Is This The End Of The Pod?

0:00All right, we need to talk about this. the podcast is either going to end today or we're going to figure this out is that dramatic enough for you I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel Sam can we start can I start with an apology yes can I say sorry I was let me check my notes I was a little pissy yesterday and you were on the receiving end of me being a little pissy. We had a fight, an argument, a disagreement, a lover's quarrel. I don't know what you want to call it. We had something. And I want to talk about it here, not just because I'm a sicko and I'm like, ooh, this is good content, Jerry Springer, but also mostly because I thought about it a lot afterwards.

0:55I found it kind of fascinating. And at first I felt really bad. I don't know about you, but I felt really horrible the rest of the day. So without discussing the specifics, I want to talk about what I learned after that fight. Can we do that? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So here's the story. We got in a fight yesterday and I wouldn't even call it really a fight. It's like every six months, there's just disagreements that we had to work through. Exactly. And like most things, it starts off as a misunderstanding, turns into a disagreement, which leads to an argument, which escalates to a fight, and then it kind of deescalates into a grumpy agreement and you sort of move on.

1:33And can I first tell you why I even wanted to talk about this? Yeah. Do you know who JJ McCarthy is by any chance? He's a rookie football player. He's a quarterback for the Vikings. So he's a rookie. Yeah. I don't know who he is, but I know the name. Football, he just got drafted. And like any, you know, a team that sucks, they draft a quarterback. They're hoping he's going to turn the franchise around. And he just had their first like preseason game, not even in the season yet. and he threw an interception while he was playing. So after the game, he's doing an interview. And I'm scrolling on Twitter and I see this.

2:05And I'm seeing this after we have our fight. And the interviewer asks him, she goes, JJ, you go out there, you want to perform well, but you throw that interception and I'm sure that did feel great. Just talk me through what was going through your mind and how are you feeling after doing that? And this guy's response was epic. He goes, what was going through my mind? what an opportunity. And she goes, what an opportunity. And he goes, yeah, I mean, this whole, my, my success in my career is going to be based. I'm a quarterback in the NFL. My success in my career is going to be based on my resilience, my ability to bounce back from mistakes.

2:42I throw an interception, what an opportunity to learn, to get better and to improve. And I was like, Whoa, fucking mindset alert. You know, I, I pride myself on mindset. I am a student of mindset. And when I heard that, I thought, wow, that was an uncommon response to a very common situation. I would say most guys are down on it, but then they'll lie and be like, well, I just had to focus on the next play, just put it out of my head and just get better. But they're kind of bitter about it. And this guy was so genuine when he said, what an opportunity. And so I kind of had that same thought where I was feeling bad after our fight.

3:15And I thought, I saw that clip and I thought, okay, what an opportunity for me to learn here. And the reason I think it's an opportunity for me was we joke on this podcast, I'm generally super laid back. Like, I don't really get easily bothered. I pride myself and have a good mindset. But of course, I'm a human being. I mess up, which is why when I get bothered, it's rare and I suck at it. And so I wanted to tell you some of the things that I reflected on afterwards. I have like five to seven thoughts. Can I just read them out to you? Yeah, and I might have a few as well. So first one, fights don't start as fights.

3:54and what I mean by this is you never start a conversation intending to fight nor do you even really see a fight coming and the analogy I was using in my head was like oh, a fight is like a forest fire when a forest fire happens the explanation they usually come to is well, there was like a bunch of the what do they call it? like the dry bush or whatever like the kind of the dead sticks that go on the ground and it's sort of this accumulation this pile of sticks that nobody really clears out and it's not a problem until somebody drops a cigarette on it and it could be something that you just squish out with your foot right away.

4:26You put it out, there's no big deal. But if you don't put it out right away, that accumulated dry stuff can catch fire. It can become a wildfire. It could tear down a whole forest. And so that was my first observation was, man, that the debris on the forest floor is kind of like a hidden danger. It's a dog that's not barking and you have to make sure that if a cigarette does drop on it, you're able to kind of immediately put it out or clear it out ahead of time. That was the first thought. Which by the way, the reason why that's very easy for you to say that that's very hard to address. And the reason it's hard to address is because a lot of times people, particularly me, and I know you do as well, you have this idea where you're like, I don't want to ruffle feathers, I'll just go with the flow.

5:07And if you do that too often, then you're like, shit, I've been going with the flow. Now, I'm bothered. And that's a very hard balance to implement of like, when do you go with the flow or when do you say that's not my preference? Right. That describes it to a T. Either avoid confrontation. That's one reason to just like let it go type of thing, but you don't really fully let it go. Right. Like 10 to 15 % lingers. Or in my case, it's a lot less of I avoid confrontation. It's more of I don't want to let myself get bothered by something small. So I ignore it. I think I ignore it, but like 10 % of it lingers.

5:43And if you ignore too many things, that 10 % can start to add up. And if unaddressed, it's that stuff on the forest floor. Okay, so here's the second one. Fights are natural. That was the second thought I had. I wrote down in my little diary here. Fights are natural. We've been working together on this podcast for four years. I can count probably three serious arguments or disagreements that we've had that felt uncomfortable to deal with. Maybe there's been some other ones I'm forgetting, but it's understandable. You work together with somebody for four years on a project, you're going to have disagreements.

6:10In the moment, it doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel natural. Logically, you know, hey, this is normal, but in the moment, it feels bad. and let's emphasize how bad like when i argue with you or when i argue with jordan or joe my my other partners like it ruins my week i hate that feeling i think you are a little more comfortable with confrontation for people like me like these midwestern nice people who have been raised to just swallow just swallow it you just you live life like resenting others sometimes or like you just don't fucking complain i hate it i hate like there's been times where i've had to fire someone and I won't fire them for a year because I just don't want I just don't want to do that conversation I hate it it bothers like I like I wake up in the middle of the night it ruined my night I was gonna show you my I'm wearing a ring I was gonna show you my sleep scores terrible I slept three hours last night I woke up in the middle of the night at 3 a.m and I ate three pieces of cookie dough from like a Nestle's bacon bake whatever it's called break and bake yeah a break and bake.

7:11Dude, I wish I had a break and bake. That would have made me feel better. I just woke up feeling shitty. And it's like the analogy here is in your diet, you can wake up feeling shitty. At least I do this as my evolution from guy with a horrible diet to trying to be better about it is I know when I feel shitty and it's either because I just door dash Taco Bell and that was just a bad decision and I'm paying the price for that. But also, even if you do the right thing at the wrong time, if I eat a very like a full meal, but I ate it at 1030, it doesn't matter if I had grilled chicken and whatever, if it was a healthy meal, if I eat too late, I'm just going to feel bad, right?

7:47So you can do the right thing at the wrong time and get pain. You can do the wrong thing at the wrong time, get pain. And for me, this was surprising because usually if I have a confrontation, it's usually a relief because I've been trying to avoid having it. And when I do have it, I normally feel quite relieved. And this one, I felt awful. I felt terrible. I couldn't sleep. It was such an unusual feeling for me, which made me think I didn't do it right. So that's probably relatable, but not surprising. I'm going to give you some of the things that I found interesting. The first is about this guy named Dr.

8:18Gottman. Let's call him Dr. Gottman because I forget his first name. Do you know who Dr. Gottman is? No. Dr. Gottman is the love doctor. Literally, this is a guy who studied marriages and his claim to fame is that he could watch a couple for 15 minutes, having a conversation about something and predict with 90 plus percent certainty if they were going to have a divorce, end up divorced or stay together 90 plus percent and only watching a 15 minute conversation. In fact, he had something called the love lab, which was his research lab where he would bring couples in. He would say, talk about X.

8:50And he knew that X would lead into a little bit of a conversation. A little bit of resentment would come up and he could watch how they handled it. And in just 15 minutes, predict 90 % accuracy. And by the way, if you let just like a normal marriage counselor or an average person on the street watch that same 15 minutes, their accuracy was about 50%. Just like flip a coin. They had no accuracy, essentially. But this guy had 90%. And why is that? Because he had done this a bunch and he was able to identify what are the things to look for that would cause a couple to break up. And so one interesting thing last night was I went down this rabbit hole of like, what did Gottman say?

9:27What are these things? and he's got a couple of interesting, very insightful things. So he's got one thing called the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It basically is like, I look for four things that if a couple does these four things, highly correlated with them not staying together in the long run. Low marriage satisfaction and divorce. It's like the emotions of contempt, resentment. What were the other two? Close. So it's criticism, contempt, which was the biggest one, defensiveness, and stonewalling. And some of these were gendered. So like men were typically more guilty of stonewalling, meaning wife is bringing something up.

10:02He just kind of shuts down, just kind of like in his mind, he's like, I'm not fighting in her mind. It's like, you're, you're not, you're not even open. You're closing me down and I'm trying to express something to you. But content, contempt was the one where regardless of gender, if you did these things like an eye roll, anything that's hierarchy, which is like, oh, you're such an asshole, right? I'm good. And you're bad. Anything that creates, anything that indicates contempt was like one of the worst things that could happen. Right. Because it indicates a lack of fundamental respect and equality in the relationship.

10:35So he's got that. He had another one, which is a magic ratio, which is they would observe an interaction and they would see that. And by the way, the way they did this was fascinating. Couples talk for 15 minutes and he's encoding. Every minute, I think they divided into like 18 signals in a minute or something like that. And they had this like specific encoding where it's like eye roll, like body language turn away, phrasing of a thing. Yeah. But like all these little nuanced things that he could, they would, they would immediately encode and then they would have a score at the end of it. And they'd have positive interactions between the couple and negative, but they're like these micro interactions, right?

11:09To the surface, it didn't even look like they're having a huge fight, yelling at each other, throwing and screaming, you know, throwing things across the room. None of that. But even in just like a normal conversation, he could get that indication. So he said the magic ratio is five to one, right? Every couple is going to have negative interactions. That's not avoidable. It's what's the ratio of positive to negative. And if it was five to one, the couples would stick together. Below five to one, you start to get into higher likelihood that the couples will not stay together. I thought that was kind of interesting.

11:36There's a ton of like little micro things that he has in there, like repair attempts. So how do you deescalate? People who like any couple that stayed together had a good habit of using humor or taking a break or just saying, I'm sorry, that was stupid. I shouldn't have said that. That's not actually what I mean. What I mean is this, a way to deescalate in a fight was like a huge tool that was very useful. And that was one thing I think I did poorly yesterday, which was I was not deescalating well, right? Either could have took a break, could have just made a joke, could have said, actually, the way that came out is not actually how I feel.

12:11How I feel is really this. But instead, it was like sunk cost. Like I said it, now I got to defend it, which is like is such a stupid way to go. He's got this whole philosophy that I'm super fascinated by now and really excited to do kind of like a little bit more of a deep dive on. How cool is that guy, by the way? He's great. I joke with my wife where I'll say, look, I've made my point. I am dug in. Okay. There is no retreating here. I'm what you call dug in. I cannot go back. and the reason I'm raising my voice is because that would mean that if I talk lower, I'm losing the argument and that is not happening you know in UFC fights I remember McGregor would always say, we'll see who takes the first back step, he's like oh we're going to fight, but his trash talk was not I'm going to knock you out, he's like, he would get in their mind like let's see who takes the first back step because he's actually a counter puncher, he wants the guy moving forward, so he'd put that in their mind, if you take a back step, you're a bitch and as silly as that sounds that would describe my behavior in a lot of interactions.

13:12Yes. Let's see who takes the first back step, which is not serving me well. No, I get in trouble a lot for it. And it's incredibly stupid. And there's so many times where I'm like, shit, my ego won't let me retreat. But that is the right decision. Right. Let me give you a mechanic that I learned that I wish I had yesterday when we were fighting. I once took an improv class in San Francisco. And the very first class, instead of teaching you how to do improv, of. The very first lesson is not here's what you do. It's here's what you do when you screw up because you're going to screw up a ton. You are beginners.

13:45This is hard. You are going to screw up a lot. So the first tool we give you, and they were just, she was like, when you say something that was stupid or didn't make sense or was not funny and you tried to be funny, the weight of the world is going to come crashing down on you. And here's your solution. Ready? And she's like, Like, could you all do that? We're like, and she was like, that's it. When it happens, just go. And that just means to everybody clear the slate. That didn't happen. We're moving on. We're moving past that. It was a whoop. And I wish I had a mechanic like that in so many more areas of my life where a way to eject or abort or pull out of a tailspin of like, I didn't want to go this way.

14:25I didn't want to say that. I didn't want that to come across the way it came across. Plus, I needed a whoop to just be like, let's wipe this slate clean real quick. Like, it's a sketch. Just quickly shake it, and it's gone. Yeah, you would look really dumb if you did that. But I agree that is a very helpful thing. I get in more trouble because of this thing more than anything else. Right. All right, another observation. My body keeps the score. So I have this coach, he's an executive coach, which is like, you know, business strategy, but mostly like therapy, thinking through basically helping me think more clearly and be a better person.

15:01And he's great. And he has this stuff that he says that's great that I'm like, totally buy it. He has other stuff that he says that I'm like, I get that you buy it. I'm not sure that I buy it yet. And one of the things he always talks about is like the body keeps the score. Have you read that book? I've read the book, but I don't have back pain. And I think it's more of a it's like literally like a back pain book, right? It's sort of. It's basically like the easiest one are soldiers who have PTSD. They see they feel things physically. And I Frank, I actually don't remember the entire premise, but I believe it was if you change your body, you can actually change your mind.

15:39Right. So he'll ask me, he'll be like, I'll say something. He's like, where do you feel that when you say I'm like, I don't feel like I said it from my mouth. What are you talking about? He's like, no, like, is there a tightness in your chest? I'm like, bro, I don't want to like, I don't want to do yoga. I just want to say what's going on and then figure it out with a logical solution. And he's helping me learn that. I hadn't really fully bought in until yesterday when I felt terrible after it. Physically, I felt terrible after our conversation. And I was like, oh, shit, I think he's right. I think the body does keep the score.

16:11And I'm more of a believer in that woo-woo shit. So that was another observation. What did you feel terrible because you felt that I was wrong or because you didn't like the words you used? I felt terrible because I felt like I did myself a disservice, which is I don't think I conducted myself well. I thought I actually had a good point, meaning I don't disagree with any of my words and I disagree with all of my delivery. And what a shame because it's like actually what I did was a total net negative. I undermined my own point. What I was trying to express, I didn't express well. It wasn't effective.

16:48and I made you feel not good too because that wouldn't feel good anyways. And I was like, oh, the other lesson, of course, is people don't remember what you say. They just remember how you made them feel. If it makes you feel better, I think your delivery wasn't as bad as you think. That does make me feel better. Thank you. And I agree with your points. Like the points you made were not bad points. The problem with having an argument with you is you are quite logical and you do make logical points. The other problem with you is that most people, myself included, are more emotional than logical.

17:21And that's sometimes hard for you to understand. Yes. And also to give myself more blame here is I am like a firecracker or something like that. It's like you can play with it. You can hold it. Nothing's going to happen. For like 99 out of all the days of the year, 364 days out of the year, that firecracker is just easy to handle. but on July 4th, there's one day that like 5 % of the time where this fuse gets lit, there was like no, no warning and it's fucking explosive. And so it's like, that's, I think my problem is I'm extremely tolerant and unbothered until the moment I'm bothered. And then I have a big whiny baby and I like get really upset really quickly more than I should.

18:03And again, and I real, what I realized yesterday was, oh, that's just because I don't have many reps doing it. And this is kind of a bullshit, like my greatest strength is I have no weaknesses, but I think it's honestly true in this situation. I'm so rarely bothered that when I am bothered, I'm so poor at handling it. Whereas I think somebody who is more frequently runs into situations like this, they become more mature and have better tools to deal with it than I do. It's almost like because you're pretty emotionally healthy, that is actually a weakness. You know what I mean? Because you don't assume that other people are broken or that their egos dictate things.

18:37Do you know what I mean? Well, I think you're giving me a very generous Ben, but I'll consider that not just a compliment but maybe something that might be true here Can I read you a couple more bullet points? Words I jotted down in my journal here There are no winners in war There's always a benefit to expressing myself and finding resolutions when there's a mix-up but once it escalates there's no winner and loser there's only two losers in a situation like that where I think at a certain point the conversation was productive and at a certain point it was unproductive and once it got into an unproductive And by the way, we weren't like cursing each other out or anything.

19:09I don't mean to make it sound like that. But just on a relative scale, it wasn't one where I felt, wow, that was super constructive. And I feel better about the relationship. It's like, no, I think we did some damage there. And there was only two losers in that interaction. There was no like winner and loser, which is stupid because when you argue, you kind of want to be a winner or you want to be a winner. And that defaults other person to be a loser in the interaction. But that's a false idea. Have you read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People? Clearly, I should go and reread it.

19:35I read the first chapter about people loving their name. And then I was like, this is great. And I was like, he has a famous line in that where he goes, the most beautiful word in the English language is a person's name. So say it a lot. But like right in the third chapter, like one chapter after that, he tells a story about how he was with this influential person who was telling him the story. And the guy got a lot of the story wrong. Like he was like saying, this is a quote from Shakespeare. And Dale was like, actually, you know, that was Thomas Jefferson. who said that. And the guy who he corrected fucking hated him.

20:10He's like, don't correct me over this shit. And the whole point is like when you try to correct people or argue with them to prove a point, it doesn't, it rarely ever works your way, which sucks because sometimes it makes you feel good to win an argument or to think you won an argument, but it actually, it's more often than not a shitty thing. Well, didn't Lincoln also say the same thing? Like never criticize? And I always had trouble with that idea. I think in the book, how to influence people was like never criticize I was like never yeah yeah I'm I'm like never criticize and I was like never how do you function with never how does that how do you well do you know what accountability I don't I don't understand I still don't understand that like what he said in that letter or in that chapter was he'd also said Lincoln would do this thing where he would write an angry letter to someone and one time he wrote like a scathing letter letter to someone and he didn't send it and the reason why he did that was one time he talked shit about this guy and the guy was like I challenge you to a duel which was a fight to the death and Lincoln was like dude I'm not doing that that's insane I'm sorry I didn't mean to offend you I'm sorry and like it was like I'm not going to criticize people ever again and so instead he would write these letters where he would like bitch bitch him out and then just not send him and he was like that makes me feel better I'm ready to try that I still don't fully understand how you do the never criticize thing but I think they're right which is rarely does that do any good.

21:32Okay, let me give you a couple others. Everybody is the hero of their own story and convincing them otherwise is a fool's errand, myself included. I recently heard this when I was in Canada at the Andrew Wilkinson's event. I was sitting at a dinner table with Chris Sparling. Chris is Andrew's business partner who's more under the radar, but a super fun guy. And he's one of my, I don't know, top three dinner party guests. The guy is just electric at a dinner table. And one of the things he said was he brought this up. He goes, isn't it funny? He's like, I have never met a person who does not view themselves as acting.

22:07I forgot exactly how he said it, but like acting good, acting just no matter what they're doing. And he's like, I think everybody from serial killers on views themselves as the hero of their story. And, uh, you know, justified, uh, either what they did was right or the wrong thing they did was justified. He's like, isn't that crazy? I was like, that is actually crazy. And it was so true. Like I felt like when we were arguing yesterday, I was the hero of my story and I had done all these valiant things that were, you know, you know, my my protagonist moves. And then you were like, aha, but I am the protagonist.

22:41And I'm like, you know, as it escalated, it was like, you're the villain. I'm the hero. And you're like, I'm the hero. You're the villain. And it was like, wait, we are both idiots is actually what we both are. We're neither the heroes nor the villains in this scenario. But it was just a good reminder of, man, I'm guilty of that. If I'm guilty of that, everybody's guilty of that. And I looked it up. There's something called narrative identity, which is like the psychological name for this phenomenon that even Hitler on believed this about themselves. And the problem is that then you go and you ask your wife or your close friend about any situation and you explain it.

23:16And oftentimes they'll say, you are right. But the reality is, you're probably not explaining the situation to where you can truly get wonderful advice. Do you know what I mean? Right. Well, there's another one I looked up when I was talking to ChatGPT about like, what is the name for this? Me and my buddy just had this argument. What's the name of that syndrome? What was I doing and what is that called? One of them was called mistaken attribution. And the principle was this, when I'm wrong, it's because of the situation. When you're wrong, it's because of the character. And if you do that, it's a very unhealthy mindset to have or a bias to have.

23:53It's a misattribution bias. And we all do this, which is, oh, those things that I did at the wrong, well, that's just because this was what was going on in the situation. However, if you don't give that same benefit of the doubt to the other person, that their actions were situationally dictated and not from any poor intention, then you end up with this same problem as like an investing. It's like, when I win, it's skill. When I lose, it's bad luck. And in the same way in a fight. If I'm wrong, it's situational. If you're wrong, it's character. That was a choice, but that's who you are. So someone told me this years and years ago, and it kind of changed my life.

24:29And I try to use it all the time. And I'm a human and I fail. And I failed on it a little bit, or I failed on a lot of it yesterday. But basically, it's the idea where we judge ourselves on our intentions, but we judge other people on their actions. And I try to remind myself constantly. And that's really, that's another thing that's very simple, but hard, but it is like very important. I think truly. And dude, during our conversation yesterday, it was like, well, you know, I didn't, there was no malintent in this, right? Yes. I know that. And it's like, and you, I know that you had no malintent in what you did, right?