Hinge expert shares dating advice for ambitious nerds

alright so our friend logan yuri she's a behavioral scientist turned dating coach and according to the analytics on this podcast ninety three percent of your listeners your men and a lot of you are young and according to the data a lot of you are also single and so we thought it'd be cool to have logan come on to talk about dating and it's shockingly just like building a business and that there's actually a process that you could follow you can iterate yourself there and logan actually broke down how sean and i met our spouses and gave a bunch of useful tips on how to meet someone and it's all back by science and honestly it's pretty hilarious so check out this episode on how to meet your future spouse i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to all in in like a days off on a less travel never you logan is a behavioral scientist i know you logan as just my good friend but you also had a book called how not to die alone and now you're on this tear where you've become a little bit of an when it comes to dating but also with masculinity i just think you're a great conversational and a wonderful person and you're really really smart and you have a lot of data to back your a lot of your opinions and you have a netflix show you're the something something something high up on the research side at hinge is that right yeah the director of relationship science but sometimes people just call me this something something something yeah you could put that on your linkedin sam i gotta tell you a story i don't i think i've been sitting on this story for a little while so i met logan for the first you know logan well she's your friend i met logan for the first time at a conference recently she walks up to me i reach out my hands to basically shake her hand she goes straight from my face and just starts fixing my eyebrows look doesn't we haven't met she hasn't introduced herself she's just fixing my eyebrows for me because they're all bushy and crazy and then she's like oh like she's like my dad has crazy eyebrows and then i had just go what and by the way i'm sitting down like a dog i'm sitting at the lunch table so i'm like a pet she's petting me and i just thought the confidence that this woman must have she must come on the show because nobody has that confidence to high high is an insane move the high agency move it was was the craziest things ever anyone's ever done logan explain sean i think i did say can i touch your face but then you didn't seem that into it and then i was like that was the weirdo thing to do well did you feel more into did you think i was i did make an impression on you you did honestly i never forgot i went home and my daughter since then has just been coming up to be doing it and she's like you know what i'm doing and i was yeah you're doing the thing that girl did she goes yeah this is my five year old then so she just need i'm couldn't be happier more happy about this intro well i feel logan i feel like the i you are incredibly confident but you're also like you in a good way you're like con i don't know what a better word where it's like you see like the end goal and you're like i'm going to experiment with this this this and this and i'm just gonna file this process i i don't know what better way to describe it calculating you you try things and i think you said you know you you had a bunch of client three you would teach him about a date and you said men were the easiest ones because you would say like look you need to lose weight you need to dress better and then you need to get a haircut and i need you to then go up and say these five words to this woman and i need you to do that fifty times and they go yes ma'am and then you tell a woman the same thing and she'd be like well your screwed up too or you know what i mean like there was like a difference of of like how people would react to your instruction well i think that's why i love my first million and truly am a fan of the show like have listened to it for years is that i think the way that the two of you see the world is that it's a game and if you know the rules you can win it and i feel like a lot of the show is just teaching people how to play the game and that's really the way that i like to think about the world and so many times i'll be like okay if sam was on my shoulder like what would he say or sam will ask you specifically for your advice on things because i think you sort of just like smile your way through life and i like yeah i could figure that out oh i need to get thirty thousand followers on instagram like duh just do some like shirtless cold plunging videos oh wait that's our other friend but that's how eat yeah we're talking about sa blue but that's how that's how but that's how you live and i think that's that that's interesting i think it's interesting also because we have you know i think like we looked at our analytics saturday ninety three percent of our listeners are men and like the majority of are young men and they look at dating like this impossible thing but they look at like engineering or building up businesses as very like systematic and process oriented it's kind of the same thing though totally yes and this is why i'm so excited to talk to the m audience because i really feel like i can help them with dating because the way that i think about it is dating is a skill so we're born knowing how to love we have these natural instincts but nobody teaches you how a date and dating is actually pretty new in the span of human history so think about how people used to get married so maybe your parcel of land touched somebody else's parcel of land so your dad's would marry you off so that they would be combined or it was about economic institutions but now starting in around eighteen hundreds people started dating on their own and creating these partnerships and so we don't know how to date we don't know how to pick a partner for ourselves and i think a lot of people are failing at it and so that's why i'm here to really help people understand that dating is a skill and you can get better at it so give us like i don't know start start with start start with something here so what's the first interesting thing that that you think is less misunderstood or misunderstood great yes i've been thinking about your audience really as a lot of maximize so people who might feel like they wanna find the perfect partner and so they're gonna keep searching and searching until they find that person and i too am a maximize it would take me months to even buy an espresso machine and so that's even worse when it comes to people finding a partner but the mistake that a lot of people make especially the m m maximize our audience is that they search for too long and so what happens is that they think okay well i want to find a partner who's the hot of this girl and the ambition of this girl and the family background of this girl and i'm just gonna keep searching until i find that person and what they don't understand is that there's diminishing returns over time and so there's this concept called the secretary problem have you heard of it yeah i'm using it right now to search for an apartment perfect okay so this comes from a line of mathematical inquiry called optimal stop theory which is how long should you search and when should you stop so imagine that you're hiring a secretary and there's a hundred candidates you have to go through them one at a time after each one you have to say yes or no and you can't go back so at what point should you stop so what they say is you should go through the first thirty seven people and say who is the single best candidate of those thirty seven and that person now becomes your benchmark the next time that you find someone as good or better than that person hire them the idea is you don't wanna go too long because then all the good people might be in the past but you don't wanna go too short because you don't know the pool and so thirty seven percent is approximately the right amount of time so how do you apply that to dating so imagine hypothetically you're gonna date from ages eighteen to forty what is this thirty seven percent benchmark it's about twenty six point one years old and so by the time you're twenty six you have already met you know a third of the people and you have your benchmark person next time you find someone who you like as much or more than them marry that person and this is such important advice for people because i think that people have their benchmark and then meet someone they like as much and then say well if they're great i can find someone even better and then they get to be forty forty one forty two and all their friends are on their second or third kid and they're still there trying to you know go to vegas for the weekend and no one's available and so i think that maximize do really well in a lot of areas of life but when it comes to dating they can actually get left behind in their search for perfection i think sean she was at my house one time recently and like she was talking to sarah and she was like talking about maximize and then she was like but sarah you are a su or something like that spice satisfy sara she's like you are just okay with like okay i first all sam sam and i are both obsessed with sara she is wonderful so it's not an ins insult at all and actually the research shows that between maximize and are often happier because it's not that they settle or have a low bar it's that when they find something that meets their bar they just buy it or accept it or move in whatever the matter is and so maximize it takes them longer to make a decision and once they make it they question it and satisfy know what they want and then when they find it they're happy with it so i think there really is a happy status see this this makes so much sense to me you know when i was when i was younger i started a company with my two best friends and on one one hand is my buddy trevor if trevor was like me where now i know the word he's a he was a maximize we would always go try to try new food new restaurants so every time every time we go out to eat we try we wanna try and new place every time we try and new place we would try to try a new dish at that place and the reality is that when you do that you have a lot of un unsatisfied lunches right because you try a bunch of stuff that you you don't actually like and you're just kinda hunting for that the satisfying feeling of once in a while finding something great and our other buddy he would just eat k all the time and k is like aggressively mediocre and so one day he was like yeah never tries as many foods as you but i'll be happier every day for lunch and they we kinda stuck with me it's like wow there really are two different approaches for life i'm not sure which one's better objectively but there's definitely a better for me and a better for him you know what i mean yeah so research from adam grant the wharton professor finds that status are happier and that they make just as good of decision so you might think especially someone who listens to this podcast no no but i'm gonna make the better decision by searching for longer and that's not what the research shows yeah but let me ask you a question okay so the secretary thing makes sense to me because hiring a secretary is not like life or death stakes but narrowing the wrong person that's probably one of the the hardest decisions to un yourself from and this approach you have where you're like you should get to twenty six point one years old and then marry the next best person you meet cool sounds cool like did you do that but does anybody actually do sounds insane to do that i did i mean i did that i and you charge shouldn't to do what what year did you what intentionally you might have happened to meet somebody with your twenty six you weren't like i've gone through thirty seven percent of the dating pool i have a benchmark alright i'm gonna if anybody's better than rebecca she's it that that wasn't the way you thought about it was your number of thirty to seven percent though like dude i went on to i went on i probably went on i don't know twenty terrible dates you know what i mean like twenty terrible dates two girlfriends on that in that process and then what i met my wife i was like oh wow she is not just like as good as the benchmark i wasn't even thinking like that i was just like wow she's amazing and i just went from just went to oh she's amazing i wanna be with her and then that was it it was it was like a simple caveman man like me like me like this you know that that's how i was thinking i wasn't like i wasn't mathematically my way there so i'll respond to that which is that people definitely get tripped up in what you just asked about which is like wait i'm way past twenty six point one like have i ruined it it's it sounds very mathematical but it's meant to be a metaphor the idea is that you likely have already met someone who would have been a great partner next time you find someone who you like as much commit to that person don't keep searching so the eighteen to forty as the equivalent of the secretary problem like this is very hypothetical it's like no one knows how long they'll be single for and so the point is just that when you've met a bunch of people and you've sort of gotten a sense of your attractiveness in the market and what the people are like and where you live that when you find someone great commit to them and i'm very happy to talk about this with both of you because both of you are married with kids and there was a version of you that could have said i'm gonna wait until i'm peak fitness and peak wealth and then find the best possible person i could find at that point but instead you found people when you were a bit younger when you didn't reach the level success you're at today and that person's been on the journey with you i think people really underestimate the opportunity costs of not committing to someone when they're younger because when you have this partner that's witnessing your life where you're raising each other where you really know them from a younger age i think there's something so precious about that yeah that's definitely true now the thing you just described it's like i have a batch of friends in my head i can yeah i won't not gonna name them but i i the batch being what wealthy single guys yeah but basically the kinda like there yeah they're still looking and it's like that you found a lot but you're still not committing right so they're yeah becoming they're call forty one forty four and and they're and it's sort of like i don't i think they need to think more like the second peter pans they're peter pan exactly mh a little bit commitment pho a little bit like maximize like is there something better out there they might even be in a relationship they're just not they're either in not all the way nor all the way so i've definitely seen that on the other hand there's a group of people who i feel like they might get to twenty six and they have not actually gone through thirty seven of the day people pool because they're just not putting up numbers there's they're very low volume interactions with you know with with the the other sites i there's a bunch of studies about this right now how like you know x percent of men under the age of thirty you haven't even asked anyone out like know they're just like sort of haven't dated in years or things like that so what about that side of the the the the barbell the the the problem what's your kind of take or or what have you learned for that that group of people yeah that's a great segue if we wanna talk about what's happening with modern men which is a topic that i am pursuing and that i'm really passionate about and so it just reminds me sean of this story where i was doing this valentine's day thing for good morning america and i was talking to the one of the participants and i was like you know how many dates you gone this is like a really good looking guy and he's like well at night i think i could either edit videos which will help me achieve my career goals for youtube or it can go on a date that might be bad so i choose editing the videos right and i was like i am terrified about society like this guy who should be out there killing it is like well my youtube views are more of sure thing so anyway i think we have a lot of issues that we need to talk about but what we're seeing in the data is that young men are falling behind there's this report from the uk called the lost boys report it shows that among men in the uk sixteen through twenty four one in seven are neat which stands for non education employment or training and this number went up forty percent during the pandemic for men only seven percent for women across all of these metrics enrolling in college graduating from college earning money young men are really falling behind so this is an issue for people in this age group and if you project it out to ten years from now it's gonna be an even bigger issue because women are into hyper mating which means that women wanna find someone who's equal or higher level of status and financial success than them and for most of human history that's worked out well right because the guys had the resources and the women married them but now as women are out earning men and being more educated than men there just literally isn't this pool of men for them to date and so there's this mating crisis where women are like where's the guy on my level and they just aren't there so right now sixty percent of enrollment in college is women soon it's gonna be two thirds so what that means is that when it's two thirds women half of those women won't have an equivalent guy with a college degree so you really have an issue where women want a certain type of guy and that guy doesn't exist and i'm already seeing this so many of my friends are attractive confident successful women in their late thirties early forties they're just not dating there just aren't guys and i live in the bay area you know who's available to them poly guys who are like yeah you can have a third of me and so this woman has to say do i want zero of a guy or do i want a third of a good guy and i truly think that this is part of the reason why we're seeing the rise of poly relationships is that there's just not enough great guys and so we have this crisis and we're already seeing the impact of it so the marriage rate is nearing an all time low in the us the fertility rate has dropped twenty percent in twenty years and so truly if fewer people are getting together fewer marriages fewer babies this is actually a crisis for humanity did you see how do you guys remember six four blue eyes trust fun remember that's something six five six five it's somewhat like inflation what are you doing here and someone like someone like did the math and they were like this is like twenty men in new york city like yeah you know if you like the the analysis of like totally need to have a trust fund you need to be single you need to be in your twenties you need to be at least six five eddie you know whatever work in finance it was like twenty people is there a thing i think i read somewhere i think i talked to my friend amanda who ran a league and then my friend woo who had a dating up called o cupid and she was telling me about how she yeah she had coffee me bagel sorry coffee me bagel and she was telling me how and i think you told me to set hinge and she you a lot of this data that like it's basically just a few like women all get likes it doesn't matter if you're like a two out of ten or a ten out of ten it's like kind of a binary system for men which is like yeah i would i would love to go out with you for for is that what i would means oh it could be if you wanna yeah like i would love to i i would love to hang out with you and for women or for men it was like you know five percent or something like dominated it was like a winner waiters take all market it what's that data behind that yeah so one that i can tell you is that a lot of women set their height filter at six feet or taller and only fourteen percent of the men in the us are six feet or taller so you have women coming up to me at dinner parties holding up their phone saying i'm on hinge where's my husband where is he and i'm like yeah he can't even get into your app because he's five nine and you're filtering him out it's like your app is a bounce your app is a club and your filters are a bounce are filtering him out and so i do think that apps have perpetuated this thing where because you can set filters which maybe you think about for thirty seconds you're like yeah six feet is good and then you don't even realize the implications of that and now when you multiply that across millions of people who are using apps then yes a disproportionate amount of attention goes to these guys over six feet and then the other guys are sitting there waiting to hear back from someone i used to set my filter to like a really tall woman because i wanted to increase my odds you know like have you ever seen shawn a have you ever seen like of what like making like a basketball get it that and meeting someone have you ever seen like the the back end of like a woman's oh you were like i'll go fishing over here yeah she's got a lot of people over here yeah like there's not a lot of people who set their default to five ten for a woman but have you ever seen the bat like have you ever seen a woman i you know i've haven't been dated in ten years but have you ever seen like tinder like every person she clicks on is a yes oh like when they swipe right it's a match but for eyes you're like swipe swipe no match it's basically a match one hundred percent of the time logan isn't it no it totally depends on who the woman is and it also that's not exactly how the algorithm works because they don't only show you people who have already said yes to you so it wouldn't be like that but i think like certainly for certain women they get so many more people interested in them than they could ever go through and i would everyone game we do all favorite okay we don't and we know you know hot women we what your status as like listen if you're seeing me i'm interested yes and i would get no yes like no yeah yeah dude when i was on a dating app it was brutal but that was like i was like a i was so old that like it's back in the day when need to hand write messages to each person there was no swiping when i was on ot right yeah so carrier let's play game yeah if i'm let's start with i'm a guy on the dating and then i we're gonna do a girl on the dating app what what are the simple things i should be doing differently to increase my odds success and you're the director of relationship science at hinge so if anyone should know it's you great yeah i'm actually gonna answer that by saying like what everyone should be doing and then i have specific like guy things okay so let's just talk really quickly about a great profile so your profile is far and beyond the thing that matters the most because it's like you were buying a billboard on the one zero one in the bay area like what are you gonna put on that expensive billboard so you want to have a really good first photo that clearly shows your face no filters no sunglasses and you should invest in a good photo it doesn't have to be a professional photo but people wanna see what you look like and honestly the quality of mail profiles is so low that if you just follow these instructions you're gonna be better off than ninety percent of us are you talking like it's like you're dressed up is it casual dog it doesn't have to be dressed up but it's like good lighting maybe have a friend take it in portrait mode it should not be like inside grainy anything like that have you ever just asked a friend to take a photo of you with good lighting i've have never done that in my life so like that's why you pampers friends i'd rather go to the dentist and ask trying to take a picture of me it's so funny so okay at some point your mom takes a good picture of you and you upload it then you want one picture of you with your friends because we need to see that you have a social life if it could be friends or a family do you know this meme from a long time ago of like ten white guys at a baseball game and each of them is like popping their head out a little bit more yeah it's like you don't want a photo or you all look the same but we should be able to see like this is what your life is like then one of you doing an activity that you like maybe you're into hiking cooking i know this raleigh feeling so awkward for guys like how am i gonna get these photos but it really does matter i heard this story about when this woman saw this guy's app profile and it was like all burning man pictures and she's like i'm not into burning man at all and then she swiped left and then a few years later she met him and she really liked him and now they're married and when they talked about it he's like yeah only went to bernie man once i didn't like it but those were the only photos i had right so he didn't realize like that it was really sending him back do you guys do just said do you guys do like just pop up like hey guys listen we know we know you got nothing okay just come come here on saturday morning you're gonna get your picture for like do you guys do that like do is there a film at the next my first million event you should have a photographer there who's taking app profile to chris fuck great idea of the charles booth gentleman photos how many like what's the ratio of photos that you have of you and your children versus your wife and your children because i know at my house sarah is always the one taking the pictures and i would not get a million pull up my phone and be like here let me capture this for you yeah well she asks like all the time for me like hey take this picture and okay so funny that's like my main feedback for my husband you don't take enough pictures of me with my daughter it's so funny seriously like i have no photos of me and our baby like can you please start taking more photos yeah just seriously just don't do it so you're saying profile matters the most get a good get get get your hero shot which is you you could see your face good lighting and great activity picture great you and your friends but not you in five identical friends perfect like you gotta have some some diversity here get some get you wanna stand out in that picture are we talking you know what's that theory where it's like you know you wanna be the hottest out of your group if somebody you know like oh yeah are you like con like that can we go machiavelli and just there is a funny theory in behavioral science which is that people don't make decisions in a vacuum they made decisions through comparison right so if you have a friend who looks like you but it's slightly less attractive then that'll make you look even more attractive but right i wouldn't say i've tried that in the wild but there is some data to back alright a call we had friends we we even told her like you're the ugly friend aid dude just get come it was like dude either i'm at the bottom or i'm going to the middle and guess what chaos is a ladder baby you're going to the bottom i'm in the middle now and then on hinge there's these prompts that you fill out which are ice breakers and i really feel like this is a chance for a lot of guys to shine because so many the profiles i look at are just pretty weak here so you wanna have a mixture of humor and vulnerability so you can be funny you can be sarcastic you can give your hot takes then also have somewhere you show that you also have a heart and you're not just silly and hi out has this ai profile feedback tool which you'll say something like go deeper or say a little bit more and so you can just really think about what are the three things that i wanna get across on my profile maybe the fact that your family oriented that you love the warriors and that you're really into cooking well we'll make sure through your profile pictures and your prompts that you're getting that across what else a guy do to stand out on these things yeah so then the next thing is that especially for people who aren't getting a lot of matches besides your profile which is the number one thing you should send comments with your likes because it really helps you stand out so if you're a guy was like i'm just not getting that many matches just i'm just gonna go for quantity i'm just gonna send a bunch of likes well it's much better to send a thoughtful comment with that because you're more likely to stand out another insider tip that i've heard is that guys are often lazy and they only comment on like the first picture or the first prompt on a girl's profile so if you actually scroll down and you comment on something lower you have a higher chance of being more original because fewer people have just ever commented on that and how do you comment without being just like totally thirsty or just lame so what's a what's your comment for bad comment there okay so there's this line from chris rock which is if a girl's name is eve don't walk up to her and say hi adam she's heard that a million times so incentive comedy might think like the best joke is like the third punchline you come up with because the first or second other people can come up with it so the person has a picture of themselves skiing and says where was this taken don't say i think it's whistler it's like cool you and everyone else but like if you can write back something witty about like okay i'm gonna challenge you to a black diamond or whatever people whose ski say then it's a much better way of getting into a conversation and so really you're trying to show your value here you're trying to show you're a level of wit and humor and you don't have to overthink it but just what is a way to get into a conversation with someone especially something that not every other guy has already said it seems so much easier if i look at the math every you're saying like what was the stat how many women have been approached in real life or how many men approach what was it like most most men hero yeah yeah in real life so then wouldn't it be just so much like i met my wife in a real life setting it just and even back then when this was less common but still common it just seems so much easier to meet people by just kind of pretending that you're confident and like even just say like like you just say hi to them like it just it was so much easier that way can we just should we just teach guys to do that i think this is a big issue in modern almost everyone i talked to is like i wanna meet someone in the old fashioned way i'm romantic i don't wanna meet someone on the app but then if you ask them if they're meeting people in real life they basically said no and last summer there was like the run clubs everyone's media at run clubs like i haven't met a single couple that met through the run club so i think we're having this issue with gen z where they don't necessarily wanna be on apps they wanna be meeting people in real life but they don't have the social skills to do it and so there's this huge problem with the younger data that i talked to where they lack rejection resilience so you know this goes down a whole pathway of parenting but you know they had these helicopter parents they had these snow parents that kind of plowed the way for them and they never had to deal with issues they had colleges that bend to every will and if their dog had an ear infection they didn't have to turn in a paper you have these workplaces where they can take a sick day you know for any random reason and then you want the person to go up to someone at a coffee shop be able to deal with rejection like they don't have the skills to do that and so yes if everyone listened to this got really good at approaching women and making them feel both comfortable and flattered and had a good opening line like bring on the babies that would be great but people are lacking the social skills right now to do that and i think in a post me to era there is this fine line between confident and creepy that people have not figured out yet how did you meet your wife sean in real life or app yeah in real life but she was she was like best friends growing up with my cousin and so through like a kinda like i was there to do something for my cousin she was there to do something for my cousin we kinda bumped each other that way and then i was like that was a much easier thing because i didn't have to like approach with a pick line it's like i had like an hour where we're hanging out and i just had to try to make her laugh like sir and if i could go the last three times in this hour this gonna be you know that's pretty good alright that that's my goal and so i was just trying to be as entertaining and you know fun as possible for an hour so there's this concept called the power of weak ties which is the idea that you're much more likely to get a job it's from an acquaintance than from one of your close friends because your close friends have such overlapping lives with you that they know the same opportunities you know but an acquaintance who you met at a wedding a few years ago and it's still our instagram friends with they might know something that you don't know and the same thing is true with dating so sam you didn't meet or sean you didn't meet your wife through you know your siblings best friend it you know it was your cousin and so one thing that people listening to this can do is can they can expand their network so leave your house go out make new friends meet people volunteer join the boards of things the more friends and acquaintances and wider the network is the more chance that you will have a weak tie who will eventually introduce you to your spouse and one of the reasons i was so excited for this conversation is that i love teaching people the strategies that sam did to meet sarah which i can happily summarize or sam if you wanna summarize we can do that too i think you should do it i wanna i wanna hear your take on this okay this is my like sam super fandom but one thing that sam did that i really like because i think it shows vulnerability but it also is very masculine is that sam's like how can i be the most attractive made possible i'm gonna make myself more interesting and so sam really planted a lot of seeds and really worked on being more interesting so he was like wow like when i talk about my interest in denim and that i'm going to a denim meat then women seem to be into that so he was genuinely passionate about it but he also knew to talk about it he was also like well i'm not making that much money right now but i wanna show that i have a growth mindset and that you know i'm i'm very ambitious and like you know potentially i'll be successful long term see sam also likes to test out his stories well how do i know what the best story is how do i know what the funniest story is in practice it over time and get better at it and so i think that if somebody is a super fan of both of you they might think oh these guys are just so smooth i bet it was so easy for them but your intentional sam about being the best possible most attractive mate and then you snagged a bat well i i wanna first of all i have three things to say the first one is thank you the second one is that i realized that effort goes a long way and that the best way to be attractive to a woman is to work on myself and bring them along with it my life which hopefully is full of interesting things and even if it's like something as nerdy is as denim the best thing about being a man when it comes to attracting a woman is if you're passionate about anything it doesn't matter how lame it is that's kind of attractive and the third thing hundred percent is that you have to also if you're gonna sell all these positive things so you have to say the line that i use to meet her so no i don't wanna bring it out so you're you're acting like i'm like great cut to hubspot commercial okay so sean do you know what this lie i know this lie i i can't believe she's voluntarily saying this right now you i thought we were gonna skip over this no i don't mind saying it and so basically my wife sarah she walked into the we're we're were at like a a happy hour she walked in i was with my friend lily i go lilly that woman she looks fantastic i'm not leaving until she talks to me and as i was saying that she comes up to me and i didn't know what to say in time and so i said excuse me what's the difference between a chick pee and a lint and she looks at her friend and she's like i don't know and i was like i don't pay five hundred dollars to have a lint on my face and for those today i'm talking about a chick tee on my face and and she like gas and i was like classic hummus joke am i right and hi i'm say i send meet you and it it absolutely oh my god we you a warning label that says do not try this at all yeah but it just a just say hit the skip button they'd move forward thirty seconds if you just never wanna changed the way you look at say again sam why did you say that by the way had you said that before why would that be the first thing that come to mind reading that it's in the game let absurd line yeah i don't i don't know it just came to me like when did you read that rick that even come from i don't remember how of a friend like told me the joke i don't remember but i thought it would have worked but here's the is sexual yeah i'm on yeah i'm a freak i had just finished a cross country motorcycle trip literally the day before and had all these pictures this was in two thousand and fourteen i had all these pictures on facebook of my cross country motorcycle trip and so instead of asking for her phone number i was like here let me friend you on facebook and we'll talk there and i like so i like front loaded like my photos with all these like where i looked cool and so that also helped but so i did try all those things that you said were true and also i'm still a filthy filthy the animal and i say things like i said and and it also worked let me give the post game analysis a bet so i wouldn't recommend that line because i think it could definitely be mis misinterpreted but at least you had the guts to say something misinterpreted i i think it'd be interpreted perfectly so it's true i mean sarah knew what she was signing up for i feel like you're consistent but i think so this is feels like a very of the moment thing which is that if you just sit at home waiting for the perfect line then you'll never approach someone sam did not have the perfect line but he just said something and it made an impression and i feel like what you said about effort is exactly right and so in a lot of the research i've been doing this year about how men and women are becoming increasingly polarized right so women are way more liberal than men right now in how they voted people used to vote across racial lines now they're actually voting across gender lines for the first time in history men in the us are more they're more likely to go to church than women and we're just seeing that men and women are really being polarized so how do we actually get people to connect and create these couples have babies etcetera so one thing through my research is that men think oh women expect me to be perfect i have to be tall financially successful all these things but the women are saying is like we just want you to put some effort in just remember my coffee order know the name of my best friend at work and i feel like effort is just underappreciated and as i said if you have a good profile that's a seven out of ten you're still way ahead of a lot of the guys out there and so i think when it comes to the basic things that men can do here's a list of a few of them so a lot of women say to me i go on dates that are z q zero questions they asked the guy tons of questions and the guys didn't ask them a single question and then when i talk to guys hey how did this happen they say well she asked me a question if she wanted to answer it she should have just answered it already and i was like no ask for the question back make her feel interesting i think that's a huge tip make people feel interesting have you guys seen love on the spectrum all the optimistic amazing they all say the same thing at first and it's the greatest line ever i guess like they're taught in dating school or something that they say yeah so what are your interest and they all say that and it's the best line ever and it's just it's just such a good interest or it's just such a good best we'd love on this fact so what are your interest like if i said that to someone or someone said to me i be how much time you got i can i can go all day so i think this goes back to like the dale carnegie stuff but be interested not interesting people think i have to have the best stories i have to have the facebook photos of my motorcycle trip no you know what people actually wanna do they wanna talk about themselves ask them questions seem very interested in them and that will make the other person like you there's all this research that in conversations where one person is talking a lot and the other person is asking questions the first person thinks wow that other person a great conversational is and what that actually means is they made me feel interesting and important and so i think that there's so much that men can do just by asking questions asking follow questions see me really interested in somebody and remembering stuff if a girl says on a date i have a big project that's due on tuesday and text monday night or tuesday morning say how did that go these little things go so far yeah i think what i'm hearing is you know and this podcast we talk about certain businesses where you go into a space and it's just like there's like a sleepy incumbent you know there may be everybody in that space still operating on pen and paper they don't do any marketing and it just feels like oh man you're shooting fish barrel like if you just go and you just try you just do the basics you will clean up in that area it basically sounds like like dating is like this i think in most most of my single friends the way they talk about dating is almost like it's this impossible game but hey i'm still putting up i'm still fighting the good fight and then i hear what you're talking about i'm like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah actually nobody tries in a way that matters so like you know my same friends who are you talking about it like i said impossible game if i bet if i asked them i'm like hey when's the last time you updated your profile like let me just see your profile real quick how much effort did you put into this and it's like y you know this is the this is your landing pace page is what everybody is seeing this is how they're making their decisions and you put fourteen minutes of working into it when you're signing up just speeding through to get on the app and then you never really touched it again well that's the problem right like you're just not investing the effort and the simple things that are gonna make a difference and everything you said like even if you just throw any of the specifics if it's not about the good lighting or it's not about the photo with the friends and whatever it's literally like try on the things that matter sounds like you know the biggest takeaway and that most people are either not trying or they're trying on the things that don't matter they're trying things that like they're spending a lot of time swiping but that's not the thing that's gonna help you actually find somebody yes sean i love your ability to really summarize and bring out the most important points i think try on the things that is an incredible headline for this because yes if you are taller will you have an advantage on the apps a hundred percent that is a bias that is baked into these filters but if you just give up because you're not over six feet tall then that's a choice that you're making why not have a better profile why not have a friend take pictures of you even if it's you know more embarrassing or painful than going to the dentist why not send comments with likes if you really are serious about finding someone then there are just basic things that you can do that will set you ahead of most other men right and you only need one which is my favorite thing about a lot of the best things in life like you know business success i failed for nine years and then i had one and all of a sudden i was a millionaire like oh you yeah i only needed one like i didn't need all of these to work i needed one to work same thing with dating you only need one to work really to make it work it it definitely it definitely helps to put up numbers so i think like i i like i remember dating and i was like when it rains at pours like i remember when i was able to get one person interested in me i would be more confident and that'll go after more and more and more and i was like oh i'm killing and i'm like why did i do this earlier and but it's hard to get over that first one is really hard like the rejection also knew where to stop because there's a version where you were like if i can get sarah who else can i can get and instead you're were like i could get sarah like hell yeah this is my wife logan you have this thing called date like a scientist what does that mean yes i definitely think that this is sort of the my first million approach to dating so daily scientist just means to be willing to run experiments and see what works so if the business equivalent is throwing up a landing page or running some google ads then that's what this isn't in dating so let's say that i'm coaching a guy and he says okay well i need a woman who has a graduate degree then i'll say okay daylight scientist states someone without graduate degrees maybe you're actually looking for someone who's intellectually curious and you're using a graduate degree as a proxy for that let's just have you date other types of people and see what happens i do this for women around dating guys who have a different job than they expected or shorter than they expected and so the whole point is that as we get older we get clearer and clearer on what we think we want in a relationship and i have people to walk into my office and say here's a spreadsheet of all the women i've dated over the last ten years and i know exactly what i want i wanna a five seven skinny red hat who's jewish tuition place tennis and i'm like i think you're wrong i think that's what you think you want but let's actually test and see who actually makes you happy long term and so date like a scientist is being willing to run experiments being proven right or wrong and actually get clearer on who's gonna make you happy long term instead of assuming that you know is there any signs of like i always a lot a lot of my friends are indian and their parents had arranged marriages and many of them are just lovely couples and they're very happy and i've always thought life's a lot better when you have less choice and so the way that i went into marriage it was like this is forever there is no such thing as like divorce like you know because i'm like irish catholic background and that's just like what you're taught and for some reason i think that you're happier that way where you're like if i'm miserable it's just like yeah that's fine i'm going to be miserable and hopefully i'll make it better versus like well i wonder are there other options there's something about final fidelity or like no other choice that i think makes me happier is there anything yeah there is a lot of research on that so when you compare love marriages versus arranged marriages love marriages usually start off happier but around the five year mark arranged marriages or happier and it's exactly what you said sam it's the fact that you're committed and you're in it and you don't consider failure as an option okay so my husband's working too much and i feel stressed out and i miss him i'm gonna commit to working out this thing with him versus giving up and there are nuances to the data and it depends on whether or not the culture allows for divorce and things like that but i think the point is that when you think about things is temporary you just don't commit to them as much so i was at oh actually that dialogue conference and this guy was like i think that marriages should be like cell phone contracts and every seven years you decide to rec or not and there should be a conversation and i was like that's a cute thing to say but that's not what the research supports because if you have an apartment versus owning a home are you gonna put wallpaper on the wall are you gonna get a new dishwasher no you're gonna be like this is temporary i have one foot out the door but when you own your home and when you're really committed you invest a lot in it because you'd think about it as a forever investment and so when you really think about i'm committed i'm in this i'm gonna do whatever it takes to work then that really produces better long term results i'm on this warren buffett kick because he just retired and so i'm reread a bunch of warren buffett books and he's got this thing where he tells his managers as well as to as a any aspiring entrepreneurs they ask him how do i build a great company because berkshire hathaway is famous for buying great companies and he said three things i need you to act like this business is the only business that you own you not allowed to have any other business mh the second thing you need to act and assume that your entire net worth is in this business and number three assume that you can't sell this business for at least the next fifty years and if you do that i think you'll make better decisions and it's kinda of funny how what you're saying for dating and what warren says for business and what i think a lot of us know for business it's a lot of the similar things i wanna add one thing to that which is that i was at a jewish indian wedding this past weekend and it was really beautiful and especially my friend who's indian her parents live in atlanta and they didn't have any other family there but they have built this beautiful this beautiful community around them called pop look and you can just see the power of the community so during the sung so many people from the pot community we're dancing and the children of pot are all friends and i think people underestimate how important it is to have a community around you because we are not meant to just be married and just have this one person that fulfill all of our goals and every aspect of our lives we need a community to support us to talk shit about our partner with to help us when one person is sick to help us with childcare and so i think just watching this beautiful indian community who really showed up for this wedding and really helped shape the bride into who she is it really inspired me to invest even more in my community what are you gonna say sean i gonna ask about like alright so i'm just thinking about my friends who are single and i'm trying to think if i was gonna send them this episode how would i make it what question would i ask to make it most valuable for them alright so here's two scenarios scenario one go on a date it was good but it wasn't like wow i met the one that was my soul mate right you don't have that level of absolute clarity and conviction so what is the post date psychology so i went on a date how should i be thinking post date in order to you know i wanna have i wanna give things a chance but i also don't wanna string things long if i'm settling for something that's not really what i want don't you have a on that logan yeah yeah that is kinda of my tagline go ahead yeah so sean i have this sort of timeline called fuck the spark which is this idea that through doing ten years of coaching i'll talk to a guy i'll help him with the date he'll come over my house after rosa say how was it and he'll say she was great she was beautiful was fine i'm never gonna see again like are you crazy what are you talking about and he's like i just didn't feel the spark and so the spark has become my nemesis where people expect to show up and feel this rom kong moment of butterflies and rainbows and they will give up if they don't feel that and so i've developed these three mists of the spark so the first one is the myth is if i don't feel it from the beginning it can't grow and that's absolutely not true only eleven percent of people experience love at for sight and many people develop feelings over time which is why people marry someone in their apartment building marry someone at work it grows over time second myth is if you feel the spark it's a good thing that's also not always true some people are just really spark they give that feeling to everyone and then you're like oh my god there's something special between me and that person it's like no honey he gives that feeling to everyone he's very spark and he could also be narcissistic and that's why it's happening and then the third one is if you have a spark then the relationship is viable that's also not true you can start really hot and heavy and then it fades over time so my antidote to that is the slow burn and i feel like i married the slow burn and see i'm can attest to that where i don't think my husband is the most charming person you'll ever meet but he's really smart he's really funny but he takes time to warm up and so i feel like by giving him more time i found this amazing lottery pick and i feel like i won the lottery but if i had just been looking for the spark person we wouldn't have wound up together and so i think if you feel zero attraction especially for men don't go on the second it's not gonna go from zero to something but if you feel some attraction then give that person another chance especially if you don't go on that many dates and if you were okay so like sometimes when you study a subject a lot or you try to help a lot of people to that individual person their problem feels very unique very special very hard but like you've seen a hundred of these and maybe even to the hundreds you could sit here like oh man i i feel like i could help you so much i don't have all the time in the world but there's almost this like if i could just shake you and get you to like either do one thing or understand one thing or a take on one mindset what's the one that if you could just like shake people but be like alright that's like they got that and then that will have all these positive benefits i don't know if it's different for men and women that you know that you you run into but like what's the advice you just wanna shake somebody and just be like if you just really internalize this or did this action it would really change your game we talked to a fuck this spark we talked about a date like a scientist so the last one left for this is my concept called the three dating tendencies and people can take the quiz on my website and it tells you which tendency you are and this really helps people have language for what's going on with them and so i i just took it by the way do you wanna you know want me to tell you my results i assume that you're a maximize i scored equally high on a hesitate and maximize your tendencies that's so funny okay let me those obviously kinda fault like i'm not dating so like i just kinda had like yeah set like you know twenty four year old me and it says who you are as a hesitate you don't think you're ready for dating because you're not the person you wanna be yet you hold yourself to a high standard you wanna be completely ready before you start your project and the same goes for dating your motto as a hesitate i'll wait till i'm a catch and who you are a and then maximize is you love doing research exploring your options turning over every stone until you're confident you found the right one you make decisions carefully and you wanna be a hundred percent certain before you make your choice your motto as a maximize is why settle and then it gives you like advice on how to like how to kind of operate knowing that that's your tendencies right and the last one is the romanticized which men do tend to score lower on this but basically someone who's obsessed with the we met story i wanna find my soul mate i'll know it when i see it and they're so focused on kind of the rom com element that they ignore a lot of great potential partners or when they actually hit a bump in the road instead of thinking i'll have a work it out mindset and i'll work through it they actually think well if it was my soul then we wouldn't have issues and they end the relationship and i think having this language is very helpful for people because i get emails from men all the time that are like i'm a hesitate i'm not putting myself out there and like great you just need to go from zero to one you just need to be on dates and for maximize my advice is what i said at the beginning of the episode which is understand that you can keep searching forever to find the perfect person but you'll miss out on choosing them great and building something together what's gonna happen in like ten years fifteen years twenty years with a lot of the kids who are twenty five right now i'm twenty years old the fact like it's pretty crazy that you're saying i mean we already know this that most women want someone who's above them or like who provides but amongst like my company and i don't know about you usa sean the women are kicking the dude's asses mh like if you take like a man and a woman who are about twenty five the twenty five year old woman is a better employee like she's typically like like for example we went to we had an event the other day and like the women dressed wonderfully like they look present and the man i had a pull aside i'd be like dude you gotta like dress nicer at these things and at least tuck your t shirt in and like the men typically asked for more money but are less good at their job the men tend to be s they tend to like think it's cool not to care there's like a there's like a bunch of issues that i've noticed themes and this is a small sample size of dozens of employees and but what's gonna happen in like twenty years is it just gonna be a bunch of single people and less children or is it just gonna be a bunch of women who are married to old men who are richer than the i i don't know what it's what is it gonna be yeah so first of all i do my research through talking to people now and seeing pattern to recognizing that i think predictions are pretty hard but i will throw some some things at the wall and see if any of the like end up being true so one of them is that i do think that we are gonna continue to have this mating gap where as you say women continue to thrive in terms of education and employment and then there just aren't enough great guys for them and i'm seeing at least among my friends the rise of single mother by choice where women hit forty and they're like i didn't find the guy i still wanna be a mom and they use a sperm donor or a known a known donor and they actually have kids on their own another thing is the rise of poly and a lot of these relationships where you know as i said the woman is willing to have like less of a great guy than you know a guy that she's not interested in another thing that we haven't talked about yet is just the rise of ai and ai companionship so i'm getting ads all the time from replica you know get your perfect ai boyfriend he always says the right things women and love this by the way i think more than men i think women are liking ai boyfriends more than men are liking ai girlfriends i i did not think it gonna to be that way but i i know so many women who like i feel like they are love with their chat gp i haven't seen the research on that yet my hunch would just be that men are more early adopters here and like more desperate but it could be the case replica and is more of the ai boyfriend use case than ai girl wow that's very interest well there you go i'm like vc twitter it was always like oh yeah girlfriend's is gonna be huge but actually ai boyfriend has been the the dominant use case so far so i'm imagine that you have some combination of ai glasses with really hd pornography you have the sex robot that's very realistic and you have companionship from your ai boyfriend or girlfriend like why are you gonna go up to somebody a coffee shop and risk rejection why are you gonna have a girlfriend who bugs you to pick up your socks when this person is this chap is sick it tells you how great you are all the time and so i think as the friction gets lower and lower and lower to having a digital spouse or partner then the effort that's required for human relationships just feels extra hard and like that is a thing that i'm worried about because if you don't have the motivation if you're just watching twitch to watch other people live their lives and like our people are just gonna slowly die off because we're not actually dating and mating yeah that's so that's your prediction i i think that's just one of them i think other things are women are gonna have to change their expectations and men are gonna have to raise the bar themselves so women right now are saying i'm gonna earn at as much or more than you i also have to do a lot of the labor around having a kid raising a kid i have this double burden of domestic and work and so no longer is a guy being a provider enough and that's what it was for a long time so you now need to be emotionally intelligent so emotional intelligence is the new currency and dating but guys were not raised to do that they were not told how to be emotionally intelligent they are basically told from a young age be successful be a provider make money and now the game has changed and they're caught without those skills plus we have the other side of it is that when they are vulnerable women are like oh no you seem weak i'm turned off by that so i think that the genders are overlapping more where women have to be more masculine in the workplace men have to be more feminine in relationships and some of that blurring is making dating words and it's making relationships more confusing and i think that the dating hasn't caught up with the data that people just do not know how to act in this modern world and we need i don't know the answer but we need to figure out some changes to it so that people actually still wanna be in partnership i am so thankful fault that i don't have to deal with this bullshit oh my god bring me back to the sixties where i worked with asbestos and i had a high you know my the average life this family is sixty six years old that i spoke the pack of six a day because this sounds really hard you remember where there was at like huge tsunami in like southeast asia i don't know you don't sam i was there the day before it hit and we happened to leave and then the next day we turned lat even our hotel was floating in the ocean i feel a little bit like that i'm like wow we got out of there you know i'm really glad i got out of there because all these shifts are sort of headwind none of the none of the things you described as a tailwind that's making it easier but you know easy it might not might not be the the only criteria here because the way you're describing dating is that dating is a skill and it's it's an endeavor just like any of your other endeavors it's gonna take some effort it's gonna take some rejection it's gonna take some resilience and it's gonna take you leveling up your skill if you wanna be successful at it right just like in business you can't just go into business and be like cool i'll will face no no no obstacles no rejections i will not get knocked down and my skills from day one are good enough for me to win like that's just not how it goes so if i wanted to level up my skills and it sounds like you've you've mentioned a couple of them you talked about like emotional intelligence you talked about conversational like how to how to be interesting interested ask questions couple yeah like if i just committed after listening to this i was like alright i'm gonna go level up in those is there like a killer book that you would recommend or like a way to actually develop that skill like what what would be the fast track way to develop some of these skills besides the obvious which is git practice yeah so we talked about the idea of effort and that effort goes a long way and remember things follow up with things women really love that develop your relational skills so one thing that i'm really passionate about is men's groups and i'm very curious to hear what you both think about this and as i was preparing for this episode i was like oh i kind of feel like maybe they'll feel like it's cringey but i just feel like men's groups are so powerful so a year ago my husband joined one our good friend david k started it and it's about six men they meet once a month they go around and they each silently right down on supposed it notes what's top of mind for them then they go around and whoever has kind of the things that are most present for them and really wants to take up space they let those people talk they give them feedback and it's really a great place for men to be angry for men to be sad for men to create this council of peers and then they hold each other accountable and i've seen so much growth in my husband so much growth in the other guys in this group and i think it's better than therapy because most therapists are female so having your wife or having your female therapist tell you what to do i think that's fine but having a council of peers who can really relate to you and create a safe space for you to be angry and sad i think that that's creating a lot more growth and i really hope that at least one person listening to this decides to create a men's group and it's not that complicated find a you guys who your respect commit to meeting once a month create a space where they feel safe to discuss what's challenging for them and then just support each other in achieving those goals yeah that's great have you ever done one sam i'm not like business related like have you ever done one that's like a i actual men's group if i've done a few yeah look like the one that you and i did or you led it that was basically this because we were all early in our relationships at the time and like we were asking each other questions but yeah i have and i i i like to make fun of it but the reality is this is super useful and awesome and like making fun of it like normalize it it like makes it cool yeah yeah i've done a i've done i've done it a few times that it's it's actually like the way you described it just now is kinda perfect like it's much much better i haven't done therapy i've done like coaching but like you know we can tell yeah yeah i could i i can imagine how someone who needs that sort of thing would would feel but you know in therapy it's an intense focus on self i think one of the best things about these groups actually it's not about you and because it's a group you get a lot out of it even when you weren't the one talking you weren't the one sharing because like there's so much that's either related or just taking the focus off your own problems and to helping somebody out with their problems all of a sudden you feel lighter and you're like i don't even i didn't even to do anything i didn't even change my own situation but i feel better and so i think that's a a great a great idea okay so men's groups is one way to get better one more thing about that is that i i don't think there's so many places for men to talk about shame and i think in general shame is just a very challenging feeling and i heard this story example of a shame thing this was a story and someone many a different men's group told me where it was like they had been fired from their job like eight years ago and they still carried this deep shame i'm not good enough i'm useless i was fired because i'm a bad employee and their men's group happens to have this guy's forty people in this men's group are fifty five and when he shared that story as this deep trauma of his life he heard from bunch of other guys oh yeah that happened to me that's gonna be a footnote in your life i just thought it was such a beautiful story because it took this thing that he felt deeply shameful about i can't provide for my family i'm a problem even though it years ago and he has a perfect good job now and having these older guys say to him that happens to everyone it doesn't matter kinda helps him just move on and so i think it's a thing where you can talk about the stuff that you sort of only admit to yourself or maybe don't even admit to yourself and once you get it out there it kind of goes away versus holding it in and i think most men are just holding everything in is there anything someone can go read or watch or listen to right now is there any easier you could do besides like being vulnerable and sharing and meeting people show what mem you need you need like a gateway drug you know like starting a men's group is not exactly the gateway drug you know for like people of our generation sean and i probably both the same thing we read the book the game which like yeah it has has so many flaws in it but the one thing that it did do was it encouraged me to go and talk to women and that was like my gateway driver i'm like oh my gosh people respond to me if i act nice and interested sure yeah so atlanta however you say his name he has really good information out there he has an episode of dia he's basically this british guy philosopher who just has studied life yeah school of life guy he's amazing i interviewed for him for my book he's really awesome esther per is one of the goats here and her book meeting in captivity has changed a lot of people's lives really the godmother godfather of relationship science the scientific study of all this stuff are john and julie got and they really set the bar for all this information and so much of the research that i and other people quote is really from them and they are really the people who created this love lab they actually test out a lot of this stuff and they really defined a lot of this obviously people can read my book how to not die alone and i also have twelve coaches who work for me who a lot of them specialize working specifically with men and sam going back to what you said earlier it's actually pretty easy for a lot of them to coach men because they are not doing some of the basic things and when they get these guys just doing the basic things that make a difference they start seeing success so quickly i'm actually reading one of john got books now he i think he's the man i think someone seven things seven principles to make a marriage work i think that one yeah yeah that's like the classic amazing one to me like reading some of these books like i'll tell you people i'm reading them i'm like you have a problem with your marriage i'm like no it's pretty great it's just that like you don't wanna wait until you're sick to start exercising like it's percent it's it's kinda like good to like to do maintenance or like to do a couples therapy if you're like oh you guys are on the fritz it's like no it's like i'm pretty fit and i still go to the gym all the time you wanna like maintain and keep things nice otherwise when they do get bad you're like oh shoot that think one of the the big edges in life right now is people think that if you let's say you do therapy or you're doing any kind of like mental health it's like it's literally the word mental health is you know basically implies some sort of sickness right like why would you do that something wrong it's something broken and it hasn't to shifted yet to something more like mental fitness where you know people who go to crossfit you don't accuse you know you don't look at them and be like oh it's because you're disease and sick it's like no no these people just they actually care about maximizing where they're what they could do physically it's so similarly i think in terms of your mindset being as clear as you could be being as positive as you could be being as you're having a positive outlook on your own life and actually taking the time to do that really important and same thing with relationships there's an assumption that if you're working on a relationship relationships because it's hurting or broken i think that's just like insane there's like a relationship fitness that that's very different than really you know just relationship health as in you're you're sort of nursing back from some problem sean i'll add on to that and say i actually think we're halfway there in terms of the shift so the language that we used to use would be mental illness now we say mental health right and then i think going towards what you said mental fitness makes so much sense yeah it's lever that's say you're just you're just you're off your rock right but my friend emily had a book that just came out about being emotionally fit and it's basically like how can you go to the gym for your fitness and it's not like oh i worked out arms yesterday i'm good life it's like you have to constantly work at it and that's actually the crux of what the go say and my favorite takeaway from their many years of research is this idea that relationships are not about the honeymoon or the trip to hawaii they're about the daily life interaction so so they talk about this concept of a bid so a big could be something really small it could be that sam walks into the room where sarah's on her laptop and she size and that's a bid from sarah for sam to say oh no what's going on and sam can do one of three things he can turn towards her and say what's happening he can turn away from her or ignore it or he can turn against her and be like why are you making so much sound you know i'm on an important phone call and so life is really about these interactions and so successful couples that have happy long marriages they turned towards each other eighty six percent of the time and the the couples that break up or are the relationship disasters they only turn towards each other thirty three percent of the time so it's really about in these small moments how you turn towards your partner we should actually sean do an episode on this john got guy he's kind of crazy like he he's great he's he's elderly now but he like has done this for probably fifty years got it and he's been doing well yeah but you know he's been doing it forever but there's some crazy stats where like he he could predict within ninety per or or he could do it ninety percent the time he could predict if you're gonna get divorced or not i think within like three minutes or something yeah something like it's saying you know he was like yeah people haven't jake's out should should go look it up he's got this thing called love lab and he would have couples come in and essentially argue or fight and he would observe them and they would mark on a score sheet like every like every second there's was an error like some some mark of like what the interaction was doing and they had this like sort of scoring system and basically they could score a couple interactions in just a couple of minutes and predict with a ninety percent accuracy like what the whether that couple's is gonna sort of stay together or end up you know breaking apart which is which is kind of amazing when you think about it and it really shows you like life is in the micro it's not the it's not the macro like we think i think you were talking about this with dating right like oh i have a type and i have this idea of how we're gonna meet i have a soul mate i have the one and it's like all these like macro language when like a huge amount of life is just in the micro it's like oh yeah she you know she said she was training for you know an iron man there's something like that and then i just said oh me too i did one and this instead of like asking her about it i yeah i pulled the conversation to me instead of like leaning into what she was saying and that like the micro is the difference between a great date and an okay date and then and then how you think about it afterwards right like each one of those is just like a bunch of micro decisions that lead to your actual result sean this is i feel like you're super superpower i feel like you're kind of like what i say like ten minutes worth of stuff and then you just summarize the stuff that's worth the takeaway it's kind of like you're chad just being like here's what she really meant so i really appreciate that and there's a good term for what you're talking about which is a shift versus support response i think a lot of people especially men get this wrong so let's say a woman says oh i'm going to lake tahoe this summer the guy's like cool gonna seem interested and add on to that by saying i went to lake tahoe last summer that's actually shifting the energy back towards yourself what women and people in general like is when you help them go deeper and you say how did you choose lake tahoe have you ever been there before what are you most looking forward to have you ever traveled with your family before support responses help that person go deeper and so you might think that they're equal but people actually appreciate the support responses more because it shows curiosity about the other person and it makes them feel interesting oh yeah by the way logan what's your deal so you got a netflix show you wrote a book is did great you're doing stuff at hands you're on this podcast like you're kind of a a superstar in the making here what's or maybe you're already aren't and i'm late to the party but like what's your door what's your deal are you trying to be like the love guru what's what are you trying to do i mean i'm feel pretty happy right now it's like i made a vision board about seven years ago so i was how i met sam's wife is that we work together airbnb we didn't even overlap that long and i was just like i really have this passion for data and relationships everything's telling me that there's an opportunity here people are lost and i can help them and so i quit my job not knowing what i would do and i'm sort of just from scratch created this career and it's taken the form of a newsletter a book the job at hinge the netflix show i am hopefully gonna have my own podcast this year and so i'm just kind of like how can i keep learning and how can i heat keep helping people find love but i don't feel like there's like a next level that i need to get to i kinda just wanna enjoy where i am right now and what's your do you feel a lot of pressure because let's say you're a relationship coach the the stupid like kinda lay version of me is just like so did they have it all figured it out like and and i know that's never the case but like i think there is like this weird expectation that people have especially though further you are away from doing the work yourself that if you're talking about this that means you need to be like fully self actual in some way and so do you do you feel pressure in that and like i guess like i guess like what's your what you know don't know when do when did you get married how how did that go for you i'm just curious sure yeah so i will one of my mentors here so eli fin is one of the best relationship scientists in the country and is at northwestern and the dedication in his book is to my wife allison who thinks it's hilarious that i'm a marriage expert and so yep i kind of i kind of feel the same way but what i will say is basically the thing that fa me the most the thing that i feel like i always wanna work on is the decision making process of who do you marry so i actually feel like i'm more of a dating expert than a marriage first so sometimes when people ask me about sex i'm like i don't know shit about sex i'm not a sex sex expert what i'm actually really good at is who you should be with and why and so i don't feel as much pressure as someone who's putting out there a book about marriage but i would say like of course i have my own issues and of course there's moments where him i'm like oh my husband's pretty introverted my life would be easier if he wanted to go to this party with me and then i just remind myself like here's all the things that are great about him and i also say to myself here's all the annoying things that are annoying about me and by kind of like nagging myself it also helps me be more understanding of my husband one last thing i'll say about that is that i think having a kid has changed our relationships so much more so much for the positive because in the past if he did something that annoyed me i might either say something about it or bubble it up and then it explodes later but because i see what a great dad he is my tank is so full with love for him that i can just let most things go and that has been a really good development sean her husband's hilarious and and if i say anything thing that is too much we can take this out but basically he he's a vegan like hardcore vegan but he's shredded and you're like why do he and and he'll tell you he's going for the hungry wolf or hungry line hungry warrior so he like looks hungry but he's like trying to get after life he's shredded and he he he's an engineer he works at a a a big ai company where he's like brilliant and also he lost his leg recently because of cancer a couple years ago but he like laughs about it and he's just like a very principled very interesting almost strange guy in the best way like he doesn't have any social media everything about them you're like that's strange and then you start hearing his and you're like oh you're you're you live the right way i'm the flawed it's like it's a very funny he's a very funny guy yeah i think that's a beautiful testament to my husband and i think that i'm drawn to very extreme people i i think that's one of the reasons why i love sam i love my first million i i think it kinda goes back to this thing of like you can create the life that you want you can create your own rules you can live that way and i've never met anyone more than my husband who doesn't care what other people think and so it is hard to be this hardcore vegan we went to this wedding and there was basically no food for him to eat well guess what he brings packets of justin's peanut butter any he chosen in the bathroom and he pre games with sweet it's like he just basically adapts and i think he's very extreme like yeah his he's super healthy he works out every day he meditate every day he lost his leg to cancer but a few weeks from now he's gonna be climbing in the para climbing world cup championship and so he's just an extreme guy who's very disciplined and has been very successful oh and he's really funny me logan in this is great all you singles out there you're welcome you're welcome for the advice you're welcome for the the tips go take some photos get some good lighting by the way what's a good first date spot so somebody goes somebody wants to do a first date with somebody they meet on an app should they be do coffee dinner what's the move dinner too intense i think coffee feels too much like a job interview what if you go get an interesting maybe non alcohol drinks somewhere and go for a walk i think people have really great conversations when they don't have to make this direct eye contact or just go go do something fun go play a pickle ball and kinda of shake out your silliness and you know take yourself a little less seriously alright thank you so much logan great to have you thanks a lot see you thank you i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a travel never looking back