Kurt Nelson 0:08 Welcome to behavioral groups, the podcast that explores why we do what we do, and how understanding can help us make better choices in work life and everything in between. I'm Kurt Nelson, Tim Houlihan 0:21 oh, everything in between. I like that. Okay, I'm Tim Houlihan, and today's episode tackles one of the most common and confident beliefs that we have and that we all carry around with us when it comes to romantic relationships. And then we're going to quietly dismantle that as well. And that belief is, I know what I want in a partner, Kurt Nelson 0:46 but what's wrong with that? Tim, come on. I mean, we all have lists, we have our preferences, we have deal breakers, we have stories about our type. And most people, including me, I think I'm talking about myself here. Are very sure that those are the things that will guide us to who we fall for, or, in my case, who I already fell for, right? It's like, boom, it's gonna hit me. It's this lightning strike and Dang, that's the person. It's the fairy tale, romantic, calm, you know, meet Q. This is, this is the person that I am going to spend the rest of my life with, or at least next week with, right? Tim Houlihan 1:34 That was a very nice lateral arabesque, okay, Kurt Nelson 1:38 what is that? Okay? Whereas I don't know, here's the deal, Tim Houlihan 1:43 your mind may be drawing a bull's eye over a bunch of random experiences that you use to say, see, I just did it right? But it's your past. And all I'm saying is that it might not be quite as straightforward as you think it might be. Kurt Nelson 1:58 Okay, okay, all right. So let's get back to the episode. Okay, all right, so behavioral science, which is what this podcast is about, has something to say about this old yarn, the I know exactly what I want in a partner, and we need to pay attention to that, because it's good science, not just you know this, saying that, like, you know, oh, here's what, here's how it should work, right? No, this isn't a this isn't a movie. This is actual science. Tim Houlihan 2:35 That's a key difference. Okay, so our guest today is Paul Eastwick, and he has spent years studying attraction, dating and relationship formation. And Paul's research reveals some things that are deeply counterintuitive. Kurt Nelson 2:50 So Paul is the author of bonded by evolution, and he is also an evolutionary psychologist who is particularly interested in what aspects of our genetic code work to our advantage in today's dynamic world, and what elements get in our way? Tim Houlihan 3:08 Yeah, by the way, Paul was previously a behavioral grooves guest with Dr Eli Finkel in Episode 464, way back in February of 2025, Kurt Nelson 3:17 yeah, that Valentine's episode. There we go, Tim Houlihan 3:23 exactly because they joined us to talk about their podcast called Love factually. Unknown Speaker 3:29 That's great. It's great. Tim Houlihan 3:31 It really is. So we strongly recommend love factually. It's a lot of fun. And in Paul's new book, he challenges the traditional models of evolutionary psychology, which he calls the EVO script. He argues that dating relationships are not solely about mating hierarchies and gender differences, but in fact, they are more about compatibility and shared histories. Kurt Nelson 3:53 So this is the really interesting part, and here's what we're going to learn from Paul in this episode, the best way to find a highly compatible partner is by using small networks and casual interactions with a bunch of people. That is the ticket to forming a meaningful and long, lasting relationship. It's not the things that people are out there doing often now, right? And we'll get into that in the episode. But he's sharing this because his research bears this out. The traits that we say we want are surprisingly bad at predicting who we are actually compatible with. Tim Houlihan 4:37 Okay, just having like this monster brain, boom going on. Kurt Nelson 4:41 It's a big brain boom, right? Yeah, this Tim Houlihan 4:45 is the big aha that we need to pay attention to, that attraction doesn't follow our preferences. It's in reverse, our preferences follow attraction. Kurt Nelson 4:56 Bing, you know, yes. So. So of course, this means that we don't find the right person by matching a checklist or swiping right or left, whichever way that works. You know, through all of this, we become attracted through interaction, through shared experiences, through timing and context, and it's later that we come back and we explain it to ourselves and these neat little package stories that fit into a nice rom com or something else, right? Tim Houlihan 5:29 Our brains are fantastic in that way. So if you've ever wondered why your dating history doesn't look anything like your preference list or or why chemistry feels so hard to predict, well, this episode is the one that you need to hear. Kurt Nelson 5:42 But before we get into our conversation with Paul Tim, we want to remind our listeners that Tim and I have been bootstrapping this behavioral grooves podcast for over eight years now, without any formal sponsors or funding or actually ways that we can pay for all the expenses or our time, and we've delivered over 500 episodes to listeners in more than 140 countries. And we do it because we love the work, and we love this opportunity to share with you, however Well, Tim Houlihan 6:19 the reason that we're sharing this. And the reason that we're talking about is because Kurt teed up the things that we subscribe to, the subscriptions and outsource service costs, they've all gone up. And if you'd like to contribute to fund our sub stack, that's great. You want to contribute to our Patreon, that's great too. But honestly, we'd rather be applying the behavioral science we love so much to you and to your business needs. Kurt Nelson 6:45 Yeah. So if you have a business need where you go, Tim and Kurt, they would be some great insight into helping me overcome this challenge, or going over this hurdle, or helping our company get to the next level. Well, send us a note. Start that conversation. If you want to improve your sales and marketing communication, I mean, we can help you with sales and marketing communication. Bring the science, not just this. Oh, this is the way we've always done it, type thing. Or if you want to improve the effectiveness of how your teams work together, building synergy and helping understand the human dynamics of those teams. Well, that's good if you want to enhance the cohesiveness of your culture, make sure that that culture isn't sending people in one direction where you want them to go in another direction. We can maybe help you with that if you want to address any of those nasty behavioral issues that get in the way of your team finding its groove. Well, that's where Tim can help you out. Tim Houlihan 7:54 We Kurt and I would love to help out. Just drop us a line. Let's get started on building a solution that will make you and your teams into heroes. Heroes. Yes, yeah. Okay, back to Paul. Kurt Nelson 8:07 Yeah. Back to Paul. So we want to encourage you to take in what Paul has to say about how attraction actually works, and when you do, you'll stop trying to optimize the wrong things. That will be the start, Tim Houlihan 8:21 yeah, and start paying attention to what really matters. So for now, we encourage you to sit back and relax with a strong core of relationship reality and enjoy our conversation with Paul Eastwick, relationship Kurt Nelson 8:35 reality, yes, I like it. Tim Houlihan 8:45 Hi, Pauli Swick, welcome back to behavior Paul Eastwick 8:48 for grooves. Thanks so much for having me back. Tim Houlihan 8:51 It's so great to have you back. Let's we're gonna get loosened up with a little bit of speed around here. So first question, if you had to give up for a year either your laptop or your mobile phone. Ooh, look at that face. Which would you give up? Paul Eastwick 9:06 Yeah, phone, I'm going up. Okay, that came, yeah, I, I actually there are a lot of things that people don't mind doing on their phones, like sending email. I absolutely hate it. So I think relative to many people, my phone capabilities are limited. So phone into the ocean. Kurt Nelson 9:30 Paul, I am in 100% agreement with you there. I mean, there's, I feel like, oh, just I can do almost everything outside of the actual use of a phone, of a phone, phone, right? Everything else, you know, I do better, probably on a laptop. So why would I? Why would I keep that and we have and who uses? Yeah, exactly. There you go, Tim, you have teams or zoom, but I don't even Yeah, how many times you actually call people anymore? Anyway, all right, we digress. Very. Here. All right, Paul, you had to live in a 35 year old body with a 95 year old mind. Or would you rather live in a 95 year old body with a 35 year old mind? Paul Eastwick 10:14 Whoa. It's like like a Benjamin Button scenario. Go with the 95 year old body and a 35 year old mind. Because, I mean, that just seems like I don't know, achieving what is inevitable, but if I've still got my mental faculties, hey, I'm doing okay. Tim Houlihan 10:36 So who says you've got your mental faculties at 35 just, yeah, Kurt Nelson 10:47 well, I think, and also like, look, you can be, you can be very good about your body. And at 95 hopefully, if you've taken care of it, it is taking, you know, it's still in a pretty decent shape your mind. I think you can take care of it, but it's so much, there's so much out of your control there. So you know, Tim Houlihan 11:05 okay, third speed round question. This is a simple true false that comes straight out of bonded by evolution. Okay, all righty, true or false. A man can stop his biological urge to gawk at a beautiful woman more easily than he can stop himself from reading, Paul Eastwick 11:22 this is a true statement. This is true. It's kind of wild. I think people when they think about, oh, you know, you can't you can't help those biological urges. You know, what are we asking of people when we're asking them to control themselves? I think sometimes we get really wrapped around the axle with exactly what that means. And you know, we do things to control our impulses in daily life all the time, and the sexual stuff, it's not all that different. It's not like it goes in a different category. Tim Houlihan 12:01 You're right. Okay, we're coming back to that, by the way. Okay, very good. Kurt Nelson 12:05 Yeah, okay. This is a question designed for all of our single listeners out there. Okay, all right. This is not, not for the married folks. So just understand that, or in or, or even those folks that are in A a serious, actually, any type of relationship, polyamorous? Okay, sure, all right, true or false? Fall, yeah, playing hard to get is the best strategy. Paul Eastwick 12:33 No, no, no, no, not the best strategy. Ken, you know, there are a lot of misconceptions about playing hard to get the I think when people hear that term, what they think it means is, oh, I'm not going to seem all that into you. I'm going to seem kind of Loof. I'm going to seem like I got better places to be. That's that's not effective. This is research going back like 50 years now. What they found is like, no, no. What the way hard to get works is if it's hard for everybody else to get but I'm into you. Oh, right. It really just is about the appeal of selectivity, or somebody who's selectively into you. That's the biggest thing. But being like, oh, luv, I'm too good for you. Tim Houlihan 13:24 I'm so there are so many misconceptions that you clarify in the book. We're then we're talking with Paul Eastwick about bonded by evolution, which is amazing, by the way, just amazing work. Well done. And it should be a primer for everybody, I think, who is especially Paul Eastwick 13:42 driver, yeah, right. Assign it in college. Kurt Nelson 13:47 Oh, high school, we, let's get this, let's, let's get this down into the real thing. So everybody gets, not just the select few, yeah, you start the Tim Houlihan 13:57 book by introducing a story about evolutionary psychology. You're, you know, it's Anna, it's, yeah, it's getting going with the relationship that everything seems to be firing on the right cylinders. You got, you got Christmas break. That's just like perfect with the family and the time you spend together, and so you're heading back into school and thinking, Yeah, I got this, yeah, but you don't. No, I definitely don't. And I totally connected to that story in a powerful way that I felt like, wow, getting dropped was absolutely a message to me that I was just not good enough, yes, Paul Eastwick 14:45 and the reason that that story was so memorable and that it hit so well is that it was very clear that it wasn't like, I don't like spending time with you, or even like, like, You're a bad or boring person. And it was a real connection. I think that the two of us had we really enjoyed spending time together. But whereas, you know, I'd had experiences in the past of that escalating into something romantic, this one was not going to be doing that. And that became painfully clear. And this is an experience that many, many people have, and it's largely connected to this idea that, well, we exist in a hierarchy of mate value and mating opportunities, that some people are 10s and some people are sixes and some people are twos, and you have to figure out your place in that hierarchy. It's a painful process. But if you listen to I think, a culturally prominent, and certainly it's prominent in the science worldview, that's how mating works. And as you saw in the book, I have a couple, a couple of bones to pick with that. Kurt Nelson 16:00 Just a couple, just a few there, Paul, Tim Houlihan 16:04 we've all got that. I'm, you know, I'm a six, but I really love to date a nine kind of thing. What's the problem with that? Yeah. Paul Eastwick 16:12 So the problem is that I think we overestimate the extent to which valuable attributes in a partner are consensual. We overestimate the extent to which everybody agrees. So it was certainly the case. But you know, in the story that I tell in the book that you know, I see myself as like a six, and I see Anna as a nine, and I think at least in that part of the story, we're to understand that's kind of how she sees the world as well. But the reality is, when you do the studies that actually Canvas how people feel about multiple other people, these studies are very hard to conduct, because you need a lot of reports about a lot of people all at the same time, a consensus about attractiveness, physical attractiveness, we think it's right there. I should be, you know, we can all see it. We must all agree, right? It's, it's really not close to perfectly consensual. And in fact, it's swamped by what we call compatibility. It's like the idiosyncratic things about another person that make them especially appealing to you and especially unappealing to somebody else, that those are the portions of the attraction judgments that really dominate it. Kurt Nelson 17:32 Yeah, that is so powerful it hits me because my assumption is no physical attractiveness is a pretty standard scale and attractive to a certain degree. And what you're saying, if I'm understanding this correctly, is that varies widely. So, so the this universality of it is, is a misbelief. It's a it's a false, it's a false kind of ethos out there that, Oh, everybody this, yeah, Bo Derek is a 10. Yeah, right. Use that. That right? You know, Paul Eastwick 18:14 old indeed, have seen the film 10. Kurt Nelson 18:19 Number of people in the listening audience that will get that you have Unknown Speaker 18:22 to give us, who is Bo Derek. Kurt Nelson 18:25 And everybody realizes that that they're a 10 or but what I'm hearing you say is that is not the case. Somebody might rate Bo Derek a 10. Other people might go, oh no, Bo is a seven, or Bo might even be lower than that, and that just varies based on individual preferences. Is that correct? Paul Eastwick 18:44 Yes, here's a useful way to think about it, and these are rough numbers. But if I ask the two of you, let's say there's a picture of a woman you don't know. And again, a lot of the studies are conducted this way. Oh, here's somebody you don't know. Oh, rate this person in terms of how attractive they are, if I made it binary, which is, I think, the easiest way to understand this. So you're just making hot or not judgments, the two of you are going to agree like 65 70% of the time. So total above average. Yeah, right. That's, well, you know, it's more than 5050, it's also far from perfect. That is also the case. You'd see similar levels of agreement when people are meeting for the first time. And I think these are the contexts where people really get the sense of how they fit, okay. And this can be quite painful. So imagine people arriving, to use the example of summer camp. Can you tell that I'm from the northeast? People arrive at summer camp and, you know, day one, day two, everybody's kind of figuring each other out, sorting Yeah, it's a sorting hat, right? Exactly, exactly. It's. The sorting hat by attractiveness, yeah. But a funny thing happens as people get to know each other better, that level of agreement starts to drop. You can start to see it over the course of a few weeks. And then as time goes on and on, agreement drops further and further. And if we get all the way out to August, we get all the way out to, you know, when small groups of mixed, you know, gender friends and acquaintances have formed agreement is getting darn near close to zero. And I think that would surprise a lot of people, but we see this consistently in the data. So if I do that same experiment with the two of you judging somebody, but now it's somebody, you know, okay, somebody was like, yeah, and your friend group or kind of peripheral now you are agreeing about how desirable she is about 53% of the time, yeah, yeah, Kurt Nelson 21:03 barely better than 5050. Okay, Paul, help us unpack that. Yeah. What? What happens in that getting to know somebody that now shifts, what, how we view that person? And I'm actually in my head, going over my own thing. And I there, I have been very many times where my perception of somebody has shifted. It's, you know, this, this person is gorgeous. She's wonderful. It's, you know, my gosh, that is wonderful. And then I start talking with them, and this goes down, right, right? Or vice versa. It could. It happens both ways. Paul Eastwick 21:49 Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think that the useful thing to think about in the situations like what you just described, is that it's not like you're discovering that. In fact, you know and now is your judgment of her declines. You're not discovering like a truth about who she really is. Oh, at first she came across as hot, but then I discovered the truth that she is less appealing. What happened is that whatever was she was doing. Maybe, maybe you didn't appreciate her sense of humor. Maybe you thought she was kind of unkind. Maybe she wasn't as bright as you were hoping. Whatever it is that all of these things are linked and so you actually begin to see her as less attractive than you did. It's not to say that one of those judgments was right and the other was wrong. You're coming to see her in a new light, in a new way, based on all the other pieces that you're pulling in. I think we we really get locked into a headspace of thinking about like, Yeah, but which one is the truth? Well, you have your truth when you perceive her, and somebody else has their truth when they perceive her, right? All of these, all of these things, you know, they're not errors, they're not mistakes. It's just you see this person in a different way than you did beforehand. And I think when we think about it like that, you're like, we're like, oh, well, right. Of course we can have all these idiosyncratic judgments. And thank God we have these idiosyncratic judgments, because otherwise, you know, fives would pair up with fives and they'd be miserable about it. But luckily, fives get together with fives all the time, and they're delighted, because they don't see each other as fives. They see each other as 10s. Tim Houlihan 23:33 That's the point. So why does this myth persist? Well, yeah, Paul Eastwick 23:45 it is, it is. There's some truth to it when we're when we're raining people, we don't know there's truth to it when we're meeting people for the first time. So, so I get that, and you can't just, you know, you know, walk into a bar and, you know, not have taken care of yourself and not have practiced your social skills in a while and expect to hit it off with everybody there. Like, there, there is consensus when people are first meeting each other. And I also think too when I describe, yeah, but like, remember, like, how you get to know people, and your opinions change, and your opinions change in different directions, like, what's that going to do that's going to create more divergence of opinion? But there are some things in the modern context that are making this kind of difficult, I mean, to the extent that we are dating on apps, boy, is that emphasizing the context that pulls for a lot of consensus, because now you're giving people photographs and very simple descriptions that are easier to build consensus around, and so you get a very, very unequal market, which is not what would be happening. If small groups of people were meeting and hanging out Tim Houlihan 25:02 face to face. So I just want to follow up on that. So to what degree are we using the wrong lens to evaluate love? Paul Eastwick 25:13 Yeah, I think when, when people are struggling and they say, I can't find anybody. Set the apps aside for a second. When people are struggling, they feel like they can't find anybody, and they think, I mean, because this goes to some really grim places on the ad for young men especially, and they get very frustrated, and they feel unwanted and they feel undesired, my sense is that the model that these folks implicitly have in mind is a model of going to a bar where you don't know anybody, going to a party where you don't know anybody. I mean, there's like, a famous meme that is literally that, right, a guy at a party not knowing anybody, looking around and seeing all these happy, attractive people this, this is a hard way to socialize. There are easier ways to socialize. And you know, in the book, I talk over and over again about the value for heterosexuals of mixed gender friends and acquaintances. These are contacts where, and I do mean friends. I don't mean people that you've, like, got on the back burner, or you're, like, slowly working or something, right? I mean actual friends, you know, people who you're, who you enjoy spending time with, for the sake of spending time with them, and to get out of the mindset of like, Oh, we're gonna go out tonight and like, we're gonna meet women, or we're gonna meet guys and they're gonna fall for us instantly. People can do that. It's way harder than the simple like, Let's hang out with groups of friends and see where nights take us. Kurt Nelson 26:57 So love at first sight that like star struck, bam, yeah, wow. This is the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. We see it in movies, we read about it in stories. But is it, is that actually the way that it happens in the real world? I'm sure it does. But is that the norm, or is that, you know, kind of off on the, on the, you know, very rare occurrences? Paul Eastwick 27:29 Yeah, it's uncommon. Now, these are some real rough numbers that I'm gonna throw out, but we've got some data that looks at people's we call them romantic trajectories. And what we mean by that is we're trying to track how you felt about a particular person that you would go on to have. It could be a short term fling kind of thing. Could be a long term relationship, you know, a wide variety of different kinds of relationships, and we try to track it from the moment you meet the person. It's pretty challenging to do this, yeah, but when, when we get these trajectories, you see something interesting at the beginning, which is that, you know, a good percentage of the time, I'm going to say 20% of the time, people are starting kind of at ceiling, like I met you and I fell for you instantly. So, like, a fifth of things that will go on to be something, and I don't know, like two fifths are, like, I thought you were awful, double the other side, it is more, it is more at the bottom, and the rest are kind of in the middle. So the average impression at the beginning, it's like, kind of, am I right? And again, these are all relationships that are going to be successful. So they go up right there, yeah. And the funny thing is, kind of didn't matter where you start everybody, more or less, more or less, gets to the same, you know, pretty high place. You know, if you're going to have a relationship with somebody, you get to some reasonably high plateau. But yeah, maybe you started that high. Maybe you were really, really low at the beginning. But, you know, there is sort of a, we know it can happen through all these routes. But if you go around expecting fireworks from moment one, if you're not even willing to start walking up that hill to get to a place where you really feel positively about somebody, this is not a recipe for success or happiness. You're now placing a bet on a rather unlikely event. I do think the movies do this. We just covered, what was it? We just covered the holiday on, on love faction and, and, like, I got mad about this because, because they talk about, like, oh, the meet cute. Oh, everybody's got to have a meet cute. You don't have to have a meet cute. You can have a meet hate. And it can still. It turned into something so I don't, yeah, do not expect fireworks from moment one. This is not a good recipe. Tim Houlihan 30:08 Quick segue and promo. I love that you guys bring up, that you talk through movies this way, and that you have guests on who are smart and dearly love the movies that you're talking about with such incredible detail. Sometimes it blows me away. Like, God, I don't pay that much attention to movies. Kurt Nelson 30:25 So for people we had, we're talking about love factually, which is a podcast that Paul does with with another gentleman, Eli Finkel. And it's, it's fantastic podcast. So really encourage you guys go out listen to it, because, if you are anybody that watches movies and, you know, rom coms, I basically are a lot of what you guys cover and and others. Paul Eastwick 30:50 Yeah, it's a fun medium to talk about these, these same topics, right? Yeah, we know. We just, we just, you know, insert it in there while we, you know, gush over Ryan Gosling and Kate Winslet, Tim Houlihan 31:04 so we've been talking around this, Paul, we've been talking around the EVO script. And I just want to make sure it's a central part of the book. And I want to make sure that that you explain to to listeners what this EVO script is, because this is, this is a central pillar of the the attack ads that you have getting it. What's wrong with the lenses that we use? Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit what what this EVO script is, and then, yeah. And how can we flip that script? Paul Eastwick 31:36 Then, yeah. So you know what I call the EVO script. It's, I think it's what most people think as being the core tenants of evolutionary psychology, which I think they then tend to infer means, well, this is how people evolved, and so anything else that's going on in the mating domain is some sort of unnatural aberration that's certainly going to be very difficult, if Not impossible. And I talk about, you know, as part of this EVO script. I talk about this mate value hierarchy. This is one component of it. I talk about the assumption that men and women are really different, looking for different things, and sort of in this competitive, you know, war against each other in the mating domain. And then the third thing I talk about is this idea that, Oh, like, some people are good for flings and some people are good for marriage, right? I mean, there's all sorts of nasty dichotomies online, like alphas and betas that reflect these ideas. Tim Houlihan 32:36 And you've got data to back this stuff up, by the way, this isn't just oh yeah, riffing on opinion, yeah, Paul Eastwick 32:41 yeah, yeah, no, there's there. There's a lot, many studies going back decades that have all kind of coalesce around this particular view. I mean, I talk about this in the book, but you know, we're all working with the same data here. The issue is, how are you going to take those data points and turn it into a story of the way human mating works, and the EVO script is that story, the story that's about competition, and it's about markets, and it's about trying to get the best deal that you can get, and that that's how humans are, that's how we evolved, and I and and my fellow relationship scientists, for the most part, we don't see it that way. We have a very we use the same data, but we have a very different story for how human mating works. We aren't again. We're not ignoring the fact that in initial attraction context, yes, there's some agreement about who is hot and who is not. We just think there's all this other stuff that gives a very different picture of how human mating evolves and how human mating works. Kurt Nelson 33:51 So what is the message from that, that people should be taking and running with, as opposed to this script that we've had, yeah, it's kind of been pushed on us. What? What should that new lens be? And particularly, you'd mentioned this idea of young men who are it feels like at least the conversation that I've seen in the ethos out there is young men are facing this hard time. They're not having the same like relationships, and they don't know how to do it, and there's a whole bunch of pain and anguish going on with them. Paul Eastwick 34:32 So yeah, it's right. So one angle, if you're if you're a young man, one angle you want to adopt the classic evolutionary psychological view of these things, it would be, I gotta have all the best attributes that I can get, and gotta sort of go out there and win women over. Okay, here's the alternative humans have historically. Me, found romantic relationships by looking for compatibility in small networks. Okay, compatibility in small networks, this is also hard, but it's really different. Go about it, if that's your lens for where romantic relationships come from because you don't focus as much on having the best attributes or sort of dominating or seeming more important than the other men around you. You would think much more about who do I uniquely click with? Who can I build something with and you think more about those small groups, those small networks, I think that's a little bit of what's becoming a lost art is socializing with other folks, just kind of for the sake of socializing and meeting friends of friends Unknown Speaker 35:55 of friends. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 35:57 yeah, because it does feel like it would be easy to put targets on the backs of the people that you find attractive, right? Paul Eastwick 36:05 Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. And that sort of works against us. Yeah, I think so. It's a it's a unique, very special skill, and some people have it. And you know, if that's you, God bless. But what I worry about is that a lot, lot of men feel like, well, maybe I can be that guy. Maybe I can work on those skills and be that guy and and look a little bit of social skills training, a little bit of confidence boosting training like that. Stuff's good, but rather than focus on like, improving your attributes. I worry that for a lot of people, it becomes demoralizing, because you go to the gym and then you think your fortunes are going to change. But again, seeking out strangers in bars is really, really hard. What so? So I like, I like to give men this bit of advice, and this comes from a set of studies that I really like a lot. But if you want to find strong predictors of which men in their like middle to late teenage years are going to in the future, find a romantic relationship. These are heterosexual men. Look at the number of female friends that they have. And it's not that they're gonna date those female friends. They're gonna date the friends of those friends, or the Friends of the Friends of the friends, right? It's, it's it's connections. Those are the things that are helpful, because we meet people all the time, and they might like hanging out with us, but they're also thinking, like, oh, it's not for me. Like, I don't want to date this person, but let me introduce you to my friend over here. Now, that sort of casual matchmaking is where a lot of relationships historically came from. And that way of meeting people, it's not dead, it's still, yeah, it's still out there. I mean, yes, online, the apps have, you know, they're number one, but you know, meeting through friends and meeting through shared activities, you know, we can still do these things. Kurt Nelson 38:13 So Paul, you talk about apps, and you talk about the changing in how dating occurs, and that is the new way that my I have no, no idea of how apps that was, that was post my kind of single year. You missed out on all the fun Kurt. I missed out on all of boy oh boy has do two part question here. One, do you think that the the apps themselves have led to some of this, where this is now the the way. So I must, you know, maximize all my attributes to get swiped whichever direction you swipe. Yeah, and two then, all right, that's part one. Part Two is okay. So if I am out there and I've only been accustomed to to, you know, using an app or some online dating service, how do I start on just this other aspect of it? Paul Eastwick 39:15 Oh yes, yes, excellent. So I do think the apps are contributing in exactly the way you describe because they make you feel like a product to be marketed. I'm not saying people didn't feel this way 30 years ago from time to time, but boy, I mean, the apps just turn it up to 11. I mean, they just absolutely supercharges that sensation that you got to be impressive, because if you don't have all the right attributes, it's just like true on there that you're not going to get a lot of likes and you're not going to get a lot of opportunities. So it's kind of a bummer. I think the other thing that bums me out about the apps is that none of them are really designed to help people. Find partners. They're designed for engagement. Because that's right. I mean, that's what all the what our phones are doing all the time. Pay attention to me. That's the whole point. So when you're spending 90 minutes a day swiping, the app creators say we did it, you know, let's, let's get a beer. That was the point was to get you to use the thing. It wasn't to get you wasn't to get you offline meeting people. So that's just, that's just too bad that this has become the process, that it feels like a job, that it leads to a lot of dissatisfaction. So the there are, there are other ways, you know, for people who live in modern and look where my biases are going to come in is like, look, I live in a city, and a lot of the people I know live in major cities. And when you live in major cities, there are people who are single, your age, who are nearby, and there are things that are designed to bring people together. Now, sometimes those things, maybe it's like speed dating, maybe it's mixers, those things are excellent services that set people up on blind dates. Love it when people are meeting face to face. I'm, you know, the scientific, the scientist, part of me is delighted. But also, don't forget the lost art of hanging out with people just for the sake of hanging out with people. I mean, this is going to sound quaint, but when I was in graduate school, I was on kickball teams for the entire stretch, and most of the time I was in a relationship anyway, but I was just enjoying hanging out with people. I was often part of those conduits that introduced some people to some other people, just kind of by virtue of being there, and I know you two, and now we're all in a conversation together. And people meet each other this way. So just being a part of of social groups and networks again, and fighting that urge to just spend another evening home with your phone or your Netflix, I really, I think that's that's can be very helpful for people. Kurt Nelson 42:16 It's interesting as I'm relaying this and thinking about my own life. I was part of a intramural you know, we play like football, we play volleyball, softball, broom ball, here in Minnesota, out on the ice, doing all these fun things. And it was just a group of friends that we did. And actually, of that, I ended up meeting my wife, and she had her own group of friends in that different connection, three of my friends ended up marrying three of my wife's friends, yeah, and, you know, these long term connections. It was this, you know, two groups coming together and having that connection. I didn't. And now that you're talking about this, it just made me realize that's exactly what happened. We we weren't hanging out with my group of friends to, you know, find love, romance and different things. And the other group, they weren't doing the same either, but because we overlapped, that subsequently happened, yeah, Paul Eastwick 43:24 yeah, exactly. And I think now if I can imagine channeling a probably young skeptic, listening to the three of us with a young skeptic is maybe thinking like, Okay, that was great for you, but I want better. I want more options. And to that hypothetical young listener, I say, you don't get it. It's not you you spend all this time. It's like you're trying to do on the front end, what you're supposed to be doing on the middle and the back end, you don't find the best partner right off the bat. And then that gives you months and years of the lifetime of happiness, the happiness, the contentment, the success relationally, comes from constructing the thing, and it ends you end up in this weird paradox that I think feels very disconnected from the modern world, but that is it actually a lot of pairs can probably make it work under the right circumstances otherwise. How was it that we were getting together with our next door neighbors for decades and decades and decades. We didn't do so miserably. We did so very contentedly, because we took the time to find like, oh, what can we build something around? So when you think about relationships, not as like, I'm. I'm gonna, like, get the best product on the market. But instead, it's, well, I'm gonna build the best thing I can build with somebody else. You know, in collaboration, it's, it's, I think it's, it's a better reflection of of how the human mating psychology is, is really designed to work. Tim Houlihan 45:21 That's so outstanding. Kurt Nelson 45:26 Hey, this is Kurt, and we want to say thanks for listening to behavioral grooves. And we hope that you're enjoying this episode, but it feels a little bit one sided. You're hearing from us, but we're not hearing from you. Tim Houlihan 45:38 This is Tim, and we have two suggestions to remedy that. The first is join our Facebook page and engage with us. We want to Kurt Nelson 45:46 talk with you. We want to hear your perspectives, and hopefully, our Facebook page might be the place to have some of that interaction. So please, please, come and join us. Tim Houlihan 45:56 The other recommendation we have for you is to leave us a quick rating, you know the little five star thing at the bottom of your app or a short review, just leave us a few words about what you like about behavioral grooves. We'd very much appreciate it. Thanks. Kurt Nelson 46:10 And we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming. Tim Houlihan 46:14 We are talking with Paul Eastwick about his new book, bonded by evolution, and it's time to get back to the speed round, okay, this question about the stroop effect. So we, oh yeah, we teed up the work, the work of overcoming evolution versus learning. And first of all, just have to say, kudos for you for figuring out how to get the stroop effect, which was based on color, into black and white. Boy, kudos to you for that, but you can take it yourself exactly. So I'm using some language that listeners might not be familiar with. Can you first give us a quick description of what the stroop effect is, yes, and then tell us why this is so important in overcoming the EVO script. Paul Eastwick 47:04 Yeah. So the stroop task is one of these classic cognitive psychology tasks. If you look at individual differences in the stroop task, you can capture things like executive control. How good are you at resisting momentary impulses? Okay. The reason that I have it, and here's how it works. Basically, it takes place in two phases. There's an easy phase and a hard phase. In the easy phase, what you're doing is you're reading the font color of a bunch of words that are being presented to you. In the easy condition, you'll see blue in blue font and red, the word red in red font and the word green in green font. Now in the hard condition, they have the word green in red font, and you need to say the color, not read the word. This is hard for people, because people have developed a strong habit, they've learned to read, and so it is very hard to resist reading the word green and saying red instead. That's the nature of the stroop task. It's actually as you measure these different kinds of tasks, it's one of the harder tasks? Yeah, that that people are asked to perform in cognitive Tim Houlihan 48:26 psychology, yeah, it's not by and just to hammer this home, it's not biology, it's not DNA, it's not genetics. You learn this is not nature, this is nurture. Paul Eastwick 48:38 Yeah, absolutely. You learn to read, and it turns out, when you develop habits like learning to read, it's really hard to stop. And the reason I bring this up is because we have a tendency. We the People, and also we the scientists, have a tendency to think, if a thing is evolved, that means it's hard to change. That means, and then and now you go in two different directions. Because if you're a critic of evolutionary psychology, you think, well, that sucks. Like, like, this could be something really regressive that I would like to change. I don't want to be told, like, oh, men desire sexual variety, and we can't change anything about that. So, so this is where, like, the politics get intermingled with these. It's almost like scientific philosophy. But the reason I bring up the Stroop is because we got to stop all of this. This is all a mess because there's really no good evidence that I can look at whether something is evolved or not evolved and make some judgment about whether that thing is hard to change. There are all sorts of things that we evolved like you, evolved to be hungry and want to eat food in front of you, I guarantee you I can find many people. Throughout planet earth who are nevertheless able to sit there and resist eating the food, depending on whatever customs they have, whatever rituals they have that tell you when you can start eating like this. Isn't it's and there and again. There are many, many things that are learned, that are very hard to resist that are very difficult to change. So thinking, we can talk about things in their evolved origin or their learned origin, these things are always going to be working in tandem, but to then go to Oh, and then it is hard to change. It's determinism. That's the name for this philosophical idea, and it is worth resisting, regardless of how you feel about evolutionary psychology, whether you're a supporter or a critic, determinism is a thing that we can, all, you know, resist, yeah. Kurt Nelson 50:53 So let me, let me go back to the food piece that you talked about, and try to maybe think, talk out this, this whole concept. So if I have learned we're hungry, right? We're biologically determined to be hungry, and we resist that, given certain norms or cultures, or maybe I'm just, I want to lose weight, so I'm going to do that. And we think about that, we go, oh, that's difficult, but it isn't as difficult if, if you start working at that right, and it becomes much easier. And so at some point, it doesn't feel like that big of a challenge anymore to resist the the ice cream or to resist the whatever it is, because, you know, where I used to desire that a lot, now I don't, and I can that's okay, right? And that's part of what you're saying, is we don't have to be slaves to this, this innate biological component. We can overcome that. And it doesn't have to be this big, Herculean element that we are doing. We can do it actually pretty well. Paul Eastwick 52:09 As you know, as an academic, I go to academic conferences which sometimes involve dinners with six or eight people who are not family members, you know, usually friends or acquaintances. And let me tell you, what happens every time is that one or two people get served, okay, and they sit there patiently, and everybody around them says, no, please start eating. And those two people will continue to sit patiently okay, because they have learned they must wait for everybody it to be served before eating. That is also hard to resist. It is hard for them to then pick up the fork. They'll be like, please start eating while it is hot. Which one is the learned response? Which one is the evolved response? When it comes to what's hard to change? It doesn't matter, like these people are in this pure tension, there's pure tension, and so it this is, this is not a useful way of framing the challenge of trying to create behavioral change wherever it is. Some things are hard to resist. Some things are easy to resist. But whether evolved or not, is not a useful marker. Tim Houlihan 53:23 Paul, when we first met you, you we shared some musical background. You're a guitar player. Yes, you talk in the book about the importance of music in sort of the establishing intimacy. And, yeah, you know, building relationship, right? Paul Eastwick 53:41 Yeah, in that first story, I Anna wanted to learn how to play guitar, so we went and, you know, I helped her pick out her first guitar. And, you know, learned a few chords, Tim Houlihan 53:51 yeah, Yellow Submarine. I mean, there's, oh yeah, some great stuff in there. And I have to tell you as as someone who has played a lot in front of other people, there have been lots of times when very attractive women have come up to me and handed me a little note with with with a phone number on it, and said, Can you give this to the bass player? That's the first thing that happened. But, but in on the rare occasion that they say, Oh, I love your music, you know, I love what you're doing, and there's this obvious affection in it, my guard goes up, and I tend to think you don't know me. You're responding to what I'm doing, but that's, yeah, you're listening to that song, and that song makes you feel a certain way. But that's not me. Paul Eastwick 54:50 That's so interesting, yeah? So it's like, it's almost like the, I would have thought that, first of all, I think the number. Times that happened to me, I could count on one hand that was not people. People think like, oh, you played music. Oh, women must have been throwing themselves at you. Absolutely not Kurt Nelson 55:10 at all. Were you the bass player? Was that maybe you needed to be the bass player? I guess Paul Eastwick 55:16 I think it was worse. Yeah, right. I should have, I should have learned to play base. I mean, I played keyboards a lot of the time. I think that's like, is that guy even in the band? So I think that was my lot. But that's fascinating, that it's almost like you're, like, this skill, that you have this like, the skill in entertaining that it became separate from who you really were, and that seeing one of those things felt a little bit invalidating. Tim Houlihan 55:50 That's fascinating. It's it's some things screwed up, probably inside of Paul Eastwick 55:58 me, but, well, but yeah, but there's a sense that, like, okay, but, but I'm much more than this. I wonder if this means Yeah, right, yeah, Tim Houlihan 56:06 I'm more than this. Kurt Nelson 56:07 This isn't your your basing your perception of me this entire day. It's almost like, Hey, I saw a picture of you, and now I am in love with you, but that's You don't know anything else about me? Yes, you've seen me playing this is one aspect. Yeah, it's an aspect of me, but it isn't the totality of me. And for you, Tim, it felt like there was a little bit of hesitation, because why was that I'm now interviewing you. What was, yeah, this reflected hesitation was like, did you feel like you're going to be disappointed if this other side of me or you are just so shallow to only think of me in this way? Was it a reflection of you, or was it a reflection of them, or some combination of both? Tim Houlihan 56:59 First of all, why is Paul getting off the hook on this? No, this Paul Eastwick 57:04 is good. No, tell us, Tim, what was it? Tim Houlihan 57:07 I think it was the shallow side of it. It was if this is, if this is the key to attraction to me, and you think, and, and I'm projecting that this is, you see this as some totality of who I am? I'm not interested in you. Interesting? Kurt Nelson 57:28 Yeah, that's fascinating. Later. Paul Eastwick 57:33 I think this gets at at the idea, too, that of the what are we a collection of desirable attributes, like, if that's really what we are, there's something that keeps people's guards up if that's how the if that, if that's how attraction is being experienced, because it makes people feel like but if you see like the truth of who I am, or you see all my idiosyncrasies or all of my flaws, then I'm going to lose out. I'm going to get Yeah, yes, and that tension is a very real thing in relationships, but it's a tension because we want to be seen. We want to be a part of something we actually kind of want to be vulnerable again, like a lot of people's real challenges with this, but it there is a human impulse to be vulnerable because we want to be seen for who we really are. That is, and you know, that's why the book's all bonded by evolution, because we do, we strive for those bonds with each other, right? We attach to each other, but if we're just collections of attributes that are, you know, like trying to get the best deal we can on a market that doesn't feel like something that I should be attaching to, that feels downright threatening. So again, it's yet another example of like when you find yourself seduced by these market metaphors, it makes all of this a lot harder. Kurt Nelson 59:05 Yeah, well, and Paul, I think what you just said really reiterates this idea of that group and kind of meeting people through that different channel, because you're not just an attribute, a set of attributes, you are, and they're seeing you probably, and again, making some big assumptions, but they're seeing you good and bad sometimes, like in those interactions, and they're getting to know you the full you Tim, not just the guitar playing rock star up on stage who looks, you know, six feet tall, and Then you come down and, oh, you're only 510 it's like, they're seeing Tim Houlihan 59:46 510 and a half. Oh, you're right, yeah. Paul Eastwick 59:51 I mean, you know another way of thinking about this is like, you know what's not seeing somebody. A collection of attributes, having a history with somebody, having a story with them. And it was that insight a few years ago, and you know, scientifically, where we realized, like, Oh, we've been covering like, exactly half of the whole story of human mating by focusing so much on, are you attractive? Are you smart? Are you talented? Are you sociable? Are you warm? You know, attributes, but that may be where a lot of the magic was in relationships. Was about the cultures that two people build, the narratives that they construct together, the rituals that they build together, because those are the things that make another person essentially irreplaceable, or at least very difficult to replace, because you remove all the history with it. And that was the thing where we realized, like, Oh, we've been looking at the wrong place for desirability. We've actually been looking at the wrong place for compatibility. We thought, well, for a long time, that's like similarity, matching people up on the right attributes, we don't think that's what it is anymore, and that it's much more likely connected to the histories and the stories that you build with another person Tim Houlihan 1:01:11 that's so beautifully said, Paul, we can't end this conversation, though, without getting to maybe the most important question, Yes, and I think, I think you're ready for this. If you were stuck on a desert island and you could only take two musical artists catalogs with you, yeah, yeah, which two? And we've talked about this before, so I guess we have a question, are you going to take the same old crap that you've been listening to? Paul Eastwick 1:01:40 No, I'm on to something new. I'm ready for something new. Okay, so I have a Normie choice and a real weird choice. My Normie choice is Pink Floyd because, because I'm actually, I mean, that band, it lived like five lives, yeah and yes and, you know, there's still, like, several phases that I'm not that familiar with. So like, right? Like, the real early stuff and the real late stuff is actually still a little bit lost on me, so I feel like there's still lots to discover while I can, you know, enjoy the middle stuff. That's my Normie answer. My weird answer is that I will take the collected works of Nobuo Uematsu. He is the composer of the music for the video games Final Fantasy one through 10 and then assorted other video game music over the years. But he's a Japanese composer, absolute legend. If you know, you know Nobuo Uematsu. I legit have been listening to that music since I was in high school. My kid and I bond over listening to that. So I would bring all of his. Tim Houlihan 1:02:50 I just heard a story about about him and about Lee, yeah, and how he just loved, like this work. He just loved creating the music for these games. And I think it's a fascinating career. It's a super crazy niche. Paul Eastwick 1:03:06 But, yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but I think too. I mean, you see more of these, you know, these concerts now, like chamber music and stuff, but they're trying to entice the young people to enjoy, yeah, you know, the string quartets, and so we'll do video game music. I mean, I don't want to spoil the end of tar. Who hasn't seen tar, but boy, is that a hammer, which is also related to video game music. So I'm in Nobu umatsu and Pink Floyd Tim Houlihan 1:03:37 with that our deepest gratitude. It's great to see you again, Paul, and thanks for being a guest again on behavioral grooves. Paul Eastwick 1:03:44 Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. Kurt Nelson 1:03:55 Welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Paul. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our relational reality brains, Tim Houlihan 1:04:07 ah, reaction, relationship reality, like, that's a lot of ours, sorry, but, Kurt Nelson 1:04:14 yeah, yeah. Well, this is this, I mean, you teed it up in the intro, that's what. I think this. This has been really interesting. And I know that Paul is talking about, you know, romantic relationships, and definitely plays out in that. And hopefully some of our listeners are in the spot where they're, you know, in in a relationship that is romantically kind of blossoming, or trying to find some romantic blossoming. But I also think that there is a really interesting piece of this that Paul didn't talk about, so maybe we can chat about it in the grooving session, where we can extrapolate some information. From what he said about romantic relationships, and turn those into just everyday relationships, and in particular work relationships. What do you think? Tim Houlihan 1:05:10 Tim, wow, are we going too far out on the we're taking, we're Kurt Nelson 1:05:15 making a we're taking a we're going way out and hoping that limb doesn't snap off, right? So, okay? Or generalizing when we know from all good science, we shouldn't generalize, however. Well, are you? Tim Houlihan 1:05:31 It doesn't sound like you're implying total generalization. It sounds like you're talking about let's take the knowledge that we have of evolutionary psychology and apply it to work relationships. Is that? Is that a fair way of saying it? Kurt Nelson 1:05:45 Is that, I don't know. Do you think that's a fair way of saying it? Tim Houlihan 1:05:50 All right, where do you want to start? Kurt Nelson 1:05:53 So I think there's this aspect that Paul talked about. It was about attraction doesn't just come from preferences, but he also talked about trust, and how trust doesn't come initially, right? That there is this element of both attraction and trust that emerge from how we interact with people. Yeah, and when you're thinking about any type of relationship, whether it be friends, whether it be co workers, whether it be a romantic relationship, it is that building that emergence of trust and attraction, and I'm using attraction maybe in a different way here a liking that I yeah, that you're a good person, right? And that I like you as an individual, or it can go the other way, right? Where that initial like, oh, you seem cool, and then I get to know you. I interact with you more and, oh, you're not as cool as I thought. You're a Tim Houlihan 1:07:02 Butthead, yeah, which we would say, Kurt Nelson 1:07:07 are you? Are you saying that about me? Tim, it's like, after eight years, Kurt, I realized you're just, you're really a butt head. Tim Houlihan 1:07:13 I'm a slow learner. Well, it makes me think about it like as having a job where I hired a lot of people onto my teams. Over the years, I found that the most successful hires, the people that perform the best on my teams, were people that I knew before they joined the team, when I had relationships with people so they were oftentimes internal hires, but not necessarily. They could have been from another company, but I worked with them pretty consistently, and had a good feel for who they were, as people like and that I had some compatibility with them. They had compatibility with me, bringing those people into my team. Oh, man, that just worked. So so well now, sure, there's a checklist, there's a to kind of get back to Paul's, there's a there's a list, there's a preferences, there's my type, all that kind of stuff that sort of gets filtered out. But what really worked was that I was compatible with those people. They were compatible with me, and the work itself was then much easier to do. We were much more productive as teams. Kurt Nelson 1:08:24 And you can see this happened. You can see this in the opposite of that as well, where somebody checks all of the boxes and you bring them into the team, and then you start to get to know them. So initially, I'm highly attracted to this candidate, this co worker, this this team member that I am going to bring on to the team, and then you start interacting with them. And it's not necessarily that they're bad, it's not right that they are doing anything wrong, but there isn't that connection. There isn't that, you know, and Paul, it would be the love interest. There isn't that, that component of it anymore, and that, I think, is really interesting from a business perspective, because it goes to this aspect of, can we set up the way that we hire differently? Can we set up the way that we I find this with clients. You know, we do a lot of work with clients, and most of the time, you know, we're going into a new client, we don't know anything about them. And do we work well with that person? Yeah, and sometimes we're going in and it's a small project, and it's like, oh my gosh, there's gonna be a lot of work. Why are we doing this? You know, we're spending all of this inordinate amount of time in, you know, doing something that we're not getting a big necessary return for. But we find that, oh, we like working with this. These people. Like us, and all of a sudden that relationship, that trust is expanded. And because that trust is expanded, the work eventually expands as well. Typically, yeah, that's really cool. Going back to what you talked about, though, Tim, how when you were hiring those people, I mean, what did you have the reverse as well? Or was it just like, were you only able to bring in great people that you worked with already? Tim Houlihan 1:10:29 No, there were a couple of fails. Were definitely some fails, and those were oftentimes situations where I didn't know the person that well, and so I didn't really understand the compatibility aspect of what it would be like for them to interact with me or the or the team, or for the team to interact with them Kurt Nelson 1:10:48 for which, which is one of the reasons that I think, like an internship often works really well, right? Because people get to see that person. I think there could be ways that we think about hiring people, where we bring people on for a 30 or 90 day contract and then go forward from there. Now that feels risky if I'm a candidate, but it shouldn't be if I if I was a job applicant and go, Oh, we can bring you in for a 90 day contract after that, we'll see if we want to make this into a long term. But it shouldn't feel that risky, because you want that good relationship as well. You don't want to be that person a year out is miserable and your boss is miserable and the work doesn't work. You want to find that out sooner, as opposed to later, and from a boss organizational perspective, that would be great. Tim Houlihan 1:11:49 So wouldn't it have been better to spend more time selecting the best candidate by getting to know them, to discover that compatibility factor, than just rushing in and just hiring them? There's always this pressure, at least in my world, in the corporate world, of you got to get somebody hired now. We've got a vacancy. We got funding. Let's get on it. Let's get it done, right? HR is on it. You know, we've got everything. Kurt Nelson 1:12:14 We need a body. We need a body. We need to do all this stuff, yeah. And so I think there is that aspect of taking longer in the interview process, but even setting up how people are brought on in a different way, if we can bring them in on a contract basis, if we can have them work with us in some way, maybe part of the interview process is spending more one on one Time actually working on a project and figuring that out. And again, there's not, none of these are like silver bullets that are going to be exactly making sure that we always bring the right people in, but maybe they can eliminate some really bad apples to begin with. Tim Houlihan 1:12:57 So yeah, well, I think Paul said that relationships aren't discovered, they're co created. So if you're going to bring somebody onto your team, taking time to co create that relationship before they actually start doing the work, could be really beneficial. Or if you've already committed to them, use the use that onboarding period to co create the relationship to set the foundation for what your working relationship is going to Kurt Nelson 1:13:23 be like, there was a lot of conversation with with Paul about this idea of, you know, part of that romantic attraction is the history that we've shared, is looking back on what we've we've done. And again, to your point setting that up to begin with, and looking at, oh, this is how our relationship, our work relationship, works based upon that initial history that we set up. And do I love that? I love that idea, right? I think it's really fantastic. I think this works not just as employees, too. This concept of building that CO creating, that relationship can be with your co workers, other departments with clients, being with bosses and executives. The stories we co create, the stories that we build, are part of what makes that relationship work or not work. Tim Houlihan 1:14:31 I have a dear friend who is a sales manager who for many years said the best clients are clients that when you meet them, they have a half baked solution. And the the implication is dual, right? One is they already have an idea about where they want to go, but the other side of that, the the dual side of it is that they need your help to put together. And then you literally co create the solution together. That's magic. That's where cool things Kurt Nelson 1:15:03 and, yeah, and I think the successful and again, thinking about this from teams, right? Successful teams come from this co creation as well. They're they're developed together. It's not the boss pushing things down. It is the interactions between the individuals on that team, and how those individual interactions are consistent, the follow through that people have, the shared experiences that we get to do right and that, I think is cool. Tim Houlihan 1:15:45 You said trust, and that just reminded me how important it is for us to remember that trust isn't just something that someone says you can trust me, Kurt Nelson 1:15:57 but Tim, you can trust me. You can trust me, Tim, Tim Houlihan 1:16:01 that does not create actual trust, that we can only create the conditions where trust emerges, where trust literally grows organically, in situations where we have consistency and we rely on each other, and we take small risks and build that over time, and this is how relate strong romantic relationships evolve as well. Kurt Nelson 1:16:26 Just like attraction, right? Trust is built through the repeated evidence of what you're doing. It's not the intentions. We don't we don't build trust based on your good intentions. I build trust. Build based on your actions, just like attraction. I could, you know, oh, I want to be the best boyfriend or husband or whatever it is. But those intentions, if they're not manifested themselves in actual actions that the other person can see, it doesn't mean anything. And so we measure all of this through our day to day interactions. Tim Houlihan 1:17:07 As they say, trust isn't a trait, it's history. Mic drop. Kurt Nelson 1:17:16 Mic drop. I think we wrapped there. What do you think? Tim Houlihan 1:17:20 I think that sounds good. Okay, so whether we're talking about dating relationships or working relationships, did that work? Kurt Nelson 1:17:29 The our little kind of segue into work and teams and different things from Paul, where we had no conversation about that whatsoever with Paul. Paul might bring our necks. Sorry, Paul, you're listening. We apologize if we totally misrepresented you all your research, but I don't know. I thought it was good. I thought it was fun. Yeah, the Tim Houlihan 1:17:54 again, getting back to sort of the big takeaways that Paul talked about that I think actually do apply to our business relationships, or that these static traits and stated preferences basically undervalue the dynamic experience that we have when we're actually co creating something, when we're in when we're in the meetings, when we're when we're brainstorming, when we're working on a project together, that repeated interaction becomes This, this feedback loop that could be really helpful at building a strong relationship? Kurt Nelson 1:18:26 Yeah, I agree 100% with that. And I think there is this aspect, again, where liking and trust don't come from. Oh, I picked the right person. It comes from showing up every day, getting to know them better, building that shared history, letting that relationship unfold. Tim Houlihan 1:18:50 So, yeah, okay, if you're still listening, Kurt Nelson 1:18:57 we haven't totally all two of you, there you go. Tim Houlihan 1:19:01 Snap the branch because we're too far out. Join our sub stack if you're not, if you're not a sub stack subscriber yet, because it's we get a weekly episode, weekly dose of behavioral grooves from a few insights and some episode recap and that sort of thing. Kurt Nelson 1:19:17 Or if you don't want to join sub stack, or join substack, and let's do an and here, you know, join our groove community on Facebook. It is a place where we ask some thoughtful questions every every week we get people to provide insights, and it's a community where we can share ideas on what we talk about here, but also other things that are just going to be important to living a better, more fulfilling life. So absolutely, we hope that you take some of the ideas from Paul this week and apply them either to your romantic relationships or to your work. Relationships and put them to good use this week, as you go out and find your group, you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai