Is This The End Of The Pod?

alright we need to talk about this the podcast is either gonna end today or we're gonna figure this out is that dramatic enough for you i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road less travel sam can we start i start with an apology yes and i say sorry i was let me check my notes i was a little piss yesterday and you were on the receiving end of me being a little busy we had a a fight an argument disagreement a lovers coral i don't know what you wanna call it we had something and i wanna talk about it here not just because i'm a sick and i'm like oh this is a good content jerry spring but also mostly because i found i i thought about it a lot afterwards i found it kinda of fascinating and at first i felt really bad i don't know about you but i felt really horrible the rest of the day so without discussing the specifics i wanna talk about what i learned after that fight can we do that okay yeah okay so here's the story we got a fight yesterday and i wouldn't even call it really a fight it's like a every six months there's just disagreements that we had to work through exactly and like most things starts off as a misunderstanding turns into a disagreement which leads to an argument we escalate to a fight that it kinda dee escalate into a grumpy agreement any sort of move on and can i first tell you why i even wanted to talk about this yeah do you know who j jay mccarthy is by any chance he's a rookie football player he's a quarterback for the vikings so he's a he's a rookie yeah i don't know who he is but i know the game football he just got drafted and like any you know a team that sucks they draft a quarterback they're hoping he he's gonna turn the franchise around and he just had their first like pre season game not even in the season yet and he through an intercept while he was playing so after the game he's doing an interview i i'm scrolling on twitter and i see this and i'm seeing this after we have our fight and the interviewer asks them she goes jj you go out there you wanna perform well but you know you throw that intercept and i'm sure you know that did feel great you know what just talk me through what was going through your mind and how are you feeling after doing that and this guy's response was epic he goes what was going through my mind what an opportunity she goes what what an opportunity and he goes yeah i mean this whole my my success in my career is gonna be based i'm a quarterback at the end nfl my success and my career is gonna be based on my resilience my ability to bounce back from mistakes i throw an intercept what an opportunity to learn to get better and to improve and i was like whoa fucking mindset alert you know i i pride myself on mindset i am a student of mindset and when i heard that i thought wow i was an uncommon response to a very common situation i would say most guys are down on it but then they'll lie and be like well i just you know next we had to focus on the next play just put it out of my head and then you know just get better you know but they're kinda bitter about it and this guy was so genuine when he said what an opportunity and so i kinda had that same thought where i was feeling bad after a fight and i thought i saw that clip and i thought okay it what an opportunity for me to learn here and the reason i think it's an opportunity for me was we joke on this podcast i'm generally super laid back like i don't really get easily bothered i pride myself out have a good mindset but of course i'm a human being i mess up which is why when i get bothered it's rare and i suck at it and so i wanted to tell you some of the things that i reflected on afterwards i have like five to seven thoughts can i just read them out to you yeah and i okay i might have a few as well so first one fights don't start as fights and what i mean by this is you never start you never started a conversation intending to fight nor to even really see a fight coming and the way the analogy i was using in my head was like oh a fight is like a forest fire when a forest happens the explanation they usually come to is well there was like a bunch of the what do they call it like the dry bush or whatever like this kind of the dead sticks that that go on the ground and it's sort of this accumulation does pile sticks that nobody really clears out and it's not a problem until somebody drops a cigarette on it and it it could be something that you just squish out with your foot right away you put it out there's no big deal but if you don't put it out right away that accumulated dry stuff can catch fire it could become a wildfire it could it could tear down a whole forest it's that was my first observation was man that the debris on the on the forest floor is kinda like a hidden danger it's a dog that's not barking and you have to make sure that if a cigarette does drop on it you're you're able to kind of immediately put it out or clear it out ahead of time that was the first thought which by the way the reason why that's very easy for you to say that that's really hard to address and the reason it's hard to address is because a lot of times people particularly me and i know you do as well you have this idea where you're like i don't want ruffle feathers i'll just go with the flow and if you do that too often then you're like shit i've been going with the flow now i'm bothered and and that's a very hard balance to implement of like when do you go with the flow or when you say that's not my preference right that that describes it to you either avoid confrontation that's one reason to just like let it go type of thing but you don't really fully let it go right like ten to fifteen percent lingers or in my case it's it's a lot less of i void competition it's more of i don't wanna let myself get bothered by something small so i ignore it i think i ignore but like ten percent of it lingers and if you ignore too many things that ten percent can start to add up and if fun address it's that stuff on the on the forest floor okay so here's the second one fights are natural that was the second thought i had it wrote down in my little diary here fights are natural we've been working together on this podcast for four years i can count probably three serious arguments or disagreements that we've had that felt uncomfortable to deal with maybe there's been some other ones i'm forgetting but like understandable you work together with somebody for four years on a project you're gonna have disagreements in the moment it doesn't feel good it doesn't feel natural logically you know hey this is normal but in the moment feels bad and let's emphasize how bad like when i argue with you or when i argue with jordan or joe my my other partners like it ruins my week i hate that feeling i think you are a little more comfortable with confrontation for people like me like these midwestern nice people who have been raised to just swallow to swallow it you just you live life like resent the other sometimes early like you just don't fucking could complain i hate it i hate like there there's been times where i've had to fire someone and i won't fire them for a year because i just don't want i just don't want to do that conversation i hate it it bothered like i like i i wake up at the middle the night it ruined my night i was gonna show you my i'm wearing uber a ring i gonna show you my sleep scores terrible i three hours last night i woke up in the middle at night at three am and i ate three pieces of cookie dough from like a a nestle bacon bake whatever it's called break bake yeah break bake dude i wish had a break bake that would made me feel better i just woke up feeling shitty and it's ever my like the analogy here is in your diet you can wake up feel shitty i early least i do this as my like my evolution from guy with a horrible diet to trying to be better about it is i know when i feel shitty and it's either because i just door dash taco bell and that was just a bad decision and i'm paying the price for that but also even if you do the right thing at the wrong time if i eat a very like a full meal that i ate it at ten thirty it doesn't matter if i had grilled chicken and whatever if it was a healthy meal if i eat too late i'm just gonna feel bad right so you could do the right thing at the wrong time and get pain you could do the wrong thing the wrong time get pain and for me this was surprising because usually if i have a confrontation it's usually relief because i've been i've been trying to avoid having it and when i do have it i normally feel quite relieved and this one i felt awful i felt terrible i couldn't sleep it was such an unusual feeling for me which made me think i didn't do it right so that's probably relatable but not surprising i'm gonna give you some of the things that i found interesting the first is about this guy named doctor go let's call him doctor go because i forgot his first name do you know who doctor got is no doctor go is the love doctor literally this is a guy who studied marriages and his claim to fame is that he could watch a couple for fifteen minutes having a conversation about something and predict with ninety plus percent certainty if they were gonna have a end of divorced or stay together ninety plus percent and only watching a fifteen minute conversation in fact he had something called the love lab which was his research lab where he would bring couples in he would say talk about x and he knew that x would lead into a little bit of a conversation a little bit of resentment would come up and he could watch how they handled it and in just fifteen minutes predict ninety percent accuracy by the way if you let just like a normal marriage counselor or an average person on the street watch that same fifteen minutes their accuracy was about fifty percent just like flip a coin i they had no no accuracy essentially but this guy had ninety percent and why is that because he had done this a bunch and he he he was able to identify what are the things to look for that would cause a couple to break up and so one interesting thing last night was i went down this rabbit hole of like what did got men say what are these things and he's got a a couple of interesting very insightful things so he's got one thing called the four horsemen of the apocalypse it basically is like i look for four things that if a couple does these four things highly correlated with them not not staying together in the long run low married satisfaction and divorce it's like the emotions of contempt resentment what were the other two close so it's criticism contempt which was the biggest one defensive and stonewall and some of these were gender so like men were typically more guilty of stonewall meaning wife is bringing something up he just kinda shuts down just cut the kinda like in his mind he's like i'm not fighting in her mind it's like you're you're not you're not even open you're closing me down i'm trying to express something to you but content contempt was the one where regardless of gender if you did these things like an eye roll anything that's hierarchy which is like oh you're such an asshole right i'm good and you're bad anything that creates anything that indicates contempt was like one of the worst things that could happen right because it indicates a lack of fundamental respect in you know equality in in the relationship so he's got that he had another one which is a magic ratio which is they would observe interaction and they would see that and and by the way the the way they did this was fascinating couples talk for fifteen minutes and he's encoding every minute i think they divide into like eighteen signals in a minute or something like that and they had this like specific encoding where it's like i roll like body language turn away phrasing of a thing yeah but like all these little nuance things that he could they would they would immediately encode and then they would have a score at the end of and they'd have positive interactions between a couple of negative but they're like these micro interactions right to the surface it didn't even look like they're having a huge fight yelling of each other throwing and screaming you know throwing things in across the room none of that but even in just like a normal conversation he could get that indication so he said the magic ratio is five to one right every couple is gonna have negative interactions that's not avoid it's what's the ratio of positive to negative and if it was five to one the couples would stick together below five to one you start to get into higher likelihood that the couples were not stating at i thought that was kind of interesting there's a ton of like little micro things that he has and they're like repair attempt so how do you dee escalate people who like any couple that stayed together had a good habit of using humor or taking a break or just saying i'm sorry that was stupid but i shouldn't said that that's not actually what i mean what i mean is this a way to dee in in a fight it was like a huge tool that was that was very useful and that was one thing i think i did poorly yesterday which was i was not dee escalating well right either could it took a break could've have just made a joke could've have said actually the way that came out is not actually how i feel how i feel is really this but said it was like sunk sarcastic i said it now i gotta defend it it's is like it's such a stupid way to go he's got this whole philosophy that i'm super fascinated by now and really excited to do kind of like a little bit more of a deep dive on like how cool is that guy by the way yeah he's great i i joke with my wife what i i'll say look i've made my point i am doug okay there is no retreated here i'm what you call doug in i cannot go back and the reason i'm raising my voice is because that would mean that if i talk lower it i'm losing the argument right and that is not happening yeah like you know in u fights i remember greg would always say we'll see who takes the first back step he's like he's like we're gonna fight but i'm not he's not just his trash talk with no and knockout he's like he would get in their mind like let's see who takes the first back step because he's actually a counter punch he wants the guy moving forward so you'd put that in their mind if you take a back step you're a bitch and as silly as that sounds that would describe my behavior in a lot of interaction interactions yes let's see who takes the first back step which is not serving me well no i get in trouble a lot for it and it's incredibly stupid and there's so many times where i'm like shit i i my ego won't let me retreat but that is the right decision right let me give you a a mechanic that i learned that i wish i had yesterday when we were fighting i once took get improv class in san francisco and the very first class instead of teaching you how to do improv the very first lesson is not here's what you do it's here's what you do when you screw up because you're gonna screw up a ton you are beginners this is hard you were gonna screw up a lot so the first tool we give you and they were just she she was like when you say something that was stupid or didn't make sense or was not funny and you tried to be funny the way of the world is gonna come crashing down on you and here's your solution ready and she's was like could you all do that we're like and she was like that's it when it happens just go whoop and that just means to everybody clear the slate that didn't happen we're moving on we're moving past that it was a whoop and i wish i had a mechanic like that in so many more areas of my life where a way to eject or abort or pull out of a tails spin of like i didn't wanna go this way i didn't wanna say that i didn't want that to come across the way it came across i needed a woo to just be like that wasn't like let's wipe this slate clean real quick like at a sketch just quickly shake it and it's gone yeah i you would look really dumb if you did that but i agree that it's a very that is a very helpful thing i i got and i've i get in more trouble because of this thing more than anything else right alright another observation my body keeps the score so i have this coach is an executive coach which is like you know business strategy but mostly like therapy thinking through basically helping me think more clearly and be a better person and he's great and he has us see his stuff that he says that's great that i'm like totally buy it be has other stuff that he says that i'm like i get that you buy it i'm not sure that i buy it yeah and one of the things he always talks about is like the body keeps the score have you read that book i've read the book but i you know i'm i don't have back pain and i think it's more of a it's like a literally like a back pain book right it's sorta it's basically like the easiest one are soldiers who have ptsd they see they they feel things physically and i frank i actually don't remember that the entire premise but i believe it was if you change your body you can actually change your mind right so he'll ask me he'll be like i'll say something like where do you feel that when you say i'm like i don't feel like i i i said it from my mouth what are you talking about he's like no like it's or a tightness in your chest i'm like bro i don't wanna like i don't wanna do yoga i just wanna say what's going on and then figure it out with a logical solution and he's helping me learn that i hadn't really fully bought in until yesterday when i felt terrible after it physically i felt terrible after our our conversation and i was like oh shit i think he's right i think the body does keep the score and i'm more of a believer in that woo shit so that was another observation what did you feel terrible because you felt that i was wrong or because you didn't like the words you used i felt terrible because i felt like i did myself a disservice disservice which is i don't think i conducted myself well i thought i actually had a good point meaning i don't disagree with any of my words and i disagree with all of my delivery and what a shame because it's like actually what i did was a a total net negative i undermine my own point what i was trying to express i didn't express well it wasn't effective and i made you feel not good too because that wouldn't feel good anyways and i was like oh the other lesson of course is people don't remember what you say just remember how you made them feel if it makes you feel better i i think your delivery wasn't as bad as you think that doesn't make you feel better thank you and i agree and i agree with your points like the points you made were not bad points your the problem with having an argument with you is you are quite logical and you do make logical points the other problem with you is that most people myself included are more emotional than logical and that's sometimes hard for you to understand yes and also to give myself a a more blame here is i am like a fire cracker or something like that it's like you can play with it you can hold it nothing's gonna happen for like ninety not out of the out of all the days the year three hundred sixty four days out of the year that fire cracker is just easy to easy to handle but on july fourth there's one day that like five percent of the time where the fuse gets lit there was like no no warning and it's fucking explosive and so it's like that's i think my problem is i'm extremely tolerant and un bothered until the moment i'm bothered and then i a big w baby and i like get really upset really quickly more than i should and again and i realized what i realized yesterday was oh that's just because i don't have many reps doing it and this is kind of a bullshit like greatest strengths have no weaknesses but it's i think it's honestly true in this situation this is i'm so rarely bothered that i'm i when i am bothered i'm so poor at handling it whereas i think somebody who is more frequently runs into situations like this they come they become more mature and have better tools to deal with it than i do it's almost like because you're pretty emotionally healthy that i is actually a weakness you know what i mean because you don't assume that other people are broken or like that their egos dictate things do you know what i mean well i think you're giving me a very generous ben i'll i'll consider that not just a compliment but maybe something that might be true here can i read you just a couple more bullet points yeah words i jot it down in my journal here so there are no winners in war there's always a benefit to expressing myself but and finding resolutions when there's a mix up but once it escalate there are only you know there's no there's no winner in loser there's was only two losers in a situation like that where i think at a certain point the conversation was productive and then a certain point it was unproductive and once it got to an unproductive and by the way we weren't like cursing other out i i don't mean to make it sound like that but just on a relative scale it wasn't one where i felt wow that was super constructive and i feel better about the relationship it's like no i think we did some damage there and we're there was only two losers in that interaction there was no like winner and loser which is stupid because when you argue you kinda wanna be a winner or a you wanna be a winner in that default that there person to be a loser in the interaction but that's a false idea have you read dale carnegie how to win friends and influence people clearly i should go and reread it i read the first chapter about people loving their name and i was this is great and i it's like he has a famous line in that where he goes the most beautiful word in the english language is a person's name so say it a lot but like right in the third chapter like one chapter after that he tells a story about how he was with this influential person who was telling him the story and the guy got a lot of the story wrong like he was like saying this is a quote from shakespeare and dale was like actually right you know that was thomas jefferson who said that and the guy who he corrected fucking hated him he's like no don't correct me over this shit and the whole point is like when you try to correct people or argue with them to prove a point it doesn't it it rarely ever works your way which sucks because sometimes it makes you feel good to win an argument or to think you want an argument but it actually it's more often than not a shitty thing but didn't lincoln also say the same thing like never criticize and i always had trouble with that idea i think in the book how win inference influence people was like never criticize i was like never yeah i'm i'm i'm like never try to size and i was like never how how do you function with never credit how does that how do you well you know way accountability i i don't i don't understand i still don't understand that like well he said in that letter or in that chapter was he'd also said lincoln would do this thing where he would write an angry letter to someone and one time he wrote like a scathing leather letter to someone and he didn't send it and the reason why he did that was one time he talks shit about this guy and the guy was like i challenge you to a duel which was a fight to the death and lincoln was like dude i'm not doing that that's insane i'm i'm sorry i didn't mean to offend you i'm sorry and like it was like i'm not gonna criticize people ever again and so instead he would write these letters where he would like bitch bitch him out and then just not send him and he that he was like that makes me feel better am i'm ready to try that at i still don't fully understand how you do the never criticize but i think they're right which is rarely doesn't do any good okay let me give you a couple others everybody is the hero of their own story and convincing them otherwise as a fool errand myself included i've recently heard this when i was in canada at the andrew wilkinson event was sitting at a dinner table with chris spa chris's andrews business partner who's more under the radar but a super fun guy and he's one of my i don't know top three dinner party yes the guy just electric at a dinner table and one of the things he said was he's he brought this up he goes isn't it funny he's like i have never met a person who does not view themselves as acting i forgot exactly what he said but like acting good acting just no matter what they're doing and he's like i think everybody from serial killers on views themselves as the hero of their story and you know justified either what they did was right or the wrong thing they did was justified he's like isn't that crazy i was like i that it is actually crazy and it was so true like i felt like when we were arguing yesterday i was the hero of my story and i had done all these val things that were you know you know my my protagonist moves and then you were like u but i am the protagonist did and i'm like you know in the as an escalated i was like you're the villain on i'm the hero and you're like the hero you're the villain and i was like wait we are both idiots is actually what we both are we're neither the heroes nor the villains in this scenario but it was just a a good reminder of man i'm guilty of that if i'm guilty of that everybody's guilty of that and i i looked it up there's something called narrative identity which is like the the psychological name for for this phenomenon that even you know hitler on believe this about about themselves and the problem is that then you go and like you ask your wife or your close friend about any situation and you explain it and oftentimes they'll say you are right but the reality is is like you're not prob you're probably not explaining the situation like to where you can truly get wonderful advice do you know what i mean right well there's another one i looked up when i was when i was talking to chat gp about like what is the name for this me man my phone buddy just had this argument what's the name of that syndrome what what is what was i doing and what is that called one of them was called mistaken attribution and what it the principle was this when i'm wrong it's because of the situation when you're wrong it's because of the character and if you do that it's a very unhealthy mindset to have or a bias to have it's a a mis redistribution bias and we all do this which is oh those things that i did at the wrong well that's just because that this was what was going on in the situation however if you don't give that same benefited it out to the other person that their actions were situational dictated and and not from any poor attention then you end up with this the same problem as like an investing it's like when i win it's skill what i lose it's bad luck and in the same way in a fight it's if i'm wrong it's situational if you're wrong it's character it's your you you just you'd that was a choice but that's who you are so someone told me this year's and years ago and it kinda changed my life and i tried to use it all the time and i'm a human and i fail and i i failed on it a little bit alright failed on a lot of it yesterday but basically it's the idea where we judge ourselves on our intentions but we judge other people their actions right and i try to remind myself constantly and that's really it that's another thing that's very simple but hard but it is like very important i think truly and dude during our conversation yesterday i was like well you know i didn't there was no mall intent to this right yes i i know that it's like you i know that you had no mall intent what you did right you're like yeah of course well we should have done that but was like the what the fuck are we talking about what does this matter none of this matters at that point what you bad about what am about how does this even how does this even make sense if there's if we both agree that the intentions were correct then we could dee escalate this down to oh we just weren't clear about x z or oh we had a mister miscommunication mister misunderstanding i thought you meant this you thought meant this oh yeah silly mistake on my part but didn't mean to make that mistake just a natural mistake you know because i'm not a perfect person so i think there was a moment in there where we could have deactivated escalated that we we we didn't properly do it that's how every argument actually should start and that's actually what i'm gonna do is like can you explain your intentions and i'll explain my intentions and then we'll break down the actions to see like if there's alignment or whatever right i once arguing my wife and then i had a training session with my trainer right afterwards and he could tell i was like a little off at the beginning like my my vibe is usually like good vibes only and i did not have good vibes only but was just quiet and he was like what's what's up i was oh yeah you know i started to explain the situation and he goes oh he i got the solution for you and i thought he was getting me the solution to the argument to the problem the issue quote unquote that we were discussing and he goes no here's here's what you do when you're in that moment just remember i love right you love me cool and we wanna be happy alright that were good like he was just like cool that nothing else matters and what he was sent and he's like what i mean by that is do you wanna be right or do you wanna be happy and he's like i have a lot of clients that are like you silicon valley types businessman you know logical left brain thinker types there is a desire to be right and it is sometimes at odds with the actual outcome you want which is happiness harmony you know cooperation feeling good and if you remember what the thing you want really is you wanted the happiness harmony cooperation you don't want you want that more than you wanna be right you will act totally differently so just remind yourself of that as the argument starts you know it's funny we were talking and we were arguing and thirty minutes in your newborn started crying and when i heard that cry it broke my frame i was like i don't want i don't want him to be upset like you wanna like is there any and i'm i wasn't there physically but if i were like is there anything we could do to like make him happy like can we hug in front of him like i remember thinking like i don't want this kid to be upset like that's the only thing that important that that's actually the important thing is like oh he's upset like that that's unacceptable part dads are fighting yeah i remember thinking i'm like oh like let's let's tend it you know what i mean like it totally broke my frame where you're like for some reason making him not cry just for two seconds it's significantly more important than a any like a large business conversation i thought that was like kinda of interesting hundred percent alright i have a couple more and then we could we can stop you know hugging each other so this i wrote a category what did i learn about myself because i i noticed as i was doing you know i i my coping mechanism was like oh this research is fascinating oh this framework is cool i was like alright alright but i'm kind of distancing myself from the cold hard facts of my own behavior in my own mistakes and i wanna tell you what i wrote under what i learned about myself i said i made the cardinal sin the cardinal sin in any relationship is measuring i remember once meeting this guy stan s stan is a very successful business facebook in google not google but facebook yeah so if he first was yeah entrepreneur he created him and his buddy james courier have been business partners for like twenty years and they have like a great business marriage and i was hanging out with stan once and he was telling me about like what they did with tickle and how they sold that for like whatever to to you know like a hundred million dollars to monster and then they created this other company this other company this other company and then z recruited him and z like recruited him for like ten years and finally you know he he finally went and work with z and he ends up running facebook with messenger and he's at an amazing career i said and one of the cool things was when he went facebook was how did james handle that like now he's doing all the work for that like their they c founded n this like fund in this incubator and they are accelerator and they and now you're going on and taking a job at facebook like doesn't that put some stress on the relationship and he was and he kinda laughed he was like it's not that that's not an issue but like you know we have such a strong partnership that like we it's great if that worked out great and i was like how do you guys do that i was because i wanna work with somebody for twenty years like that's a when i think about winning what winning looks like in my life that that's what winning looks like find somebody amazing just do projects with over for twenty years find a handful of people that i can do that with and she told me he goes oh the secret very simple he goes the first thing is turn it into a giving contest he said ninety eight percent of the relationships you you are in are taking contest meaning you're trying to get out as much as you you're asking what am i getting out of this relationship that's the fundamental like underlying questions what am i getting from this other person what am getting out of this you don't realize it but you don't you don't realize it until you get into a tit for tax scenario meaning they didn't do this so i'm also not gonna do that they did this to me so i'm also gonna do that to them and you get into this tit for tat contest is measuring and basically it makes the pie smaller he goes the beautiful thing about james is that james is constantly trying to figure out how to make our relationship pie bigger meaning he's just thinking how do i give more to this relationship and he doesn't measure even when i'm not giving it as much he just gives he just keeps asking himself how can i give more because the beauty is that if you're if you're with somebody who's wired that way if you start to do it too your relationship high grows like crazy and i remember hearing that i mean like this is the way that is the wisdom that is the fundamental truth about how to do this tony robbins has a very similar framework around four levels of love one of the he calls the tit for tat thing he calls it h he's like i'll give to you if you pay me basically it's like i'll put out for you if you if you put out for me and he's like most of us run around our whole lives h and most of relationships we have there and that is the root cause of why you get into these patterns these negative patterns with people because it's in game theory terms if every time one person even accidentally short changes the other and then you intentionally short change back and then they pick up on that and then they short change back like what are you left with at the bottom very little but it is very common and i think that was the the cardinal mistake was i was measuring what i was getting instead of focusing on what am i giving and how do i give more because that's just who i am whereas what i was doing was saying how can i give so much because then i'm gonna get back and that's fundamentally like a measuring scenario where instead it should just i i wanna i wanna roll differently i think that was the probably the biggest mistake i made i i think is that your list i have one last one but it's a positive one so i'll end on a positive note which is the best relationships are bigger than you so me and my wife used to argue a bunch when we were dating we actually end up breaking up right before we finally got back together and up getting married and we broke up because i was like dude you're just upset all the time and i don't really know what to do like i'm just being me and like if that upsets to you we should be together and she's like no i'm upset i'm just i'm like you're upset we're upset a lot we're finding a lot is too much i don't wanna do that how long were you dating when you broke up and how long did you break out for and then how long until you got married okay i think something like we were probably dating for two years my guess broke up for one month exactly and then got back together and it was it's been amazing ever since in a unbelievable kind of way meaning you know most people are like oh people don't change and if my friend was in a relationship and i'm like okay so y'all were fighting all the time you broke up for a month she got back together and was like no now now i'm gonna be cool about everything i'd be like dude come on are you serious what are the odds of that like what are the odds that like it'll just all turn around and then it it actually did and one of the things that i i would say it turned around like a one eighty let's say a full turn it turned around like one thirty which was great huge improvement and then when we had kids it's now a full one eighty where i told my wife was i was like dude when's the last time we fought and she's like i so i don't know we do have time to fight and i was exactly i was like the best thing about kids is that both of you and i have an unspoken agreement which is okay first of all we no longer doubt each other's intentions i know you were trying to be great for me and i'm trying to be great for you and we're not perfect that's okay but second to that is when we do disagree or have an argument we only let her self suffer for like ninety seconds whereas you were saying like you dude when i have a conversation that ruins my week it used to ruin our week then it started to ruin our a couple days now it ruins literally ninety seconds but was like we gotta be awesome parents so we gotta like function we gotta go to gymnastics right now it's like are we really gonna like make this call right uncomfortable like dude how about we just agreed to this like totally let that go and just get back on the good foot we've been doing that now for last five three or four years and it has been amazing it is a miracle it is something i would not have believed and if my friend told me you know that's how it's gonna go i'd be like oh you're bullshit yourself but i think the principle is the best relationships have something that's bigger than eat just yourself in it you you can't really be selfish as a parent you you know your selfish just goes down when you have kids because it it's really about at least for me i should speak for myself life is very much in service of them and i i i won't i will give up so much i used to never give up for them and that and i feel like in a way the podcast thing is great for us because it's something bigger than us like let's say we didn't have the podcast i'd probably after that lesson interaction probably wouldn't talked to you for a few months just out of like well we don't have to talk so why would i talk whereas the podcast is like no i gotta make this right which made me think what can i do better which made grow up and be a little bit of a better person today before you put a bow on it let me say one thing so when we have that argument also wanna have any argument with anyone in business i like this little thing gets in my head where i'm like i like sometimes i'm like you know what i don't wanna do business ever again i don't want to like i don't want confrontation like you know it's like when you're losing a board game and you just like fuck this game and you like flip it out upside down like sometimes i'm like i don't want any of it i'm out i don't want any of this i don't want any drama and the reason i like reading history and biographies is i'm able to see people admire in like some of the issues that they've had and i think i've said a bunch that like all great men or bad men meaning anyone who you admire like who's a achieved greatness whether it's a president or a ceo like there's people who dislike them because they've had to kill like someone like you know like in war but you're like that war was unfortunately good but there's down huge downsides and i think about like to do anything interesting in life whether it's business whatever it involves confrontation and it involves tension a lot of times that is such an uncomfortable feeling but it's sort of like working out where it's like you gotta do that to make your muscle strong but i and i and i hate it when it's happening and i have to remind myself like don't burn it down don't walk away from everything like you can achieve what you want you just have to go through some arguments sometimes but it's sort of like when you let's say you had a company with a hundred employees and let's say twenty six percent of those employees are unhappy that's like a pretty good ratio so you have roughly seventy five percent of people who are happy but that means that every single day if there's twenty six days in the workweek week or in the month work workday days in the month someone's gonna bitch you do you know what i mean and someone's gonna bitch to you every single day and what it does to you is it makes you think everything is bad and it's really hard just switch your psychology to be like no not everything is bad i need to compartment compartment these two things and it is a i've gotten better as i've gotten older but it's that is a huge issue for me personally and i think it's an issue for a lot of people where they they face some adversity and i typically human adversity like tension between people is i think my opinion the hardest one and the most common one and the reaction is fuck it yeah i have that reaction i have that reaction super fast i think even yeah thing i was like forget the whole thing then not the podcast but like the situation we're already argue was like forget it who cares even then i do that all the time i do that all the time and i have to i have it's a really hard thing to say it's my future self gonna be happy or sad that i made this decision in this particular moment it's really fucking hard to nail that do do you also read the kind of history of biographies because it's like the problem is one hundred times bigger than your current problem like whatever the tiff is with your wife or with your neighbor or whatever it is it's like well i just last night i spent four hours reading about these guys were ship and unless you know that's one of the reading why like oh okay that's more relative i read it for that reason to it's sorta like when i used the box i need to get my ass kicked in the morning i was like oh everything else the volumes weight turned down like i just got beat up and it's okay like i don't mind like and that's sort of why i like rem biographies i also like reading them because i like seeing this is a normal feeling that i am having it is right it is okay and that is like a cool thing about reading about these people is when i'm in these moments i think don't burn it down don't walk away don't don't do these things it is normal to have this and you have to accept that like in order to do anything interesting conflict is part of that and oftentimes conflict or constraints is where beauty and art is created do you know what i mean yes hundred percent that that makes a lot of sense to me and i think is pretty wise to be honest let me ask you a question have you ever heard the phrase somebody said it's slang skill issue you're not a gamer and you're not like seventeen years old so you might not be like part of this like sub culture where one of the like common internet slang is just skill issue and what skill issue me like somebody will describe like a huge problem they'll be on reddit typing like this whole thing about how them this is bad and this is hard and this this thing out of my control whatever and then somebody will just skill issue i think it started with gaming which is like they're complaining about the game and then somebody who's better at the game we'll just say skill issue and what it fundamentally means is like there are so many things that we describe as outside of our control or just fundamentally hard or impossible that's actually a skill issue meaning if you had the skill you wouldn't be and whining about this that's how i felt about yesterday meaning when i started reading the gauntlet stuff i realized oh skill issue disagreeing and arguing is a skill and i have a skill issue i am not as good at it as i could be be and the reason why is when i'm reading his stuff he's got all these different words to describe things he's like i was reading his like encoding of the arguments he's like cross complaint i'm cross what's a cross complaint i'm like looking it up i'm like oh yes yeah he just did that he he did a cross complaint like that's what that was that's why that didn't feel good and he's like yes but i was like oh dude yeah i did a yes but where i agreed but then i like undermine my agreement right afterwards by the next sentence i said and i realized in the same way that i once read like intelligence is the number of distinctions you have on a subject what that means is if if you talk to es o's about snow snow we like i have one word for snow snow they have like fifteen eighteen twenty one different before i describe snow the snow that's a little bit runny the snow that's really hard the snow that falls fast the snow that like behaves differently because they live in the snow they had they had to become intelligent about snow they had to create a vocabulary that described the distinctions because they mattered in their life and they were familiar with them whereas somebody who's not not so skilled and familiar with snow only has one word in the same way as this guy was describing argument dynamics i realized oh skill issue there are a bunch of words for snow that i don't know when it comes to arguing and arguing well i think it's even got a book like fight right or something i ready it but like i'm gonna go read that and so that was the last interesting takeaway which is yet again skill issue so many things in my life just come down to that oh losing weight is hard no no skill issue i used to have this asshole friend and college used to say the only way you get good at drinking and driving is through a lot of practice i'm like you're will you you be but you might be right and sort of kinda like this that's kinda like this so you gotta fight a lot in order to like i'd learned how to do it okay well sam i'm sorry for all of those reasons that i just said and and it's mutual you prepared this so it's gonna sound like you're well you are it sounds like you're being the bigger i i definitely the bigger man and and i wanna let and and i wanna let you know that everything is mutual i i feel that like it sounds like you hey well it sounds like you're in in some ways you're you're you're sort of acting that you didn't blame me for anything you only blamed yourself and i and i wanna let you know that it that's not actually the reality you just you just use more words than i did your word count was higher but that doesn't mean that the the feeling is different just perfectly when we're gonna say it that's it that's the pod by the way we get to use the one time and one time only youtuber thing to do where it's like it's all over i'm shutting it down we we quit we're breaking up like the one time you could fake you could fake your own death you could fake retirement you could fake your break up and everybody wants to click to see the gus and then they you it's the boy who cried wolf you can only do it once but you could hell a lot of clicks at that time so i think we should use it this time we should title this whatever you know is this over podcast or yeah it's over sorry guys you know you know sean's apology or like we're breaking up here's why some some version of that i feel like i could rule word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back