Kurt Nelson 0:00 Hey. Welcome to behavioral grooves, the podcast that explores why we do what we do, as well as how a better understanding of human behavior can help us make better choices in work, in life and everywhere in between. I'm Kurt Nelson Tim Houlihan 0:21 and I'm Tim Houlihan, and today's episode is about something most of us think we understand pretty well, that is until it stops working. Kurt Nelson 0:29 Yeah, right. We're talking about dating. We're talking about relationships, attraction and this idea of partnership. We carry around a lot of stories about how all of this should work, but we we don't always get the facts straight. Tim, you know, we don't really understand how it could work really well into our lives. Tim Houlihan 0:52 Yeah, and a lot of us tell ourselves interesting stories, like the we're modern humans. We're evolved past our human instincts and how love is mostly about shared values, good communication and maybe a little bit of chemistry, Kurt Nelson 1:08 okay, okay. And while none of that is wrong, definitely not the whole story. Tim Houlihan 1:15 Yeah, you see beneath all of our apps and norms and expectations and cultural rules. We're still using an operating system in our brain that was designed for a very different and ancient world, Kurt Nelson 1:28 yeah, that world, which was made up of small tribes, high risk, scarce resources and a very asymmetric biological stakes, Tim Houlihan 1:37 which leads us to today's big behavioral science. Aha, and that is modern dating problems aren't just random. They are predictable mismatches between ancient biological tendencies and a radically new and different environment. Kurt Nelson 1:53 Yeah, our guest today has spent years exploring exactly that mismatch. He's going to share how we can best address that. Tim Houlihan 2:01 Tim Ashe is a past behavioral grooves guest when we talk to him as the author of unleash your primal brain, he's also the co author of a new book called Primal dating, which takes an evolutionary psychology lens to modern relationships. Now, while the book is full of important dating tips, the Big Insights are there to help us understand the forces shaping attraction, choice and conflict. Kurt Nelson 2:26 And what makes this conversation especially interesting is that Tim isn't Tim ash isn't arguing that biology is destiny. In fact, he'll argue that we have agency to make changes in our lives, which I think we all want we do. Tim Houlihan 2:42 And at the same time, he's there to remind us that our biology does create tendencies, and that ignoring those tendencies leads to poor results. Yeah. Kurt Nelson 2:52 And in this episode, Tim my Tim Tim Houlihan talked to Tim Tim ash about why dating feels increasingly broken, how cultural overlays distort our expectations, why life stages matter far more than we think, and why calling the dating world a marketplace is both useful and dangerously incomplete, and I wasn't part of that conversation. So, yeah, you know, Tim Houlihan 3:16 I stay Okay, yeah, I recall this flimsy excuse, like, Oh, my original flight got canceled, so I have to be on a different plane, and there's something like that, as if I never heard that before. Kurt Nelson 3:31 Thank you. Thank you for doing the fantastic job that you do. And I'm sure people will be very happy that I wasn't part of this, because I would have just ruined it anyway. It was team Tim, you know, yeah, so it worked. All right, all right, so, but it was a really great conversation, and we hope you'll check out the Tim connection conversation. If you've ever wondered why smart, well intentioned people keep running into the same, the same over and over. Relationship frustrations, yeah? Or why? Attraction only rarely follows the rules that we say that we really believe in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is an episode that you'll want to sit with. Tim Houlihan 4:17 I think So for now, we'd like to encourage you to sit back and relax with a generous cup of relationship soup and enjoy our conversation with Tim ash. Tim Houlihan 4:35 Tim Ashe, welcome back to behavioral grooves. Tim. Speaker 1 4:38 It's great to be with you in the company of other great Tims. Tim Houlihan 4:42 Today it's the Tim fest, because Kurt is not here due to some travel troubles. And so it's Tim fest. I think that we should just enjoy it for ourselves. Okay, but we have to start with our regular speed round. And so first question, if you had to live a year without either. Your laptop or your mobile phone. Which would you give up Tim Ash 5:05 my laptop because I associated more with work? Oh, wow, wow. Tim Houlihan 5:11 That is really. Most people are like, I'm happy to get rid of the phone, because it distracts me too much. But the work thing interest, Tim Ash 5:20 I use my camera. I'm a photographer, so I use my Samsung Galaxy S 23 Ultra has great cameras. I mean, so you know, one, a friend of mine once told me the camera is the best. Camera is the one you have with you. And so I like to have a good camera on my phone. Tim Houlihan 5:36 That is. That's good advice. Okay, second speed around question, if you inherited a house that would cost you nothing to maintain. Where in the world would that house be? Tim Ash 5:46 Ooh, well, I'm already living in my top five, which is San Diego, California. I might move it a little closer to the beach. I'm about a mile away, but, yeah, Tim Houlihan 5:55 how much closer? How much closer? Well, Tim Ash 5:58 within ocean view, so it means a couple of blocks to the crest of the hill, Tim Houlihan 6:02 okay, not right on the water. No, no. Tim Ash 6:06 Then, then you, then you're just watching darkness for every time night falls. So, oh, Tim Houlihan 6:13 that's very strategic. It sounds like you've thought about this. Tim Ash 6:17 Oh, yes. And so other places all have something in common. Melbourne, Australia, Lisbon, Barcelona, Sydney, they're all beautiful, yeah? Ocean cities, yeah, Tim Houlihan 6:29 yeah, fantastic. Okay, I love that all right. Third Speed Round question, tell me if this statement is true or false. Human dating behaviors are still stuck in a hunter gatherer world that is extremely different from our modern society. True. Unknown Speaker 6:45 Ding, ding, ding. Do. I guess we're going to talk about my primal dating book. We are Tim Houlihan 6:51 definitely going to talk about primal dating. But after we get through our last Speed Round question, and that is, in your opinion, is the dating scene just another marketplace for winners and losers, negotiations and price sensitive deals Tim Ash 7:06 it is, and there's a lot of distortions in it. So when we talk about marketplace, that means efficiency, that means equal number of buyers and sellers, we can talk about utility. Yeah, is not that, you know, it's just like we call our society capitalism, when it's run by a bunch of giant monopolies, it's not capitalism either, right? Tim Houlihan 7:27 Okay, well, let's, let's actually let's. We're going to come back to that because we want to start this conversation with Tim ash talking about his newest book with co author, Dr Limor. Is it correct? Yes, yeah. Limor Gottlieb, okay. And the book is primal dating, as Tim is holding up there. The last time we talked was April 2021 it's been Wow, five years, almost five years Tim Ash 7:52 result of the pandemic. I know that was shortly after I published. I think we were talking about my previous book, unleash your primal brain, which is basically like a user manual for human beings. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, I'd say is the best description, right? Tim Houlihan 8:06 And by the way, I love this because following this primal theme, you're continuing to plumb the depth of evolutionary psychology, which there is so much to learn from. Yeah, and I'm glad you're doing it. Tim Ash 8:23 It's funny. I just graduated to the sixth floor. I just turned 60 this past summer, and I realized, thank you. And I feel like I'm leaning more into what I would call wisdom. It's not specific knowledge about holograms or AI or whatever is up next. It's about these deep wells of wisdom to you can to which you can return. And for me, evolutionary psychology is that it helps explain everything. Yeah, all human behavior is, is a function of what we evolve for, and that includes business. I do a lot of stuff, obviously, with my former marketing agency and leadership and how to initiate people in your work tribe. That's all business stuff. But then relationships like we're going to talk about. My next book is going to be about health and wellness from an evolutionary perspective, what we evolved for, how we broke it, and how to get back to that primal wellness. So to me, the root of all of this is that we're all just cavemen in modern clothes, and that gives me this deep well of wisdom to return to. Tim Houlihan 9:24 I've heard that it was, it's been said that that basically, from the time of Homo sapien, that our brains were about as developed as our brains are today, that there's a lot of similarity in our brains, that you could teach a homo sapien, you know, 500,000 years ago to do the same kind of math and have the same kind of reading skills and similar as to what we have today? Tim Ash 9:47 Yeah, yeah. We like to think we're some kind of new and better model, but you're absolutely right. The Homo sapiens branched off, depending on who you talk to, two to 300,000 years ago. So that's 10,000 generations, and then at evolutionary times. Scale, some things have changed. We have smaller jaws. I have my wisdom teeth removed because we don't need to chew as much. You know, there's small adaptations, but brain wise, we are exactly the same. You're absolutely right. We have the capacity for language, for making art, for social structures, and the ability to plan all of it. There were modern humans 200,000 years ago that were identical to us. Tim Houlihan 10:25 I want to start with, thank you for that. I want to start with, what is it about dating in the modern world that is still primal? Tim Ash 10:36 The short answer is everything, as much as we want to believe otherwise. So here's kind of how I think about it, is that we're highly cultural creatures. As people, you know, devoted a couple of chapters to that and unleash your primal brain. Book culture kind of CO evolved us help. And so we really look at our surrounding tribe and how to survive in our environment. And so we take on a bunch of cultural beliefs. That's what makes us tribal, polarizes our politics when it misfires all of this. So we have a lot of beliefs about relationships and dating and the differences between men and women that are anchored in these cultural overlays, let's call them. And so what we tried to do in this book is just to really step back from that and say, let's look at the species level stuff, and that we shared with our ancestors 200,000 years ago. And again, this is 10,000 generations, maybe for the last 100 some of us went from hunting, gathering to farming, and over the last two or three we got the birth control pill, and women entering the workforce, and massive changes all of a sudden. And so the point is, on the timescale of evolution, nothing has changed. So all of our basic tendencies, which is life, to reproduce, to find a reliable mate, all of those things, are the same. And so all of it is primal. But we just have to dig beneath these cultural overlays. And the ways you can do that. Just to finish off, the thought is that look at what works, what things have existed in human societies, across all time and in all places. That's the root stuff we're talking about. So that's going to take you to the level of general tendencies, and not swimming against the tide. There are huge exceptions to things at an individual level. But that doesn't change the fact that we're jealous, that we're not monogamous as a species, that younger women are preferred by all men. You know, there's like all of these evolutionary reasons that are true in all places and at all times. Tim Houlihan 12:36 You explore these evolutionary foundations in the book, and I want to talk more about some specifics, but in in a short answer, why should people read this book, but both and it's, by the way, it's for both men and women, just just to be really clear, absolutely. Tim Ash 12:54 So we well, first of all, it's an easy and fun read. Okay? We have some bitter medicine in there for both men and women, yeah, but we tried to wrap it up in some some humor, and it's a very conversational, very easy read, you. It's not a science book. It's not even a popular science book. It's a self help and personal development book is the best way to look at it. So it applies to people that are dating, non dating, yeah, we have some tactical advice, but it's really understand yourself and understand the other gender in a very fundamental level that you're not going to get in any other way. And that's really important. So the first part of the book is our evolutionary tendencies. The second is how modern society broke all of that. And then there's a guide for men from the women's perspective and a guide for women from the men's perspective. And you should read the whole book, as you said, because you'll understand yourself and the other gender, right? Tim Houlihan 13:47 This aspect of writing a section for men, but with the parentheses, and by the way, women should read this as well. Speaker 1 13:55 Yeah, that's actually our subtitle for that part. Yeah, it's really informative. Tim Houlihan 13:59 It's a real it made me feel like, okay, you're not trying to tip off some special secrets or something that nobody is supposed to know that you know about men that that men aren't supposed to know from a women's a woman's perspective, or vice versa. I like I really like that, and it is very conversational. I really appreciate the conversational tone of it. Let's, let's start with a big question, though, you talk about behavioral tendencies, you meant you use that word a couple of times. What is a behavioral tendency and and how is it different from what we think of as being kind of hardwired in our genetic code? Tim Ash 14:39 Well, it's think of men and women. You know, if I'm going to go all scientific, is overlapping distribution, so bell curves right and on most psychological and behavioral dimensions, men and women are the same as my daughter likes to remind me, Tim Houlihan 14:56 give me an example. So. Tim Ash 15:00 So intelligence, verbal ability, stamina, a lot of things, okay, but on some things, psychologically, if you look at ocean, the ocean model, which is one of the few that's validated across a bunch of domains, you'll find two dimensions, where people, men and women different, and one of those is going to be your sensitivity to threats in the environment, or is called n in the ocean model neuroticism. It's unfortunate label, but the women are more attuned to threats in their environment, okay? And the other one that you're going to find is essentially kind of aggression and risk taking behavior. And again, if you're so women tend to be more agreeable, and agreeable just means how you get along with others. Well, if you look at the fact that men, on average, are 25% larger and have 15 to 20 times the testosterone, which is essentially risk taking, it's no surprise that women that are weaker and have to take care of helpless babies, evolutionarily speaking, are going to be more threat focused and more agreeable because they can be dominated physically. So essentially, the main difference that cuts across men and women is our willingness to take risks. In fact, women bred men to take risk, and men bred women to be selective investors in this story and to pick their single best choice. That's called hypergamy. So you have to as a woman, I'm looking for a guy that's going to upgrade my chances of survival and reliably provision for me and be a good father as well. Tim Houlihan 16:38 I'm glad you used the term hypergamy, because we're going to come back to that a little bit later. I want to make sure that we have a discussion about that, because I love learning new words in in books, and didn't expect to be learning new words Tim Ash 16:53 evolutionary psychology builder will probably put that on Dr Lam godly, my brilliant co author, she's she's much more solid on the science than I am, Tim Houlihan 17:02 but it's fantastic. So if I understand what you're saying correctly here, Tim, we have some undeniable differences in how we're built and the way that we have evolved, evolutionary for a long time, evolutionarily for a long time, yes, and it's hard to disentangle that even with all of these modern overlays of swiping left and swiping right, still at the heart of it, we still have these tendencies. These these are inclinations, if you will, the Tim Ash 17:36 main the evolutionary reason, and again, being Men of a Certain Age, evolution doesn't care about you or me. Tim, I mean, well, maybe we can still get involved in the gene pool or raising our grandkids or something in the future, but it's really about getting together, having children to the point where they can have their own children. That's the name of the game. And so what from an evolutionary perspective, gender relations are about complementary needs. We need each other, and we evolve each other for these very asymmetric roles in order to be able to raise kids effectively and reproduce in the gene pool. That's it. The happiness stuff, the soulmate stuff, the I'm going to remarry, you know, after, you know, my kids grow up, you know, after the divorce stuff, evolution doesn't care about that because it doesn't impact the gene pool. That's the brutal truth. Tim Houlihan 18:27 And yet that, if I understand the book correctly, that evolutionary stuff is still at play, regardless of what the current circumstances are, Tim Ash 18:37 exactly, exactly right? So one of the things that you know, one of the things we talk about, a huge insight from the book, is that it's not just men versus women. There are also massive differences by life stage. So they've done, you know, a lot of studies, and if you look at economics, sexual economics, or behavioral economics and large populations, we see these tendencies, which is that all men prefer younger women. That has to do with fertility, most of the women's value starts super high around 1820, 22 and drops for the rest of their lives. And that biggest drop comes from 20 to 40, when you're capable of having kids. So the guy is subconsciously thinking, Okay, I have to have a kid. I want it to survive, and it's going to take many years to raise. I might want to have more than one kid with this kid with this woman. So the fertility window is the main thing that determines men's preferences. And we can find that by visual inspection waist to hip ratios, facial features. And for women, it's not so much. It's like the Will he be able to bring home food every day? Because there are no 401 K's. There are no houses to live in. It's just like go hunt and bring me something to feed us and the kids and the rest of the tribe. And from that standpoint, being a good provider meant literally showing up every day and being competent enough to navigate the world and take risks. And so men don't know how to do that when they're young. Young men are useless to women. And to other men. Because, I mean, if I teach my my teenage son how to do stuff, it's going to take years to turn them into a viable man. And so men peak earlier. There's a flat peak between 40 and 60 or so, and the crossover points at 30. That's when on average, women's sexual marketplace value, their kind of on average desirability, falls below that of the average man. So a lot of this depends on life stage, too. I'd be giving very different advice, not just to men and women, but like, how old are you? Have you had kids? Yet all of those things really factor into it? Yeah. Tim Houlihan 20:34 So to what degree did you and your co author discover that the standard tropes about the differences between men and women, hold up or don't hold up. Tim Ash 20:46 They do hold up, but we put value judgments on top of them. So let's take this idea of that of crossing curves, which is a whole chapter in the book where you have like that 30 is the crossover point. So if we put that crossover x in a box at the top of the box you have people that are of equal value. At the bottom of the box, you have people of equal value on average. And in the middle, where that crossover point, you have people of equal value. Well, let's look at each of those. They represent things that exist in our society. At the top of the box, equal value is young women with well resourced older men. That's your traditional model. That's both of them trading at the peak value they can have. So for rich women, they used to have these coming out parties in the society get the fruit while it's fresh when you're 16. And if the woman's really that exceptionally beautiful and fertile, you owe us a dowry. And there's some economic exchange, because you're not powerful enough to have her just straight up exchange, right? So, but you put cultural names on and all of a sudden she's a gold digger, or, Why is she with that old guy? Right? So that's cultural, yeah, the middle of the box we have the crossover of men and women are equals, and that's kind of the Kurt model, egalitarian, and we're all the same in all respects. And what we found is that so the age of first marriage in the US for women has shifted from 23 many decades ago, to 29 and a half, which is right at that crossover Tim Houlihan 22:11 point. Dramatic change, huge Tim Ash 22:13 change, like career first, or screw around first, or some combination of those, but basically, delay marriage as long as possible until there's no advantage. But the thing to realize is that's that crossing of equals is only a point in time, and then at the bottom of the box, again, equal value would be older woman, younger man. Well, she didn't get the resourcing, or she's on round two of that, but she can collect some good genes on the way out, right? So that's your Cougar Town, we call it. And again, that's a very common thing, right? It's like, oh, that the hot, you know, 45 year old. And finally, the Jim bro at 25 is getting some attention from an attractive woman. So that's also an equivalence point, so, but again, it's laden with stereotypes, yeah? Tim Houlihan 22:59 And it does sound like this is a marketplace. It is competitive in that regard, right? Tim Ash 23:05 Yeah, and everybody, by the way, so we've also seen strong evidence that going outside of your kind of quality isn't going to work for you, because if there's an imbalance, if one person knows they can do way better, the other person is going to become highly jealous and know that they're a flight risk, if you will. So whether the man or the woman has more optionality, the point is, you got to find someone at your level. So the way we describe this, it's like the junior high cafeteria, where the jocks sit with the cheerleaders and the nerds are like, whatever, you know, playing Magic the Gathering at their own table, but you can't really go too far outside of your actual value and hope that there's some pretty woman scenario you know, the billionaire is going to swoop in with the roses for you. Tim Houlihan 23:52 In my own experience playing in bands in high school and college, I happened to be in bands with bass players that were basically Greek Adonis is like they look like they were carved from stone. You know, in ancient Greece, these guys were so perfect and and charming and everything. And I can't tell you the number of very attractive young women that came up to me with a little note in their hands with their phones to my favorite God. Can you give this to the bass player? Was the question was so disparaging. It was so it felt just terrible for me, but it was a reminder of, I'm not a 10. You know, very few Tim Ash 24:36 men are, you know. Well, that brings us to a really important point, men and women select and attract differently, Tim Houlihan 24:44 yeah, right, right, like you said, they should attract differently, right? Because of, yes, of all these evolutionary things that have been built into us for all of all these years, right? Yeah. Tim Ash 24:55 So who has the bigger risk? Like we were talking about the woman. In, you place all your bets on one guy. You get pregnant by him. You don't know if he's going to leave. You don't know if he can actually go find food on a reliable basis. You don't know if he'll be a good father. So the risk is on the woman, right? And so she has to be much choosier and evaluate things that aren't, again, obvious from visual inspection, that waist to hip ratio of point seven. Blind men prefer that. It's not something that, you know Cosmo magazine to expect, you know, it's so it's just like, how fertile Are you? Can you push out a bowling ball at nine months, you know, and make a viable human right that that stuff is absolutely visually obvious. Are you a good provider? Not so much. And so women tend to have these two axes and how they select men. And one is the ability to provision, and the other is the attractiveness, which having the body of a Greek God helps, being in a band in the first place, having some aggression and willingness to take risks. Those are all attractive qualities. So that's why women are especially earlier in their lives. Go for the bad boys. But if that doesn't materialize into steady provider, at some point, they'll cut that loose. They'll cut that guy loose. You don't see, you know, middle aged women on the back of Harley's very often. You know they've passed that it Tim Houlihan 26:21 still happens, but it's yes, yes, well, Tim Ash 26:25 not to judge, but they're probably don't have all of their teeth if they're still on the back of a Harley. Tim Houlihan 26:33 So okay. And yet, not all human relationship issues are evolutionary. Tim Ash 26:40 No, no, so again. So there's, there's cultural stuff. And you take someone from one culture and their expectations, it's really hard to span experiences, you know, from different civilizations, I would say, and different religions and and there's, you're none of us are perfect. We were raised by imperfect parents. We all got our share of intergenerational trauma handed to us. We all have our specific life circumstances. And, you know, they go, my wife's a social worker. And then they talk about this, this ACE score, you know, adverse childhood events. It's like, Were you raised by drunks? Were you beaten up? You know, were you neglected? Were you did you go hungry? Okay, so you get an ACE score. Well, you know, some of us got handed more than our share of stuff, and that's going to impact you and how you approach it, because your individual development, your nervous system, all of it is wired differently. So yeah, level, then you have the cultural level, and then you have these underlying tendencies? Tim Houlihan 27:42 Yeah? So these things that are impacting us on a, what I would call a contextual basis, or environmental basis, right? That, that these things do matter, that they we can't just say all of it is, is bound up in our evolutionary tendencies. Yeah. Tim Ash 28:01 Thank you for that, Tim, because you're right with these are tendencies. And tendencies means like, if you're going to swim in this direction against the Riptide, know that you're doing it against the Riptide. Okay, just have no illusions about that. And we feel like, yeah, the individual stuff, you can go to therapy or do personal development work, great. Do that anyway, become a better human. Okay, overcome your childhood stuff. Stop blaming your parents. Whatever your deal is, okay. Get rid of your addictions. Become a better human. And then you'll draw better humans, but at some point, then it goes back to Okay. Well, now you have a pool of different humans available to you, and that stuff is still subject to all these kind of evolutionary rules. Tim Houlihan 28:41 Early in the book, you introduce a concept called pair bonding. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. Tim Ash 28:49 So the again, the reason, evolutionarily speaking, that we pair bond is to produce kids, and there are actually three different chemical systems that fire in the body to create what we call love. So love isn't something that you know, like you see this on dating profiles. I'm looking for my soul mate, my last first date, my ride or die, whatever word salad you want to put on top of it. Basically it means that I I'll know it when I see it. And the fact is, it happens to you involuntarily. That's the reason we call it falling in love. So these chemical triggers fire, and there's three different ones, and they don't all happen in order, or at the same time or the same for both people in a potential couple. So the first one is lust. I want to screw you and make babies with you. Okay, now, the second one is, I want to screw only you. That's exclusivity. I want to focus my attention obsessively on you. Okay? And the third is the long term pair bond. I want to stick around and raise kids with you. And the commitment, yeah, yeah. And so all of those are chemical reactions. We know the chemical pathways by which they operate, so somebody might be it's. It's like, I'm not sure I want to go on a second date with him, and he's picking out color coordinated Christmas sweaters already. I mean, they're in different stages of that bonding. So, so the key thing to understand is Love happens to you. When somebody is happens to be standing in front of you, it's nothing you can choose. It's nothing you can pick out. You can be in a different environment, looking for people, but you can't pick when those chemical things will happen, and they only last a few months or a couple of years. So that kind of passionate love phase where you're obsessed with someone that will fade, guaranteed and again, doesn't mean that longer term relationships aren't possible, but we're not set up with the chemical support for it. Let's just put it that Tim Houlihan 30:44 way that's beautifully said, we're not set up for the chemical support of just passion for an infinite amount Tim Ash 30:51 of time. Well, he's like, Yeah, so you're being sold as by matchmakers. And I work, you know, obviously a lot in the industry with understanding matchmakers or dating sites and things like that. And, you know, he told us you just need to find the right person and all your problems will be solved, and then you'll be with them forever, and that happily ever after lifelong monogamy is assumed to be the default, when, in fact, it's not at a species level. I thought that was true. They told me that exactly, and I paid them 25 grand to go on a few dates. Yes, exactly, Tim Houlihan 31:21 but that's not the case. Tim Ash 31:23 It's not the case. Again, both men and women are non monogamous, and as a species, we're non monogamous, and women and men, quote, unquote, cheat even that's a loaded cultural word for different reasons. So, but if you look at even just within our great ape cousins, the wide variety of stuff. So gorillas have a harem set up. The dominant silver back controls access to the females, so his testicles are inside his body and have very low capacity, because he's guaranteed to spread his seed. Whereas pygmy chimps, bonobos, they're basically like free love monkeys. And you know, just like, jump on my boner. I literally saw this at the San Diego Zoo. The guy's sitting there with a boner, and the woman just jumps on it. They screw and then she leaves. 30 seconds later, he's like, that was a good start to my morning, you know. But that's a matriarchal society because of internal, uncertain paternity. So the allegiances are through the mother's line. You always know who the mother is, and very different. And we're kind of in this weird in between, evolutionarily speaking, where we want to have sexual optionality, and it takes us so long to raise a viable human that the strategy of just impregnate as many people as possible isn't going to work if you're not willing to put in the provisioning and the resources to raise your own kids so we have attention. So men will look for sexual opportunity as a side bet. Women cheat for different reasons. They have a plan B in case their guy starts underperforming and starts backsliding, and then they monkey branch over to at least as good or a better situation. But they have to have that backup. So men are concerned about physical fidelity and uncertain paternity, as you don't want to raise someone else's kid, that would be the worst evolutionary insult ever, not even your own genes. And women care about the emotional attachment. So if you say to a man, if a woman says to me and well, I just slept with him, it didn't mean anything. That's not going to fly very well with a guy, because sexual jealousy is about the certainty of your paternity, whereas the worst thing you can say to a woman is like, Oh, honey, we didn't even have sex. I just really care about her, and she's a really good friend, because the woman is afraid of that emotional attachment getting transferred to somebody else in the longer term. Tim Houlihan 33:45 That's beautiful that you pointed that out. Thank you, because those differences that have evolved as these evolutionary tendencies are big and bold. Even though we've got all these societal mores and cultural overlays and things. This is pretty common across all cultures, isn't it? Tim Ash 34:03 Yeah, yes, exactly. And again, that's our standard. If you want to understand the evolutionary psychology of it, look at things that are across all social structures across all times. So is, is 100% lifelong fidelity across all social cultures across all time? Definitely not. So that tells you something about our monogamy and the willingness of men and women to play sexual side beds. By the way, men used to be the kings of this, but women are catching up really fast in terms of extramarital affairs and stuff like that and and why is that? Because there's no consequence of you. I can bond you as a woman. I can bond a man to be very strongly sexually, without the consequences of Russian roulette and having a baby with them. Yeah, yeah. So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna have more Plan B's, you know, backup plans with with high quality men who might want to get into my orbit. So. Tim Houlihan 35:00 Is that basically our environment, our cultural norms and the changes in our modern society, kind of overlaying to allow the evolutionary tendencies to come out. Tim Ash 35:13 Yeah, the evolutionary tendencies have always been there, but the risk rewards have changed. So the biggest change was women being able to control their own reproductive destiny, which, which is really powerful thing, right? So if I'm not afraid of getting pregnant by the wrong guy who's not going to be there to Father My children, then that changes a lot of like my actual urges and needs and things that I would want to get out of life. Tim Houlihan 35:40 Can we switch over to talking about first dates for for just a couple words here. So app first dates, versus walking into a bar and seeing that hot person across the way and making the first move, is there? Is there a better way? Is one better than the other? Or does it matter? Tim Ash 36:02 Yes, it matters. And no, you can't do anything about it. Here's the Well, here's the dirty math. More than half of people now meet on dating sites, right? That's the majority of all human relationships being mediated through dating sites and online dating. So it's inescapable at a social level, maybe, I mean, you can go join a meetup group and go on hikes and, you know, or do other things in person. By the way, we recommend that in the book to free your dependency on it. But there aren't as many places to meet people face to face anymore, and especially with people that are both working. You know, if most of your time is spent at work, you're going to meet people at work. Well, guess what? In this moment, culturally, that's not an option either, because HR is going to sue you. Yeah, there's and so we have these again, this landmines of behavioral norms and men and women trying to figure out how to be together. 24/7, and we weren't designed to be the men were designed, again, cartoonishly, to go off in a hunting party for several days. The women had to take care of the helpless lumps of babies and digging roots and tubers out of the river bank and stuff like that. So you essentially had male and female societies that existed side by side. Once in a while, we get together to feast and screw and but even think about your typical Thanksgiving what happens after this Thanksgiving feast? Tim Houlihan 37:27 People sit around right? Or they self segregate into groups of like kind of Tim Ash 37:33 men and women. The guys will smoke cigars or watch the football game or throw football in the backyard. The women will catch up on all the social stuff in the kitchen while under the pretext of cleaning. So it's not like just men are useless and they don't want to help clean. Those are like, you guys go off and do your thing. We'll go off and do ours. It's very natural to have just single gender groups. And what we're trying to do in I believe, my personal belief, is that we're trying to square that circle in the workplace by saying, well, we should coexist 40 hours a week with each other and have no problems. And that's that's one of the root causes of problems, is that we weren't designed to essentially be in a co gender environment that much of the time, or, incidentally, in dyads in pairs, that's unnatural, too. You're spending 24/7 with your partner. That's not normal either. That's right, we need a long break. So absence makes the heart grow fonder. We had long breaks from each other, and we don't anymore. The idea that we're going to put all this weight on a nuclear family or a couple is really dangerous and corrosive. It's really hard. You Kurt Nelson 38:43 Hey, grooves. We want to take a moment away from our conversation to thank you for listening to behavioral grooves. If you enjoy the conversations we're having and want to help us keep the groove going, here are a few simple ways that you can support the show. Tim Houlihan 38:56 First off, subscribing to our sub stack is a great way to stay connected with us between episodes. The weekly newsletter provides you with cool insights that are beyond the episodes, and they get delivered straight to your inbox. Kurt Nelson 39:09 And if you haven't already leaving a review or a rating of the podcast on a platform like Apple or Spotify or YouTube, helps other curious minds discover us. And there's two great things about that. One, it gives us a boost. And two, it costs nothing Tim Houlihan 39:25 and it only takes a second, but it makes a huge difference for us. Plus, we love hearing from you, so don't be shy. Leave us a review or give us a quick thumbs up. Kurt Nelson 39:35 We're coming up on 500 episodes, and we're doing this because we love the conversations we have with our guests. Tim Houlihan 39:41 Yeah, we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful behavior, changing content every week, and we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove. We are talking to Tim Ashe about his new book primal dating, and I want to continue this conversation. Conversation on first dates. How much does the first date matter when it comes to building a successful long term relationship? Tim Ash 40:09 Well, I'm going to flip that back on saying it's probably going to start with online dating. So there's so it's but for both sides, it's a filtering process. So you have to swipe on somebody, you have to they have to respond and like you. Then you have to have text game, then you escalate the phone call, then you go to the first date. And if you're not doing efficient filtering up through the first date, you've already lost because the what would you call it? The cost of a first date is significant. It's a half, a half a day of your life. It's planning it. It's financial. It's getting dressed up and groomed and having to spend time with this person that you find out is completely incompatible with you. That's a high cost. So these days, it's more of a filtering process, and you have to be efficient about every step of it, and there's no way to avoid that. Tim Houlihan 40:59 So if there is such a high cost sticking with these economic metaphors, okay? Is there? Is there also a sunk cost fallacy that we feel like, oh, man, I put all this time and energy into getting ready for this first date, and it was okay, but I should probably just go again, because maybe conditions weren't optimal. Tim Ash 41:20 Well, you're the I would say that it's again, it's not what happens on the first date or how much weight you put in. In fact, no, there's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy. Is people are willing to cut and run at any stage of this process I describe, including the first date or including the first time you even sleep together. Yeah, you may get ghosted. In fact, that's the expectation these days, the expectation, the expectation is I do not have to respond to you, and regardless of how wonderful you thought the previous step in this process was, you may never hear from me again. That's the reality. That's the cold reality. So no, I'd say it's kind of the opposite. People are seen as disposable, is interchangeable, that there's always more, you know, options out there, because I can keep swiping infinitely and finding attractive potential partners. So there's fear of missing out. So if you look at it that way, it's it's become more brittle, it's harder to form relationships and they can end. And the expectation is that I don't owe you anything. How does that Tim Houlihan 42:23 change a daters approach? Then, if, if I, if I know that I could get dropped at any moment, does it? Does it influence the way we behave in those early exchanges? Tim Ash 42:36 It should, in the sense that we, I mean, it's a perfect vehicle for, I'd say, personal growth in the sense of, like, do your best and step back. You know, that's like a very Tao Te Ching kind of thing to say, you know, like, do your best but have no expectations. Tim Houlihan 42:54 And when was the last time that worked for you? Tim Ash 42:57 Well, it's a lifelong practice, you know, we're never going to get there, but it does teach you a lot. It's like, God, I thought we had a great connection. And again, you might at some point get chemically bonded to someone, even on a phone call or on a first date and even without sleeping with them. And and so you're invested, because your chemistry is working and trying to get you to mate. And they're like, Yeah, I'm not feeling it, and doesn't. So again, it's a tough balancing point. So you should adjust your approach to essentially treating it like a job. This is one of the symmetric pieces of advice we give to both men and women. You're going to have to filter. You're going to have to use your time effectively, and you're not, and it's you shouldn't have any expectations. So what you're describing traditional dating, which you and I are familiar with, is basically non existent. People have polarized into like the the red pilled goblins of the manosphere, the Shock Troopers of the feminist movement, and that traditional I'm going to go on several dates with you approach to dating is basically non existent, Tim Houlihan 44:02 and yet a more traditional dating environment could actually be healthier. Right to Tim Ash 44:10 get as a judgment, and we really try to stay away from those, I would say that meeting in person is you learn a lot more about the person more quickly. And so you should look for opportunities to do that and get off of the online as much as possible. But remember, we had tribes of Dunbar's number, the famous sociologist who said, our brains are based on the complexity of the social groups we form of about 100 to 200 people. So let's say it's a small on the small side, 100 people. 50 of them are women. 20 of them are of breeding age and available, and there's competition from 100 guys for you, for those 20 women, including the ones that are married and in relationships. Okay, so you so you might have two and a half choice. Faces. One of them has most of her teeth, you know? So that was the in person option. It was the lack of optionality. Now we have this false sense that we have infinite optionality when we don't, just because you're in, sitting there in your car and willing to swipe for a half hour doesn't mean those women would go out with you. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of distortions in that sexual marketplace. I go through them, if you like. Tim Houlihan 45:27 I want to get to what I'm thinking of is some of your closing thoughts. But before we get there, there's another comment that you wrote that romantic love is a beautiful lie, a beautiful lie. Tell us what you mean by romantic love being a beautiful lie, Tim Ash 45:48 that it's going to solve all of our problems and that it will last forever. Again, that's that's what we're culturally. That's what we're sold by Hollywood, by Madison Avenue, and it's, it's just sets up for a lot of pain and expectations, and it it's not likely to happen. I'm sorry for anybody, to stay in that in love state your whole life. Now that's not to say that you can't, as an individual, have expectations of your relationships or loyalty or actually having a soulmate or somebody you can grow through. Okay, but realize that these are really, really rare things for you to track in your life as you change together in the same direction for the rest of your lives. That is not what we're set up for. We're designed to may be good enough to make babies with someone. I like that. It's a difference between survival, which is what evolution cares about, and thrival, and you having a good life or in a pair as a human being. So you have to actively work for thrival, and even then, it's not guaranteed. But the evolutionary stuff and all this ugly behavior and all these tendencies, they are good overall survival strategies. That's why our species continues. Nothing in there about your happiness. Tim Houlihan 47:10 You use, you use the term good enough. And it really got my attention, because it reminds me of the behavioral economics term satisficing. Tim Ash 47:19 Yeah, satisfying. I learned about that in college, absolutely, exactly. Tim Houlihan 47:23 And we've talked to relationship psychologists in the past about how people who are maximizers, who are, you know, the super type A everything has to be perfect, perfectly, well organized, and they and that their expectations of a relationship are extremely high that they have a harder time finding really successful relationships than the Satisficers do. The Satisficers actually can live long and happy and successful in relationships in part because they're willing to do with good enough is that? Tim Ash 48:01 Yeah, well, I think it's true. I heard a YouTube segment by Orion Terra ban. He wrote a book called the value of others, which is strictly looking at kind of this sexual marketplace from a behavioral economics point of view, right? But one of his video segments not in the book, but he mentioned that you basically have two strategies, as in dating. You can, like, date a lot of people, or you can be satisfied with someone you meet early on along the way. And he uses this small town versus big town metaphor, if you're going to travel all over the world and say, Well, is this the best city to live in? I don't know. San Diego is great, but Barcelona is even better. And I've never been to London or Tokyo, you know. So you're going to keep trying to up your game, but you're going to spend decades doing that and trying to find the right person. Whereas, if you met someone in your small town, in your neighborhood, you know, little league game, and you're happy with them, just stick with that one. The problem is actually in the middle, where you know that there's probably someone better, but you haven't done the work to sample enough. So high school sweetheart, maybe it'll work out. You know, woman of the world has had lots of options and seen it all, and it picks the best guy that might work out. But in between is where we mess with ourselves. Tim Houlihan 49:21 That's beautifully said. Thank you for sharing that. That's a that's a terrific observation. Okay, I want to move to closing thoughts. Sure, the closing thoughts section of the book are are just peppered with really interesting insights. And so I just want to give credit to you and your co author for writing it and for creating something that look like a list of sort of FAQs, like burning questions that need to be answered. I'm not going to go, I don't want to go through all of them, but I do want to ask you, pick your favorite child, which, if there's one that you have to give some advice to, to some. One today. What would, what would one of those be? And I'm just going to mention a couple that I thought were particularly interesting. The dating market is broken. We've talked about that women have changed dramatically. Hypergamy is hurting men. This is getting back to our hypergamy issue. We need each other and embrace your instincts, or another couple that I thought were particularly interesting. What strikes you as your favorite child right now? This isn't a go to your grave question, by the way. Tim Ash 50:32 Yeah, there's so that last part of the book, the closing thoughts, was just our personal reflections on what all this stuff means, and how to philosophically and spiritually approach all of this, and which is Tim Houlihan 50:44 probably why I loved it, because there's this philosophical insight in the way that you wrote, that they're they're beautifully done. I want to go back to hypergamy, because I promised that I would get your take on hypergamy as a as an issue that we face today. And first of all, what does hypergamy mean? So that listeners don't have to look it up. And then, why is it a problem? Tim Ash 51:08 Yeah, well, hypergamy means the woman is always going to choose her single best bet. I think there's some Charlie Sheen quote or something like, yeah, the reason she's not happy with you is because you were never her first choice, which is brilliant, ouch, yeah, but, but it's true. Maybe it wasn't him who said it, but something along those lines was said, and it's absolutely true. So the woman is going to look at someone who upgrades her lifestyle, that can be a more consistent provider, that will be there, be reliable as a partner, and upgrade our lifestyle both. The thing is that doesn't change when women do economically better. And so now you have in this country, 60% of bachelor's degrees awarded to women, women out earning men in major metro areas period until they choose to have a child. So women's economic empowerment, you can say is a wonderful thing, and they're still looking for guys that will do better. And so what you basically have is the dating marketplace has become a hell, especially for educated women, especially for educated, middle aged women who chose to put career first, it's become hell for 90% of men had her functionally invisible because, you know, no, if I have a bachelor's degree, chances are I'm not going to even go out with the guy who has an associate's degree, or is the plumber or is the electrician. So men have become functionally invisible because they're not the providers. And then the Chads, those top five, 10% of guys that have the money and the looks, all the women are competing for them, and they're not never going to settle with any one woman. Why would you you have infinite optionality? And so the Chads are having a great time. Everybody else is really, really pissed off and frustrated. So hypergamy leads to this. Women still want to upgrade their lifestyle, no matter how well they're doing, and they bred men to take risks. They're going back to kind of close the loop on risk we were talking about at the beginning. Think about it this way, on average, men and women are the same, but along most dimensions, women have bred us to roll the dice. Men are either really successful or you're a fuck up to you know, that's a using French, Tim Houlihan 53:23 yeah, we speak French, actually. Tim Ash 53:26 Okay, excellent. So what does that mean? There are more geniuses among men and more idiots. There are more cowards and more heroes. And along every dimension, the bell curve is the same, but the spread is very, very different, and so women are just looking to mate with the winners. They're at the finish line, waiting for the winner. And there's actually strong evidence for this. So if you look at mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down to mother's line, versus obviously, X chromosome is passed down to father's line, there are twice as many women in our genetic past as men that thought. So what does that mean? Women were choosing the men, and half the men didn't make the cut. It's always been thus. And so, in a way, you could say things are distorted and messed up, and TR guys having a hard time and all of this stuff, and that's true. It's painful right now. We're recalibrating things, but the fact that most men didn't get to reproduce has always been the case. So there is no such thing as an involuntary celibate. If you can't make a sexual opportunity and spread your genes as a man, that's just the default setting. And so again, I'll just leave you with the thought that evolution is ruthless. It doesn't care about your happiness. It cares about raising the fitness of the population at a population level over time and survival chances. So women are the choosy investors and will always be, and since they're doing economically better, that breaks a lot of things about. About the relationship market. Tim Houlihan 55:02 Beautifully said, I think that Tim Ash 55:06 the real key is that to understand why the current dating market is broken and how deep this rabbit hole goes. In other words, there's a massive issue with relationship formation around the world and also in all advanced societies. You know, birth rates are plummeting where we're in our lifetime, probably going to see reverse of this 10,000 year trend of growing populations. And when it starts going down the other side of the water slide, it goes down just as fast as if your fertility replacement. Fertility is 2.1 children per woman, and you have a lot of industrialized societies where it's one that means every generation is going to half in size. Doesn't take too many of those to depopulate the planet. So this goes deep, and so my main kind of meta takeaway under all of those is understand yourself, understand the other gender, and do it from a place of empathy. Don't do it from judgments. Don't the worst thing you can do is polarize and and to say, you know, men are the problem, or women are the problem, or men just need to step up. Or, you know, women just need to stop being such gold digging whores or, you know, like this stuff you hear is just unbelievable from the this is the dominant conversation. So it's just like, understand our tendencies and view it from a lens of empathy. We need each other, and regardless of whether you choose to have children, that some of the deepest psychological and spiritual juice and testing you're going to have is probably in an intimate relationship in your life, and so I'm not willing to forego that, no matter how hard things are. So it's it's looking at it from a empathetic viewpoint, while recognizing the massive differences between us. Tim Houlihan 56:58 Now let's turn to music. Let's talk. It's it, there's no elegance in that. Last time we were together, you talked about Pat Metheny. You talked about Chet Baker, yeah, Elvis Costello, who got inspired to write almost blue from Chet. Baker's almost blue, lovely, circular connection about, Tim Ash 57:21 well, actually, Chet Baker performed almost blue, is Costello's composition, but I love Chet Baker's cover Tim Houlihan 57:28 of it. Yeah, there's, it's fantastic. Miles, Davis, salsa, Almonte, yeah, yeah. What would be on your playlist today if you were stranded on a desert island and could only take two artists with you. Tim Ash 57:45 Okay, so I'm writing my new book, as I mentioned, primal wellness right now, and so I get into the mode by listening to music. And you know what? I'm listening to, a lot of Steely Dan, Tim Houlihan 57:56 a lot of Steely Dan for this book. Tim Ash 57:59 Well, just as my background like, because it could just like you just, I think that well, my judgments, 70s was peak rock, okay. And then 70s and the Steely Dan was one of the most innovative bands of all time. And their perfectionism and what they expected of their session musicians, how they composed, the sophistication, the crossover of jazz rock and R B, it was all just incredible. I heard this phrase once that Steely Dan is your favorite band's favorite band, Tim Houlihan 58:30 yeah, yeah. They are the musicians. Musicians, aren't they? Tim Ash 58:34 Yeah. And so I just like, I keep going back that, just like I can listen to FM and repeat forever, Tim Houlihan 58:40 or Josie, is it the whole catalog? Or is it just, Tim Ash 58:44 well, I have a playlist of my favorite steely dance songs, and I just let it run for hours while I write, Tim Houlihan 58:49 and you listen to music while you work. Tim Ash 58:52 Yeah, it makes me creative. Do that, because a lot of it is they just have, usually, you know, chorus or bridge or two, but most of it's instrumental, so it doesn't pull me out of the the the writing and the verbal stuff too much. Tim Houlihan 59:07 Yeah, I've also heard that people will listen to music that they're really familiar to in part because it's it's almost like just noise in the background. It's so familiar that they're not intensely listening to try to figure something out, or what is this word, or I can't wait for this lick or something? Speaker 1 59:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you've overplayed it so much that the surprises, yeah, that's probably true, so I guess, yeah, oh my god, I started Steely Dan into elevator music. That is a horrible thought. Tim Houlihan 59:39 It's a sad day in Mudville when Steely Dan becomes elevator music, or somebody even thought it was yacht rock. Speaker 1 59:45 Oh, yeah, I never understood that characterization. Tim Houlihan 59:50 No, I got rock in general. I still don't understand the characterization. Tim Ash 59:54 To me, that's like Jimmy Buffett stuff. I mean, no, the parrot heads, so that's yacht rock. So. Place if you're barbecuing on the back of your boat and getting loaded on beers, that's yacht rock. That's right. No, there's no way. Steely Dan gets put into that category. Tim Houlihan 1:00:10 That is not the category. I couldn't agree more. Tim ash, it is always a pleasure to see you, and thanks for rejoining us as a guest today on behavioral grooves. Oh, Tim, Tim Ash 1:00:21 it's been my pleasure. And if people want more info about any of this, though, just go to primal. Tim Comm, and you'll get links to primal dating and unleash your primal brain book, and then the new primal wellness book when that Tim Houlihan 1:00:32 comes out soon, working the primal brand. I love it. Yeah. Primal. Tim, calm, Hey, Kurt Nelson 1:00:45 welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion or Tim's discussion with Tim ash, have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our primordial dating minds. Tim Houlihan 1:00:59 Ooh, primordial. Unknown Speaker 1:01:04 Okay, yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:01:06 cuz that's it, right? That that's where we're going back to. That's, that's what? Kurt Nelson 1:01:10 Yes, it's the eyeball dating. Isn't it? Not primordial? Did I just is primordial? Yeah, is it good? Does it mean the same thing? Tim Houlihan 1:01:19 I don't know something pretty close Kurt Nelson 1:01:24 well, people, I meant primal. And maybe, you know, my, my lack of understanding of vocabulary might have just messed all that up. But hey, it's all right. It's the primal dating minds. You know? It's the brains that are wired for being in small tribes, for being, you know, in a in a very threatening environment for most that we are as what, what did our one guest call us just meat bags out in the Savannah. We are not the apex hunters that way. You know, we weren't for much of our existence. Tim Houlihan 1:02:01 So, yeah, right. We've had human history is filled with a lot of kind of bad days. You know, we've had some, we've had some, some Kurt Nelson 1:02:12 kind of sitting around, hiding, being in our tribes, but we were in our tribes, and that was what kept us safe and right. And you know, that was how we also found our mates, and that was an interesting piece. So it is, yeah, okay, so, all right, so, all right, I'm gonna have to interview you, because, okay, for this grooving session, because I wasn't there. So what? What did you take away from the Tim's conversation here. Team Tim, Team connection. Team Tim, yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:02:49 Well, the first thing is that our behavioral tendencies are not hardwired right, that they are about probabilities of behavior, and they're not fixed scripts. And I think that this is a real and now we heard this with Paul Eastwick, right? Yep, who is an evolutionary psychologist. And so in some ways, it's a very similar message. And I, and I like that in our cover. My conversation with Tim ash absolutely went into that direction to remind us that this probability aspect of who we are is something that we can overcome right that dating will trigger these ancient tendencies, because it involves a lot of uncertainty and status and risk and social evaluation. All those things are are absolutely ancient, and they are primordial, but, but we also have ways of countering them, and I think that it's, it's so remember that we do have tools, Kurt Nelson 1:03:50 so we should just ignore these, right? Well, these tendencies. Tim Houlihan 1:03:54 Oh, actually, I don't think that that makes us more enlightened. Kurt Nelson 1:03:58 Okay, okay, that's a fair question. Tim Houlihan 1:04:02 But if, and if we do ignore them, it can kind of make these things sort of feel mysterious. And, you know, we can get into conspiracy theories about how relationships work and Kurt Nelson 1:04:12 get way out of hand. Well, it brings to mind, you know, like the work of Danny Kahneman on dual processing theory, this idea of system one, system two, and what I'm hearing you say is that we probably need to pull ourselves out of maybe system one, thinking a lot, maybe move ourselves into system two, looking at the emotional context, the You know, where we are, kind of the larger picture of this, which seems counterintuitive, because shouldn't love just strike us like lightning, and it should be an immediate thing. Doesn't have to love, Tim Houlihan 1:04:53 doesn't have to strike us late like, like lightning, like just because Hollywood has romanticized that doesn't necessarily. Make it better or make our relationships better? Yeah, and I agree with your comment. Kurt Nelson 1:05:05 Comment, yeah, what? What else? Tim, what else did you? You know, I would say that Tim Houlihan 1:05:11 a lot of the the problems that we have in dating are sort of can be related to being misplaced in the way that we think about where we should be, rather than just where we are, right? So life stage is a really important aspect of this, the evolutionary pressures that shift us across all of our lifespan, basically our risk tolerance and our priorities change, and so of course, that's going to influence the way we think about relationships Kurt Nelson 1:05:42 that's interesting. Yeah, so and let it happen, right? So, so the person I might have been attracted to when I was younger and wanted to date might not be that same person if I was out on that dating scene today. Is that what you're saying, or is that isn't different from that, that is it, that is it. Tim Houlihan 1:06:06 Now, there are great stories that that are romanticized about. You know, people having the like a high school sweetheart, and things don't work out. But that first love, right? That first big fireworks, explosion of romance and love doesn't get it doesn't get manifested so you and so that. So you marry someone else, and you go on for years, and then you get divorced, and it's like, I want to go back to my high school sweetheart, because they're available right now too. And you know what? In a different life stage, things can just be completely misaligned. It's not that we have bad motives, but but all those changing priorities, all those risk tolerances, all the things that we've learned could be completely misaligned with with life stage. So I think that it's important to think about, where am I at right now? What is it that I really want in a relationship and where where am I start with a good inventory of how I'm doing that. Kurt Nelson 1:07:03 So there's an interesting part to this. Then Tim is this like for myself, who's been married almost 30 years, and I know lots of long term relationships, there's a there's a potential connotation from this, which is, do you that person you married when you were younger, is that still the person you want to be with? Is that? Why did you and Tim talk about like, divorce and that kind of thing is that we didn't. The reason, Tim Houlihan 1:07:36 yeah, we didn't get into that on on a we didn't get into that in any meaningful way. However, I think that I'm just going to riff a little bit here. Yeah, our preferences do change over time. And either, I think that to some degree, you kind of have to decide, is this a relationship that I want to continue to invest time into, or not? And and from a behavioral science perspective, you know, I think about the work that Kevin kivot, Ron kivets and and Itamar Simonson did on our preferences. And our preferences change over time. They're context dependent, and that's okay if you want, if you want a relationship that continues to laugh, you're going to last. You're going to have to figure out how to adjust as the time goes by. Kurt Nelson 1:08:24 Basically, it's interesting, because I think there's also this, you know, joint life that you're sharing, and so your preferences are being impacted by that other person as well. So again, part of this is that, yeah, your preferences might change, but you and that other person are maybe changing together. And so if you're doing this, you're you know, you talk about it, it's like, yeah, I loved you and you were a very different person when I married you, but I love you more today, because now you're a different person, I'm a different person, and we're still, we're growing in that, right? Tim Houlihan 1:09:07 And you still have all these shared experiences to look yeah, I think that those are, those are really important. The third thing that I wanted to mention about our my discussion with with Tim, was we talked about this dating marketplace thing. Now this is something that came up with, with Paul Eastwick as well, right? But this idea of, it's a choose me market and and Tim ash talked a lot about how the sort of the economics and the supply and demand of it, and I think that human pair bonding really depends on repeated interaction and shared experience, right? Kurt Nelson 1:09:45 Human pair bonding is that, like the technical term for dating human human pair bonding, Tim Houlihan 1:09:58 it did it didn't. Sound just funny when I was when it was going through my head, Kurt Nelson 1:10:04 it just came across as, Oh, you're very smart. You're talking about human pair bonding. Is that just like a one night stand? Is that, I mean? Is that a very technical term? Is that how this works? Or term dating? Is this like a special kind of relationship as human air bonding? Tim Houlihan 1:10:24 Okay, I'm moving on. The underlying problem with the marketplace thing is that we really don't have, like in economic marketplaces, you've got all the assessments of product value and product quality and distribution, everything comes back to how much am I willing to pay for that? Yeah, and so there, there ends up being a measure, an economic measure, the financial measure that we that that is Uber Alice. It oversees all. But the Kurt Nelson 1:10:58 problem is that like a human pair marketing market and no big and like overarching and Uber Alla, no, it's Tim Houlihan 1:11:08 just father Kester voice from sophomore German class, actually, Kurt Nelson 1:11:16 in my head, but I'm I'm Loving it. I'm loving it. Keep going. Sorry. Tim Houlihan 1:11:21 So, you know, marketplaces, in an economic sense, have a single measure that everything can be, you know, routed up to. But in human relationships, if we say that there's a marketplace, there are still 1000 different factors and yeah, and the benefit of the complexity of human relationships is that you get to over time and time together, you get to work out, what are the things that really are important, and say, Okay, these are the things that are most important to me and to us. Rather than saying, there's just one thing. And I think that this is a, this is kind of an important aspect of of Tim's Tim ashes message is like marketplaces don't exist anywhere else in the world, like they exist when it comes to to our human connection, our human pair bonding, Kurt Nelson 1:12:14 human pair bonding. Yeah, the Uber rescue, or whatever word you use that. I had no clue what it meant. That's cool. I mean, I think that it kind of matches. So I didn't talk with Tim, but I did was on the call with Paul, you know, and there's this aspect of a marketplace where I know Paul was saying, Look, that that kind of the dating scene on apps and different things, is not necessarily the best way of, right? You know, going around trying to find a human pair bond that would be good for you. You know, it because they are. Attraction emerges often the while we might have an initial like, oh, you check all these boxes. That's not really how attraction and love form. It's from that getting to know that person, and you start to see them differently. And again, your initial attraction. I've seen this. I'm you know where it's like, Ooh, cool. And then you gotta talk to him, and you're going, Oh no, not cool. So vice versa, right? Yeah, well, Tim Houlihan 1:13:27 and I think Paul said this really well, that our preferences follow attraction, not the other way around. It's not that that that attraction leads or it's not its preferences follow attraction, not attraction follows preferences. So it's not that we set a preference up front and then we get attracted to that. It's the other way around. We get to know somebody, and then we start to go, oh, this is what we like. Kurt Nelson 1:13:54 And oh, yeah, I like that. That was I like how they do that. I like the way they treat me, I like the way that they do this or do that, yeah, that's Tim Houlihan 1:14:04 really cool. And then that becomes my preference after I've discovered that that's what I'm actually attracted to. Kurt Nelson 1:14:10 Preferences are so freaking weird, again, just from the work like, you know that did, oh yeah. I mean, all of those like you would think, all right, I like a more than b, and I like B more than C, so therefore I should like a more than C. But that doesn't always play out either. I mean, we are just so messed up as humans. It's just, it's, you know, our brains, and we think that we should be able to have all this rational understanding of how love works, and that's just Yeah. Basically, what I'm hearing saying is that is a lot harder than we think it is. And, you know, good luck. Yeah, right, yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:14:53 And so give yourself a little break. By the way, it's give your, you know, allow for some room for error, because. Because that's it. But learn from those errors. I think that's the other thing. And, you know, biology, life, stage, context, all those things matter, and it's a lot to take in. So try to take time to do some inventory every now and then, to try to get a handle on what's working and what's not. Kurt Nelson 1:15:20 Yeah, so it seems like understanding the system, understanding this information, isn't necessarily a silver bullet and you're going to find love tomorrow, but it might help reduce some of the frustration and maybe increase the your likelihood of being able to, you know, do this in a way that it goes, Oh, this works. This is for this is good, agreed. Tim Houlihan 1:15:51 And so if you're looking for a book with some very practical uses that that addresses very specific things about very specific environments and situations for men and for women. I think Tim Ashe has written a book that that is definitely for you, so encourage you to pick that up. Yeah. Kurt Nelson 1:16:12 Thank you. Now, if you like what we're doing here, and you want to support us, and you want to get actually, some other cool information beyond what we just talked about. Here, you can subscribe, subscribe to our sub stack, which a it gives you some cool like, keeps you informed on what we're doing in our latest episodes. But also we go in there and do more stuff. And you know what Tim they could subscribe to that for free we are that free, or fruit is good, or Tim Houlihan 1:16:44 if they wanted to pay, what would it cost them? $100 a day. Kurt Nelson 1:16:48 No, no. $10 a day. No, no, $1 a day, no. Well, if they wanted to, we take any of those, by the way, but no, no, it wouldn't. So it would cost about the cost of one coffee a month. You know, if you go out to Starbucks, you go out to Caribou Coffee, which is the local one here, and you buy a fancy coffee that, you know, I'm not saying just you're playing regular coffee. You might have two of those coffees a month that you'd have to, you'd have to do, but then you'd have some change left over. You know, everything but coffee a month. So come on, people, you can just go and maybe, maybe instead of going out and getting that fancy frappe double shot of espresso, caramel latte, whatever, you know, just brew your coffee at home for the day, put some fancy creamer in it, and then join our sub stack and and pay us. How about that? Tim Houlihan 1:17:48 Yeah, and if you don't feel like you're the right person to make that contribution, get somebody else to do it. Kurt Nelson 1:17:59 I don't drink coffee. How that doesn't make that doesn't apply to me, don't drink coffee. There you go. Yeah, or or Yes. You could just join our behavioral grooves community Facebook page. We have go over a couple 100 people our members, where we share questions. Every week, we have discussions. You know, it's just, it's a cool group that's there to help answer some of these big questions and how they see the world. And it just helps kind of go through this. And we're bringing a little behavioral science lens, and I think it's a good thing to join. So please join that. It's a go out to Facebook. Join look for behavioral grooves community and join the group. We invite you. We'd love to see you there. I'd love to have some conversations with all of our listeners here. Tim Houlihan 1:18:50 Yeah, absolutely, because it is very conversant. Or give us an opportunity to earn our living by hiring us with the proviso, it's not for dating advice. Kurt Nelson 1:19:02 That's not no but now we're experts. We've had two people on in the recent year about dating. So we are experts, aren't we? Tim Houlihan 1:19:11 No, we are no good, good to go conversations did not, does not an expert make. But we are, Kurt Nelson 1:19:18 but we're in great relationships. Doesn't that count for anything? Boy, it does. Man, we are in great relationships. We are in both of us are in really great relationships. So yeah, we'll, we'll just share our own personal we won't charge you for that. There you go. But we will charge you for Yeah, you know the expertise that we do have a lot on, which is around incentives, around goal setting, around team development, around recognition programs, you know we can come in and help your organization improve on all of those. And whether that be consulting, whether it be doing workshops, we have done workshops for or. Organizations all around the world, virtually, in person. We are keynote speakers. We can do all of that. So a lot Tim Houlihan 1:20:10 of people say, But Kurt and Tim, do you ever work with companies that aren't among the top 50 companies in the whole world? And of course, the answer is yes, no. Kurt Nelson 1:20:21 Oh, you, you work with those. I, on the other hand, have very selective. Yes, we work Tim Houlihan 1:20:30 with a lot of different size companies. So So reach out if you, if you do have some interest Kurt Nelson 1:20:35 we had, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, well, I was gonna pontificate more on how, how it would be fantastic to work with any of these people who are listening, because, you know, it's a it's fun to work on these things. It's always interesting, and we can make a difference. So, yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:20:54 we hope that you enjoyed the conversation with Tim ash, and that you use it this week in your dating life or your relationship. Life, as you go out and find your groove, you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai