dunked two weeks
0:36:40 if they’re time away for nothing?
0:36:42 Uh-huh. Yeah.
0:36:47 Your body goes right back into regaining old lost muscle so rapidly
0:36:50 that this is such great news because look,
0:36:53 let’s say you lifted consistently most of the year.
0:36:55 Holiday season comes up, winter holidays.
0:36:59 You’re not going to the gym as much, maybe not at all.
0:37:01 Three weeks later of no gym, you look at yourself,
0:37:04 you look a little small or kind of deflated and you’re like,
0:37:08 oh my God, I’m going to have to restart all this from scratch.
0:37:08 Nope.
0:37:12 Two weeks later, you’re in the best shape of your life again.
0:37:15 If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later,
0:37:17 you’re in the best shape of your life again.
0:37:18 That’s how rapidly it comes back.
0:37:20 So it’s really good news for anyone who hasn’t been in the gym
0:37:22 and is feeling guilty about it.
0:37:25 Go back, get consistent again, you’re just going to skyrocket.
0:37:28 That is very exciting because yeah, we always have,
0:37:31 sometimes it’s the trough, the couple of weeks off
0:37:34 that makes us demotivated because that’s crossed my mind before.
0:37:35 Oh my God, that took me three months to get there
0:37:38 and it’s going to take me another three months to get back.
0:37:41 But what about, so if I’m training that bicep,
0:37:44 how have I got to think about stretching and warming up
0:37:47 before I start, before I get going with my training?
0:37:52 There are many ways to do it, but some research on this recently,
0:37:55 actually, you don’t need much.
0:37:59 One of the simplest ways to warm up that we recommended
0:38:01 RP and our app has it in the instructions,
0:38:06 you want, let’s say you have your final weight already picked out,
0:38:11 like last week you did 20 pound dumbbells for sets of 15,
0:38:13 this week it’s sets of 16 with a 20 pound dumbbells.
0:38:18 What you want to do is you want to do very lightweight,
0:38:21 maybe the five pound dumbbells for a set of 12,
0:38:24 just to get everything moving and grooving good technique,
0:38:25 same technique you’re going to use.
0:38:30 30 seconds of rest, a minute of rest, you pick up the
0:38:36 10 or 15 pound dumbbells, you do a set of eight reps.
0:38:38 It’s a little bit more challenging, you’re feeling your groove a little bit,
0:38:40 but your body is already more warm, your nervous system is more active,
0:38:42 your muscles are more pliable.
0:38:47 You rest a minute after that, and then you’ll pick up the weight
0:38:48 you’re actually using, the 20 pounders,
0:38:52 and you’ll do a set of two to four reps with them,
0:38:54 just to get the feel of that heavy weight that you’re going to be doing,
0:38:57 to acclimatize not just your muscles and your nervous system,
0:39:00 but your psychology to like, okay, this is the business weight that I’m going to be using.
0:39:04 So 12, 8, 4, rest another 30 seconds,
0:39:08 first working set of whatever, 16 reps, you’re up.
0:39:12 When you have multiple exercises for the same muscle group,
0:39:16 you just need to do one set of like four to eight reps
0:39:20 in that middle weight range between zero and whatever you’re going to do,
0:39:21 just to get the feel of the exercise,
0:39:23 because you’re already generally warm in that area,
0:39:27 one little warm-up set, rest 30 seconds a minute,
0:39:29 and then hit your first set.
0:39:31 If you’re switching which muscles you’re using,
0:39:33 like you were training chest, but then in the same session,
0:39:37 you start a training back, that first back exercise, 12, 8, 4,
0:39:40 the weight goes up, up, up, the reps go down, down, down,
0:39:41 just a little bit of time between,
0:39:43 and then you hit your first work set, you’re good to go.
0:39:45 You don’t have to do cardio before,
0:39:47 you don’t have to get on the treadmill, you can, if you like it.
0:39:49 You don’t have to do some kind of cardio warm-up.
0:39:52 You don’t have to do any kind of stretching or anything like that.
0:39:54 You don’t have to do any kind of weird bozu ball band
0:39:57 around your neck, crazy, potentiation exercises.
0:40:01 Just that little ramp up is basically a 98% of all cases,
0:40:03 exactly the only way you need to do.
0:40:04 What is a warm-up?
0:40:07 What is going on physiologically inside my muscle?
0:40:08 Because we all just warm up,
0:40:11 and I don’t think anybody actually knows what’s going on.
0:40:19 Yeah. So your muscle tissues, they have physical qualities
0:40:22 that can be measured almost in like a fluid dynamics terms,
0:40:25 like viscosity and hysteresis and all that stuff.
0:40:34 And so when you’re very cold, a lot of times there’s kind of a frailty implied there.
0:40:39 As you’re warming up, you’re sending blood to around the muscle.
0:40:41 The muscle itself is literally becoming warmer.
0:40:45 And a lot of those kind of tight structures that are,
0:40:48 the proteins that are made of kind of stretching material,
0:40:50 they loosen up a little bit.
0:40:55 And that allows you to go through that full range of motion and training,
0:40:57 and not actually get hurt.
0:41:00 And that’s from the muscle perspective.
0:41:02 You also get some kind of chemical stuff that happens,
0:41:04 and certain structures fill up with chemical,
0:41:06 certain structures, chemicals go down,
0:41:08 and that gets you ready to perform super hard work.
0:41:10 But that’s part of the story.
0:41:12 The other part is the nervous system,
0:41:15 because your nervous system is also getting warmed up.
0:41:17 And in technical terms, it’s called potentiation.
0:41:23 When you just show up to the gym and you, let’s say we said,
0:41:25 look, okay, we re-engineered your tendons when you were asleep,
0:41:27 you’re not going to get hurt.
0:41:28 It’s impossible for you to get hurt.
0:41:30 Like a car would have to hit you for you to rip your bicep off.
0:41:33 You can just go and just hit the curls right away.
0:41:36 You wouldn’t get hurt, but it would feel really strange.
0:41:40 And you wouldn’t get four or five reps close to where you’re supposed to be
0:41:41 from last week.
0:41:44 Because your nervous system was like, what the hell is going on?
0:41:47 I’m supposed to be doing something so you knew more of the nervous system.
0:41:50 A part of that is literally like the actual nervous system itself
0:41:53 down to the cellular level is flushing all kinds of metabolites through.
0:41:55 The connections are getting stronger.
0:42:00 You’re sort of doing a little bit of kind of mini rewiring of primary motor cortex
0:42:02 to say, oh, we’re doing curls.
0:42:04 This is how you execute this pattern.
0:42:05 Another part is technical.
0:42:08 Like, oh, this is the technique I’m going to do.
0:42:10 Because if you just get in the muscle and just do stuff,
0:42:12 like imagine if I told you, like, here’s a ball,
0:42:16 just like, go shoot some hoops, just hit that three-pointer shot.
0:42:20 You’re like, I need a couple of shots to remind my body of what it’s like
0:42:22 to shoot the basketball.
0:42:23 Same idea for lifting.
0:42:26 You’re going to remind your body of what a curl motion is.
0:42:28 And if you remind it a couple of sets in a row,
0:42:31 by the time you hit that real working set, that fourth set,
0:42:34 your body’s like, oh, I know exactly what I’m going to do.
0:42:37 Which parts of the muscle I’m going to activate to contract?
0:42:40 Which other parts of other muscles I’m going to activate to relax
0:42:42 and co-contract to make this whole thing happen?
0:42:45 What are the other sort of common mistakes people make
0:42:48 when they go to the gym or they start training or they start exercising?
0:42:52 So there I’ve kind of ticked off not stretching
0:42:54 and taking on a heavy load too quickly,
0:42:58 but also ramping up volumes and loads too fast.
0:43:01 So that sort of overstrain before my body is ready for it.
0:43:05 Are there any really other sort of common obvious mistakes people make
0:43:06 that inhibit their progress?
0:43:12 One of them is a failure to pay attention to good technique.
0:43:15 There are sort of some universal principles
0:43:18 of what is good technique in the gym for muscle growth.
0:43:24 One of them is, are you moving in a way that properly activates,
0:43:26 stimulates that muscle to actually get it to grow?
0:43:33 Because if you do a curl that arcs up, it does a lot of bicep.
0:43:36 If you do a curl that arcs back this way,
0:43:39 because the bicep is being pulled one way and pulled the other way
0:43:41 at the shoulder and the elbow,
0:43:45 it ends up doing more of a stabilizing contraction
0:43:48 than actually being the prime mover for the movement.
0:43:49 So when you see people curling at the gym
0:43:50 and they’re just kind of doing this,
0:43:53 you’re like, yes, that is training your biceps.
0:43:56 But if you just moved a little bit differently,
0:43:57 it would be so much better.
0:44:00 Here’s another example, squatting, right, for your legs.
0:44:05 If you squat really far back and mount so far down,
0:44:08 like your glutes get hit, okay,
0:44:11 your lower back and upper and mid back is going to get hit a lot.
0:44:15 But because there’s not a huge change in your knee angle,
0:44:18 you’re not getting a ton of quad stimulus.
0:44:21 If you stay more upright and your heels and toes are on the ground
0:44:26 and you allow your knees to go way forward beyond your toes,
0:44:29 as you stay upright and sink down really low
0:44:31 so that your knee goes into one of these.
0:44:34 Oh my God, it’s all quads all day long.
0:44:37 So you want technique that is targeting the muscle.
0:44:39 It’s very similar rep to rep to rep.
0:44:43 And it puts the muscle consistently through a range of motion
0:44:47 that is in that deep, painful, length and stretch position.
0:44:49 If you just have all those three,
0:44:51 everything else we can say about your technique
0:44:52 is just nuances and finer points.
0:44:54 Those are really the big ones.
0:44:56 We talked about nutrition earlier as well.
0:45:00 So if I want to make my bicep grow
0:45:02 and also drop off the weight around the bicep
0:45:03 so you can see it even more,
0:45:05 what should I be putting into my mouth?
0:45:09 The number one requisite for muscle growth is protein.
0:45:13 Foods with lots of protein in them.
0:45:18 Ideally, should be consumed three to five times per day
0:45:20 at roughly equidistant intervals.
0:45:23 Breakfast, lunch, dinner, totally fine.
0:45:26 Even better breakfast, lunch, dinner, evening snack.
0:45:33 The average person needs a little bit less than, let’s say,
0:45:37 a gram per pound of body weight per day of protein.
0:45:38 Actually considerably less.
0:45:40 So that’s kind of the top limit
0:45:42 and a cool aspirational thing to shoot for.
0:45:46 So if you weigh, let’s say, 200 pounds,
0:45:50 you should be consuming something like 150 to 200 grams
0:45:51 of protein per day.
0:45:53 And 150 for almost everyone is totally enough.
0:45:54 But if you’re real serious and hardcore
0:45:56 and you just want that insurance policy,
0:45:57 200 grams of protein per day.
0:46:00 So then if you’re eating four times a day, that’s,
0:46:06 oh yeah, 30, 40, let’s say 40 to 50 grams of protein per meal.
0:46:10 Can I eat too much protein and then it becomes fat or something?
0:46:14 So protein by itself, no.
0:46:18 If your protein is so high that your carbs and fats are the same
0:46:19 and you jack up your protein super high,
0:46:22 but your carbs and fats stay where they are,
0:46:23 your calories become excessive.
0:46:25 That will cause fat gain over time.
0:46:28 But if you’re doing a diet where you did a ton of protein
0:46:29 but you dropped your carbs and fats
0:46:31 and your calories are at maintenance levels,
0:46:32 you’re not going to gain any fat.
0:46:34 It’s not bad for your kidneys.
0:46:36 It’s not bad for any other part of your body.
0:46:39 Excessive protein as a health malady
0:46:41 has been a myth the entire time.
0:46:44 And that’s one of those notions that people carry with them
0:46:46 that too much protein is bad, right?
0:46:48 Like, yes, if you’ve had kidney surgery, absolutely.
0:46:50 Short of that, you’re probably good to go.
0:46:52 You’ll fart a lot and people will hate you, but you know.
0:46:55 You mentioned three to five meals a day.
0:47:00 A lot of people are now in this camp of fasting,
0:47:02 an intermittent fasting and not eating often.
0:47:06 Is it possible to fast but also to gain muscle mass
0:47:07 in the way that you’ve described?
0:47:08 Yeah, totally.
0:47:10 It just won’t happen at as an impressive rate.
0:47:12 So you have to make a trade-off for yourself.
0:47:14 If you want, you know, most jacked,
0:47:15 Stephen that you can be,
0:47:17 three to five meals a day consistently spread
0:47:22 and almost to an individual competitive bodybuilders
0:47:26 eat that frequently and eat high protein.
0:47:26 How often do you eat?
0:47:29 Uh, I eat it five, five times a day,
0:47:30 four or five times a day usually.
0:47:32 And do you eat before or after you train?
0:47:33 Both.
0:47:35 Okay, so before you train and after you train?
0:47:38 Yeah, but a lot of times I’ll train early in the morning
0:47:40 and so I won’t eat at all.
0:47:42 I’ll wake up and I’ll have like a protein and carb
0:47:44 mix shake with my training.
0:47:46 Totally optional, super extra credit.
0:47:49 May not do anything at all if you look at the literature,
0:47:50 but I find it a little bit compelling
0:47:52 to do a little bit of that.
0:47:54 And then afterwards I have my first post-workout meal,
0:47:56 second meal, third meal, fourth meal,
0:47:58 bedtime, wake up, do it again.
0:47:59 Would you take to get you going?
0:48:00 Do you do pre-workout?
0:48:01 No.
0:48:01 Why?
0:48:04 No, I don’t do any stimulants of any kind.
0:48:04 Why?
0:48:08 Uh, I’m just kind of cooked up all the time naturally.
0:48:10 So like if you give me stimulants,
0:48:12 it’s just going to go into the not so pleasant side
0:48:13 of side effects.
0:48:14 Like I’m just going to be like this
0:48:17 and way too amped up, super high anxiety.
0:48:19 And my thoughts get to be like,
0:48:21 I have less fluidity of thinking and stuff.
0:48:23 So I just, it was just a lot of me I guess.
0:48:25 And so when I wake up in the morning,
0:48:26 I don’t need anything to get me going.
0:48:27 I just go.
0:48:28 And a couple of warm-up sets later,
0:48:30 I have all the energy I need.
0:48:31 That’s not everyone.
0:48:34 And so some green tea, some black coffee,
0:48:37 or some pre-workout, 30 minutes before the gym,
0:48:38 is great advice for a ton of people.
0:48:40 I feel like pre-workout can’t be healthy
0:48:43 if you’re doing it five, six, seven times a week.
0:48:46 Because some of that stuff is so unbelievably strong.
0:48:47 Like I’ve had it before.
0:48:48 I’ve got literally like heart palpitations
0:48:49 when I’ve had a pre-workout.
0:48:51 And you know, you talk about anxiety,
0:48:52 that anxious feeling.
0:48:55 It can’t be, it can’t be healthy for people
0:48:56 to be doing that frequently.
0:48:59 It seems to be quite fine.
0:49:00 It seems to be quite fine.
0:49:03 Now at the extremes and for some individuals,
0:49:04 it’s not ideal.
0:49:10 But the upper limit dose of caffeine in milligrams per day,
0:49:13 at which we can confidently say most people
0:49:17 will experience the beginnings of health maladies,
0:49:19 is a thousand milligrams.
0:49:24 And a cup of coffee has, depending on which cup, 50 to 100.
0:49:30 Now some pre-workouts have 250 milligrams of caffeine.
0:49:31 Some have 500.
0:49:35 Last I checked, Ronnie Coleman’s pre-workout
0:49:39 has 550 megs of caffeine per scoop or per serving.
0:49:40 Isn’t that kind of a lot?
0:49:44 If I took 550 megs of caffeine,
0:49:45 you don’t take me to the gym,
0:49:47 just take me right to the hospital,
0:49:48 put me in the psychiatric ward.
0:49:50 36 hours later, I’ll be okay.
0:49:54 But for some people to get so accustomed to high doses of caffeine,
0:49:56 that it’s both not unhealthy for them to consume.
0:49:58 And also, they feel quite fine.
0:50:01 So I would say start with as little as you need to get you going.
0:50:04 And if you need to titrate and work up from there,
0:50:04 that’s a good thing.
0:50:05 The other thing I would say is,
0:50:10 I would have a compelling case for pre-workout or stimulants.
0:50:12 If I ask you, like,
0:50:13 “Hey, how much energy do you typically have at the gym?”
0:50:15 You’re like, “Oh, that’s super great.”
0:50:17 And they’re like, “Should I take pre-workout?”
0:50:19 I’d be like, “No, there’s no compelling case for that at all.”
0:50:21 If you’re like, “I wake up in the morning,
0:50:23 some days I just don’t get a ton of sleep,
0:50:25 and I need something to get me going.”
0:50:27 Not every day, but sometimes I’ll be like,
0:50:30 “Hey, look, consider green tea, black coffee,
0:50:32 some diet soda,
0:50:35 or all the way up to pre-workout if you need it.”
0:50:39 But some people take it kind of as a religious thing,
0:50:42 as a habit, as a ritual.
0:50:45 And it’s like, dude, you’re training your forms and biceps
0:50:48 for 20 minutes total at 9 p.m.
0:50:50 You do not need three scoops of pre-workout for that.
0:50:52 I don’t even know where it’s going at that point.
0:50:54 So some people get a little crazy with the pre-workout.
0:50:55 It’s at the end of the world.
0:50:58 At best, needless.
0:51:03 What’s your stance on the whole idea of calories and calories out?
0:51:08 A lot of people just focus on that as the script
0:51:12 to lose body weight, lose body fat, and gain muscle.
0:51:15 Is that a useful frame to use?
0:51:19 And why do so many people fail at it if it is a useful frame?
0:51:23 Most people fail at it because they don’t consider
0:51:26 both the calories in and calories outside of the equation.
0:51:30 And a lot of people fail because they’re very bad
0:51:32 at estimating food amounts and calories.
0:51:35 Till someone will say like a tablespoon of peanut butter.
0:51:38 Stephen, have you ever actually seen a tablespoon measuring cup?
0:51:41 It does not look like mom’s tablespoon
0:51:43 where she takes the peanut butter and goes.
0:51:46 That’s like four tablespoons.
0:51:48 And so like, but I’m eating the calories, blah, blah, blah.
0:51:52 Every time you take people into what’s called a metabolic ward,
0:51:56 which is a study center where you’re not allowed to have visitors
0:51:57 that bring you food.
0:51:59 The workers only give you the food that you need.
0:52:02 And all of your exercise and your output is controlled and monitored.
0:52:03 And so is your intake.
0:52:06 No one has ever violated the laws of thermodynamics.
0:52:08 We give you a certain number of calories
0:52:09 and we expect you to lose a certain number of weight.
0:52:11 There’s a variance about that.
0:52:14 But you’re going to lose the weight that roughly we predict.
0:52:16 If we account for all variables,
0:52:17 you’re going to lose almost exactly the weight that we predict.
0:52:20 So calories and calories out is incontrovertible.
0:52:23 And among 90 something percent,
0:52:26 98 percent of people who do research in the field
0:52:28 and are scientifically literate and educated,
0:52:30 calories and calories out is not controversial.
0:52:31 It never has been.
0:52:33 There are some people who say,
0:52:35 well, calorie counting didn’t work for me.
0:52:38 That’s probably because you did it wrong
0:52:41 or you weren’t even concerned about how much protein you’re taking in
0:52:42 or how many carbs, how many fats.
0:52:44 There are other details that matter.
0:52:48 Like if you say, I need a V8 engine in a car.
0:52:49 That’s all that matters.
0:52:50 Like, OK, well, there’s no steering wheel.
0:52:51 There’s no pedals.
0:52:51 Cool.
0:52:53 OK, I need those things too.
0:52:56 So calories and calories out is the very core.
0:52:57 Because without an engine, you’re not going anywhere.
0:53:01 But what types of foods you’re eating matters a little bit.
0:53:03 Are you getting enough protein, carbs, fats?
0:53:04 That matters a bit too.
0:53:07 So people like to just bash calorie balance
0:53:10 and calories and calories out is, well, it’s totally myth.
0:53:10 It doesn’t work.
0:53:12 No, no, it works great.
0:53:15 It’s just not always enough to get you in the best shape you can.
0:53:18 But if you do it right, as far as net balance,
0:53:20 weight gain or weight loss, calories and calories out
0:53:22 is actually the only thing that matters.
0:53:27 Tissue-wise, is that gain mostly muscle or mostly fat?
0:53:29 Is the loss mostly muscle, mostly fat?
0:53:30 That has not so much to do with calories.
0:53:33 It has much more to do with proteins, carbs, fats,
0:53:36 the quality of food you’re eating, nutrient timing,
0:53:36 and all the rest of it.
0:53:38 So calories and calories out is amazing,
0:53:40 super explanatory, critical.
0:53:41 But it’s just not the whole picture.
0:53:44 And that’s really it, I guess, because so many people say
0:53:46 they’ve heard about calories and calories out,
0:53:49 but they fail at maintaining it.
0:53:51 Now, that’s really about motivation
0:53:52 and the psychology of doing such a thing.
0:53:54 Some people have said to me that our bodies
0:53:56 want to defend our weight.
0:53:58 So if we start eating less, we’ll become a little bit more hungry.
0:54:02 If we go for a run after the run or after physical exertion,
0:54:03 our body will try and make up for it
0:54:05 because it’s programmed to try and defend its weight,
0:54:08 because its weight correlates to our ability to survive.
0:54:12 Why do people fail at it?
0:54:13 One of the reasons you said this,
0:54:16 because they’re not actually measuring calories correctly,
0:54:20 but the psychological reasons that it hasn’t worked for some people.
0:54:22 Can you think of many?
0:54:24 Because when people talk about calories and calories out,
0:54:26 if you look at the comment sections on those videos,
0:54:27 people say, “I’ve tried this and it didn’t work.”
0:54:29 Okay. So first of all,
0:54:31 I typically don’t look at comment sections of videos
0:54:35 because comment section is not representative of the population.
0:54:38 It’s not representative of the people that watch your videos.
0:54:40 It’s not representative of the hardcore demographic
0:54:42 that watches your videos.
0:54:44 So just as a statistical artifact,
0:54:48 every single claim by people against calorie balance
0:54:51 in that comment section could be true for them,
0:54:53 but they represent 1% of the population.
0:54:55 So 99% of people at work’s just fine.
0:54:57 For 1%, they get into some kind of trouble.
0:55:01 Usually that trouble is they didn’t count calories properly.
0:55:03 They didn’t account for macronutrient profile,
0:55:04 proteins, carbs, fats.
0:55:05 They didn’t account for nutrient timing
0:55:08 or the kinds of foods that they’re doing and so on and so forth.
0:55:12 And another one is, like you said, sustainability.
0:55:15 How long do I have to count calories for?
0:55:18 In my life, for me to get the body that I want and keep it,
0:55:20 is sure shit not going to be forever.
0:55:22 So what I’ll do is I’ll count calories for a few months.
0:55:23 I’ll lose a lot of weight.
0:55:26 Then I’ll go back to eating on vibes and the weight comes right back.
0:55:29 Absolutely. So better than just counting calories,
0:55:32 what we want to do is instill people with good eating habits.
0:55:35 If you learn how to construct meals made of lean proteins,
0:55:37 veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats,
0:55:40 you know roughly how to see how much food you need
0:55:43 and how much food looks at least like it’s what you eat per day.
0:55:46 If you’re checking your body weight relatively often
0:55:48 and when your body weight starts to get a little higher,
0:55:50 you kind of clean up your diet a little bit.
0:55:52 And when your body weight’s nice and low, a couple of cheat meals,
0:55:55 a couple of kebabs, burgers and stuff, that’s all good.
0:55:57 If you do that and you have those healthy habits,
0:55:59 whatever weight you lost on calorie restriction,
0:56:03 you can maintain with very, very little work,
0:56:06 not counting a damn thing just on good habits.
0:56:08 But if you count on calories,
0:56:10 you do some weird diet where you only eat like
0:56:12 tooth was orange slices and protein shakes or something.
0:56:15 Yeah, the calorie counting will get you wherever you need to go.
0:56:17 But then afterwards, you’re like, the diet’s over.
0:56:19 And you’re like, now what do I do?
0:56:21 I’m like, good luck going out in the world
0:56:24 and eating the same diet that got you fat in the first place.
0:56:25 That’s the big kicker.
0:56:29 People might say it takes too much time to count calories.
0:56:32 It leads to an unhealthy relationship with food.
0:56:33 I think there’s a big movement at the moment
0:56:35 to try and get calories off menus
0:56:38 because it’s said to increase the amount of people
0:56:39 that have eating disorders and things like that.
0:56:46 Is that a conversation worth entertaining in this regard?
0:56:47 Sure, sure.
0:56:51 Very few people will develop eating disorders
0:56:54 based on increases in information they are presented.
0:56:56 I would actually call that eating order
0:56:58 instead of eating disorder.
0:57:01 Most people who get eating disorders
0:57:03 are highly at risk genetically
0:57:06 and with a few other social circumstances.
0:57:10 Eating disorders are, for example,
0:57:14 the most deleterious eating disorders,
0:57:18 anorexia nervosa, seen not exclusively,
0:57:22 but almost exclusively in females of reproductive age.
0:57:25 They ain’t calories on a menu doing that.
0:57:26 That’s something you bring into the table
0:57:30 usually because you have the genetic proclivity for it
0:57:34 and additionally because you’ve been in a social
0:57:38 and cultural circumstance where not only were you
0:57:40 the wrong person to get ridiculed for your weight,
0:57:43 but also a lot of people ridiculed you for your weight
0:57:46 and then you go all careening off on this path
0:57:48 where no one can even tell you’re super skinny
0:57:49 anymore because you don’t believe it.
0:57:53 So the idea that you’re going to see much higher prevalence
0:57:54 globally in eating disorders
0:57:57 from putting menu calorie labels on things
0:58:00 is true by this much at the margins
0:58:02 and it’s just largely not the case.
0:58:05 Adjacent to that is this idea of muscle dysmorphia,
0:58:07 which affects a lot of people,
0:58:11 but specifically men, roughly 87% of men
0:58:13 that are between 15 to 32 years old
0:58:17 that experience muscle dysmorphia, which is what?
0:58:22 So muscle dysmorphia generally is for whatever level of jacked
0:58:26 that you are, you think you are considerably less jacked,
0:58:30 both in reference to yourself and your own desires
0:58:32 and in reference to an ethereal make-belief
0:58:34 comparator population in your head.
0:58:39 So if you were to ask me like, “Hey, Mike, do you feel jacked?”
0:58:40 And I’m like, “Nope.”
0:58:42 You’re like, “Ooh, not good, not a good sign.
0:58:43 Clearly he’s jacked.”
0:58:44 And then you can ask me, “Mike,
0:58:48 compared to other 40-year-old Ashkenazi Jewish men,
0:58:49 how jacked are you?”
0:58:52 And if I’m probably like, “Bottom 50% for sure,
0:58:53 probably bottom 25,” you’d be like,
0:58:56 “Okay, he’s mentally ill, take him away.”
0:58:58 That is high-level muscle dysmorphia,
0:59:02 a disassociation from any objective reality
0:59:04 about how much muscle you actually have.
0:59:07 Do people overestimate or underestimate
0:59:09 their appearance as it relates to their muscles?
0:59:14 Dysmorphia is almost always catalogued as an underestimation.
0:59:16 But from your experience working with people,
0:59:17 do people think they’re more jacked
0:59:18 than they actually are?
0:59:20 It really depends on the individual.
0:59:24 Most people that are in gym culture that are very invested,
0:59:27 if you catch them on their not-so-great days,
0:59:30 they think they’re substantially less jacked
0:59:31 than they really are.
0:59:33 And if you tease it apart via conversation,
0:59:35 they’ll end up being like, “Yeah, no, no, I know I’m jacked,
0:59:36 but I’m just saying like…”
0:59:39 And then it’s aspirational, like, “For my goals,
0:59:41 I’m not as jacked as I would like to be.”
0:59:45 It’s interesting because we typically think of women,
0:59:47 I think stereotypically in society,
0:59:50 as caring more about their body image.
0:59:53 But I’ve read a lot of stats lately
0:59:55 that suggest men care equally about their body image,
0:59:57 but just in slightly different ways,
0:59:59 and about the correlation between their perception
1:00:01 of their body image and their own mental health
1:00:02 and the link between the two.
1:00:04 Sure, sure.
1:00:05 Do you see a lot of that?
1:00:06 Do you see this link between mental health
1:00:07 and male body image?
1:00:12 Yes, huge proportion of psychological proclivities
1:00:12 are genetic.
1:00:16 The others are very individually acquired.
1:00:17 They change through time.
1:00:19 It’s not as easy as saying
1:00:21 upbringing or family environment.
1:00:24 So the one consistent thing about how you relate to the world
1:00:25 in your own thoughts is genetics.
1:00:28 And a lot of the traits tend to aggregate together.
1:00:33 So it is true to say on a spectrum, very nuanced,
1:00:38 that some people aggregate a lot of negative psychological traits,
1:00:40 and some people aggregate a lot of positives.
1:00:41 And they’re absolutely people.
1:00:42 Everyone’s a mixed bag somewhere in between,
1:00:44 but there’s a little bit of this kind of,
1:00:47 I don’t want to use a term for another mental health,
1:00:49 a bipolarity to the distribution, right?
1:00:53 And so a lot of people that are generally neurotic,
1:00:57 they feel consistently unsafe and unsure of themselves,
1:00:59 are going to be also the type of people
1:01:01 that when they get more jacked through lifting,
1:01:02 they’re still not going to believe
1:01:04 that they’re as jacked and accomplished
1:01:06 and awesome and alpha male as they really are,
1:01:07 because they’re always like,
1:01:09 you know, to use the old Jewish jokes,
1:01:12 stereotypically, I’m never going to be big.
1:01:14 And it’s like, you’re already big.
1:01:14 Like, oh, I don’t know.
1:01:16 It could get worse tomorrow.
1:01:19 And a lot of people just bring that to the table.
1:01:22 And so when you get neurotic people jacked,
1:01:23 they don’t think they’re that jacked.
1:01:25 They’re always like, oh my God, it’s always going to end.
1:01:29 But if you take not neurotic people and make them jacked,
1:01:31 one week of lifting into those people,
1:01:32 they’re like, dude, I’m like,
1:01:34 do you think I should turn pro in bodybuilding?
1:01:35 You’re like, get out of here.
1:01:36 You’re just overconfident.
1:01:38 So it really depends on who’s doing the thing.
1:01:41 Now, cultural stuff, social, who’s in your circle?
1:01:42 I’ll give you a good example.
1:01:46 I have a lot of my closest friends
1:01:48 have no relation to fitness whatsoever.
1:01:49 A bunch of them are actually neuroscientists,
1:01:51 just randomly people I knew in college
1:01:53 that ended up being my friends for life.
1:01:56 And so when they assess their muscularity
1:01:58 relative to myself and my bodybuilder friends,
1:02:00 they’re like, I’m in terrible shape
1:02:02 and I’m not remotely jacked.
1:02:04 And it’s a weird comparator population
1:02:06 that I always remind them like, dude,
1:02:07 not everyone looks like this.
1:02:07 They go to the store.
1:02:08 They go to school.
1:02:08 They go to the bank.
1:02:10 And they’re like, oh, crap, you’re right.
1:02:12 I’m actually the most jacked person at the bank.
1:02:14 It’s just not like gold’s gym where everyone’s enormous.
1:02:16 So if you happen to be in an environment,
1:02:18 let’s say you’re a university student
1:02:20 and you go to the university gym
1:02:21 and there’s lots of jacked people there
1:02:23 and you’re there all the time trying to do your best,
1:02:25 you may, if you’re neurotic to begin with,
1:02:27 more neurotic, start to develop a sense
1:02:30 that you’re just not nearly as jacked
1:02:32 as you should be or could be or whatever.
1:02:34 But if you like hang out at an old people home
1:02:35 with your grandma and grandpa all the time,
1:02:37 you’re going to feel like Superman all the time
1:02:38 because holy shit, you’re like,
1:02:40 you can do real things and move furniture around.
1:02:43 And so then go back to the point about weight loss.
1:02:44 If I’m trying to lose weight,
1:02:47 what are the biggest myths around weight loss
1:02:49 that hold people back and inhibit them?
1:02:51 One is you have to be perfect.
1:02:53 If I’m on my diet, I’m good.
1:02:56 If I’m off my diet, not only am I bad,
1:02:59 but as soon as I’m off my diet, I have sinned
1:03:01 and there is no solace for me.
1:03:05 A lot of people have that falling off the bandwagon thing
1:03:08 where they’ll eat clean food, whatever that means,
1:03:10 diet food for weeks and weeks and weeks.
1:03:12 They have one kebab, they have one cheeseburger
1:03:14 and they’re like, back it.
1:03:15 That’s it, man.
1:03:17 I’m done dieting.
1:03:18 I’m not a good person anymore.
1:03:20 It’s like that whole dichotomizing
1:03:23 and kind of a religious approach.
1:03:24 That hurts a lot of people
1:03:27 because in reality, if you just eat a cheeseburger,
1:03:28 your body’s like, oh sweet,
1:03:30 like I got a little bit more carbohydrates
1:03:31 stored in the muscle.
1:03:32 I recovered a little bit more.
1:03:33 My diet fatigue is actually a little lower
1:03:35 because you fed me some food.
1:03:37 Tomorrow, I’m back on the diet.
1:03:38 I’m making even better gains
1:03:39 than if I didn’t have that cheeseburger.
1:03:40 So it was so exhausted.
1:03:43 And so a lot of people have that approach
1:03:44 completely backwards and they’re like,
1:03:47 I’m either good or I’m bad and that’s really tough.
1:03:50 Another one is people think that the approach
1:03:53 to lose weight is the same as the approach to maintain it.
1:03:56 This is really, really, really nasty
1:04:00 because so my wife is a board certified family med sports
1:04:03 med doctor and she does a lot of work,
1:04:05 international Olympic teams, all that stuff.
1:04:09 And she is looking at these formal recommendations
1:04:12 from the medical literature and it’s like,
1:04:15 here’s the kind of diet you need to get to lose weight.
1:04:16 And then she was like,
1:04:18 she followed up with some of the professionals
1:04:19 and she’s like, and so what about maintenance?
1:04:23 And they’re like, yep, what do you mean?
1:04:24 Yep, what are you talking about?
1:04:26 That’s not the conversation.
1:04:28 So people think, okay, I’m going to clean up my diet,
1:04:32 no more ice cream, no more crisps, no more Cheetos.
1:04:33 I’m going to eat super healthy.
1:04:35 And then when I get to the weight that I want,
1:04:39 I eat continuously super healthy.
1:04:41 I never have ice cream again.
1:04:42 We’re in a bizarre world, is it?
1:04:44 And so they’ll flop back to the other one.
1:04:45 Well, they’ll try for a few months
1:04:47 after they’ve gotten to the weight they like
1:04:49 to just eat completely super healthy, clean,
1:04:49 everything like that.
1:04:50 They lose a little bit more weight.
1:04:51 They’re exhausted.
1:04:52 They’re tired.
1:04:54 Their food focus is driving them nuts.
1:04:57 They’ll eat some ice cream and they’ll go, I’m a sinner.
1:04:59 And then ice cream, ice cream, cheeseburgers,
1:05:00 cheeseburgers, up they go.
1:05:02 And then they regain all the weight.
1:05:06 So a huge myth is the fact that, yeah, when you’re losing weight,
1:05:08 you got to pay a little bit more attention to what you eat.
1:05:10 But once you’ve gotten to that weight,
1:05:12 you both need some time.
1:05:16 Roughly every three months that you diet hard to lose weight,
1:05:19 you should be taking about at least two months at maintenance,
1:05:20 just maintaining it.
1:05:22 So if you weighed 100 kilos, now you’re down to 90.
1:05:25 After three months, for about two or three months,
1:05:26 just stay at 90.
1:05:28 Eat mostly the healthy stuff that you were,
1:05:29 but throw in a little junk in there.
1:05:32 Maintenance, again, is much easier than losing.
1:05:36 When physiologically and psychologically,
1:05:39 your diet fatigue comes down after those two or three months,
1:05:42 you’re able, if you’d like, to start dieting really hard again
1:05:44 to get to that next goal that you have,
1:05:46 or you just live in balance for the rest.
1:05:48 But if we tell you, like, here’s your diet
1:05:49 to make you lean and healthy and you’re like,
1:05:50 okay, how long do I have to do this?
1:05:52 And the doctor is like, forever.
1:05:54 What am I supposed to do?
1:05:57 I’m never allowed to have tiramisu after dinner ever again.
1:05:59 And I’m like, well, probably not too.
1:06:00 That’s terrible advice.
1:06:02 And not only do medical people too often say that,
1:06:03 most people have that in their heads.
1:06:06 And it’s a very, very untenable situation.
1:06:09 One of the big Swiss narratives that I was exposed to
1:06:13 for most of my life about weight loss is that 80% of its diet.
1:06:16 What do you think about those ratios?
1:06:19 How much of weight loss is determined by diet versus exercise?
1:06:24 Diet has a bigger effect than exercise.
1:06:27 As a heuristic, I’m very comfortable with 80/20.
1:06:29 There are a couple of reasons for that.
1:06:35 One is there’s the constrained energy hypothesis.
1:06:37 It’s also called Ponzer’s Paradox,
1:06:40 based on Herman Ponzer’s work in physical anthropology.
1:06:45 And so basically they realize that the amount
1:06:48 of physical activity that humans can do has a range.
1:06:53 But if you try to get people to double their physical activity,
1:06:54 you say, I’m not going to change my diet.
1:06:57 I’m going to work out twice as much as the next guy.
1:07:01 Your body becomes so fatigued so rapidly.
1:07:03 And your metabolism adjusts itself.
1:07:06 Your physical activity that’s not planned exercise,
1:07:08 like how much do you get up when someone calls you?
1:07:10 Are you still on the couch talking to them?
1:07:12 Or how much do you get up and walk around your kitchen a bunch?
1:07:15 Your body makes all these adjustments.
1:07:19 So if you try to really outwork a bad diet, it doesn’t work.
1:07:22 And usually you just come back to the same physical activity
1:07:24 because you’re too exhausted to continue and then you fail.
1:07:28 Whereas with diet, you can make some dietary changes,
1:07:32 principle-based, like stop eating junk food every day
1:07:35 and just eat two pieces of junk food on Friday
1:07:37 and two pieces of junk food on Saturday.
1:07:40 Just that alone is sustainable.
1:07:42 Your body, as long as these are filling foods,
1:07:45 a lot of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats,
1:07:46 you’re not hungry.
1:07:49 You’re just like, damn it, I want a bag of chips.
1:07:50 That’s not a reason.
1:07:51 That is mostly psychological.
1:07:53 It’s not physiological.
1:07:56 And thus, dieting is just able to take bigger chunks
1:07:58 out of your calorie balance equation
1:08:00 without completely destroying it.
1:08:01 That has limits as well.
1:08:04 You can’t diet forever, so you have to take it in chunks.
1:08:05 Another thing is this.
1:08:11 In order to burn a lot of calories to lose a lot of weight,
1:08:14 you got to do some serious work.
1:08:19 The average person will burn something like 100 to 150 calories
1:08:21 per mile will run.
1:08:22 Oh, my God.
1:08:26 You start thinking about it like a donut has 300 calories.
1:08:29 How fast, Stephen, can you eat a donut if I time you?
1:08:31 Five seconds.
1:08:32 No problem.
1:08:32 Boom.
1:08:35 You’re going to run three miles after each donut?
1:08:35 No.
1:08:36 It’s insane.
1:08:39 So taking your diet, cleaning it up,
1:08:42 reducing the junk, reducing the calories is not that hard.
1:08:46 But if you try to fight off the nasty extra junk food calories
1:08:47 you’re taking in with exercise,
1:08:49 it’s kind of like a three-to-one fight.
1:08:54 You eat two donuts at your work function after work.
1:08:55 You have six miles to run that day.
1:08:56 Nobody doing that.
1:09:00 And that’s why diet is such a huge factor.
1:09:02 It’s so easy to do “damage” with it.
1:09:05 And it’s much easier to take control of it
1:09:06 versus with exercise.
1:09:08 The boundary layers are just smaller.
1:09:10 And what you would have to do to fight the bad diet
1:09:13 is just grotesquely large and outside of those boundary layers.
1:09:15 I think it’s a lot because I think people typically assume
1:09:17 that the way to lose weight is to go do a run.
1:09:18 Yeah.
1:09:20 That’s typically, you know, you’ll see people in the gym
1:09:22 and if you ask someone why they’re on the running machine,
1:09:24 they’ll probably say, “I’m trying to lose some weight.”
1:09:24 Yeah.
1:09:27 It helps a little bit.
1:09:32 But if you run and you burn 200 calories extra per day,
1:09:33 three days per week,
1:09:37 then it’s 600 extra calories you’re burning through the week,
1:09:38 that’s good stuff.
1:09:41 You can lose some decent weight like that.
1:09:43 Are you just going to be more hungry, though, afterwards?
1:09:46 Typically, exercise does not dependably increase your hunger
1:09:47 in most people.
1:09:51 So depending on the context in the individual,
1:09:54 it’s not a dependable thing to say that doing more exercise
1:09:55 necessarily makes you more hungry,
1:09:57 which is kind of cool because usually you’re not really
1:09:58 any more hungry.
1:10:00 And if you stick consistently exercise,
1:10:02 but you control your diet, you’re good to go.
1:10:03 However.
1:10:04 Is there a psychological component to that?
1:10:04 Why?
1:10:08 Because I’ve done the run, I now feel like I deserve it.
1:10:09 Oh, yeah.
1:10:09 That’s huge.
1:10:11 And some people do have a hunger response,
1:10:13 but what you put in your body after that could be really
1:10:15 healthy stuff that doesn’t have a ton of calories is really
1:10:17 filling or it could be like we’re done running,
1:10:18 pizza and beer.
1:10:20 And then that’s really bad news.
1:10:21 But real quick.
1:10:24 So let’s say you’re burning 600 calories extra per week
1:10:25 by running two miles at a time or whatever,
1:10:28 or whatever you run an extra four miles per week, right?
1:10:31 600 calories per week.
1:10:32 So what is that?
1:10:35 Well, to burn a pound of body fat,
1:10:39 you need to get 3500 calories per week out of your diet
1:10:42 or do 3500 extra calories of activity per week.
1:10:45 600s a drop in the bucket to that.
1:10:46 You’ll never notice.
1:10:47 I mean, yeah, after a year,
1:10:50 you’ll lose like two or three pounds or five pounds or whatever.
1:10:52 Nobody thinks in terms like that.
1:10:57 But if they were to simply alter their diet and keep training
1:11:01 to keep the calorie burn at a moderate to high level,
1:11:04 but take food out of their diet, especially through junk food,
1:11:08 the total calorie sink deficit they can make for themselves
1:11:10 is now in the hundreds of calories per day.
1:11:13 Now you’re losing a pound of fat every week.
1:11:14 Now you’re having big results.
1:11:17 Is there a preference between doing cardio or strength
1:11:20 as it relates to long-term weight loss?
1:11:22 Because I’m thinking if I’ve got more muscles,
1:11:25 then surely my body’s going to need more,
1:11:26 it’s going to burn more calories.
1:11:28 Just by a small margin.
1:11:29 Almost unnoticeable.
1:11:31 So your body versus my body,
1:11:34 you’re not burning more calories.
1:11:34 How much do you weigh?
1:11:37 90, I don’t even know it in pounds.
1:11:39 It’s about 92 kilograms.
1:11:40 Okay, solid.
1:11:45 So I currently weigh about 98 kilograms.
1:11:46 202 pounds.
1:11:47 So 202.
1:11:49 So I weigh like 216 to 220 right now.
1:11:51 So we weigh not too far off?
1:11:52 Not too far off.
1:11:55 So even though I have considerably more muscle.
1:11:56 In your opinion.
1:11:58 And am I very biased?
1:12:01 No dysmorphia here.
1:12:06 I would be burning a teeny bit more fat
1:12:09 or more calories per day because of my higher muscle mass,
1:12:12 but it’s mostly my absolutely higher weight.
1:12:14 So for example, the people in the world
1:12:15 that burn the most calories
1:12:18 and need the most calories to sustain their body weight
1:12:19 are the fattest people in the world
1:12:21 that like Lady that weighs 800, 900, 1,000 pounds.
1:12:23 Like just to keep her the same size,
1:12:25 it’s 15,000 calories a day.
1:12:28 And if it was all muscle and no fat,
1:12:30 somehow she was 1,000 pounds of muscle,
1:12:31 which would be sweet to look at.
1:12:37 She would be burning like maybe 16,000 calories per day
1:12:41 instead of 15 and probably even that’s an exaggeration.
1:12:44 Muscle mass doesn’t help you burn tons of calories.
1:12:46 So that’s not what it’s there for.
1:12:48 It is incredibly good for your health.
1:12:51 It is incredibly good for how you look.
1:12:55 Those things by itself make muscle mass an awesome thing to do.
1:12:57 But it is neither true to say
1:13:02 that cardio reliably over the long term burns lots of weight off.
1:13:04 And it is not true to say
1:13:06 that gaining lots of muscle burns lots of weight off.
1:13:08 What is really, really critical is
1:13:11 do you have a well controlled, nutritious diet?
1:13:14 And do you have an average, moderate to high level
1:13:15 of daily physical activity?
1:13:18 Dancing and swimming and running and having fun
1:13:19 and chasing your kids.
1:13:21 If you’re on the higher end of activity,
1:13:23 not psychotically high to where you get super tired,
1:13:25 just not being a total slouch like slouch.
1:13:28 And making sure you’re aware of your body when you’re diet.
1:13:30 That’s what really pays these massive dividends
1:13:32 in long term weight control.
1:13:34 It’s not like, well, if I put on a ton of muscle,
1:13:35 that’s great for everything else.
1:13:36 It makes you super healthy.
1:13:38 It makes you look really awesome.
1:13:40 It gives you the ability to like, I don’t know,
1:13:43 like do real world stuff, defend yourself, things like that.
1:13:45 That’s what muscle is there for.
1:13:48 It’s not the greatest like calorie sink in the world.
1:13:50 I wish it was, I’d be cheeseburger right now.
1:13:51 So in terms of supplements,
1:13:55 are there any supplements you suggest that I take
1:13:58 if my goal is to lose weight,
1:14:01 but also to gain muscle mass for the average person?
1:14:03 No.
1:14:04 There’s no supplements.
1:14:05 I mean.
1:14:06 Creatine.
1:14:08 Creatine will not help with weight loss.
1:14:11 And for most people, it’ll temporarily gain you
1:14:13 about two kilos of body weight
1:14:15 because it attracts body water into the muscle.
1:14:17 It’s a cool look because it makes on my creatine right now.
1:14:18 Can you know?
1:14:20 Yeah, really?
1:14:24 So creatine doesn’t help you lose weight
1:14:26 in any meaningful extent.
1:14:28 So I’m aware of no over the counter supplements
1:14:30 that simultaneously help you burn fat and gain muscle.
1:14:32 There are supplements that are not over the counter
1:14:33 that do that quite well.
1:14:33 Right.
1:14:35 What if I’m just trying to gain muscle then?
1:14:36 What supplements?
1:14:37 What supplements would you recommend
1:14:39 the average person to be taking?
1:14:41 Really regardless of, I guess, goals.
1:14:44 If their goal is to be a little bit more lean
1:14:45 with their muscle mass,
1:14:46 if their goal is to build muscle,
1:14:48 is it different types of supplements you’d suggest or?
1:14:52 Creatine works to build muscle.
1:14:53 It’s got awesome cognitive benefits.
1:14:55 It’s just healthy for you and it’s great.
1:14:57 So five grams per day for most people
1:14:59 of creatine monohydrate, super awesome.
1:15:00 Have you got to load creatine?
1:15:01 I remember myself.
1:15:03 I used to load creatine.
1:15:05 That’s basically like a corporate scam
1:15:07 that’s just trying to get you to consume more creatine
1:15:08 so you buy more.
1:15:08 Yeah.
1:15:10 After if you load your creatine,
1:15:13 which is like taking 20 grams per day for a few days,
1:15:16 you get to intramuscular creatine stores
1:15:20 that are optimal like in four or five days.
1:15:22 If you don’t load creatine,
1:15:24 you get there in like seven to 10 days.
1:15:25 And because you’re taking creatine
1:15:27 either for months or for life,
1:15:29 it’s just a moot point.
1:15:31 So creatine loading is a gigantic waste of time
1:15:32 in almost every case.
1:15:32 Okay.
1:15:34 So creatine works.
1:15:37 Way protein, casein protein,
1:15:39 can be an excellent way to conveniently get protein.
1:15:42 So they’re more like foods rather than supplements.
1:15:44 Those are totally cool, but not mandatory.
1:15:47 If you talk to me like you are now
1:15:48 for just several hours at a time,
1:15:50 let’s say we’re sitting on a plane together
1:15:51 and you’re like, I’m just a guy who’s trying
1:15:52 to get like a little bit more of this, a little bit of that.
1:15:54 What supplements do I need to take?
1:15:59 Is the wrong time to ask that.
1:16:00 The time to ask that is like,
1:16:04 I want to take a run at a natural bodybuilding show.
1:16:05 What supplements do I need?
1:16:05 Okay.
1:16:08 Then they pay some dividends that are worth noting,
1:16:10 but supplements are just not in the conversation
1:16:12 for important things that health conscious people
1:16:14 should have in even in their top 10
1:16:16 of important things that you do.
1:16:18 The top 10 important things are like
1:16:19 getting adequate sleep,
1:16:21 managing your stress really well,
1:16:22 consistently lifting weights,
1:16:24 consistently doing a high level of physical activity,
1:16:26 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
1:16:28 Those are the big rocks, not supplements.
1:16:32 Supplements are insanely overrated as a general rule.
1:16:35 This next challenge is offered in partnership with Woop.
1:16:38 There’s the idea of waking up with more energy,
1:16:40 a clear remind and a feeling of control appeal to you.
1:16:44 If it does, I want you to join me this sober October.
1:16:46 I stopped drinking a while ago now
1:16:48 and it was largely because of Woop.
1:16:50 Time and time again, I watched my heart rate variability drop
1:16:52 to like 40 after having a drink,
1:16:54 even one or two glasses of wine,
1:16:57 when it would otherwise sit nearer to 150.
1:16:59 The only other times it would drop this low
1:17:02 was when I was sick or when I was stressed.
1:17:04 Information enables us to make more informed choices
1:17:07 and seeing this led me to make a change in my life.
1:17:08 So if you’re a member of Woop,
1:17:11 look out for Woop’s sober October challenge in the app.
1:17:13 And if you haven’t joined yet,
1:17:20 head over to join.woop.com/ceo to start your free trial.
1:17:23 That’s join.woop.com/ceo
1:17:25 and get ready for your life to change.
1:17:27 What about steroids?
1:17:28 They’re great.
1:17:29 What?
1:17:31 Am I allowed to say that?
1:17:33 What are steroids?
1:17:35 And you said you take steroids.
1:17:38 Do you take steroids all the time?
1:17:40 And what is the impact?
1:17:42 So say if you weren’t taking steroids,
1:17:43 how different would you look?
1:17:46 I know this because I used to not take steroids.
1:17:49 And when I wasn’t taking steroids,
1:17:55 I weighed about at a body fat similar to this.
1:18:03 I would have to weigh probably 180 to 190 pounds,
1:18:07 more like 180, and this kind of body fat level.
1:18:12 I currently weigh 216 pounds
1:18:15 because I’m on a moderate amount of steroids
1:18:16 a few weeks ago.
1:18:18 Actually, earlier last week,
1:18:20 I was on higher amounts of steroids.
1:18:22 And with this same level of body fat,
1:18:24 I weighed 227 pounds.
1:18:29 So we’re talking about 30, 40 pounds of muscle tissue difference
1:18:31 between steroids and not steroids.
1:18:32 Have you got a picture of before and after?
1:18:35 Before when you didn’t use steroids
1:18:36 and you trained and then after?
1:18:38 Yeah, it’s got to be somewhere.
1:18:38 Okay.
1:18:41 We’ll try and get it just for visual control.
1:18:42 Sure, sure, sure.
1:18:44 You said they’re great.
1:18:45 I was kidding.
1:18:46 All right.
1:18:47 They’re great for putting on muscle
1:18:51 if you want to jettison your long-term health and longevity
1:18:53 to some extent, yes,
1:18:54 and your current psychological stuff.
1:18:56 It’s something that’s never done it.
1:18:57 Give me a window into…
1:18:59 What’d you do?
1:19:00 You inject it somewhere?
1:19:03 You can take steroids orally through pills
1:19:05 or you can inject it into muscle.
1:19:09 So usually you would inject it into your quads.
1:19:11 A lot of people do their shoulders.
1:19:12 And some people, if they’re flexible enough,
1:19:13 do their glutes.
1:19:16 And how quickly do you notice a difference
1:19:18 and how big is the difference?
1:19:20 Just to give me sort of like your…
1:19:21 As far as jackness is concerned?
1:19:23 Yeah, so if I start taking steroids now,
1:19:26 how long would it be before I notice the difference
1:19:28 and how extreme would the difference be, in your opinion?
1:19:30 Visually, after a few months, you would be like,
1:19:32 “Oh, wow, okay, this is some other shit.”
1:19:34 After a week or two, you’d be like,
1:19:37 “I don’t know, my workouts feel pretty good.”
1:19:40 Psychologically, if you’re especially introspective
1:19:43 and perceptive and you’re sensitive to some psychological side-effects,
1:19:45 which I’m greatly sensitive to,
1:19:49 I notice in 30 minutes of taking steroids.
1:19:53 And would I, if I did the same exact workout, but took steroids,
1:19:55 would I get different results?
1:19:58 Or would I have to ramp up the workout that I’m doing
1:20:00 to see those different results?
1:20:00 Both.
1:20:04 If you have the same workout and you take plenty of steroids,
1:20:07 you can literally double your muscle gain from that workout.
1:20:12 If you understand that steroids also allow you to recover faster
1:20:13 and better and more completely,
1:20:17 you can take your workout and magnify it more easily.
1:20:21 Magnify it, more sets, etc., more sessions per week,
1:20:24 and then you would grow like two and a half times as much muscle.
1:20:28 Sounds exciting, but there’s always a downside for these things in life, isn’t there?
1:20:29 There are a few downsides, yes.
1:20:31 What are the downsides that no one’s talking about?
1:20:33 That no one’s talking about.
1:20:35 So there’s cosmetic downsides.
1:20:37 You get an increase in body hair growth.
1:20:40 This is especially profound for female,
1:20:42 but if you’re a male, that’s a thing.
1:20:43 I have hair that grows on my ears.
1:20:45 I have hair that grows on the outside of my nose.
1:20:47 I have to shave the front of my nose.
1:20:49 Now, a lot of that is just being a Russian Jew,
1:20:52 and hair just grows out of our eyeballs, but shit happens.
1:20:54 You get pimples, you get stuff like that.
1:21:00 Over the longer term, you get a substantially increased risk of heart disease.
1:21:04 If you’re smart, you take blood pressure drugs to counteract the blood pressure increase.
1:21:06 If you’re dumb, you take it on the chin,
1:21:10 and you have a high probability, much higher of kidney failure later in your life,
1:21:14 and losing your limbs and your vision and all that good stuff that comes with that.
1:21:17 There is an increased probability or severity of cancer.
1:21:22 Steroids increase the probability of damn near every disease,
1:21:24 kind of central systemic disease that you can have,
1:21:27 but that usually happens much later.
1:21:31 And so while you’re on them, you deal with the cosmetic side effects,
1:21:35 increased probability of balding, and the psychological side effects,
1:21:38 which are highly unpleasant I can get into in a bit.
1:21:41 If you’re a teenager, there’s an entire class of steroids
1:21:43 that close your growth plates early.
1:21:47 So if you’re under the age of definitely 22 as a male and you take steroids,
1:21:50 there’s a very good chance you will never reach the adult height
1:21:52 you were supposed to reach if you just let nature do the thing.
1:21:57 So when teenagers take steroids, this almost always categorically a super,
1:21:58 super terrible idea.
1:22:01 Also, they’re not intelligent enough yet.
1:22:03 Some teenagers are very smart.
1:22:07 They’re not wise enough yet to be able to make that trade off appropriately.
1:22:11 And so that’s a huge sort of different topic.
1:22:16 But the psychological side effects are a lot of times the things that
1:22:20 are the approximately most displeasing part of taking steroids.
1:22:24 Some people like them, but they’re also a mixed bag.
1:22:28 Tell me about the, before we get onto the psychological effects,
1:22:29 what about libido?
1:22:30 Because I’ve heard all kinds of things.
1:22:33 I’ve heard it shrinks your balls, your willy.
1:22:37 Something like half of all people experience testicular shrinkage
1:22:38 while using steroids.
1:22:39 Your boy got lucky.
1:22:40 My shit’s all the same size.
1:22:46 A lot of people roughly half will experience a decrease in ejaculate volume
1:22:48 and a profound decrease in fertility.
1:22:50 That does not mean you’re not infertile.
1:22:50 I know many people.
1:22:54 I know many people’s children that were fathered when the people were on steroids.
1:22:55 So some people are like, I’m on gear.
1:22:57 I could just bang away and nothing happens.
1:22:58 Like that’s not true.
1:23:05 Steroids have never been shown to change the size of your willy.
1:23:08 There is no mechanism by which really they can do that.
1:23:10 So that’s not a problem.
1:23:14 But steroids, depending on the steroids you take,
1:23:16 depending on your own individual biology,
1:23:18 depending on the ancillary drugs that you take along with it,
1:23:23 steroids can either have no real effect on your libido,
1:23:26 have a profoundly up regulating effect on libido,
1:23:29 or like hunger, like you would not believe.
1:23:35 And for other people, you get an increase in libido.
1:23:40 But some steroids, for example, decaduorabolin in some people,
1:23:44 it’s a type of steroid, radically escalates your libido.
1:23:45 You turn it just as hungry.
1:23:49 And at the same time gives you, in many cases,
1:23:54 dependable inability to sustain an erection.
1:23:56 So erectile dysfunction risk goes up a lot.
1:23:58 That’s a real big problem because you want it,
1:24:01 but it’s not around for the picking there.
1:24:04 So there’s all that kind of stuff that plays a huge role.
1:24:08 And a lot of the other side effects are increases in anxiety,
1:24:13 increases in aggression, increases in disagreeableness
1:24:14 and probability of confrontation.
1:24:17 Stereotes have been shown decently,
1:24:18 well, this isn’t super confirmed,
1:24:21 to at least approximately why you’re taking them,
1:24:23 substantially reduce your fluid intelligence.
1:24:28 And they may in the long term reduce your overall intelligence,
1:24:29 but it seems that if you stop taking them,
1:24:33 you get most, if not all of that back, but maybe not all of them.
1:24:37 So they do make you dumber as a general heuristic.
1:24:38 That’s probably true.
1:24:42 Of those psychological implications,
1:24:44 which ones have you suffered with the most?
1:24:47 Decrease in fluid intelligence, for sure.
1:24:50 Radical increases in anxiety.
1:24:52 Radical increases in aggression.
1:24:56 I pride myself on never losing my cool.
1:24:59 I’ve never screamed at anyone.
1:25:00 I’ve never gotten physical with anyone.
1:25:03 But the ideas in my head that tell me to do things,
1:25:05 tell me to do unspeakable things.
1:25:06 Like what?
1:25:07 They’re unspeakable.
1:25:10 I’d have to speak them.
1:25:12 You really want to know?
1:25:18 I’m also fucking weird, so just remember that.
1:25:19 No, we rolled a bit weird.
1:25:22 Most people probably don’t have this severity, but…
1:25:28 I’ll read a comment on social media, directed at me,
1:25:29 I guess, about me.
1:25:33 And it’s from a nameless, faceless profile.
1:25:38 And I begin to fantasize about what it would be like
1:25:43 and how much sublime pleasure I would receive
1:25:51 in hurting that person at a deep physical and emotional level.
1:25:55 Badly, hurting them in such a way that
1:25:56 they’re never going to walk right again
1:25:58 and they’re always going to remember me
1:26:01 and how they dared to cross me.
1:26:03 Do you know what honor culture is?
1:26:04 No.
1:26:07 Like the idea that like in the hood, you step on someone’s
1:26:09 like a gang member’s Nikes and he just blasts you away
1:26:11 and goes to jail for 20 years.
1:26:11 Over what?
1:26:16 Steroids, the honor culture comes from maleness.
1:26:18 It comes from testosterone and other brain structures,
1:26:21 of course, but the more testosterone and steroids
1:26:23 are all testosterone-like molecules.
1:26:26 If you have 10 times the testosterone-like action
1:26:28 affecting your brain, your proclivity to falling
1:26:30 into honor culture-like behavioral patterns
1:26:33 and thought patterns increases to an enormous extent.
1:26:36 Do you tend to take things that are not meant
1:26:38 in any poor way as a front?
1:26:40 If they’re actually meant as a front,
1:26:42 you tend to catastrophize them in your head.
1:26:43 And like this is the thing.
1:26:45 Like I’ll be brushing my teeth in the morning,
1:26:49 in the shower and like thinking about people in my life
1:26:50 that have wronged me.
1:26:53 No, I’ve never been wrong in a real serious way.
1:26:55 And I’ll just be like those friends of,
1:27:00 uncontrollable fantasies of rage and aggression
1:27:02 and righteous anger and revenge.
1:27:04 I hate that.
1:27:08 Like as a philosophical-minded person,
1:27:10 I just want to hug everyone in the world.
1:27:12 Right now, I’m on not-so-high levels of steroids.
1:27:12 I’m just like that.
1:27:14 I make jokes with every all-star conversation
1:27:16 with random people in the street.
1:27:16 No problem.
1:27:19 And so when these thoughts consistently
1:27:20 enter my mind on higher doses,
1:27:23 I’m just like, “Ugh, why?”
1:27:25 And I’m never like, “I should be feeling like this.”
1:27:28 I’m like, “This is really annoying and really terrible.”
1:27:32 So if there are all of these physiological
1:27:33 and psychological implications,
1:27:36 which you said it basically increases your chances
1:27:37 with all of the major diseases,
1:27:42 from cardiovascular diseases to cancers to other diseases,
1:27:46 but then also there’s this ongoing psychological consequence
1:27:50 of taking steroids, what’s the point?
1:27:53 That’s a good question.
1:28:00 Recently, I’ve taken probably several-year backseat
1:28:01 away from competitive bodybuilding,
1:28:04 precisely because I have a lot of really good things
1:28:07 going on in my life and I’m going to need my brain
1:28:12 and my more fluid civility to deal with them best.
1:28:15 And for a couple of other reasons.
1:28:18 So right now is an interesting time to ask me why I do it
1:28:20 because I’m kind of winding that down big time.
1:28:27 But the real reason is one of the reasons
1:28:31 that I started steroids is I was drug-free for a long time
1:28:34 and I was starting to become kind of an educator in fitness
1:28:35 and a promulgator of opinion.
1:28:40 And a lot of the people who were in the industry at the time,
1:28:41 this is not as true anymore,
1:28:43 now drug-free bodybuilding and fitness is exploding,
1:28:45 which is a beautiful, wonderful thing.
1:28:47 But back when Nick and I came up,
1:28:49 to be relevant to fitness industry,
1:28:52 we sort of had to be like super, super jacked and super, super lean.
1:28:54 It’s nothing we were going to accomplish drug-free.
1:28:56 So we were like, this is where the road leads
1:29:00 to being taken seriously as a thinker in the space.
1:29:04 Let’s do it. Another thing is I really like being,
1:29:08 or at least for a long time liked being enormous and ripped.
1:29:15 It’s just like, you ever see how a four-year-old looks
1:29:17 at like a garbage truck or a tank or an airplane?
1:29:22 Just that. It’s as simple as that, biology.
1:29:25 And I’m at the extreme end of masculinity brain-wise to begin with.
1:29:29 And so you see a movie where like the Hulk rips off
1:29:30 an airplane wing and throws it.
1:29:32 Some people will be like, whoa, some people are like,
1:29:35 I hate this movie. And some people are like, oh my God,
1:29:38 I want to just be that. That whole thing.
1:29:39 Why?
1:29:41 I want that. It just feels good.
1:29:43 But do you know why? Because have you got any hypothesis
1:29:46 as to why you versus someone else?
1:29:49 Because the average person doesn’t have that feeling.
1:29:53 So have you been able to figure out in hindsight
1:29:56 why you were so taken by being big?
1:30:01 I have a few ideas. I’ll caveat this idea with the following.
1:30:04 Retrospective analysis of why you do things
1:30:07 is almost always grotesquely flawed.
1:30:09 Most of why we do things is a combination of variables
1:30:11 we don’t understand and genetics.
1:30:13 And so like the whole life story arc,
1:30:15 well, it all started on a t-shirt in the third grade,
1:30:16 like that’s bullshit.
1:30:19 That’s a backwards justification you made up.
1:30:22 So the following statements are backwards justifications
1:30:26 I’m making up as just tentative, very not sure hypotheses.
1:30:30 Here’s a fun story. This will be fun.
1:30:37 When I was a small young, my dad would wrestle with me a lot.
1:30:43 And he would always let me win in the end.
1:30:45 He’s great. He’s a great person.
1:30:49 And he would always tell me that I was strong and capable.
1:30:56 And then in like end of elementary school
1:30:58 all the way through the beginning of high school,
1:31:02 I was bullied honestly, like literally a few times.
1:31:06 I think I was just the wrong person to bully
1:31:10 because that very temporary state of disenfranchisement
1:31:16 and powerlessness, I’m never going to be bullied again
1:31:18 to put it simply.
1:31:23 I wish I was logical enough that when like if I was getting robbed
1:31:26 by someone at knife point or not even a knife point,
1:31:28 just like just a guy tried to be like,
1:31:30 Hey man, get out of my way. No.
1:31:32 I said, get out of my way.
1:31:35 I’m going to die here before I move out of your way.
1:31:36 You’re going to treat me with respect.
1:31:40 Or one of us is either going to jail or the morgue
1:31:41 or the hospital.
1:31:46 It’s a terrible thing to think it’s stupid beyond belief.
1:31:50 Just be like, sir, my apologies, please keep going.
1:31:52 But what were you bullied for?
1:32:02 Nothing. Nothing. Just kid just wanted to bully people.
1:32:06 I want to understand the content of what was going
1:32:07 through your brain at the time,
1:32:09 like what you were thinking in that moment.
1:32:11 Because I think we can all think back to well,
1:32:14 unfortunately too many people can think back to a time
1:32:15 when they were bullied in some way,
1:32:18 whether it was a day or whether it was something
1:32:19 that was a bit more prolonged.
1:32:24 They started to embody that sort of pain and shame
1:32:26 and that feeling of I’m different from these other kids.
1:32:27 Some of my best friends have talked,
1:32:30 they’ve been to therapy and their therapists have,
1:32:33 I think figured out through some of that retrospective analysis,
1:32:35 which obviously a lot of the time isn’t accurate,
1:32:37 that much of their adult behavior today,
1:32:40 correlates back to an early experience in such a way
1:32:42 where they were made to feel a certain way
1:32:45 in that social environment where we’re so sort of formative.
1:32:47 How did it make you feel?
1:32:54 I felt scared and I felt like I wasn’t brave enough
1:32:55 to stand up for myself.
1:32:58 Later I began standing up for myself and I felt very nice.
1:33:02 But it felt like I was out of control
1:33:05 and a part of my brain that I didn’t consent to
1:33:10 made me frown and dipped my head down for me.
1:33:13 It was almost like musculature in my neck just deactivated.
1:33:18 It’s an ancestral mechanism that everyone has.
1:33:21 Kids, all the way up through teenage and adulthood,
1:33:24 sort themselves, male children into dominance hierarchies.
1:33:26 It’s just the dominance hierarchy sorting itself.
1:33:28 And someone confronted me
1:33:32 and I automatically sorted myself beneath them.
1:33:36 I felt beneath someone, I felt weaker, more inferior,
1:33:39 less apt, less capable, less confident, less strong.
1:33:40 And I didn’t even have consent to it.
1:33:41 It’s not something I chose.
1:33:44 I was like, “This kid will beat me up. I better not.”
1:33:47 It was totally a subconscious behavior.
1:33:51 And looking back on it, I did not enjoy how that made me feel.
1:33:55 Do you remember a specific day or a specific thing happen?
1:33:57 Because I can think back to a couple of specific days
1:34:00 when I was younger that I think shaped me in that regard
1:34:03 where I was pretty much the only black person in the school.
1:34:08 I remember an evening where this particular kid called Sam
1:34:12 had cornered me and called me the n-word and everyone was there.
1:34:14 And I’ll never forget those days.
1:34:20 They’re etched into your mind as unforgettable memories
1:34:22 of pain, of shame, of that feeling.
1:34:25 Do you have those a particular day?
1:34:26 Yeah, sure.
1:34:27 Could you share that with me?
1:34:30 This is getting deep, huh?
1:34:35 I have a few incidents.
1:34:37 One probably stands out the most.
1:34:41 So there was a kid named Darren, and he was black,
1:34:46 almost certainly fatherless.
1:34:52 Peter naturally, physically developed for his age.
1:34:53 He was 10, so was I.
1:34:56 We were just wrestling.
1:34:57 I wrestled with everyone.
1:35:01 He beat me in wrestling.
1:35:02 He was the only person, I believe,
1:35:04 to beat me in wrestling my whole childhood.
1:35:08 Because he was like a 14-year-old kid in great shape,
1:35:10 and I was a 10-year-old kid.
1:35:15 And he beat me in wrestling, and that was cordial,
1:35:16 because I get this in wrestling.
1:35:21 But he had braces, I think, and he cut himself while wrestling
1:35:23 with me, and he was bleeding out of his mouth.
1:35:27 And then he got really upset about that.
1:35:29 And he kind of stood over me.
1:35:32 And he was like, you know, little this and that.
1:35:33 Like, you did this to me.
1:35:36 Like, I’m going to eff you up and all this other stuff.
1:35:38 And that’s when that mechanism switched.
1:35:41 When he did that to me, my whole perspective
1:35:43 on the world changed for years.
1:35:46 I was like a confident, happy kid.
1:35:50 And then after that, for four or five years, maybe longer,
1:35:52 all of my confidence drained out.
1:35:53 I became introverted.
1:35:55 I am not naturally introverted.
1:36:04 And his presence alone reminded me that I need
1:36:07 to keep my head down, and otherwise I get real scared.
1:36:09 And I didn’t want to be scared.
1:36:12 And so that’s how that worked.
1:36:16 And it wasn’t like he got something like, your shit is racial.
1:36:17 That’s deep, bro.
1:36:19 My shit’s not deep at all.
1:36:19 It’s just two kids.
1:36:21 And one of them punked it out.
1:36:24 I was just the wrong person for that to happen to.
1:36:27 And I remember fantasizing when I was in like sixth grade,
1:36:29 I think, like a year later.
1:36:34 Like, wouldn’t it be great if I brought a baseball bat to school
1:36:37 and just broke his legs and just kept hitting his legs
1:36:40 to where he’d never walk right ever again?
1:36:41 Because he wronged me that bad.
1:36:44 I felt that deep and true.
1:36:47 I’m going to keep the statement as contextual as I can
1:36:49 with full understanding of respect
1:36:50 for the gravity of what I’m saying.
1:36:53 When the Columbine people did what they did,
1:36:56 I thought it was egregious and terrible.
1:36:58 I also understood how you could be pushed to do that.
1:36:59 Now, in their particular case,
1:37:01 I don’t even know how they were pushed or whatever,
1:37:06 but enough bullying will make you consider doing terrible things
1:37:07 to regain your honor.
1:37:12 And so that was probably like the most premium.
1:37:14 I was bullied in other situations.
1:37:16 Again, like I might have been bullied three or four times
1:37:21 my whole life, but it just it just did not sit well with me at all.
1:37:25 For a long time, it changed how I express myself to the world.
1:37:27 And even right now, as I talk to you,
1:37:28 I’m getting pretty emotional.
1:37:31 I’ll say that if I see that guy again in real life,
1:37:35 if he’s even around, I have a brown belt in Jiu Jitsu now.
1:37:36 I’m almost certainly bigger and stronger than him.
1:37:39 Is he safe around me?
1:37:42 Probably.
1:37:45 Can I guarantee his safety if he brings it up?
1:37:46 No.
1:37:50 If he watches this and hits me up and goes,
1:37:51 “Hi, got you, little bitch.”
1:37:56 If I see him in real life, I might take something from him.
1:38:00 Medical science can’t give him back within the next five or 10 years.
1:38:02 What a terrible idea.
1:38:03 I’d go to jail.
1:38:05 I have a lot of really good things going for me.
1:38:07 It would be wrong in every single way.
1:38:09 It wouldn’t even be ethical,
1:38:11 because he never like beat the crap out of me or anything like that.
1:38:13 It was not like he brutalized me.
1:38:14 Oh my God, like I’m going to cripple someone
1:38:15 over some bullshit childhood.
1:38:18 People say, “Also, Steven, it was 10.
1:38:22 The gravity of how deeply it feels to me even right now at age 40.”
1:38:24 He’s like, “Man, yeah, that shit definitely meant something.”
1:38:29 It’s interesting because I think for the first, I’m 31 now,
1:38:32 so I think for the first 27 years of my life,
1:38:35 if you’d asked me why I do what I do,
1:38:37 I would have in hindsight probably told you a story
1:38:38 that sounds a little bit heroic.
1:38:41 I have this drive and I have this motivation
1:38:42 and I had this goal and I went after it
1:38:44 and it was all like self-agency and all that stuff.
1:38:47 But the more and more I’ve learned about,
1:38:50 I think psychology generally and how humans, as I often say,
1:38:51 are sometimes driven and they’re dragged
1:38:53 and it’s hard to tell the difference.
1:38:55 Like whether something is drive
1:38:56 or whether it’s like you’re being dragged.
1:38:58 Compulsion.
1:39:00 Like compulsion that you just can’t explain
1:39:04 because of maybe a trauma or an experience you went through
1:39:07 or maybe the household you grew up in.
1:39:12 I think I’m leaning more now towards the dragged side of things
1:39:13 in most areas of my life,
1:39:16 especially where I exhibit atypical behavior.
1:39:17 Like what?
1:39:20 Like the fact that I work like seven days a week
1:39:23 and I can just and I’ve always been absolutely obsessed
1:39:26 with like achievement and success.
1:39:27 So why do you think that is?
1:39:29 Because I think I grew up in a context
1:39:31 where the thing that invalidated me was that,
1:39:36 like we were the poor family that didn’t have things
1:39:38 and I was black in an all-white area
1:39:41 and I was just full of shame growing up
1:39:44 and I think I saw that medicine to the shame
1:39:46 as being material success.
1:39:47 It was the thing that I lied,
1:39:49 cheated, and stole to try and achieve.
1:39:52 And you know, it’s been my orientation for my whole life.
1:39:56 I think deep within me is this story that success
1:39:58 and material success and all those things make me enough.
1:40:01 And I didn’t feel like inside.
1:40:02 Inside, yeah.
1:40:03 And I didn’t feel like I was enough.
1:40:04 And as much as I’m aware of that now,
1:40:05 it doesn’t mean that it’s going to stop.
1:40:07 Did it?
1:40:08 So it didn’t?
1:40:10 Do you feel like you’re enough?
1:40:13 Well, it’s interesting because if you ask me,
1:40:14 do I feel like I’m enough?
1:40:14 I’d say yes.
1:40:17 I’m very comfortable with who I am.
1:40:19 Like, I think I have somewhat of an accurate reflection
1:40:22 of who I am to some degree.
1:40:25 But then I also, I contrast that with the fact that
1:40:28 why am I still just like obsessively driving
1:40:30 towards these ever bigger goals
1:40:32 in a way that’s really, really atypical?
1:40:35 Like not the average person, you know?
1:40:37 And why does it matter so much to me?
1:40:40 You know, that’s why I go,
1:40:41 “Okay, there’s something different in my wiring.”
1:40:42 It’s still at an element,
1:40:45 this sort of proving my worth to myself
1:40:47 or proving to the kids back on the playground
1:40:50 that they should respect me in some way or whatever.
1:40:51 Yeah.
1:40:52 And it’s complicated.
1:40:54 And I say this not because it makes me sound great
1:40:55 because it certainly doesn’t.
1:40:57 I just said because I really believe
1:40:59 that the more honest I can be with myself,
1:41:01 the closer I can get to everything that I want.
1:41:02 Oh, sure.
1:41:04 You know, like the closer I can get to holding the steering wheel,
1:41:07 not being dragged with a rope at the back of the car.
1:41:09 I’m trying to hold the steering wheel in my life
1:41:12 and that starts with like an honest self-awareness
1:41:13 and one that honestly has only come from
1:41:18 being more and more confident
1:41:19 and caring less about what people think.
1:41:21 Like I wouldn’t have said this on camera.
1:41:23 There’s like millions of people probably listening right now.
1:41:24 I wouldn’t have said these things about myself.
1:41:25 It sounds icky.
1:41:27 Oh, I’ve never told this bullying story to anyone
1:41:28 but a few people.
1:41:29 Yeah.
1:41:30 I was like, “When you brought it up,
1:41:32 like tell me about when you were bullied.”
1:41:34 In my head, I was like, “Holy shit, all right.
1:41:35 This is where this goes.”
1:41:37 Well, I just think it’s everyone I’ve met.
1:41:39 It’s not, you’re not, you’re the same as everyone
1:41:39 I’ve met in that regard.
1:41:43 Probably if I had to write that fake back story arc
1:41:44 explaining my life,
1:41:46 the bullying thing is like kind of a little bit minor.
1:41:49 I have a really gnarly story
1:41:52 about having really severe attention deficit disorder
1:41:53 when I was younger.
1:41:56 Well, at the same time growing up in an Ashkenazi Jewish family,
1:42:00 for Ashkenazi Jewish Russian immigrants to the U.S.,
1:42:02 you were either good at school or you were worthless.
1:42:04 And it’s not just that my parents thought that.
1:42:05 I didn’t really think that at a deep level.
1:42:07 They didn’t believe it at a surface level.
1:42:08 I thought that.
1:42:11 You can’t make fun of someone for being fat
1:42:12 if they’re cool with being fat.
1:42:13 They’re like, “Yeah, I’m fucking big.
1:42:13 Hell yeah.”
1:42:14 And you’re like, “Oh, it didn’t work.”
1:42:16 But if they believe that being fat is terrible,
1:42:18 you can be like, “Hey, how much do you weigh?”
1:42:19 And that’s it.
1:42:20 Everything changes.
1:42:24 So for me, I believed I had a destiny
1:42:27 to be at least competent at school.
1:42:29 And up until I was 14,
1:42:32 I was like in contention for being the worst student
1:42:35 at any single school I attended at any single time.
1:42:38 And the bittersweet element was my dad
1:42:40 is a PhD in mathematical modeling
1:42:42 of atmospheric physical phenomena.
1:42:45 And my mom was a translator of the Russian language,
1:42:47 a translator of English to Russian
1:42:49 and got a master’s degree in social work
1:42:50 in her second language in America
1:42:52 a few years after we got in.
1:42:53 That’s the legacy I’m dealing with.
1:42:58 And I can’t do math problems three grades younger
1:42:59 than the kids.
1:43:01 I got held back in school a grade.
1:43:04 And so I took that not so well.
1:43:07 And so later, because I was medicated
1:43:08 for attention deficit,
1:43:10 it was a revelatory experience.
1:43:14 As I came up and sort of grew into the idea
1:43:15 that I was actually fairly intelligent,
1:43:18 I had something to prove.
1:43:21 And it’s getting better now
1:43:23 because I’ve taken enough IQ tests
1:43:24 and you can only write so many books
1:43:25 and be on so many podcasts
1:43:27 until people are like, “You’re pretty smart.”
1:43:29 And you got to start believing it
1:43:30 unless you’re totally irrational.
1:43:32 At some point that sinks in.
1:43:33 So one thing I will say is
1:43:37 there are ways of dealing with demons
1:43:38 and insufficiencies
1:43:40 that you’ve developed through your childhood.
1:43:42 Some of them are just having
1:43:43 a real deep personal journey
1:43:45 in your own head consistently,
1:43:47 reinforcing good attitudes,
1:43:48 not reinforcing the bad ones.
1:43:50 Other ones are talking to friends, family.
1:43:51 Other ones are therapy,
1:43:53 which is excellent for this.
1:43:54 But I got to tell you, Stephen,
1:43:56 I’m not sure if this is true,
1:43:58 but there’s got to be something
1:44:03 to proving the opposite is true.
1:44:06 To doing it all, to getting,
1:44:08 I don’t know if the top or whatever,
1:44:10 but to like no one in the right mind
1:44:11 would at this point be like,
1:44:13 “This guy is below average intelligence.”
1:44:14 That would be preposterous to say,
1:44:17 “I’ve taken the Ravens Advanced
1:44:19 Progressive Matrices test
1:44:21 and I pegged at scale high.”
1:44:22 So you get every single question right.
1:44:24 And so my IQ is above 160.
1:44:24 We don’t know how high
1:44:26 because they don’t do standardized IQ tests above that.
1:44:29 You do that enough times.
1:44:30 You, enough PhD program,
1:44:31 enough book enough,
1:44:32 teaching awards enough,
1:44:33 authorship’s enough,
1:44:34 all the stuff,
1:44:35 enough millions and app designs
1:44:36 and all the stuff.
1:44:38 And dealing with otherwise really smart people
1:44:39 and they walk away being like,
1:44:41 “Fuck, that guy’s real smart.”
1:44:42 Enough of that
1:44:46 makes you swim in a warm,
1:44:49 comfortable sea that heals you in a way
1:44:51 maybe therapy can.
1:44:53 But goddamn,
1:44:54 there’s something to just do
1:44:55 when the fucking thing.
1:44:57 You take a skinny little kid who’s bullied,
1:45:00 you make a Muhammad Ali champion of the world,
1:45:01 enough title fights later,
1:45:02 you’re like, “Hey, Muhammad Ali,
1:45:03 what you gonna do about this?”
1:45:04 He didn’t even flinch.
1:45:08 So yeah, it’s nice to say
1:45:10 and I think it’s true that therapy
1:45:11 and self-care and all these things
1:45:12 can heal the soul.
1:45:16 There’s something about overcoming
1:45:17 and becoming superlative
1:45:18 to that thing you used to fear
1:45:22 that might heal your soul to a huge extent.
1:45:25 I think maybe I’ve witnessed that.
1:45:26 Again, maybe this is all just make-believe.
1:45:27 It sounds real nice.
1:45:29 No, I completely agree.
1:45:31 And it’s perfectly what I’ve experienced
1:45:31 in my own life.
1:45:32 And as you were speaking,
1:45:34 I was thinking it’s just so clear to me that
1:45:37 when you’re young, you get evidence.
1:45:40 You get like a stack of evidence
1:45:42 about who you are and what the world is.
1:45:43 And what you then have done
1:45:45 for the next 10, 20, 30 years
1:45:48 is to counteract that evidence with new evidence.
1:45:50 I think about it like a library.
1:45:51 I think everything that I went through
1:45:53 and you went through when you were younger
1:45:55 just added like one book to this shelf.
1:45:57 And the interesting context of the library
1:45:59 is those books are both informative.
1:46:02 They’re both non-fiction books,
1:46:03 but they’re also fiction books
1:46:04 and they’re also instruction manuals
1:46:05 for what you’ll do in the future.
1:46:07 If you think about those first 18 years of your life,
1:46:09 what you did is you filled this library
1:46:12 full of in books, stories, self-stories.
1:46:14 And this library that you’ve collected
1:46:16 is just a bunch of stories
1:46:17 that you believe about yourself.
1:46:18 Now, if you want to change some of these stories,
1:46:20 unfortunately, you have to get new books.
1:46:20 Yes.
1:46:22 So what you did in your life
1:46:24 is you pursued hard things
1:46:26 that would put new books on the shelf.
1:46:27 And when a new book comes on the shelf,
1:46:28 that counteracts another one.
1:46:30 You have to take the old one off.
1:46:31 But you can’t just sit around willing.
1:46:35 It’s, as you say, as an eye of experience in my life,
1:46:37 the only way I can put books up there
1:46:39 is to go and get first-party evidence
1:46:41 with my own eyes that something else is true.
1:46:43 And not just ones.
1:46:44 Over and over and over.
1:46:46 Depending on how stubborn the existing books are.
1:46:46 For sure.
1:46:49 And if they’re real stubborn, here’s my question to you.
1:46:52 Do you think that childhood experiences
1:46:56 build the kind of books that are hard back,
1:46:58 Lord of the Rings type of shits,
1:47:00 whereas adult experiences that completely
1:47:02 countervail childhood experiences
1:47:04 are like a little magazine you’d read on a plane?
1:47:07 I got– so in the analogy, when you’re a child,
1:47:10 you put books on the shelf very quickly.
1:47:12 They’re all very cheap books
1:47:14 because there’s nothing on the shelf.
1:47:15 So you’re just grabbing–
1:47:17 your mom says pigs can fly on the shelf.
1:47:19 As you get older, actually,
1:47:21 because there’s so many books on the shelf already,
1:47:24 and let’s see if I just focus on this analogy of pigs flying,
1:47:26 there’s already a book about aviation on the shelf,
1:47:28 which means it’s harder to believe that pigs can fly.
1:47:31 There’s a book already about animals in their anatomy.
1:47:32 So you can’t add a new one
1:47:34 because there’s so many counteracting ones already.
1:47:37 So this is why they often say that young kids adopt–
1:47:39 you can’t teach an old dog new tricks
1:47:41 because there’s so much existing evidence there
1:47:42 of something else being true.
1:47:45 So kids throw them on the shelf without much interrogation
1:47:47 because there’s less counteracting books there already.
1:47:49 Whereas adults, they take a little bit more time
1:47:51 to add a new one because they’ve got six other books,
1:47:53 which might tell a different story.
1:47:57 And so if we think about neuroscience and neuroplasticity,
1:47:59 it becomes a little bit harder sometimes for adults to–
1:48:01 I mean, I had a neuroscientist yesterday saying this to me,
1:48:04 that after you get to possibly 25 years old,
1:48:06 neuroplasticity becomes a little bit more stubborn.
1:48:08 It’s still possible up until you die,
1:48:09 but it’s a little bit more stubborn.
1:48:12 So you just need more reinforcement.
1:48:13 You need more reinforcement, more evidence,
1:48:16 more repetitions, and he described it as more focus.
1:48:18 More focus on the thing.
1:48:21 One thing that I found maybe is helpful
1:48:24 is my wife is similar to me.
1:48:27 She’s like an insane, super goal-driven, psychotic person.
1:48:32 And we have real trouble taking a step back
1:48:36 and telling ourselves, like, man, we’re doing pretty well.
1:48:38 So every now and again, like evenings and weekends,
1:48:41 especially weekends, we’ll do some like–
1:48:44 sounds super lame, but gratefulness discussion.
1:48:45 It doesn’t sound lame at all.
1:48:48 Depending on how you talk to, I guess,
1:48:50 to my old childhood bullies, that’s lame.
1:48:53 But it’s really weird to say
1:48:55 some of these things out loud to yourself.
1:48:59 And there’s some resistance, especially early,
1:49:03 admitting to yourself, like, I won.
1:49:05 I won.
1:49:06 I won.
1:49:06 I won.
1:49:07 I did the thing.
1:49:09 Maybe it doesn’t work quite that simply,
1:49:11 but I think it’s good to try,
1:49:13 because it’s a really weird thing
1:49:17 to go and be 60 years old and look back on your life.
1:49:18 And someone’s like, so what have you accomplished?
1:49:19 Like, not much.
1:49:19 I kind of eat shit.
1:49:22 I’m like, I’ve seen you on book covers.
1:49:23 You’re like, right.
1:49:24 Oh, that’s right.
1:49:26 OK, so I accomplished a lot,
1:49:28 but I don’t feel like I have.
1:49:32 How dare you rob yourself of being able to swim
1:49:37 in that beautiful, warm sea of self-actualization?
1:49:39 I think it’s worth it for people to focus.
1:49:43 When you do good, let yourself bask in that glow.
1:49:44 Get your time under the sun.
1:49:46 Amen.
1:49:49 And it’s all about subjective progress.
1:49:52 It’s all about, like, I was going to do a post last night.
1:49:54 I was thinking, like, so many people spend their lives.
1:49:56 I was just scrolling through Instagram.
1:49:59 And I wrote the post, and I just didn’t post it.
1:50:01 But I noticed that so many people go through their lives,
1:50:03 like, looking for an enemy.
1:50:05 Like, looking for the person or the system
1:50:07 or the government or the political party
1:50:08 that’s currently wronging them.
1:50:09 And they commit their whole life
1:50:11 to just this focus of who’s wronging me.
1:50:12 And I need to point them out
1:50:14 and call them out and scream at them.
1:50:16 And I’ve never fallen into that trap.
1:50:19 But I do have a competition with myself.
1:50:21 And I feel like that’s very healthy,
1:50:23 because what I’m actually looking for in myself
1:50:24 is some form of progress.
1:50:26 Whether it’s how I show up or with my fitness
1:50:28 or with my muscles or whatever,
1:50:31 this constant search for progress in myself.
1:50:34 And there, when I do discover progress, I can celebrate it.
1:50:36 And I can have that gratitude we talked about.
1:50:37 And so anyone’s progress,
1:50:40 whether it’s when I went from being a university dropout
1:50:42 to getting my first investor,
1:50:44 that is like, oh my God.
1:50:47 And it’s only in hindsight and with some aging wisdom
1:50:49 that I start to realize that those moments
1:50:50 were so unbelievably important.
1:50:53 They’re so motivational, identifying your progress.
1:50:55 And I’ve done, there’s two kind of data points
1:50:58 that have really shone a light on this for me
1:50:59 is one of them was Sir David Brailsford,
1:51:01 who took the British cycling team
1:51:02 from being down and out and depressed
1:51:04 to the greatest team of all time winning all the gold medals.
1:51:06 And he said, yes, the marginal gains thing
1:51:07 that he’s known for,
1:51:10 that’s in the front chapter of atomic habits was key.
1:51:12 But actually, he said to me,
1:51:14 he went, when you can get a group of people or a person
1:51:16 to feel like they’re going somewhere
1:51:18 because they have a sense of progress,
1:51:23 he goes, that’s what made us stay in the bike shop
1:51:24 till 2am in the morning.
1:51:26 And I read another study from Harvard Business Review
1:51:29 where they asked people now to keep work diaries.
1:51:30 And then at the end of the study, they said,
1:51:33 point to the day where you had your best day in work.
1:51:35 And people always pointed in their work diaries to a day
1:51:38 where there was a feeling of subjective progress, even small.
1:51:38 Yes.
1:51:40 And that makes you motivated.
1:51:42 You feel like you are going somewhere,
1:51:43 which means you’re more likely to do it.
1:51:46 So gratitude serves a happiness role,
1:51:48 but also just a motivational one.
1:51:50 We have a closing tradition on this podcast
1:51:52 where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest,
1:51:53 not knowing who they’re going to leave it for.
1:51:56 And the question that has been left for you is,
1:51:58 Oh, crap.
1:52:04 What is the most meaningful dream, brackets, nightmare,
1:52:07 you’ve ever had and why?
1:52:14 I don’t know if this is the most meaningful dream,
1:52:23 but Jesus Christ, I’m really going to say this, fine.
1:52:29 As I was, when I was a young adult,
1:52:33 I was starting to experience success with the opposite sex.
1:52:37 And I just did not ever experience that when I was younger,
1:52:39 or already of age, but younger.
1:52:41 It’s just probably like a bit of a hang up.
1:52:42 You know, for most people, it’s kind of like
1:52:44 when you’re not getting in, you feel kind of out of it.
1:52:50 And when I started experiencing success with women,
1:52:52 my dreams at night changed.
1:52:58 And one of them was the following dream has nothing to do
1:53:02 with females and sex, but it had to do with power.
1:53:05 And it had to do with an ability that you can.
1:53:08 I ran out of my childhood home into the street
1:53:13 and it wasn’t the street anymore.
1:53:15 It was just a black empty void.
1:53:17 And it became a lucid dream.
1:53:20 So I kind of knew a little bit that it was a dream.
1:53:22 It was like, oh, I’m going to do cool Dragon Ball Z stuff.
1:53:24 Do you know what Dragon Ball Z is, the anime show?
1:53:29 And I opened up my hand and I wanted to make a fireball.
1:53:33 And I made an energy ball that was like a singularity size,
1:53:35 but it was made of people’s screams.
1:53:44 And then I woke up and I was like, that was so cool.
1:53:47 Not victim screams, just Viking screams.
1:53:49 And I was like, that is the coolest shit.
1:53:52 And I had multiple other dreams in my young adult life
1:53:55 after successes with women, which were dreams of power.
1:53:58 And I was like, goddamn, if I can have those dreams every night,
1:54:00 it’ll be super happy.
1:54:04 That’s the most interesting dream I’ve ever had
1:54:06 about following someone losing their virginity.
1:54:08 I didn’t say I lost my, get out of here.
1:54:09 I still haven’t lost my virginity.
1:54:10 I’ve been a good person.
1:54:16 Dr. Mike, thank you so much for your wisdom and your information
1:54:17 and all the work that you’ve done in your life
1:54:20 because it’s formed a wonderfully important perspective
1:54:23 on a subject that so many people struggle with.
1:54:24 I’m going to ask you, I’m going to leave you
1:54:26 with my last question, which is,
1:54:30 what is the most important thing that we didn’t talk about today
1:54:32 as it relates to the subject matter of getting in shape,
1:54:35 building muscle that we should have talked about?
1:54:37 Is there anything we left off the table?
1:54:42 There’s a lot to this, so we left a lot out.
1:54:48 I have a lot more to say about body dysmorphia
1:54:51 and how people do relate to their bodies
1:54:54 and how they maybe shouldn’t
1:54:57 or try to weave their thoughts away from various ideas
1:55:00 and how maybe they should try to relate to their bodies better.
1:55:03 And it’s a conversation I love to have.
1:55:06 I just don’t ever get asked about it super often.
1:55:10 So I think that in body dysmorphia in general,
1:55:13 in self-esteem as it relates to bodies
1:55:15 of guys that grew up too skinny,
1:55:17 of girls that grew up too fat,
1:55:22 I think a combination of getting the body that you want,
1:55:25 soaking in the sun and really being like,
1:55:28 “I’m the hot girl now. This is really happening.”
1:55:30 And how to relate to your body.
1:55:33 There’s a plethora of wonderful conversation around that
1:55:36 that I had a time machine and go back and interrupt you
1:55:38 and just be like, “Let’s talk about that instead.”
1:55:40 Maybe we can save that for another time.
1:55:41 Sure.
1:55:42 Dr. Mike, thank you so much.
1:55:43 Where do people find you?
1:55:45 Your YouTube channel is incredible, so I’ll link that below.
1:55:46 Just YouTube.
1:55:47 Every now and then links off of YouTube.
1:55:48 And you’ve got your app as well,
1:55:49 which people can go and check out.
1:55:50 Links off of YouTube as well.
1:55:51 Links off of YouTube.
1:55:52 Two apps.
1:55:53 Okay, so if I go to your YouTube channel,
1:55:54 I can find everything.
1:55:55 Boom.
1:55:57 Great. Dr. Mike, thank you so much.
1:55:58 Hugh, John, I’m a pleasure. Thank you so much.
1:56:02 Isn’t this cool?
1:56:05 Every single conversation I have here on The Diary of a CEO,
1:56:07 at the very end of it, you’ll know,
1:56:12 I asked the guest to leave a question in The Diary of a CEO.
1:56:15 And what we’ve done is we’ve turned every single question
1:56:19 written in The Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards
1:56:21 that you can play at home.
1:56:24 So you’ve got every guest we’ve ever had, their question,
1:56:28 and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code,
1:56:32 you get to watch the person who answered that question.
1:56:35 We’re finally revealing all of the questions
1:56:38 and the people that answered the question.
1:56:42 The brand new version two updated conversation cards
1:56:46 are out right now at theconversationcards.com.
1:56:48 They’ve sold out twice instantaneously.
1:56:49 So if you are interested in getting hold
1:56:52 of some limited edition conversation cards,
1:56:54 I really, really recommend acting quickly.
1:56:57 (upbeat music)
1:56:59 (upbeat music)
1:57:02 (upbeat music)
1:57:05 (upbeat music)
1:57:07 (upbeat music)
1:57:10 (upbeat music)
1:57:12 (upbeat music)
1:57:15 (upbeat music)
1:57:17 (funky music)
1:57:20 (upbeat music)