EXPERTS ON EXPERT: John Gottman

Hello, welcome to experts on expert. My name is dr. Dak Shepherd. I'm joined by dr.

Padman dr. Monica Padman I wouldn't call us doctors. Well, why not because I'm truthful. Well, you've played people in film and television Did it didn't have your real name, right?

What are you saying? I don't know but I am here to tell you that's more than any other person I believe I referenced the gentleman that's on our podcast today Yeah, I discovered him in Malcolm Gladwell's book blank and this is a man who's dedicated with his wife Julie to to studying marriage and what makes it end he can predict at a very scary high percentage rate who will get divorced after watching them talk for one hour. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I find that information very helpful because look he's pretty much listed the things you should avoid.

His name is Dr. John Gottman and he and his wife Julie Gottman. They are the I don't know I'll just say directors I that's not the right word but of the founder founders of the Gottman Institute. They do a lot of work on relationships both marital and familial child parent parent child.

Yeah, they have a new book called eight dates that we will talk about but if you are in a relationship think you may ever find yourself in a relationship and this is incredibly helpful data to have. My voice went on data to have so did you even hear what I said I said data to have I think it was clear data we have your data data data isn't data weird in that when it's plural it's still data sure I like words like that you do right can you think of any others no okay uh um oxen that's an en no um data that's one oh that's a good one oh good we thought of another one oh good we have to well without any further ado please enjoy dr. John Gottman data this podcast is brought to you by Squarespace the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace gives you everything you need to build and grow your presence in one place when we first got the armchair expert website up and running while we wobb used Squarespace and honestly it made sense right away they look polished it was easy to navigate and it didn't feel like we had to become web designers just to make something good what I like about Squarespace is that it gives you a lot of flexibility without making things complicated you can start with one of their beautiful templates and customize it so it actually feels like you whether you're building a portfolio of business or just finally making the thing you've been meaning to make and once it's live Squarespace also has built-in analytics which is great because you can actually see what people are engaging with instead of just guessing so head to squarespace.com slash DAX for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use go DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain you're supported by Airbnb so we've all done the hotel thing with friends right everyone's in separate rooms sometimes on different floors in your coordinating plans over text it can feel a little more complicated than it needs to be that's why some trips are just better when you're booking to stay on Airbnb having a shared space a kitchen a living room somewhere to actually hang out makes the trip feel more connected we were just talking about this the other day one of our past pod trips that was just so fun because there was a pool in the middle but then we all had rooms surrounding it and so communal perfect amount of privacy and communal space it was incredible and if you're not sure where to start look for guests favorites the most loved homes on Airbnb consistently highly rated by guests that's a great way to find a place that fits the kind of trip you're taking it's a great pleasure to have you here because I've been quoting you for a very long time and misquoting you saying you worked at a different university altogether I've gotten virtually all of it wrong but what I think is the important thing and I became aware of you through blink all right right Malcolm Gladwell book and it just so happened that I started reading that book Chris and I read it together my wife and we read it pretty soon into being a couple and I found it to be such a revolutionary idea that you've targeted what destroys a marriage through lots of research longevity research and I said oh my god this gentleman has found out the things we need to avoid now I've forgotten the other three but the one we live by is is no contempt yeah that's a big one people on here have heard me talk about you again with the wrong details but in fact you work at University of Washington or you at least did yeah I did and is that where all the studies took place at the University of Washington and University of Illinois and at Berkeley okay so Bob Levinson and I have been collaborating for 45 years and you are you were born in the Dominican Republic well in World War II Roosevelt convened 38 countries and asked him to take Jewish refugees to Rio was the only one who said he would oh really yeah and he did that because he had massacred a bunch of Haitians and he was out of favor with Franklin and so he wanted to get in his good graces so he said he would take a hundred thousand Jews and only 750 made it and you guys were Orthodox yeah my father was Orthodox yeah so was it was it challenging to maintain being kosher on that island that probably didn't have a lot no my father was a kosher butcher he was the kosher butcher the rabbi he ran the newspaper and he ran the theater no kidding theater so in industrious and raised chickens oh wow and how old were you when you left there three and a half okay and you moved to Brooklyn or New York right what brought you guys there well he started off wanting to be in Miami and he got on a bus he didn't know about you know the you know all the laws that segregation laws and he got and got on the bus and sat in the back with the black people and caused you know major disturbance and couldn't understand you know what the problem was yeah when he found out that you know black people had sit in the back and white people in the front he said he couldn't live there so under the Jim Crow laws that's right so he had a cousin in Brooklyn so that's what we went so that's what you are you're a New Yorker yeah would you consider yourself that yeah pretty close yeah yeah and where did you go to school to college I went to fairly Dickinson University in New Jersey okay and did you go right into psychology no I was in math but you were yeah I was a math and physics major and then I went to MIT on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to get a PhD in math and and my roommate you get assigned to roommate randomly was studying psychology and I found his books a lot more interesting in my books yeah so I switched fields at that point I applaud anyone who can study math at MIT for four years or six or eight years I was good at math and I was doing you know there was a point in high school where you had to double up if you wanted to end up in yeah do trig and pre-calc and then calc if you wanted to take two at once and I just had this moment of clairvoyancy where I was like what am I think I'm gonna do work for NASA what is the end goal of all this math right and buddy I pulled the parachute and I never look back yeah yeah my only math now is deducting like what year it is from the year you're born we love doing math on here yes addition is attraction so you did you change then your major wallet MIT yeah I did I did a master's thesis and modeling learning to learn you know which Harry Harlow had found that if you teach monkeys a two-choice discrimination you know they have to be able to tell one thing from another they learned it is a nice learning curve then if they go to three choice discrimination there's another learning curve but the time you do four they just get it right away really so they've learned how to solve that kind of problem and so I created a mathematical model for that kind of discontinuity where at a certain point everything flips and it's kind of like the knock on gladwell is tipping point idea right like you hit critical mouse right exactly yeah and um did you find that your background in mathematics gave you a kind of unique perspective on psychology yeah it really did you know it took a long time to develop but you know when Bob Levinson and I found that we could predict the future of a relationship so accurately you know we started off with just no hypotheses Bob and I our relationships with women were you know terrible we went from one disaster to another so we were two clueless guys uh-huh thought let's study relationships and at that point psychology was at a critical point because the guy named Walter Michelle read in the book saying it's not a science if you can only account for nine percent of human variation ninety one percent is error you know that's not very you know it's over lap with that that kind of hoax that was perpetuated on psychology where the guy from England he sent like nine different students to nine different uh psychiatric wards and then they were admitted and all they could say was I hear the word thought in my head and then after that they had to tell the truth are you aware of this whole thing no no I don't know that study oh it's great these people who just simply said I'm hearing the sound the word thought in my head and then they told the truth well of the nine of them eight of them got pretty significant you know pathological diagnoses right ranging from schizophrenia to multiple person right and so this was kind of exposed the lack of uniform assessment right or diagnosis in that field well that was that was Walter Michelle's challenge so when Bob and I followed up these original 30 couples that we studied in this lab that synchronized physiology with the video time code that's all we really did and what kind of physiological markers where you're monitoring like heart rate heart rate blood velocity uh skin conductance how much they were sweating from the palms of their hands of respiration how much they're moving around and stuff like that and what year is this 1974 okay when we started working together and again you had no idea where it was gonna go right you just thought along the way you might be able to recognize some patterns right that was the plan and so you just start interviewing people at that time were they married or just people in relationships yeah they were 30 married heterosexual couples and uh you know we measured a whole bunch of things with questionnaires how happy they were in their relationship and you know very sort of things and then have them talk about how the day went after they've been apart for eight hours and once we got a good signal on the physiological measures then interviews them about their major conflicts and said okay take the major conflict and try to resolve it in the next 15 minutes we don't know what we're doing so we think what the hell yeah yeah and then we had them talk about a positive topic and then we showed them their videotapes you know the split screen version and had them just turn a dial that went from very negative to very positive independently of one another and tell us what they were feeling in the interaction and then we just sent them home okay we didn't have any clue on how to help them right then we re-contact contact them there was like an anthropologist at this point you're just observing you have no real that's right so you know what my interest was it was an emotion and Bob was interested in emotions so we coded their emotional behaviors so facial expressions voice tone what they were saying how they were saying it how they moved and how they talked to one another you know I mean like for example a lot of stuff was really obvious like one guy assisted his wife why don't you go first talking about your day it won't take you very long right so right away he starts with contempt oh yeah so it wasn't like subtle right observing these couples yeah I mean you could see you know you could cut the hostility with a knife and some couples yeah and you could cut the tenderness with a knife and other couples right so we just described it then three years later we re-contact the same couples haven't come back again studying them again and I remember a phone call from Bob once every morning when he said have you ever counted for 90 percent of the variation but that's what our data was showing we could predict with almost complete certainty what was going to happen to a marriage who would divorce and who would stay together and how happy they would be unhappy they would change over three years basically right and that kind of blew our minds and you know yeah you kind of fell backwards into that yeah right it was like an accident and I want to explain because when I read that contempt is the main engine for divorce I had to really think about what contempt is and tell me if where I'm wrong about my this is how I try to explain to other people where the simplest example would be instead of my wife is a bitch no sometimes my wife is bitchy on a certain day she can be bitchy she's not a bitch once I label her as some kind of a permanent condition it's her that's her character now I've decided is bitchy or impatient or any of these things when I when I label it as a permanent condition I'm now in contempt is that no that's criticism that's criticism yeah okay so delineate for me exactly okay so criticism is is expressing your complaints as a defecting your partner's personality or character so saying she's a bitch saying you know she's stupid is you know that's criticism but the the content has a superior quality to it right you're your flawed in this way and I'm not right that's that's the basic but isn't there also some some level of like permanence to it because once there's a permanence to it it's very defeatist that's like this person's crazy I hear a guy say all the time like oh my girlfriend's crazy I'm like well there's no fix and crazy so that's what you think that's right I can you're eventually gonna get yourself out of this right it both criticism and contempt have that permanent quality so if you say you know sometimes uh sometimes my wife can be impatient and that's problem for me and you know what I really wish is that you would do this and when I you know when I start talking to her you know just wait for me to finish yeah that's not criticism that's just you know that's a healthy way of complaining it's so weird the power of your language right so once you start using this language whether it's past tense present tense you know it builds a mode around that idea so I said to myself is a is a pledge I'm never gonna label her as something right going forward really that's a that's a good choice and it's tempting though right you know what I'm saying like my instinct is to do that and I have to actually catch myself and I'll go no she's not that just in this moment in this context God knows what led up to this moment you know I found it disagreeable but it'll be different tomorrow and it could be different the day after that there's no permanence to it yeah when you when you describe you know what's going on that way as situational then it kind of feeds your curiosity you might even say you know what's the matter baby you seem kind of stressed this morning yeah you know well right and especially if you're starting from a place which is no I know you're sane I know you're generous and I know you're loving right so I know that's who you are yeah so this this little behavior today is basically abnormal so what's going on how can I help yeah by the way I've now extended that to my children which is it's very tempting to say oh that kid's messy or that kid's this and I'll remind myself all the time out loud no she's nothing yet she's just acting this way today you know in studying parent child interaction we came up with a thing that we call the parental agenda which is that you know we all worry about certain things about our kids you know like one kid's takes too many risks another kid is not brave enough you know and sort of hangs back another kid is not generous enough or not empathetic enough another one's too empathetic and gullible right so it's natural for parents to worry about their kids and have a checklist of what they want you know their kids to be like but you're right when you label a kid as being a certain way then it's hard for them to dig out yeah be different yeah well you get all this this confirmation bias loop where it's like you're expecting something from them to confirm what you've labeled them and then they live up to it in a weird way right that's right and that's the sad thing when they when they hear the label the tragedy is that they will believe it yeah my dad is telling me I'm lazy so I must be that kind of person so what is a person like that do and then I'll become that kind of person well the other big trap we fall into a lot too that we have to police ourselves on is the oldest one's her and the younger one's me you know and there's a lot of subtext of that because even if they only hear the part where I say you're me and there's nothing necessarily destructive about that but then they pick up later mom says dad's this well then I must be back because of a equals b and b equals c then you know and so that's a really easy trap for me to fall into because you my own ego wants to see a resemblance in this thing I created you know I want to share this identity with this child I love so much and then I start super imposing all this stuff on her unfairly just because I want to feel close like my instinct is probably sweet but then the result can be a little dangerous yeah I might leave you kind of blind to who she really is exactly I keep trying to tell myself oh no she's a whole other thing that'll probably exceed anything I like about myself right yeah yeah it's really hard to keep that door open to discover to let your kids surprise you yeah do you have children yeah I want you do boy or girl he's a girl yeah uh-huh but turn me into it an instant feminist yeah sure you know I kept going around with my my four-year-old daughter and you know I've knocked on the door of a bus and a woman was driving and I'd say can you tell my daughter about your job then uh-huh and then you know I'd say well so she drives this big bus there are two buses connected with an accordion thing you know and I'd say look at that a woman can do anything she says I know Papa and also have babies right you know they became this thing you know that between us yeah okay so how long did you stay at MIT uh two years and then when do you move out to Washington and why um well after I got my PhD uh in clinical psychology I went to UC Medical Center to do a postdoc in clinical psychology okay and then my first job was at Indiana University that's where I met Bob Levinson and from there I moved to the University of Illinois and it was there for 10 years but you were yeah and Bob and I collaborated there and I had my own psychophysiology lab as well but my interest was a lot not just in couple relationships but also in parent-child relationships and then when I moved to the university Washington 1986 um I built a lab and and Julie helped me so you're live yeah we met then and so she's a frustrated architect and she designed this apartment lab where we saw 130 newlywed couples and as they became pregnant um we started studying them and you know and I have a lot of friends who are experts in studying babies so I learned how to study babies and parent-infant interaction and I in this set of research studies of what happens to a relationship when a baby comes I got to know 222 babies oh wow and watch the babies with the parents and watch that babies grow up and develop and so much fun well now and so this to me is a fascinating area um and very I think counterintuitive I think when you fantasize about getting married and having a child your expectation is joy and happiness and fulfillment which of course that's there as well but I think people underestimate the the stress on the relationship that's exactly true so we found two thirds of our couples when a baby arrived in the first three years of the baby's life relationship happiness went down the tubes just really two thirds of the couples they must have cited you in brain rules for babies because we read the little part on relationships in that book right and I was like okay heads up right so 66% chance we're gonna suffer some downhill right so you know Julie and I studied the third of couples that sailed through the transition to parenthood and they were actually different just a couple months after the wedding they they started different which was really interesting especially the men the men were different that's why different in what ways they were kinder they were less contemptuous they were more respectful to their wives and they had an easier time with their wives being pregnant you didn't hear them say stuff like wow she's now like one guy said you know she's as big as a whale and I'll just I'm not attracted to her yeah I got much hornier for my wife when she changed shape me too yeah it's so cool it almost feels like you're cheating on your wife like you're getting a pass you know there's new boobs in the mix where those things come from I didn't realize you got those you know that's exciting yeah so you know the guys who were saying boy you know she clothes looks really you know I just love this you know they had they had totally different babies so we found that if we looked at how a couple talked about a disagreement in the last trimester we could predict what that baby would be like tell me please give me an example of that well if you know if the conflict that they had in the last trimester was kind of respectful generous then the baby was relaxed the baby's physiology was different so the baby actually had higher vagal tone so the vagus nerve is the tenth cranial nerve is the biggest nerve in our body and it's responsible for creating calm okay focusing attention and they had higher vagal tone in fact we could predict half of the variation in the vagal tone from the way the parents talked to each other on the last trimester let me ask you is that does it have anything to do with the fact that when mom and dad are fighting it's not going well mom's doing basically a cortisol dump isn't she that's totally what the mechanism is that we think so mom's getting into kind of a flighter a fight or flight mode right cortisol dump and that that's affecting the baby right the baby is so sensitive to what the mother is feeling that you can play music to a mother baby doesn't hear the music through earphones right if you play music the mother hates she's creating cortisol and the baby moves a lot more oh wow and if you're playing music that she likes no matter what it is it can be you know grunge hard rock anything whatever classical music if she likes it our baby comes starts coming through yeah so isn't that so you really are directly affecting that intra-union environment so it's very important when a woman is pregnant that she feels safe and loved and cherished well i wonder then in this book we read um because they clearly uh referenced your work i wonder then were you a part of the prescriptive anecdote because what we read that i took to heart was uh the key things that will lead to that uh degradation of the quality of the relationship is dad doesn't do his half of the work was that do you have anything with that that's part of it yeah you know what uh truly and i wound up designing just a 10 hour workshop that could reverse that drop in relationship happiness for almost 80 percent of couples and 10 hours and when things where you teach and the ingredients were days being more involved uh-huh but the secret to days being more involved was that there had to be less fighting with mom and there had to still be romance and connection you know and well i would imagine a woman wants a lot of reassurance post that experience a lot of you just changing so dramatically i would imagine that's a good time to be letting them know hey i still or you want to attract a new one that's right so so the secret was well those two things into maintaining intimacy and decreasing conflict so it was much more gentle and constructive but also learning something about babies so you know we kind of taught dads about babies and how important they are to the development emotional and intellectual development of both sons and daughters the father is critical because the one place that we men shine is we know how to play uh-huh uh-huh it's funny to say that because my wife and i'm glad she uh actually is grateful for it yeah my job is wrestler like an hour a night i'm wrestling those two girls and she knows they need to do that like their little monkeys that need to try out their valence and their physical fitness and yes that's not for her yeah and it is for me but what i selfishly wanted to do half not because i want to change diapers but i'm a know it all and i wanted an equal say in how we're going to raise these kids and i just felt like you don't get an equal say if you're not doing an equal amount of work um and i want to say something else that i i experience which so i'm sober i've been sober for 14 years and i've seen uh numerous guys um who are struggling uh and they believe when that child arrives they're going to get sober it is a very common fallacy for you know that men to believe in a is that they're having a hard time their struggling but when that kid gets here that's going to straighten them out that'll be the thing that's worth living for and it is almost always the opposite and it always confused me until i myself had kids so i had been sober for nine years when we had our first kid and i started having thoughts i don't have anymore that i have been freed of that obsession but once i was responsible for this kid and i got to be extra general around mom because she's very emotional and i'm just of service so much all day long to these two people i start feeling selfishly like i deserve something i need something for me i found myself having this kind of throwback very all these selfish impulses both thinking about women thinking about drugs thinking about anything that would be my treat for having to be of service these people and then that moment i thought i don't get on speak for everyone but i thought oh i bet that's what's going on with these people yeah i was like you know it's it's you feel sorry for yourself you do you get into a little bit of self-pity because you're not sleeping and you're you're right again you're giving giving giving giving him right and getting uh shitty diapers that's right yeah it makes a lot of sense i you know but uh i i think it's a big revelation to fathers especially expectant fathers that they are so important yeah it's i mean it just blows their minds really when we do those workshops and we say what you do makes a big big difference yeah because most of us grew up in an era where dad had to put food in the fridge right and that was and if he went to a couple baseball games he was the best dad on the block that's right and i know for most of the time on earth we lived in not in monogamous relationships we generally there was a team of women a team of dudes and a lot of guys had two wives and some had none you know because there's not a prescriptive blueprint for how we do this can we argue that there's a historical context for men being really involved like do you feel like this is a return to that or do you think this is a new development in our well you know a lot of anthropologists think that that there was a belief that um in our ancestors that if more than one male had sex with a woman and she became pregnant they were all fathers and so it was it was kind of a good strategy for a woman to do that to seek out particularly successful guys who could feel like they had a stake in that baby um so there's you know some evidence that non-monogamy was actually effective way back in hunter-gatherer phase of development yeah so a lot of anthropologists are saying that at a certain point in our development maybe 30,000 years ago which is pretty recent um monogamy was invented as a way for you know a woman to find a way to invest a lot of resources in one child and well as you get this specialized division of labor with that came with civilization right now you're not because what punning and gathering cultures had over us is they had the network of women sharing all these roles and being ants to all the children right yeah right most women had their babies at the same time it was kind of a group effort and as we get this division of labor now that structure changes in a way that probably dad needs to be more involved yeah maybe 10,000 years ago right the invention of agriculture right things change a great deal stay tuned for more armature expert if you dare so when you're um advising in this ten-hour workshop you offered you're advising that dad be involved you're letting dad know that he plays a really huge role right and it's a lot of fun even the diaper of baby because that you get this eye contact and play that happens there you know giving giving giving a kid a bath is really it's just fun yeah and they you know there's nothing more interesting than your face and your voice you can't construct a toy for a baby that's more interesting than a parent's voice and face yeah and when dads realize that it's fun to do this stuff they really get involved so after our workshop you know we have dads it's the only intervention that is dads being involved with daughters and sons and involved in housework and involved in child care so it really doesn't work do you think there's any kind of societal historical um baggage that would lead men to feel emasculated by that process do you think like culturally is there anything that yeah i see that some guys maybe feel that way well i think i think it's the opposite i think that women make men feel incompetent as fathers you know there's a society of women that surrounds the expected mother and officially sort of tells dad to go away right we don't know about out yeah but out well again and uh dad had not earned a place at the table to begin with right historically so he's very true i would say they deserve to tell him about that they deserve to tell him they can't show up at seven o'clock at night and say you're doing all this wrong and then if you're cocktail and go to bed but you know in our workshop you know we have to help the mom realize that keeping dad involved with the baby benefits everybody so that they actually have to put the breaks on you know mom coming in and taking over or sister coming in and taking over or best friend coming in and let dad do things let dad make some mistakes yeah make mistakes and have the baby for an evening and you know and you know and realize that you know he can do it may not be as great as she is at it but he can do it pretty well right so when you when you get to washington so the work you're doing you never have stopped interviewing uh couples right from the MIT days to the University of Washington yeah pretty much um you have you have decades of video exchanges you do yeah we have just thousands of tapes uh and you know they've open scored you know with these observational system that tell us what's going on moments a moment and then we can synchronize that with what's happening in the body and what people are thinking at the same time so it gives us kind of a window on you know what makes things work so so i mentioned contempt but there's there's four that you identified yeah right that we call them the four horsemen of the apocalypse such an optimistic term yeah the book of revelations is a great read both bob and i had to learn how to code facial expressions and learn paul echman's uh and while he freezes facial action coding system 46 muscles in the face moving around and the most fascinating thing if i'm got these guys right i think i saw a documentary on them yeah what they found which blows my mind is as they were trying to document every conceivable facial expression they found that when they'd say oh do 14 which is let's say sadness that the physical act of making the face actually produced the emotions of sadness that it went both ways that's right that's right so the there's an internal program that changes the face and it's it appears to be cross-cultural universal and it's a two-way system so i sometimes like as a as a um an experiment like i'm feeling shitty and i force myself to smile and see if i can't like work it backwards yeah just uh you know for shits and giggles it's about ten percent effective if you want to try but one of the things i found really fascinating from the the blink uh story about you is that right so if you watch it you watch a couple talk for one hour right you're in the 90s for being able to predict whether or not they will get divorced right you're saying that correct right yeah but you can watch it for 15 minutes and still be in the 80s right 88 percent 88 percent in 15 minutes yeah and then i think it even went one increment lower like i think he said that you can watch for five minutes you know so we did that you know we just kind of you know we had them talk for 15 minutes and then we said what if we cut off the last three minutes and it was still good we cut off another three minutes and we went down to the first three minutes and we could still predict the future relationship not at 90 accuracy but but still about 70 or so yeah really really well and that's the way people begin the conflict discussion turns out to be very very important and so i really want people to think about that because that that is so powerful that it's that telling the relationship you're in how you're treating your partner that the way you would treat her or him in three minutes right is that telling yeah i find that very encouraging i think some people might find that somewhat depressing but i find that to be so encouraging right that we can isolate these things and we can avoid them because we how do you even know what to avoid well you know we we do this in our couples workshop we talk about soft and startup what's that what's soft and startup is going from that critical thing and we actually do this exercise with with the audience and we say okay so here's a here's a situation your mother in law is coming for dinner tonight she always criticizes something about the way your home is or how you treat the children and you really want your husband to support you tonight you know if your mother in law is critical so here's the hard startup you know your mother is a wort on the back of humanity okay so that's that's okay now so the soft and startup is i feel about what and here's what i need here's my positive need so we do this exercise with the audience and you know and people say well you know i feel kind of scared that your mother is coming over tonight and if she criticizes me again i would like you to stand up for me and support me you know and speak up for me like tell your mom you think i'm a great mother i'll tell you mom you know you love the way i keep house or something like that yeah so and then the audience just comes up with this comes up with different and we give them like 20 different hard startups and they convert it to a gentle startup well the need is so critical right it is right not what you don't need what you do need yeah and it's really hard for people to state what they need i find it hard and then but you have to remember like even the most well-intentioned person can't guess what you need exactly and yeah and so you're saying it a little different than i learned it but um yes these these i messages and i think these are really important for people to understand when you say you scared the shit out of me when you came in the house and slammed the door you're going to then end up in an argument about his intentions or her intentions and if you tell me i i tried to scare the shit out of you and i said no i didn't i would never try to scare the shit out of you now if you say hey when you slam the door i got really scared i can't argue how you felt i have to take you at face value i can't tell you didn't feel scared that's very insightful and you just explained what physically happened i shut a door lightly and so from there we can get to a place of well oh i'm so sorry i would have never tried to scare you now what can i do differently but when you when you start with an accusation that you tried to scare me or that you tried to piss me off or any one of these things i'm gonna fight to the death because i know i don't have those intentions against you right so that that's where the arguments happen is that you're attacking a person's intentions so you know for a couple of years we actually try to study what were the intentions in each message we asked people what did you intend when you said this intentions were always positive yeah even when the impact was negative the intention wasn't negative it was you know it's exactly what you're saying yeah you know people inadvertently say things or do things well we're lousy communicators in general 95 of us it's we're not great at articulating what we feel or think or well that's true but you know it's also because there are two brains in a relationship and the chances that your headspace is going to be the same as your partner's headspace or you know almost zero yeah right you're just going to be in different frames of mind so you know it's not that the probability of communicating perfectly all the time is so low you know just because we have two different minds in our relationship right so the need is really really interesting and i like that part of it the positive need is really critical because what you want to do is really present your partner with a recipe for how to shine for you right and if you can do that and be pretty specific about it then you know your partner can you know can agree that they'll do that or try to do that but they well you have to give at least minimally even if you want to leave the person you have to give them the opportunity to have stated at least clearly what you want see if they can't meet that or fail at that but if you've not given them your need you you're not you can't really justifiably evaluate them because you didn't really tell them that's right yeah most people really do want to meet their partners needs to know you know what they are but you know like if julie says you know i really need you to be quiet for the next 10 minutes because you know i got a concentrate or something i know probably harmonica now let me ask you this so you were divorced twice before you met julie correct and where did those lie within your studies where you hadn't cracked it yet or you just you're a human like all of us you know you know when you do a study you know you kind of you want to predict how it's going to come out so bob and i when we started we didn't have any predictions and i was going to come out but after a while we kind of you know felt like we got smarter the data taught us things in a certain point i wanted to see well how much smarter have i gotten you know so i wrote down how he thought the study was going to come out and put it in the notebook and put it away and then analyze the data wrote up you know the articles for publication with bob and then went back to my notebook and my predictions were wrong 60 percent of the time okay so majority of the time i was wrong or in wrong about what kinds of things oh like you know here's one you know that that ratio of positive to negative given my screwed up relationships in the past i thought if couples were as positive as they were negative that'd be a great relationship like 50 50 yeah with 50 50 i thought that would be a great relationship i mean you know compared to my relationships yeah it wasn't 50 50 right 70 percent crap you know and 30 percent maybe nice things but uh it turned out the ratio of positive to negative in good stable happy relationships during conflict was five to one five times as many positive things as negative things well and again let's let's just get into that for once because there's a great biochemical explanation for this right so your reward chemical versus your you know if you find a yummy apple on tree as a hunting gather and you take a bite and it's sweet and juicy you get a little dump of dopamine or you know right oxy whatever think positive message your brain tells you says remember this tree now if you eat a poisonous apple and you get violently ill the chemicals sent are ten times as strong as strong as the positive ones right exactly exactly so we're gonna say i love you ten times to your wife and then you call her a bitch on the 11th time your bed square one chemically like no human can compete with that as smart as you are right very well said okay so the negative is so much more positive so much more powerful yeah that offset it you need five times as many positive as negative right now again who would think that you'd be like well in general i'm pretty positive yeah i was blown away that that was that high yeah and that's during conflict so in our apartment lab where we're seeing 130 newlywed couples when we compute that ratio for the masters of relationships it's 20 the one 20 the one and they're just hanging out right people are really overwhelmingly nice and kind and generous but it's just not your personality some of it feels like maybe certain personalities are better suited for this than others well that's certainly true um but you know the the dimension that makes people better suited for relationships is agreeability there's some people who you know when their partner says something you know and they score high on this agreeability dimension they say interesting oh yeah i can see that kind of makes sense let me try to understand that yeah you know and other people their first reaction is bullshit you know you know i can see the flaw in that right so it's a personality dimension so agreeable people they you know probably can partner with you know a big wide range of other humans that somebody is not so agreeable they need a particular kind of partner right in order to really get that five to one ratio yeah they've got to be with an agreeable partner probably yeah interesting now i'm imagining though your pro conflict yes yeah i mean you know i think conflict is inevitable you meet couples right that say oh we never fight that's true and what do you think about that well they're an interesting group the ones who the ones who never fight you know we call them conflict avoiders actually talk a lot and and find out how they disagree with one another and then they kind of let it lie they sort of accept these differences yeah and let it lie do you think so i mean there are some conflict avoiders who just never talk all right you know and and they're fine you know the sort of mind pah kettle you know sort of image you know the strong silent woman and strong silent guy right and they like having independent emotionally distant relationships those kind of couples do exist but they're very rare and most conflict avoiders actually will talk about a thing and they'll go oh so you think this way oh that's why you think that way and if i you know i think this way and here's why i think that way and then they kind of go okay we're done yeah you know i've had both i had a nine-year relationship and i'm in a eleven and a half-year relationship and the nine-year relationship we never fought we talked non-stop i like to think we were both pretty good communicators and i wouldn't say one's better than the other anything there's really no i have no takeaway judgment of it all but then my current relationship where such opposites it requires quite a lot of come to jesus moments you know it's just where we're so we see the world so differently we're coming from such different places but don't you think a lot of this stuff i think i think people often in relationships believe that if they got their partner's behavior correct the problems would be over when in fact you know where you're at emotionally a disagreement seeing something differently from your your partner can be very threatening if the foundation of your relationship feels shaky already yeah that's true right like it feels like the stakes of not agreeing are the end of the relationship whereas if your partner's good at reassuring you and letting you know that you're on very sturdy footing do you think those those are easier to overlook yeah there's a there's a critical hidden variable and all of that but a woman named cal russbolt really taught us about she did 30 years of work on this very question and it has to do with whether when you're fighting do you make negative comparisons between your partner and real or imagined alternative relationships so why are you saying i can do better mm-hmm who needs this crap right i can do better my partner's image or my partner's defective in some way i can do better and when you do that it's the beginning of the end mmm and that's what cal russ will show us whereas if you're doing a positive comparison you're saying well you know this kind of sucks but you know you know it's you know she's not like that or he's not like that really you know this we'll get through this moment and you know and there's a lot of good stuff in this relationship well i've always kind of thought oh whoever i end up with i'm gonna end up in this exact same spot like this is the nature of a relationship the first six months are exciting and hot and heavy and you're having so much sex you're not even noticing all these other things and those chemicals dissipate and then you're left with the person you know i just i guess i've never succumbed to the illusion that you're gonna be in a relationship that requires no work well that's a very pro relationship pro-social relationship way to think and cal russbolt you know talked about that as well so you're thinking well you know this is what happens you know the grass isn't greener you know over there right you know the lady at Starbucks it smiles at me really nicely the way my wife hasn't in the past week you know she's not any better in option yeah you know you also to be honest with yourself if you found this perfectly acquiescent human being is that stimulating for you is that would you even be attracted that for sure you would be easier right definitely be bored out of your fucking mind right exactly now your wife Julie she is also in this field you guys work together oh absolutely she's really the co-creator of all of this and you know without her clinical insight i would never have been successful you know what strengths does she have that you don't oh my god you know you don't have enough videotape for audiotape for me to list all those you know basically she spent like 40 years really working with very damaged people people who are combat veterans with PTSD you know from vietnam people who were survivors of torture incest sexual abuse that people who are addicted to heroin cocaine back shepherd types yeah okay i'm really i mean worse than zach seperate you know people who didn't get sober right people you know very damaged people you know some people some people who have been insisted by by their father for you know 16 years and you know then raped by somebody else you know really difficult lots of drama right and she's a fountain of compassion she's an amazing woman and tell my wife it's too oh yeah you're lucky yeah you know i am too and you know but she's very insightful she has really she's a really good judge judge character and i'll tell you story this is kind of a convoluted story but we used to fight a line we used to fight a lot so i was kind of arrogant on the scientist she's a clinician we're collaborating i kept saying where's your data you know i think this you know where's your data and you know we started working on helping it was a national project to help couples who were in poverty and a baby was on the way because the divorce rate was very high for those couples they were generally unmarried and so we started working with this population and in psychology they called them fragile families right so there's a fragile fragile families project and maybe 150 papers have been written out of columbia and prince and university by these very respected scholars and i read the literature and we were working with these couples and and i said july you know these guys say that these guys aren't they're not addicted and they're not violent and they're you know they're really okay you know and she said well shit that's just not true i know this population i said well i've read these articles i read the journal articles and that this is what they read the journal articles she said i don't have to read that i've worked with them in boston you know in the combat zone in the ghetto and i said well you know how can you disregard all this scholarship so you know we're fighting about this right and i'm the arrogant scientist she's the clinician i'm putting her down but honey it was peer-reviewed yeah i tried peer-reviewed i said that sure so we get to this conference in washington dc with these guys and i take them aside you know and i'm very respectful because they're you know they're really very highly regarded scholars and i say you know i what i don't understand about your papers is that you say that these guys have not been incarcerated they they don't have addiction there's no domestic violence and they say yeah we lied oh really we lied we never we'd gotten funded oh if we were trying to keep these relationships together with these men who are the scum of the earth uh-huh right there would have been what no lack of compassion or uh the funding agency would have said well the women are better off alone right and actually the women were not better off alone these guys loved their babies and they were trying really hard to make their lives different when this baby came and and we got involved you know and and i just went julies right yeah these guys they lied and i'm not doubting or anymore okay i want to talk about a couple of the other four horsemen um so we have contempt we have uh disagreement no criticism criticism i'm so sorry so that's the first disagreement that's going to happen yeah criticism criticism is stating a problem as a defect in your partner's character okay contempt is feeling superior to your partner also when you do that yeah and you know people are contemptuous in many many different ways i mean one of my favorite is correcting somebody's grammar when they're angry with you oh my god that would send me right to the i've never been a violent person but that could really yeah actually all the words i say wrong right yeah all the monica kind of does that here yeah yeah it weren't a relationship so in deer it's just in deer yeah you seem to like it yeah tell me about defensiveness because that's one of the defensiveness uh you really had two forms one was a counterattack but an escalated counterattack so you know you hit me with a four pound cannonball see how you like the sixty pound cannonball okay so you know you you had this criticism i've got 15 and and i'm gonna i'm gonna my criticism is gonna really go below the belt you're gonna really get to you right it's gonna hurt it's gonna hurt and so that's one kind of defensiveness counterattack so it's it's uh your partner makes an observation about some bit of your behavior you're so selfish sometimes yeah i can't believe it well at least i don't fucking drive drunk yeah they just go over the top they find some other moral imperative that is that's right okay i don't endanger the lives of our children like you do right by the way i find this in politics like every time they actually nail somebody for something the response is always well that guy did it worse it's like well we can get to that guy let's talk about your thing first yeah that's that's one form of defensiveness the other one is i'm blameless the innocent victim posture you know you know my intentions are always positive what are you picking on me for you know i never can do anything right for you you've got an infinite list of things you want i can never please you i try so hard i never get credit for all the good things i do in this relationship you know why you so negative well i'm glad you're saying that because what my number one pet peeve the probably the number one thing i'm not attracted to is is victimness yeah victimhood victimy personas right and they appear on the surface this is there's a wonderful thing in a a which tells you the things to avoid but you know in the list of grand self-aggrandizement is also self-pity self-pity is as narcissistic as self-aggrandizement it's the exact same thing it's the other side of the coin which is i'm so important the universe is conspiring against me that's right that's right and people are so good at defensiveness that they can do the innocent victim in the counter attack at the same time uh-huh really hard to deal this is one of the sharpest swords in the narcissist's playbook too right they're always a victim no matter what the situation is right they're always innocent they're always good they're you know they just you know they try so hard and you know they can never make you mad or make you happy and so there's something wrong with you right so right you know it's unpleasable yeah so it's turning it back on you uh-huh stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare so in defensiveness i think it's really the work that we have to do in relationships is down-regulator on defensiveness so how does someone do that the mechanics my way of doing it is i have a little notebook in my back pocket okay and i whip it out when julie says the foremost terrifying words in english language we need to talk right uh-huh and i get out my little notebook and my pen i have handy and i go take a deep breath and i say talk to me baby uh-huh uh-huh and i write down what she's saying oh you do i write down everything she's saying and the more defensive i feel the more i slow her down so i write down every word and tell me what that what is the purpose of that for you and for her you know at first when i'm writing i'm thinking what a bitch man she just you can i can never please her you know and then i'm going well that's a good point uh-huh uh-huh do you think there's something physically that's happening that the act of writing is for me it is the physical act of writing you know i don't have to look at her face all the time i'm you know getting it down and then i look up you know every now and then you know and i go okay slow down so what was that let me get that okay well let me ask you though she's already maybe peeved with you and she ever just like put that fucking notebook down and look at me i could imagine that being irritating to someone if they were already high you know i think it could be you know it works for me uh-huh and she knows that a solution is on the other side of that she knows that you know when i do that i'm i'm going to be more rational it isn't so much of this just breaking up pattern and in kind of uh building some goodwill where it's like you got through the first time you wrote down the stuff and she found the result was a little better so maybe next time it was a little easier for to witness this approach and yeah and then you're kind of building goodwill and trust and i once wrote for two and a half hours oh you really fucked up she talked two and a half hours uh-huh and the 18 single-space pages oh oh my goodness she had a lot to say yeah yeah and it was great i mean i i've saved it i'll go back to it every now and then and i i learned a lot of stuff about her that i didn't realize you know and and she said i said so you know we've got a couple of hours when in this hotel room you know we're gonna give a talk in the evening but you know we got some time i said so why don't you tell me you know where are you at in your life you know right now because i probably don't know she said i'll tell you if you if you stay quiet uh-huh two and a half hours no kidding and i got to talk you know after that and i talked for about half an hour and you're a fan of time outs right yeah i think it's important to have your heart rate below 100 beats a minute at certain heart rates different areas of your brain for survival take over right and it just keeps getting more and more reptilian yes right you go into fight-or-flight or freeze and yeah and you can't listen you're not taking in information um tell me about stonewalling so stonewalling was kind of a surprising thing that we saw 85 percent of heterosexual couples 84 percent of the time a guy would do this thing he would stop looking at her would stop nodding his head stop uttering these brief vocalizations like you're doing right and just look away and down sometimes fold his arms across his chest and no facial movement you know no vocalizations very little eye contact maybe an occasional glance and so we brought guys in and said what are you thinking right in this moment on shoulder tape what are you thinking and turns out what they're thinking is you know god i just don't say anything you always make it worse right i get i surrender it's kind of a surrender right it's i have to endure this yeah you know and i can get through this but if i if i say anything she's gonna go ballistic yeah bad enough the way it is just endure yeah and they kind of they're shutting down right and they're suppressing what they want to say well i think for a lot of men the the the emotional vocabulary is so daunting and even just discussing emotions is so daunting that it's overwhelming and they i think a lot of it people do it just passive aggressively but i also think for a lot of guys who had no training in that way it's kind of overwhelming isn't it yeah i think it is and you don't know what to say well yeah and just if we look at how our at least our culture works girls get on a playground they look at each other's faces they talk to each other eye to eye and they share feelings and they share fears and boys play games where they avoid eye contact there's no emotion so there's zero practice almost right guys right yeah for guys it's really when an emotional event happens you know like a kid you know they're playing a running chase game and you know some kids start crying you know they'll stop the game and say what's the matter i didn't get the ball okay give them the ball and they don't talk about it right there is no right and you know so that the goal is keep the ball and play keep the game going whereas for girls it seems to be the relationship is really important thing yeah it's not that they're playing hopscotch or they're playing you know they're doing something else instead they're connecting the whole time connecting the whole time yeah so men don't really get a lot of practice and dealing with emotion and then of course that lesson happens then you get intense lust sure and then now you have to communicate with a female you've got no choice yeah yeah what would you do for those men who their their defense is stonewalling and they don't know how to breathe yeah pace breathing is very powerful meditation is powerful but just sort of awareness that oh boy this is this is a stonewalling moment for me what do i do in this moment so i want to say listen i need a break we have this we have three conflict blueprints three separate blueprints presented with conflict one of them is dealing with past regrettable incidents that have happened that you haven't fully talked about okay and for a lot of couples those incidents that they try to get past and only ignore say okay that was just a bad situation let's not talk about that that becomes like a stone in your shoe where you can't maintain intimacy anymore because there's been some betrayal of trust or some feeling like you know my partner's not on my side really i'm right right so we have a way of going through and processing that a five-step blueprint for talking about where did you feel what were your perceptions what triggers did you have and where did they come from in your childhood and they can be fears they can be times when you were humiliated disrespected you know and again you're triggered and you feel disrespected in this moment just you know well you're literally responding to the person when you were eight exactly exactly so understanding the triggers are very critical and so you know in in my marriage for example you know my mother-in-law was a formidable woman she could make well she raised a tough girl so it doesn't surprise me she could make anybody defensive and so you know i began to understand you know how you know a lot of times when Julie got defensive it was because i was repeating something that reminded her of her mother right now and as i understood her triggers i could avoid those triggers those were enduring vulnerabilities that we all have right from the past so triggers are really important some of it's so simple like my wife and i started off in couples counseling like we right from the get-go we were in counseling together wow um that's unusual it is uh i had done couple couples counseling at the end of a relationship and to me the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure things so much easier i i i think i really recommend people do it out of the games because you you get into these patterns these these kind of figure eight patterns you just can't get out of and they just get harder and harder they're quite simple to break at the beginning though right right yeah so you know that voice of you saying that is so important because there's still a stigma about going to therapy going to counselor you know when people can get in very desperate straits and field is so much shame in going to see a therapist and it seems like it has failed and this is a last-ditch effort yeah and it would be so much better if people had the idea that it's kind of like coaching you know when you're learning a sport or learning how to play an instrument you know you need some correction to develop bad habits and yeah and some of the some of the advice at least that art therapists who i i love gave us harry they were just so practical and pragmatic he would be like uh christen you have depression you get quiet at times dax is an ex scumbag addict he's used to feeling like he's in trouble his mom was very talkative the only time she wasn't talking it was when he was in trouble all you got to do to solve this pattern is like when you're starting to feel a little low you say hun i'm feeling quiet has nothing to do with you and then i'm good i can go do my thing and i'm no longer obsessing about what i did and it's not triggering all the years of shame i carried around when i was a shithead you know like just a simple fucking sentence right hey i'm feeling a little quiet has nothing to do with you that's the kind of shit a therapist can just observe in you in a couple and just give you something so simple like that yeah i mean you had a creative therapist who gave you really a blueprint a solution that really worked yeah and knew both of you so well that he could suggest something that really went to the core of the problem but by the way he did what you do he then sliced he watched us debate something and he didn't let us go more in 12 minutes like i my breathing was elevated hers was and he's like stop i got i know i see what's going on we don't need to do this further like you know if you're both well intentioned they're kind of easy fixes that's right that's right so you know it is important to know the triggers though because we all have them a lot of the crazy buttons yeah now do some people just it's effortless for them or is that an illusion i've never had it where it's effortless or some people just the high school sweethearts and it's all easy honky dory no it doesn't really exist doesn't i don't think it exists i had an next door neighbor one time in oh knowing and she was like the center of the neighborhood and her christmas decorations were tasteful and perfect and she was sweet and husband was sweet her children looked great and healthy and you know and i you know i got to know her i said you know if you're looking for a job i need somebody like you in my lab somebody can relate to people as well as you do yeah you know and so she said yeah i really would like a job and your work sounds very interesting so she worked in my lab and i got to know her and the problems were right there under the surface right and they were big problems yeah and you know and she had she struggled mildly to present this image of being perfect i thought she was perfect well and i think a lot of the reason there's a reservation to go see counselor is you perceive that all your friends are they're living in blue and you're fundamentally flawed and that's embarrassing you're the loser you're the you know you always mess things up and yeah yeah i think it would be comforting to people to recognize no every cohabitation is it takes a lot of work and you're normal to struggle well julie and i in our couples workshop and in the second day when we focus on conflict we process an argument that we've had and we go through it and it's a real argument mm-hmm just to tell people look we're in the same soup when you're in a relationship we're all swimming in the same waters you can't learn enough to avoid right right yeah and you know it doesn't go away i you know when julie says we need to talk i get defensive you know and i'm not any less defensive than i used to be right but i know what to do now i get to get the book out of my back pocket i get the pen and i go talk to me now if people these people that you observe right who are maybe i would imagine some of them are displaying all four of these in one argument right um and you know that if they're if they're exhibiting those the 91 percent chance they're gonna get worse now can that be interrupted yeah so you know we have a blueprint for that and it's based on the work of a real brilliant guy who focused primarily on international conflict his name was anatol rapper port okay and he had this great thing that he did it was like a model and here's what it was you postpone persuasion until each person can state their partners point of view to their partner's satisfaction that's the rule uh-huh so you don't get into persuading your partner that you're right and it partners wrong or find the ideal solution or compromise until you can state your partner's point of view to the person's action i mean just imagine if people did that you know everywhere on the planet it's it's very powerful and so we give well first of all it just tells that person i hear you right like you're you're being heard right that's a very important thing to feel well and the important thing is it's a kind of listening where you know you're trying to do what mr spock did in the old star trek the Vulcan mind meld where you're trying to really see her point of view from her eyes mm-hmm so that it makes sense to you yeah and you're putting your own point of view on the back burner because she's going to do that for you too right right and so it's mutual it's balanced it's symmetrical but that kind of listening is very hard to do but once you do it it's 95% of solving a conflict 5% of it is then problem-solving but that's the easy part once people feel understood and validated you know that their point of view makes some sense you know maybe not a hundred percent but some sense then you're rolling the ball up together you know you're rolling the ball up together you're a team working on an issue together rather than antagonistically against one another now what role does sex play in relationships oh huge usual and you know and and i but i think the important thing to realize is everything is sex tell me that to explain that uh you know just getting up in the morning and you know telling your wife that she smells good and you know i got you like everything is is going to impact that right the relation you know it's all for play right you know just you know you know i i get up before Julie does usually and you know i can you know i make the coffee and empty the dishwasher and you know get stuff ready and i can look at the kitchen the way she looks at it which is very different from the way i look at it but i can look at it now so when she comes in you know she doesn't go oh Jesus i have to clean this all up you know it's really mess and so she's going she can walk in very sleepily and say you're ready for your coffee and she goes yeah you know and here's the coffee yeah so you know you're always making love i think you know you're always connecting right emotionally in some way whether you mean to or not and so if you're i think when you do those things now you know you probably know this study that was done the largest study ever done on sex in the world 70 000 people in 24 countries you know the study no okay a colleague of mine pepper Schwartz University Washington was involved in the same pepper shorts i would buy any other products after that person what they did was they had one question is there any systematic thing different about people who say they have a great sex life and people say they have a bad sex life uh-huh and is that universal they found a dozen things that people do of a great sex life okay people don't have a great sex life they don't do those things and they're simple things you would think they would be sex techniques or certain positions out there yeah yeah right yeah now we're talking they say i love you every day i mean it uh-huh they give their partner compliments they have a weekly romantic date just part of why we wrote this book eight dates right okay they have romantic getaways they make they make time for each other they make time for each other they cuddle they you know even if they're watching tv together they're they're on the couch holding each other right express affection and public so all of these 12 things what's so simple it's just not rocket science yeah all one fabric and sex is a big part of that fabric yeah it's really really crucial for intimacy right now and i i'm i'm hesitant to perpetuate these male female stereotypes but i will just say in my anecdotal friendship circle for men it's very simple it's it's stupid how simple it is but men get their validation through sex like men i see the difference between like when a man hasn't had sex with his wife for seven days like i guess what i'm saying is you ask any married couple how long's it been since you guys had sex the guy will know down to the hour and the woman generally won't in my circle yeah and i just recognize that for men it's this very simple way to be validated by your wife and then of course your wife requires a different validation than that and maybe i'm crazy maybe someone infillates men do and some vice versa but sometimes i i just think um i go on this other show sometimes and they have callers and they ask and i'll just say just minimally if you can have sex with your husband once a week you'd be shocked how many things i might solve for you like you just might be shocked and if you could just be the one to go first i think in relationships a lot of it's like well who's gonna go first so it's like wife may want like well hey how about you notice me how about you talk to me how about you look me in the eyes how you take me to dinner all that stuff true he should do that yeah but if he's resentful that you haven't you guys have an in sex in two weeks he's not there so someone just got to go first and the easiest one to do is like have sex with your husband maybe let's see if then you bring up this other stuff then he's he's feeling validated and he's opened all these things but i just sometimes it's like it becomes this this power circle who's gonna go first who's gonna be the first benevolent one right yeah we asked a large group of couples do you agree with this statement that for men sex is a way to get intimate and close whereas women only want sex when they already feel intimate and close and 97 percent of the couples of the people you know agreed to but that statement yeah that was true as a gender difference and so that's a great way to articulate you know i think it really is true now here's some other facts what percentage of the time in a marriage when a guy you know really asks for sex what percentage of the time does the women say yes what would you guess i'm very nervous i'm gonna i'm gonna say only half the time 75 they say yes yes oh that's encouraging right yeah now here's another key thing the response to no is really critical so a man's response to no i i'm not in the mood i don't want sex is critical to determine how much sex don't have if his response is punishing in any way uh-huh they'll stop having sex mm-hmm but if he says well thank you for telling me that you're not in the mood you know what are you in the mood for yeah i want to take a walk you want to make some popcorn watch a movie you know it doesn't end no doesn't end connection uh-huh for him right then no is not punishing mm-hmm so what it's just true third fact women have more requirements for sex than men do meaning for to be pleasurable well Billy crystal said it this way a woman needs a reason for sex a man just needs a place right right right yeah you know so but and there's good reason that women have more requirements and and that has to do with a woman's relationship with fear oh tell me more about that the world is so much more dangerous place for women than it is for men uh-huh i mean really life threateningly dangerous you know it's the kind of thing where um you know a woman walking across a parking lot at night to go to a class you know she locks a car and she just has to walk to the class a guy doing the same thing you know would think oh you know i'm going to the class a woman would really be thinking i could get raped and killed yeah on the way Monica talks about this all the time she puts her keys in her knuckles in case she's got to like uh puncture someone's eye on and all my everyone i know does all girls yeah so 40 percent of women in their lifetime will have a physical encounter with with a perpetrator that's life threatening 40 percent of women that's crazy equivalent is seven percent from then so women have a special relationship i just want to add on to that yeah 50 percent of all boys are physically abused in their childhood so i think that number's got to be in adulthood because we are beating the shit out of young boys oh okay something terrible yeah anywho okay it's a great documentary out right now the mask you live in we talk about it all the time it's about how we raise boys and girls and it's incredible i'll have to watch that it's wonderful i haven't seen that yeah we're all victims of men it's terrible that's a good point you know so you know so women need to feel safe and they need to feel connected to feel safe emotionally connected to their partners to feel that sense of security and safety and they need to feel like there's not you know items on the to-do list that need to get done that they're responsible for that's why you know guys who help with housework have more sex okay you know hear that guy speak up a fucking song that's right get ready so i you know so i think it's really about about fear and women are easier to fear condition than men so if you you know if you just pair you know some random thing you know like a rabbit's fur with an electroshock and you know build a fear to this you know an object innocuous stimulus right women get conditioned to that fear much more quickly than men do oh they do yeah so it's i think a lot of it has to do with safety and connection yeah that you know give women more requirements for sex than men well i think it's really i think people underestimate how hard it is to keep the sex life thriving and my theory on why that is is it's it is really our single most vulnerable fear we have is that we would not be enough for our partner physically sexually it's such a for a man to say like you know well why don't you desire me it's so crippling that no guy's gonna do that or vice versa it's just it's to me it seems to be the fear that is just the hardest for us to go front right into be and to walk the line between vulnerability and neediness which is a total bone kill you know one wants their partner to be needy it's not attractive yet vulnerabilities very attractive so but it's a very fine line between those things right yeah um anyways i just think uh you know it's it's um i'm very sympathetic to people who have a hard time talking about that subject and being honest about it well you know hella fisher has done some really interesting work um you know putting people in a functional MRI tube and having them look at um picture of a stranger versus the person they say that they're in love with not just that they love but in love with okay and it turns out that there's no shelf life for staying in love you can be in love with the apartment for 35 years you still have that same brain response to seeing that picture uh-huh so sex can be kept alive and romance can be kept alive for a lifetime if emotional connection is valued in the relationship if there's respect and affection and these these 12 things that people do everywhere on the planet yeah it's the same it's the name of that book i want people to read it's called uh the normal bar the normal bar which is a terrible name because it you know it seems like it's about a pub balloon yeah we're nothing that exciting happens yeah but it's a great book because you know it really highlights how important these simple things are like taking a partner's hand in public you know or giving a partner a kiss or you know and there's there's a wonderful book called but what it says is you're proud of me yeah i'm proud to be seen with me you're proud to be connected to me you're you're yeah that's a book called the science of kissing that reviews a study done in germany that says that men who kiss their wives goodbye when they go to work live five years longer oh man who don't oh my goodness yeah so kissing is really you know a powerful way to maintain erotic connection i think it's so cute that us humans kiss like when i watch all these animal documentaries none of the other animals are really kissing i think oh it's so sweet that we do that it's so silly let's just touch our mouths together so you're tell me about your new book the new book is called eight dates yes central conversations for a lifetime of love so you know julie and i wrote this book with uh two you know very close friends of ours uh Doug Abrams and Rachel Carlton Abrams and she's a physician and you know he's just a great writer and the four of us just get along so well and we wanted to really deal with the fact that in a lot of relationships people become like two railroad tracks in parallel they just live like roommates they just don't maintain their intimacy yeah it seems like one of the easiest patterns to fall into especially if you're raising kids it's like that's right yeah we're all we're this team now who's got to get these kids well i'll tell you about a story there's a study done in los angeles of dual career couples where they put microphones and cameras in their home and they found that they were in the same room in an evening 10 percent of the time and they talked to each other an average of 35 minutes a week oh yeah yeah and all that conversation was about errands logistics logistics logistics they didn't date they didn't do the stuff that you know the normal bar found that people everywhere on the planet do when they have a good sex life like have like have dates yeah and so curiosity dies uh-huh and what we want to do is write a book that set fire to curiosity ooh where they could keep having dates so we design these questions and we had 300 couples go out on these dates gave lesbian couples new relationships you know we had uh 37 percent of our couples went new relationships 60% were in longer term relationships and we designed these questions to go very deep so that curiosity gets fired up yeah it's quite easy to think you know your partner either inside now there's only nothing left that's right to discover yeah i feel that way at times i'm like yeah i get it i feel like i could predict what she's going to do good 80 percent accuracy you know the questions we thought in these eight dates were um would plant a seed that would build after the date so for example our date on trust and commitment and start off really asking the questions tell me about your parents what how did they show on another that they were trustworthy or fail to do that how did they show on another they were really committed to one another or fail to do that and you know once they talk about that well what is it like in our relationship you know what you know what do you feel what do you need what's been our history and so that turned out to be a really powerful day emotionally yeah i'm scared to ask those questions so i find out i've got a lot of work to do well that's so exciting you know yeah and you know and you'll be surprised at some of the answers so and it's literally you're to go on eight dates each date has a different kind of topic that you right and it's not confrontational it's really about being curious about your partner how does your partner think like to example you talk about money and work so what was the history in your family with money your father and mother feel about money how did you dead feel about money and what was history with work i don't know how it was in your house but right so you have all kinds of it says there's a story yeah around money so all the conflicts people have about money are all about the meaning of money really not about money itself like what they've attached to this right on set right so i thought that's what i was going to ask you about is money the number one thing couples fight about it seems to be the number one thing that leads to divorce and fights oh really that's what that's what has been determined by sociologists now this is one of the greatest gifts uh i feel like one of the only gifts money really gives you is that we my wife and i don't fight about money she makes a bunch of it and i make a good enough amount of it and we don't fight about it and that's huge okay so but even when i was dead broke with the girl for nine years we didn't fight about money either so when people fight about money what are they fighting about how to allocate it uh what they're saving for who's going to make more why doesn't so what were they fighting but usually they're fighting about something so stupid and trivial but you spent how much on that sweater you know if you don't need us you have so many sweaters what do you need a fucking sweater for you know yeah and they get really upset about it yeah but if you get down to all these conflicts and i studied nine hundred conflicts about money uh-huh and i got hundred i stopped at a hundred meanings of money and money can mean power and competence and justice and love and caring and all these different things that when people get down to well what's it for so there's always there are always stories around these things about now here's an interesting thing so i just analyzed data from 40,000 couples that were starting couples therapy 80 percent of them said they were not having any fun anymore there was no play fun or adventure in their lives anymore yeah i thought that was so sad yeah so one of our dates is really about adventure play and fun so you can say so what's what's it been like for you i mean what is it you know what's made what's made you happy when you have adventures and what adventures do you want to have and what's it been like in your family do you come from an adventurous family or you know what's that about how do you play how did you play as a kid how do you play with your dad or your mom and you know what's played been like for us you know what's fun you know and uh-huh so here again we're you know we're firing up curiosity and here's a topic that i couldn't believe it 80 percent of couples coming in the couples therapy you know sure sex is a problem almost all of them yeah but playing fun is more of a problem than sexist well again sex is often the outcome of play and fun right right um you're big into it's not just about how couples fight you're concerned about that yeah but you're concerned also about how couples make up right it's very important i think to you know maintain friendship a relationship very important to really feel like your partner is on your side partners your ally your partner's your best friend and your partner respects you and values you and cherishes you and maintaining friendship and intimacy is just as important as dealing with conflict you know we read something uh very helpful not too long ago that kids always witness their parents fight but generally the make-ups behind closed doors and so they don't ever gather the tools to make up because you hide that from them and uh we're not great at it but we do occasionally force ourselves to make up in front of the kids which is awkward for everyone but fuck it we do it you know well this is good research that supports a guy named mark comings and Notre Dame has found that when your kids are young you need to make up physically if they if they witness the fight you need to physically hug and kiss one another for them to feel because it's simple yeah otherwise they're blood pressure stays high oh interesting let me tell you one story so you can measure a couple's marital happiness by asking them questions or you can take a 24 hour urine sample of their children and measure stress hormones in the urine oh my goodness oh they pick up on unhappiness between the parents so that making up physically that mark comings found was so important for kids is really critical right that makes me so sad that the little people have that in their you know um in all of this exploration into marriage and what makes them succeed and fail have you ever asked yourself the global question is this even natural is this do we believe this is how this species should be living right living do you even ask yourself that do you care yeah I do and you know one of the things that is very exciting about this field of research which really began you know about 50 years ago when psychologists got involved in studying relationships is that another field developed is at the same time a field called social epidemiology really interesting field because what they found was they were looking at what predicts how long somebody's going to live you know healthy though be is it diet is it exercises cholesterol you know what is it how do you how you stay healthy and happy and have well-being and live a long time and a guy named Leonard Syme started this research research with a student Lisa Berkman it was at Berkeley that they began and uh Len Syme was very interested in diet and he was he was noticing that Chinese immigrants to this country live longer than European immigrants and he thought well maybe it's because they you know they cook in a lock and they eat this healthy vegetables and stuff like that yeah so he started off and really looking at serum cholesterol and diet and they did a classic study called the Alameda County study where they studied people for nine years and what predicted longevity was the quality of people's closest relationships it wasn't food it wasn't diet it wasn't cholesterol yeah and that has been replicated over and over again so that what predicts how long you're going to live how healthy you'll be now quickly you recover from illness when you get sick and how wealthy you'll be and how well your kids do in life and even in middle age how healthy they will be when they start you know when their bodies start winding down it's all about the quality of your closest relationships what the French actually underestimate how social of an animal we are right the notion of being a hermit just not how we're designed yeah so if you can have a love relationship that lasts a lifetime then you're gonna live 15 years longer it's gotta be good can't do that so I think it's natural okay what are your thoughts about open relationships you know uh there hasn't been very much research done on them there's you know there's you know what are in Madison did a classic study of gay male relationships and this is before AIDS before the 80s and they found that there were no gay male relationships that lasted 35 years longer that weren't open relationships now they hadn't studied of course the relationship that dissolved you know in the struggles with having open relationships but that was a very interesting finding and so you know there's something to it well there's several of my friends in the gay community here males not females but uh have said to me that it's uh far more standard in long-term gay male relationships have to have some kind of openness and I don't know if that's just testosterone squared or what else I think it is I think it is and you know they're 45 percent of male relationships now post-AIDS are monogamous and it's much higher among lesbian couples right and in between for heterosexual couples you ever heard this great job um what what what do lesbians bring on a second date uh the moving band are you all yeah and then what are gay men bring on a second date what what second date that's a good old joke yeah so you know there hasn't been much research on open relationships polyamory things like that for one thing it's so many different things open relationships yeah you know so have so many different forms there's also different so I was the one out for my nine-year relationship was an open relationship and then again we had parameters that maybe other people didn't have which is like I had no interest in never knowing if anything happened nor did she that might be a difference that some people had so that's unusual yeah you'd have to I guess you'd have all these sub brackets of who you were studying like yeah what version of it is do you we slept at home together every single night for nine years now all right uh and my swingers like to watch their partners having sex with people yeah can't relate to it but it's fascinating right yeah um you know and then one common form of polyamory is a couple in their 40s heterosexual couple in their 40s finds a woman in her 20s that they both have sex with okay and usually one of them falls in love with her more and he breaks up the relationship that's a common form now I've read 15 books now on polyamory oh you have yeah I mean I'm curious about it people asked about it so my my conclusion after all of it was I don't think it impact I felt very loved by her I never ever felt second to anything it was a beautiful wonderful relationship but because maintaining a sex life is so challenging and requires so much vulnerability if you have an option to have sex without all that hard work I think for at least for us it was it was detrimental to our own sex life I see so again now if I was older could we have navigated that maybe I'm not sure but it is it's just interesting to me because I did it and I I was very happy and in love and but the sex life did I think take a pretty big hit because of how much easier it is to just have sex with our love without all the vulnerability and all the love work yes right the heavy lifting well the other thing I think is that a lot of gay couples and polyamorous couples have this rule that you can have sex but don't fall in love right don't have strong emotional attachment and that's hard to do because we secrete oxytocin after every orgasm yeah you get a love hormone get the love hormone the cuddle hormone more than men though right no no I mean oh well men secrete vasopressin as well as oxytocin is that's the time to get the fuck out of there no oh vasopressin is the possessive part oh attachment oh right it's like you know warding off rivals you're mine right so men get this ugly you're mine yeah when they have when they have an orgasm with a woman no I don't like that no I don't like that you know so that's vasopressin women don't have vasopressin well there's also when we think about monogamy in marriage there's this really fascinating data that's coming out of New York City right that the women are getting married far less than they were right in the 70s and 80s and the explanation I'm hearing is that they don't need men anymore like there was a period where if you wanted to live in that city and eat you needed a man in your life and now you don't need that and when they don't need men it's like economically they don't need men and when they don't we're seeing much higher numbers choose not to have that yeah male commitment I'm just curious I'm not right to say that's right or wrong or good or bad or anything I'm just here it's just something interesting to think about and yeah and I think probably the inducement to marry would be you know much more intimate much more about well you know he actually is helps me fulfill my dreams he actually is on my side well that's a kind of a beautiful takeaway is that presumably the marriages that are happening now are really happening for right the nicest reasons yeah right yeah so maybe it's a positive statistic Monica do you have any questions for the good doctor I feel like you hit them all really yeah I'm pretty proud okay impressed oh I did have one question because I think in blink one of the facial expressions that you cited as contemptuous was eye rolling right yes that's right and I do that all the time it's a tick it's just a tick and I think about that all the time now because I'm like oh no am I doing that or am I feeling that am I giving that off yeah I mean there are you know there are facial expressions that are habits yeah and even in certain families right you know there are impolikements written about this that there's certain facial expressions that are underliners you know they serve to underline something and you know so you know some people wrinkled their nose it's kind of a disgust facial expression but it's really to emphasize something right underline it so an eye roll could be that and you know and in families you know people do things like you know they wrinkle their brow in a certain way they knit their brow in a certain way to communicate they really mean it oh it's really serious yeah and usually those kinds of facial expressions get held for longer than a natural facial expression oh interesting so the eye roll I have to see it but I've done it six or seven times without even yeah could be slower could be slower more meaningful and then it can have a different interpretation right it's really an empty it's an emphasizing something right underlying I guess it's also would require just communication because if a partner saw it and took it in as something negative it might just require like oh I just do that and it doesn't and it's so it's a it's a habit well it's usually accompanied by the left lip corner being pulled laterally and creating a dimple on the left side so that company's the eye roll usually and that's the universal facial expression for contempt I'm gonna go look for that next time you roll right here's the muscle called bucksinator that doesn't bucksinator yeah okay you're probably gonna be the only person I feel like I could get away with asking this question to both jewish and you're a doctor that studies marriage we're not where I grew up one of the stereotypes about jewish men was that they make the best husbands have you ever heard this stereotype I've heard what do you think that's rooted in hey is there any data to support that do jewish men get divorced at a lower rate than i don't think there's any data to support at all okay yeah it's just a fun night sometimes the monica and I argue all the time I say sometimes stereotypes are really flattering like jewish men make great husbands who wouldn't want to hear that I think it's because jewish women are strong it's a value in the culture uh-huh women to be strong and it really goes back to moses you know when when the women approached moses and said you know you're giving away the land you're apportioning the land what about us we've lost our husbands in war you know what land do we get we're widows and moses said they're right you know and you know he yielded to them so there's a tradition that women who stand up for themselves are sexier they're more valued so we like strong women I think can right so we grew up with strong mothers uh-huh you know my mother was a very strong one I mean my mom did you marry yours in some ways I think in some ways I mean she has the annoying quality of being right most of the time sure I always think you kind of hit the lottery because if there's any truth to the fact that you do want to marry your mother I happen to be blessed with the greatest mother ever to live so I got lucky in that the person I was trying to replicate was like a great role model for that but if you you know if you you don't hit the lottery and you're trying to yeah what feels familiar is a lot of dominance and critique then you know you're kind of screwed I guess yeah but you know on the contrary you know it's always a counter example right in the Orthodox Jewish community women are really you know subjugated yeah I just recently watched a um a documentary on the Hasidam and that's a rough uh yeah I think I've seen this one yeah and it's very sad but it's not mainstream to it right right um well uh Dr. Gaiman has been so fun to talk to you again I know that I've referenced somebody's work more and gotten it more wrong but still reference it all wrong I thought he worked at Stanford I've said that in the past I always get the percentages wrong when I say how many people are dicks but I but I have the gist I think I can sincerely thank you because I doubt in your mind you would ever consider the fact that I 11 years ago read about your work and I made a conscious effort to avoid these four horsemen that's great and I really am active in doing that and so is Kristin and um so you know I'm not saying we wouldn't still be here but I promise you it's made a huge difference well you have good intuition too I think well it's that mom of mine yeah I have a photograph uh we have this wall of ancestors in our house and you know photographs and I have a photograph that I treasure which is a picture of my mom and I you know I remember she kind of said we're going into this this room and it was a photographer for some reason she wanted to go into a professional photographer she had this picture taken the photographer wanted me to hold a stuffed animal which I wasn't interested in doing you know at the time and but you know it's this picture of me sitting with my mom and we both look so relaxed and you show this company and I look so confident you know being with her I just love that picture yeah so I had a good mom is really a wonderful thing well good luck to you and everything I hope that book does exceptional uh you know good luck and thank you continue on your good work thank you and now my favorite part of the show the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman I know I generally sing songs about facts but I want to sing a song about Monica okay um Monica Monica are there any famous Monica songs no it's not a good enough name for that most songs its names the kinks have a song about Monica oh how does it go I'll play it is it an English oh yeah you know kinks Lola hello yeah I do oh my god he always said Monica Padman Monica Padman oh manne can knows every line this is actually written about the Monica Monica knows every line Monica knows every line yeah that was exciting it was but um I think I'm gonna go to the drawing board as they say great and I'm gonna start playing with some songs and your name thank you yeah that'll make me feel weird and good you know we just got back from uh San Antonio we had so much fun there deep in the heart of Texas and uh Michael Rosenbaum was our guest yeah but he was high-sterical very fun and something that he does that you appreciate greatly oh boy yeah because he does many impressions he is a master of impression he's a master we could have him on as an impression expert yeah you know what you know why that would suck as an expert on experts is um no one could explain how they do like mimics I don't there's no like advisable technique to get any of us to be able to do that well he told us what sort of grove him there but root yeah but he yeah how to do it but maybe the whole episode could just be him going through all of his impressions seamlessly he could do everyone it was crazy darns and ears everyone but but what you really appreciated about it is he doesn't look at you when he does he was so grateful that's when you know you're a real impressionist oh is that the right is that called all I heard was a dig on me no do you think you are one impressionist do I think I'm an impressionist yeah would you know but I think I do 20 or so impressions pretty pretty I feel like you've set out like I don't like do impressions well in that that's not no that my comedy generally is wordplay exactly that's not like the type of comedy you take pride that that's right but and yet I also do some impersonations you do some wonderful ones and then when I do that my stare into your soul yes but all rosy rosen penis he he throws it out to the crowd I guess just doesn't look at your face he finds a neutral zone yeah it's pretty nice now do I do it because I'm I want to interact with you or this would be the worst case scenario I'm wanting to enjoy your reaction of liking it that would be the worst that would be bad I don't think that's what it is I don't either but I do think it's probably monitoring your reaction to know if I should knock it off I think that's what it is actually now that I are you sure because I think if that were true you'd stop immediately stop quickly instead you keep going well there is a period where I think I can win you over and then I throw in the towel um I think it's because that's just where like you decided to focus like because you think it requires like some you have to like get into a zone you have to focus and I think that's just what you're doing you have to leave your identity and kind of join someone else's and then maybe you're just someone I don't write back it's like a new person yeah yeah yeah interesting oh my god who is this right i'm gonna hold a piece of paper in front of my face your voice this is it this is tremendous i could still see i could still see half an eye and it was I'll hold you vertically now i'm ear allowed to look at my face when you do stuff okay thank you're allowed to also it would have been extra we're because i didn't really know him well right that was your first time eating in real life yeah i think we met like one one other time quickly but yes spending real time yeah yeah yeah yeah quickly in my bed but anyway um so if you don't know someone and they're staring into your eyes and doing an impression it's that would be excruciating well it was like Jim Carrey even still still okay no one no one is too good no one is too good to not look away okay um but you know Rosenbaum told us a scary story well can say it's not exactly he loves a word he explained a movie to you yes which didn't happen but he did it with like impressions so it was like he was telling a scary story and he well what he did was he was telling us the first scene in the last scene of the original one a stranger calls right right and it was very spooky and you know he not only was he imitating of course all the characters in the in the movie yeah but his his beats in his timing were very horary they were he took his sweet ass time yeah that's what i mean i would have probably been nervous i lost you and started speeding through it and then it would have lost all this impact no you would have been scared you would have of course again been uncomfortable it had a lot of um suspense suspense and pop outs yeah i knew that i was actually scared but and that i was going to be scared for a little while about it yeah and then the next day i was still thinking about it you were yeah and i was thinking like in my brain what is that like why does that have such a resonance this is what i ask you all the time when you get scared because numerous times you've watched them at our house and then you go home and you're quite nervous to go home yeah and i try to get into your head and i'm like but you know it's a movie how do you convince yourself it's not a movie i don't even know how i could right i have a theory now oh right so yeah when we're watching when i'm watching a scary movie i like i really feel like i'm in that scenario i it does not feel like there's a barrier like it feels like me who is experiencing this and my mirror neurons are firing like crazy yes they're pop rocking uh-huh and pop blocking and and i think it's because i live with some amount of fear in my life always so when something fearful is happening my response is is a quick you're always one stop away from feeling scared just naturally yes exactly like my body recognizes the feeling of being scared quickly uh-huh so then when i watch these movies i feel that and i wonder if there's like a study i want to look into it okay about men and women and the enjoyment of horror movies oh yeah um anecdotally i feel like women like them more than men oh really yeah okay i was gonna say the opposite well because i think they're they're more impactful i know but but then they're also like extra scared yeah so i don't know i don't even know if i stand by what i just said i don't know i mean i i'll have to look maybe i just think of twilight so twilight is not a lot of women like i like i think a lot of women like the movie and that was the drug and sophia copel no not at all what's that guy's name rubber pet thank you rubber pet oh of course wavy wobba would know because it's a fellow wobby it's another wobby wobba waderson yeah yeah so i'm just curious like if women don't like horror movies as much because women have more fear and here's what i do know women consume those murder mystery shows way more than men i do know the demographics on those shows like your date lines and your pointy twenties where there's an abduction those yeah and lifetime that that is is a highly female demographic.

That's true. Well, lifetime, I don't think because of horror. Life times like romance and stuff. Oh, well, lifetime did our escaping our Kelly.

It's like playing- Yeah, I'm not a horror movie. No, no, but nor is it romantic. You just said it's all about romance. And if you think that was romantic, then.

It used to be, lifetime used to be like equivalent to a romance novel. Oh, yeah, and I think at some point, a decade ago, they realized women like to get the shit scared out of them because there's always, even the movie of the week, they're like time producing. It was always like a husband that was being the shit out of somebody. There was always some general threat, some kind of really relatable female concern.

Yeah. I guess. I sound like I'm that familiar with the programming of lifetime, but I do know that lifetime does have a bunch of those kind of murdering mystery deals. All right.

Okay. Anywho. Who are we even talking about today? Michael Rosenbaum.

We're talking about John Gottman. Well, we owe it to John Gottman on Rosenbaum's fact checks to really get into his stuff. Well, we're going to. Don't worry.

Okay. You're okay. All right. Well, it was exciting to have him.

You talk about him all the time. You know what's so funny is I do. I think I probably have referenced that person more than any other person yet for whatever reason. I had never even known his name.

Like just what he discovered was so compelling to me that I remembered the details, but I hadn't seen his name in print since I read the link nine years ago. 182 years ago. Yes. And so I even think it was you who said we should have John Gottman on.

And I was like, who the fuck is John Gottman? I was like, oh my God, how embarrassing. I've been quoting John Gottman for nine years. Yeah.

So it was exciting. And he was really cute when he arrived because he had like a leather jacket on and stuff. Anything that was cute. Yeah, he was great.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah. He's not a he's not a young man. No, but he was brightly.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. But I guess, and I don't say that in an age this way. I say like when I'm over 75, the notion of having to travel somewhere to do anything work related sounds a little daunting to me.

So I guess I'm just I'm really impressed when right when old folks are still in the mix. Me too. Yeah, I agree. We appreciate it, Gottman.

Yeah. Gottman Turner overdrive. Do you know that man? Well, Foxman Turner overdrive.

Big seventies, man. No, no. Did you understand earlier that I was talking about Blink 182? Nope.

When did that happen? And then I said 182 years ago. No, I didn't. That was a good riddle.

Thanks. And I failed it. I did like a couple Blink 182 songs. Which ones?

That one that was like, I'm feeling it. Feeling it. Oh, right, right, right. If my memory serves me, it was someone who's excited to have some sex.

Is that not what this song? Oh, sure. I want to be done. No, I'm feeling it.

Oh, god, I wish I could remember more of those words other than feeling it. Did Blink 182 sing All-Star? No. Oh, I liked All-Star.

Wow. These are musical resident musical experts. Totally. I really liked the drummer Travis from Blink 182.

Oh, yeah. Primarily because he had a big, sweet tat-two of a Cadillac cymbal on his chest, which I thought was pretty titties. Did you want to get one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For sure. But he already had it so prominently displayed famously that I knew people would, you know, accuse me of copying them. What tattoos did you almost get and not get? None.

But you know, I covered one up. Yeah. I had a huge one that I covered up. And my defense of that was it was on the cover of a soul side album when I was 18, and I thought it was really cool.

And it was a sun with fire coming out of it. Right. After the fact, as these became popular, you could have described the fire that was coming out as, quote, tribal. And I did not like the direction that tribal tattoos were heading in, nor the folks that were wearing them.

You know, giant tribal tattoo. So it turned on me, basically. Oh, I see. I had this thing that I liked.

You know what would be a great example? It would be like if I was Hindi and I'd gotten that swastika on me and then all of a sudden the Nazi party comes into power and you're like, oh, heavens, no, I've got to change this in a hurry. All right, sure. Yeah, that's basically what happened to me.

I started noticing everyone on an MTV show who was 18, had some gigantic tribal thing. I was like, I got to fix this right quick. The irony is you were on an MTV show. Well, that is a very good point.

And it was on display several times on there. You can see it on baby mama. Yeah. Listeners, if you're interested in seeing that tattoo.

Well, tattooed. I got it. I got it right before I met Kristin. Got it covered.

Yeah. So, oh, you talked about the famous study about hearing a thud in your head. So that is the Rosenhahn experiment. I'm so glad you found it.

I was buckling up that you were going to tell me. Well, because I watched it in an eight-part YouTube documentary thing that I think had been produced by the BBC or something. So I was like, oh, she's going to say she doesn't exist or something. Yeah, I thought maybe it didn't.

But it does. The Rosenhahn experiment or thud experiment, this is a paragraph so buckle up, OK, was an experiment conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. The experimenters feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals and then acted normal afterwards. They were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and were given anti-psychotic drugs.

The study was conducted by psychologist David Rosenhahn, a Stanford University professor, and published by the Journal of Science under the title on being sane and insane places. It is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis. Rosenhahn's study was done in eight parts. Maybe your YouTube thing was each part.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, because there's a really fun twist at the end of it that I'm sure you're going to get to. I don't know. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or pseudo-patients, three women and five men, including Rosenhahn himself, who briefly feigned auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 psychiatric hospitals in five states in the United States, all were admitted and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders.

After admission, the pseudo-patients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had no longer experienced any additional hallucinations, all were forced to admit to having a mental illness and had to agree to take anti-psychotic drugs as a condition of their release. The average time that the patients spent in the hospital was 19 days, all but one were diagnosed with schizophrenia and remission before their release. I mean, like all but one. Isn't that crazy?

Jesus. So that the awesome end of that is, I don't know which hospital, but one in particular that had prided itself on being the gold standard of psychiatric evaluation said, that could have never happened at our hospital. I challenge him to send us five over the next three months. We will tell you which ones are full of shit.

And so three months goes by or whatever the term was and they ask him, okay, who was it? And he says it was these four people and he says, I didn't send anyone. It was a fucking double fuck you. Oh my God.

Isn't that awesome, but I do believe this led. This whole thing led to the DSM. This is what created. Yeah, you said that.

I didn't see that at all. I can look again. Oh, maybe not quite directly, but this was a popular thing when it happened. And I think as a result, you know, maybe some other things were happening, but then they decided to standardize the evaluation, which is self problematic.

When you just told that twist, I felt like it was a horror movie. A little bit. I got a little scared. Scared that you wouldn't be sent to us, like you're trick or something.

No, no one. I just got scared. Maybe you need one of those thunder shirts that give dogs a really heavy shirt you wear all the time. So you feel safe and not skittish.

I should probably have like an anxiety animal, but I'm a big animal person. Right. So that would give me more anxiety. I want you to get a super obnoxious, anxiety animal, like a fucking adult male chimpanzee.

That'd be fun. I mean, it would just tear the shit out of everyone's house and car, but you would have this lovely peaceful smile on your face as you felt. By the way, it would work because you'd be so distracted by the havoc your friend was causing that you could never evaluate your own safety. Other than that, you'd be in great danger from the chimp.

No, you'd love me. He wouldn't hurt me. Then you would most certainly have to raise him from a baby. I like the idea of having a tiny chimp with me.

Yeah, bubbles, like Mike Jackson had. Oh, he had one? Yeah, bubbles. You don't remember his chimp?

No. Bubbles were diapers, not hella bubbles unfortunately. Oh, unfortunately. Fortunately, there was a leaped diaper.

But yeah, he traveled all around with bubbles. And then obviously bubbles took up residence at Neverland Ranch. I am curious what happened to bubbles, because again, the chimp is the worst pet a human being could have, because they're five times the strength of a human and as smart as a seven-year-old. So you're in, you know, imagine your current seven-year-old was five times stronger than you.

That's just a recipe for disaster. Ugh. I don't think so. Bubbles was in Florida now.

Oh, he died? He retired in Florida? Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know about bubbles.

OK. And so what are you saying? And this is so twisted. That he had a dream?

Yes. We were just joking one minute ago. And then it got really real. Look, man, Mike Jackson is a very troubling figure.

You just add up, you know, you've got bubbles in the max. It gets worse and worse. Paying off any people to get out of being prosecuted for pedophilia. You have the room they discovered in his house after his death.

That was full child pornography. Yeah. You have him holding his baby over that. Oh my god, I forgot about that.

I mean, that was that was bonkers. Yeah. He must have. Well, this is a good topic because we got into it on the flight home from San Antonio.

I think we're only presented two options in this country. It's either your for justice or you're just super tolerant and compassionate. Right. I don't think people realize you can be like uber compassionate and demand justice and that people pay the consequences that are due to them.

Like I can. So I guess what I'm saying is I feel quite bad for Mike Jackson. Me too. There's that.

Me too. All those things combined tell me that person didn't feel great inside. And we know he was abused. Like there was horrible stuff happening.

Yeah, I mean, he's heavily medicated and all these things. I think, you know, he should have been punished with the full weight of the law of molested kids. Yeah. And yet I also could shed a tear for his life, you know.

Me too. Yeah, yeah. And I feel that way about a lot of criminals. I know.

I watch the most just troubling, troubling documentary on the front line a couple weeks ago about this doctor who was practicing on the state of American reservation. And he molested over the course of 10 years, like 100 boys. And they couldn't interview nearly any of the boys that this had happened to because they were all in prison. Almost every one of his victims was in prison.

They showed a few of them. They had like face tattoos and they had gotten really buff. And I was just looking at them going, at least poor guys did everything that they could to reclaim their masculinity. Yeah.

And now they're in prison and this human sent them there. Yeah. So you can have you obviously feel so bad that these boys lied by another human being. I also really wish that whatever early crimes they committed have been met with a system that could truly rehabilitate and give them tools and give them therapy and help them rejoin our society.

I know. And then yet, of course, if they hurt people who are violent, I think they got to serve their time. Yeah. So yeah, I'm the same, although it's like, where does the pattern stop or does it?

Like that man who molested all them probably had an equally horrible something. Like keep going back and back at these patterns. They just perpetuate this horrible, horrible behavior. Well, that was the coolest thing I've been Rachel Wood said, which is abuse is a virus.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Mm.

Cheers, John Gottman. Oh, OK, so, oh boy, I'm going to stare over here while I do that. Oh, boy. Mm.

Did they cite John and brain rules for babies? There is a part where he mentions the Gottman Institute. Mm. But it's not really the part that you were talking about.

So I don't know. Maybe he just, maybe this person just is really knowledgeable in their studies and stuff. And then so he just used that's like now in his brain, part of his philosophy. Yeah, you know.

I believe that theory. I'm not going to say that anyone was stealing on here. Stealing ideas, plagiarizing. Well, not intentionally.

I think we all plagiarize all the fucking time and we genuinely don't really doing it. No ideas, like brand new in your brain. What was I showing you the other day? Oh, Hooper.

I showed the girls I put Hooper on, the great Bert Reynolds movie directed by Hal Needham. Oh, uh-huh. The goddamn opening credit sequence is almost identical to my character and induction in chips. I mean, he's getting ready and it's all these shots of his different scars.

And then he takes a bunch of pills and I take it. No, I can tell you with absolute certainty that when I was writing that scene, never once did I think, oh, I want to do it. I want to do it like Hooper. Right.

Not even like, as a no-maj or a nod. Mm-hmm. Nope. I didn't even remember that title sequence.

I know. But I was watching it. That's crazy. I was definitely watching it.

And then, yeah, how am I to know? No, you don't know. This idea I got from my brain wasn't a memory. Exactly.

I don't know that. No, there's no way to know. That's why you got to be, you got to keep your good ideas under lock and key and never tell anyone because you never know what they're going to use and then think they created. That's the takeaway.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then I guess all you can do is if someone pointed that out like, hey, man, I think you ripped off Hooper.

I would have to watch it and then just go, oh, it's quite possible. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, man, that's pretty darn close.

And I love that movie. Yeah. But also, it's in movies that it happens all the time in songs. It art.

It's just like repeating stuff. Yeah. And probably not the first time they introduced a character by showing off a bunch of stuff. No.

So, you know, it's not like it was the plot line of Forrest Gump. We're like, well, come on, buddy. No one else had thought of that. Right, right, right.

But even that, I'm sure is could be connected to some Greek play. Some Greek play about a guy who walked across Athens. Yeah. I fought the Romans and carried people out.

Yeah. That's a good movie. Oh, really is. Really is.

It's a really, really good movie, though. Uh-oh. It's like one of those movies that I know is really good. I've seen it multiple times, but I don't ever want to watch that movie again in my whole life.

Interesting, because it was one that Rosenbaum cited as one he can't watch five minutes of without watching the whole thing. And I'm in that camp, too. Yeah. And you know why, for me?

I think, and then it made me really start breaking out what makes different movies highly watchable, because for me, I was thinking, oh, you know, movies that are shifting time and space, maybe even genres within movies. Yeah. And Forrest Gump's like 25 different lives. Totally.

And you keep shifting ages and timelines. Yeah. I wonder if, like, just when you're getting bored of it, you're like, I shouldn't rewatch this movie for the 11th time. All of a sudden they're wheezing in, and you're like, oh, wait.

Yeah. As long as this go, yeah. Yeah. Keeps your attention.

That's for sure. Your attention. But it is, there's like a sadness to that movie. Because he's mentally challenged.

I don't know. I don't think it's that. I mean, there's some actual sad things that happen. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Um, Jenny.

Robin. Robin Wright Penn, Jenny. Right. I don't even think it's Robin Wright Penn anymore, is it?

Robin Wright. Oh. Oh, you went the other way. Robin Wright.

What if they were married and she changed her name from Robin Wright to Robin Wright Pan? And then they got divorced and she changed it to Robin Pan. Exactly. And she dropped her maiden name.

That would be a cool flip. Could've. Anyway, yes, she's in it. Well, it's unrequointed love.

Do you think that's it? I'm sure it's Robin. There's a lot of life-sad things like that, like not like the war, of course, is sad. Sure.

Yeah. There's just this like underlying sadness with the mom. Yeah. Like she had been clearly molested by her dad.

Yeah. I forgot about that. God. Yeah.

You have a favorite line from the movie? I do. I don't think I know it well enough to quote. I like when he goes, sorry for ruining your block Panther party.

Sorry for ruining your black Panther party. Oh. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's nice to me a little sad. Oh, John Gottman. Oh, John Gottman. Other stuff.

I'm just making fun of the fact. I'm just being self-aware. I'm making fun of the fact that we've talked about him for one second. Well, there's not- Which I'm enjoying.

Oh, perfect. I'll stop worrying. Okay. You're really highlighting that there's not any fact.

You're putting a bit of a magnifying glass on the lack of facts. Geez. A magnifying glass on the lack of facts. Could that be the title of your autobiography?

Oh, my God. Maybe. What does it even mean? It's a mystery.

It's a mystery. You find out on the last page what it means. Yes. Well, I got a little nervous because during this episode I asked him a couple of things, but I said it seems like some personalities are just going to be better suited for this whole thing.

Marriage. Positive relationships than others. And he said the dimension that makes people better suited for relationships is agreeability. Oh, sure.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It definitely makes sense. But I don't know.

I don't like love highly agreeable people. Well, I think if someone, let's say you're Steve Jobs, I don't know what his wife was like or his ex-wife. So I don't want to accuse her of being in a certain way, but there are people who are just in general highly acquiescent and they don't feel like it's a failure or a loss. Yeah.

It doesn't pain them to go like fine. I'll go along with that plan. Yeah. Which is totally cool.

So if someone is happy in their life being super acquiescent and they actually don't want to make any decisions and they want to be along for the ride, then certainly that would be a great partner for someone like Steve Jobs. Totally. That's true. Yeah.

I don't desire that personally. I want someone who's going to fight tooth and nail to do the thing they want to do so that I don't ever feel like someone's doing something just to make me happy. That's my bigger fear than not even getting to do the thing I want to do. Mm-hmm.

Like how did you feel when you looked over at me and we were at that magic show? Well, okay. Where's this going? Don't try to guess where it's going.

I was asking a very sincere question. Well, I thought you thought it was funny. Oh, it was really funny. It was a blast there.

Right. So I wasn't like, oh, no. He's not having fun. Right.

Right. But you wanted me to think that. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no.

I was wondering if like if I could do a motorcycle race, I would be really concerned you weren't joining yourself. Mm-hmm. And like, but some guys would just, they want their old lady wherever they're at and they don't give a fuck if they like motorcycle race. They just want them there.

Mm-hmm. I'm just not that way. You know, I don't think you're that way. You wouldn't want someone just.

No. Right? I wouldn't. I would feel like, I don't know, I feel like this is like a weird three part thing or like it's like stacked because you, so you didn't want to go to the magic show.

You know, in general, I'm not very interested in what life's magic. Of course. So why did you do that? To spend time with you and Rob.

Okay. So, so then it's a wrap. Well, hold on. And 25% of me was very open to witnessing something like David Blaine, which I probably would like.

Right. Right. Like if I were like Harrison Ford during that David Blaine, David Blaine, he's like, get the fuck out of my house. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like it was shocked at his core. Yeah. How are my house?

I feel like that could have been me. You know, so I'm not opposed to having that experience, and I'm slightly open to having it. Okay. So if you went to spend time with Rob and me, then you do want to be there, like this feels like a trap kind of to be like, okay, I'll go to just be with you, but I don't want to be there.

And then what about what's other person supposed to do? Like, I mean, well, I think the motorcycle race is a better analogy because you're, you're likely never going to enjoy motorcycle race. Right. That's not true at all.

If I was there, yeah, with friends, I could be anywhere. That's true. That's true. I could be anywhere.

I mean, I guess the magic shows different because you can't really talk. So you do have to watch. Yeah. It's not encouraged.

Although we did do quite a fair amount of communicating. We did talk. We were not very respectful. Yeah.

But I. We never got shushed. Well, now I feel like you were upset that whole time. Oh my God, you do?

Well, yeah. I wasn't upset at all. Or you were dreading it. What I was asking you was were you nervous when I was there?

Oh, I hope he enjoys this. Well, I shouldn't. I shouldn't. Well, no, I'm not overthinking it.

I shouldn't have to think that because you should never be doing something that makes me think that. Like you shouldn't be just acquiescing or placating. Well, we just got our answer. Our answer is you wouldn't want to be with someone that acquiesces.

Yeah. That's something to be with someone. Yeah. But I trust that you wouldn't do that.

But you did. I would. I'd go see anything. I'd go see things with you that I would otherwise hate to go see.

For sure. And then you'll be upset about it. No. That means I'm high on the agreeability chart, apparently.

But you know. But you just said that you don't like doing things you don't like doing. Well, you know what? You and I are in a bunch of different paradigm.

Why? We're applying a paradigm to you and I that doesn't exist. So for Chris and I, it's different because I'm with Chris in every single day all day and I'm going to be to like die. So I'm in no way thinking, oh, I should leap at the opportunity to spend time with her because I'm just going to spend lots of time with her, whereas you're a friend.

And so I might leap at any opportunity to join you at do something because we're friends and I don't see you all day long every day. I mean, we kind of do. You know what I'm saying? We're kind of putting a paradigm on it that maybe is not the right paradigm.

Right. I can definitely see where Mary couples who are going to fucking see each other nonstop. One of them, the husband's like, I'm going to the truck polls this weekend. You're coming.

And she's like, no, I hate the truck polls. It's noisy as fuck. It smells like exhaust. Yeah.

And I want to do it. Yeah. But friends would probably do it. You know?

Yeah. Anyway. Oh, okay. You said in the mask you live in that they say that 50% of boys are abused during childhood.

Physically abused. Yeah. I could not find that stat. Although I didn't rewatch the whole movie.

It's at the very end. There's title cards at the end. Okay. I'll have to look.

I looked up stats on it. And I got a bunch, but I couldn't find that one. So I will report back after I watch it, but they did say that 25% of boys are bullied. That's a lot.

And then in another article, I found researchers have found that at least one in six men have experienced sexual abuse or assault, whether in childhood or as adults, and this is probably a low estimate since it doesn't include non-contact experiences, which can also have lasting negative effects. So. That's a hard number to know because it's so underreported. Yeah.

Exactly. Feel safe saying that out loud. I think that about like rape statistics, too, that are already like so high, but so many of those aren't not getting reported. Yes.

I think that's about all statistics. Like anything that's remotely negative, like drug use, there's no way what they're asking people. Right. I'm going to be committing that they use drug.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. True.

True, true, true, true. Well, that wraps up Gotman. Sure. Well, we had a lot of fun just getting to those few facts, didn't we?

Yeah. I did. Yeah, me too. And boy, do we have fun in San Antonio.

I gave the inaugural wiring booting shooting, so apropos that we were in Texas for that. Exactly. We had a t-shirt gun made. We now own a t-shirt gun.

Thank you, Ryan Hanson, for bringing that idea to our brains. Yes. It should have been Ryan who shot the inaugural t-shirt. Exactly.

Yeah. It would have been what it couldn't have been. Yeah. But you shot it first.

Mm-hmm. And then I shot it next. Yeah. First shot was cool.

I did like a TJ Hooker barrel roll on the ground and got up and shot it. Then I tried to pop up from behind the couch. Yeah. And boy, did I shoot it into the second row.

It was about 10 feet away and had an actual thunderbolt of panic in my chest. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. I went straight to this thing.

I saw an HBO reel sports about how there's this movement to put nets up along the first baseline in Major League Baseball because people get fucking wrapped. Oh, yeah. Like bad, bad, bad. And they showed pictures and stuff of these different people who've been injured by foul balls.

I mean, people's heads have been, you know, open up. Decapitated? Not decapitated, but opened up. Oh.

And I immediately went to, oh, Jesus, I'm going to look in the audience and someone's going to be holding a broken nose. Oh. Or a missing eyeball. They were holding a nose.

All of their teeth. And it was still in the shape of a smile. Oh, they're still so happy to be there. Oh, then I would have just gone.

Oh, someone's dentures fell out. That's fine. Right. I mean, they can just slip those back in.

But luckily, and I don't know if the gentleman's downplaying it, but no one's hurt. No one's hurt. He said he ducked and we didn't really ask about the person behind him. That person may have been rendered unable to speak.

And anyway, big, big wave of embarrassment, then followed by what I always do when I'm super embarrassed is go fall laughing when you know, you know, then we kept going. Yeah. That was a real good time. That was fun.

Oh, I did want to say this. This is not an advertisement. We've been touring the country. We've been going to all these historic theaters.

So in San Antonio, we're at the Majestic Theater and it was so beautiful inside. It looked like Pirates of the Caribbean. The ceiling had like little light bulbs in it that looked like stars. Mm-hmm.

And it's such a unique environment to be sitting down in. It just is very exciting. And I just wanted to urge people to go see stuff at these theaters. Oh, that's true.

Not our show. But just go. If you live by a city that's got one of these hundred year old theaters that's been restored, like, go there. It feels so cool being inside of them.

That's true. Yeah. I hadn't been one and forever until we started touring. Yeah.

It's not your way to experience. Yeah. All right. That's my two cent tip for today.

I love you Monica. I love you. Love you. Love you.

Love you too. Love you. Love you. Love you.

Love you. Love you. Love you too.