Conversation with Matthew Hussey — Set Better Intentions and Break Unhealthy Dating Habits

0:00Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. Episode 300. Route 300 is a highway running through the Hudson Valley of New York, And Noah's Ark is said to have been 300 cubits long. True story.

0:42I've been reading the Bible a lot lately. Think of it as cramming for finals. I've only read 12.5 % of the Bible, as I'm an atheist. Get it? Atheist? True story. I asked my priest, what is a blowjob? And he said,$300 downtown. Ask for Mickey.

1:04Go, go, go!

1:15Welcome to the 300th episode of The Prop G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Matthew Hussey, a leading dating expert and confidence coach. Last name is Hussey and it's a dating coach? I'm not even going to go there. We discuss with Matthew his new book, Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What. But I already have a question for Matthew. And is really the key raising your standards? I think that's part of the problem is people don't want to give people a second chance. But said the guy who needed second and third chances over and over. Okay, what's happening?

1:48The dog is back in London. That's right. A lot of parks, a lot of green, a lot of places to lift his leg and mark his territory. London is like New York if Godzilla stepped on it and it just went squish and spread out. And then someone poured massive amounts of fertilizer and turned it all green. True story. My dad was the national sales director for O.M. Scott's, a division of ITT. This was back when conglomerates were buying everything for some reason. They owned fertilizer and peanut butter and alarm systems. Anyways, people used to come over to our house in Laguna Niguel and bring like a food processor.

2:27And then my dad would wink at me and I would go get three bags of fertilizer and put it in the trunk of some man's car. who I guess worked at a company that made food processors. Anyways, sort of my first lesson in economics. Before we get to the news, we have an announcement. Our Prof G Markets podcast is expanding to its own dedicated feed. What a thrill. Do us a favor and please sign up, subscribe. We were, get this, number three in, wait, no, we were number 24 of all podcasts globally on our launch and number one in business. so please help us keep the momentum. You still get our Monday Markets episode on the general Prof G pod feed, but for our more markets-driven news and interviews with analysts, professors, authors, and financial advisors, you'll have to subscribe to the Prof G Markets pod wherever you get your pods.

3:17We're going to do unpacks of specific companies and try and go deeper into specific sectors and specific asset classes and companies. Okay, that's right. The dog wants to go to soft food. I need more money. All right, moving on. What else is happening? The face behind Meme Stock Mania is back in action. Roaring Kitty, who you probably are all familiar with now, tweeted a meme that depicts a man leaning over to get locked into a video game. It was Roaring Kitty's first tweet since 2021. Isn't that interesting? And sure enough, the tweet garnered tens of millions of impressions and GameStop's stock went soaring, closing up 74 % on Monday.

3:55AMC also jumped 80 % the same day. So the last time this happened, the stock skyrocketed 1 ,02300 % respectively in just a few days. So that's up, what is that? That's up 11-fold and 24-fold. So this is, wow, this is what is referred to as a mob squeeze. And that is someone finds a company with a low flow, they all go on Reddit. It's basically the essentially, it's essentially a pyramid scheme. And that is, my mom used to talk about this. She went to a couple of parties in the Hollywood Hills and came home and said it was a pyramid party. I'm like, what's a pyramid party? And it's like you, someone forms their pyramid and tries to get two people below them to give a thousand dollars.

4:35And then those people try and go get more people and they try and create heat around investing in this pyramid. And once I guess there's 16 people, the top person gets the 16 grand. And then the next person, if there's another 16 grand in the pyramid, hopefully grows. The problem is at some point people think I'm so far down the pyramid and I'm paying so much money for a fairly low ROI or low likelihood of a payout that they start leaving and the people who came in last lose everything. And this is a little bit like that because we're no longer dealing with fundamentals. We're dealing with a meme and that is a movement to try and get rich quick and basically trade up a stock, almost like buying into a pyramid in 1970s Los Angeles, hoping that they'll maintain the momentum and the greater fool will come in before everybody decides to bail on this thing.

5:22It is a dangerous game. It's total speculation. I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with it. I think if people want to have some fun and see if they can make some money, and I don't know, but be clear, it's gambling. It's speculating. It is something that has never existed before. And initially, it was couched as sticking it to the man. Well, not really. And there was all this bullshit about it was a guy who, it was a kid whose parents lost his house in the Great Financial Recession. Okay, maybe. What this is, is fun and access to a phone and access to these message boards where people can sort of clot and come up with a strategy and find a victim.

6:04And that is a low trading stock or a low volume stock and take it to the moon and hope that they know when to get out before everybody looks around. It's like they storm a castle and they get enough people to storm the castle. And then, but they know eventually the British are going to show up and take the castle back and kill them and then cut William Wallace up into pieces, which they did and sent his limbs to the four corners of Europe to send a message. That is happening. You are fighting eventually an army that is much more powerful than you. That army, fundamentals. I have found that so far all stocks are subject to gravity.

6:37And that is eventually, eventually gravity wins. When Michael Jordan jumps from the baseline, It feels like he's never going to come down, but guess what? He always does. At some point, people are going to realize that a movie theater stock and a company selling video games in a store is not worth 40 or 50 times revenues. Eventually, gravity takes over. The question is, how long can it stay in the air and can you make money while it's still in the air? So this is, what would be my advice here? If you want to play with it and gamble, have some fun, but ring fence your investment here and also recognize that while you could make double, triple five times your money, you could also lose it all very, very quickly.

7:13And also the thing I don't like about this is you're constantly staring at your phone, one for a dope ahead and two to figure out when the British show up. And then while you're sleeping, everybody else abandons the castle because they know that this thing is not worth what it's trading at. But it's very interesting. It's definitely part of our zeitgeist. I believe that when you're young, and I think this is mostly young investors, that you should take no more than a third of your capital and invest in stocks and individual things like this. Why? One, it's not a bad idea just to put all of it into SPUI or low-cost index funds.

7:49The entire financial service sector is mostly a scam. Anyone on CNBC or has ads is essentially engaging in a gigantic grift. Kathy Griffin has no fucking idea what she's talking about. I mean, absolutely none. And she consistently underperforms the market, but because she has big chunky glasses and says these very bold, provocative things and has a big following on social, she can charge$2.20 and get very rich off your losses. And if you took all of the financial services industry, all the mutual funds, all the hedge funds, all the alternative investment funds, and you aggregated all of them, their performance is exactly the S &P minus their fees.

8:26So why not just invest in SPY or low cost index funds and do your own diversification, which you can do with SPY and make more money. You'll make more money. That's the good news. The bad news is the answer will be slowly. But if you're dying to get that dope ahead and you think it's fun, that's fine. But keep in mind, it's consumption, it's speculation, it's gambling. So have a little bit of fun, learn about the markets. I think what's going on on Reddit is really interesting. I think this is a cultural phenomena. It has to do with communications, network effects, understanding the markets, understanding capital flows, short squeeze, options, things like that.

9:01By the way, do not play options around this. If you want to buy some options, fine, recognize you can lose it all, but do not. I would be very careful riding options here are going short because this thing is unpredictable. You're dealing with an unpredictable dog. I don't like to use that metaphor because most dogs are not violent, but anyways, I'll make it. But I don't think there should be government legislation here unless they find there's market manipulation or people who are weighing in and trying to move the market beyond kind of SEC rules. But have at it if you want to have some fun. It's like betting.

9:35It's like going to the racetrack and betting the X-Acto or whatever it is. Just be ready to lose it all. This is not investing. This is speculation. We'll be right back for our conversation with Matthew Hussey.

9:49From Pushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and Heavyweight is back. The new season is bigger than ever. Bigger hopes. I keep waiting for this moment. When he says, Mom, I get it. I'm sorry. Bigger dreams. Tom Hanks wants to meet with you. This is a real chance. And bigger heartbreaks. I thought it would be my movie moment. And maybe he would even whisper in my ear, I've always been in love with you. Check out new episodes of Heavyweight on Apple Podcasts.

10:39Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Matthew Hussey, the author of Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What. Matthew, where does this podcast find you? At Los Angeles. I'm in Beverly Grove. So let's talk about your new book, Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What. Can you walk us through what led you to write this? I wrote this book. It's called Love Life. I suppose I wrote it partly because I hadn't written a book in over 10 years. The last book I wrote was about 11 years ago, and it was a very different book.

11:17It was more kind of, I suppose, on some level on the strategic or tactical side of how to go out there and find someone. Um, but this book really addressed some of the bigger reasons why we might struggle to do that. Why all the, all the advice in the world that relates to dating can fail us when there are just fundamental obstacles getting in our way in either the way that our life is structured in the mindset we bring to it in the, frankly, the trauma we bring to the table. when we go out there and date the internal blockages, the continuing to go for what is familiar instead of what's actually going to make us happier.

12:02And so this book attempts to address those while also addressing the reality that life doesn't always go the way that we had hoped. And it often doesn't. And people find themselves single at a time in their lives they never assumed they would be single, never dreamt they would still have not found the kind of person or love that they'd been looking for, or come out of a second marriage at 65 and are going, oh my God, what happened? How am I finding myself alone right now? And for the people that had never been married and had never found that and are finding that they've spent their whole lives with a kind of chronic pain of loneliness, anxiety, sadness, or depression around not having a fulfilling love life.

12:55So I wrote this book to deal with hard questions, really, and hard things that people go through as much as the dream of finding what we want to find. What do you think are some of the macro there or the environmental factors that have resulted in it seems like there is a crisis of loneliness, a lack of household formation. But in general, it feels like loneliness, especially men, but across both genders, is kind of a, for lack of a better term, epidemic levels. What are the atmospherics that have caused that? And what are some of the solutions or personal behaviors you would recommend? So whatever issues people have with finding it harder to make friends the older they get, which I think is a real issue.

13:42I think that there are certain structures that we are kind of forced into at age. You know, if people go to college, then you're forced into a social structure and you meet people. And every year after that, it tends to get harder for people. I mean, for some people it's easier, especially starting a new job is a chance at a new community, although it's still one related to your work, but it's still a chance to go if you even work in a building anymore. It's a chance to go to a building where there are other people there and potentially meet people. But outside of starting new jobs, a lot of people I talk to don't have any forced structure where they're going to meet new people in this decade of their life, whether it's their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.

14:31And so I think increasingly we have to have the the proactivity and the impetus to engineer those structures ourselves um and that's a hard thing to do one of the things i love that you i heard you talk about scott is just this idea that when you're talking about men they're staying at home and they're not in the world you know they are they're not building the robustness that comes from simply stepping outside their front door and being in teams, in groups, in situations where they can meet strangers. And I think that's true for a lot of women as well. Women typically, from everything I've ever seen, have empirically a much easier time staying connected to friends and being part of social groups with their friends than guys do.

15:24But on both sides, it's so much easier to stay home now. And by the way, all the changes in dating and tech and dating have made that easier again, because at least dating used to, finding love used to be a motivator in getting out of the house. And that might be something that forced us into situations where we had to meet with other people. But nowadays, you know, you don't even have to leave the house for that. So human behavior is always going to trend towards what's most comfortable. What's the path of least resistance? And that's what people are able to do in dating as well as every other path I see these days.

16:03And dopamine, I think, also plays a huge role in the problems that people are experiencing because the addiction that we have to our phones, the addiction that we have to constant hits of attention or novelty. and I'm not just talking about the areas where it's directly social, like liking, getting people to like our Instagram posts or getting a match on Tinder, even just the dopamine cycle we're in of constant stimulation that has nothing to do with our social life, I think is a real problem for building relationships because it, we're just wired these days for that kind of novelty and instant gratification and friendships attraction long-term relationships they require a calmer slower pace to actually build the trust the you know the the reciprocity the time spent together that actually leads to real friendships real relationships and what i see now is that people have so many superficial connections, but they're just, they're not building friendships they can actually rely on.

17:17They're building lots, a network of people they can show off to, but they're not building the relationships that when they're having a terrible time in life, when things, when the shit really hits the fan and they need someone to talk to, they don't necessarily have an abundance of those people in their lives. And a lot of the ones they do have are unhealthy relationships. They're not supportive. How has online dating impacted how people meet? What's your view on online dating? And my sense is it's impacted men and women differently. What are your thoughts? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

17:56Online dating has made it easier for people to get that dopamine hit that I was talking about, But it's made it harder to, for many people, to get to the point of actually getting to know someone, actually having any real moment of social interaction. You know, the number of people I speak to that get locked into cycles of speaking to someone for weeks or months where it's just a texting dynamic. There's, there's no moment, you know, how many people never even get to the point of a date with someone that they are seeing in an online environment. You know, and I say seeing in quotes, because the real danger I see with so many people, and I see this time and again, is we are not present with the reality of our actual lives and relationships, especially in our love lives.

18:55we are more concerned with the fantasy of what could be. Online dating gives us ample kind of fodder for those stories without necessarily training us to be disciplined and ruthless about actually focusing on people that present as real prospects. And I see people waste years or even decades of their life on those stories. And time is ticking. The whole time we're spending six months in a, quote, quote, situationship with someone who's not progressing. That's six months you'll never get back. So I see that a lot on the women's side. I'm curious to know what you are seeing on the men's side and how it presents differently.

19:48Well, with men, it's, so women have a much finer filter than men. And also there's more men on these apps. So what this all distills down to is that a man of average attractiveness on an app has to swipe right 200 times to get one match. And so for men who are kind of in the bottom 90, online dating is pretty humiliating. And so you have this kind of Porsche polygamy effect online where the top 10 % of men get an abundance of opportunity and the bottom 90 get almost none. And so it feels like women are all kind of pursuing the same guy and those guys who get an abundance of attention, it doesn't incentivize them to behave well.

20:29And then the bottom 90 are just very frustrated and upset and start going to dark places. You said something that struck me in your book, and I really like this. He said, we have to be wary of the instinct to transfer the importance we feel for the position we are looking to fill to a new person who only might one day fill it. And I was thinking about my own personal experience with dating. And that is, whenever I've become a little too, obsessed is the wrong word because it's never taken over my life, but infatuated with someone, it wasn't about that person. It was about where I was in my life at that moment, that I wanted something that was going to take me away.

21:09and I envisioned this new life because I wasn't enjoying my current life and the prospect of this person or being in a relationship with this person filled that vessel, that opportunity to do something differently. Anyways, say more about what you meant here. Well, I love what you just said. You know, I think when we're not, when we're trying to derive our source from something or someone else, then, you know, we can't afford to lose it. And I do think the more we find ways to create that source from within or, you know, even just from more diverse external sources so that it, you know, in the book, I get people to kind of as an exercise draw what I call an identity matrix of all of the different things that make up the identity they've constructed for themselves.

22:02And I know on a mindfulness level, that would be seen as just all being a problem because any kind of identity we take from anywhere makes us vulnerable. And of course, that's true. But that doesn't mean it isn't wise to diversify the sources of confidence and identity in our lives. And, you know, that's why for people who have hobbies that they love or creative endeavors that they derive purpose from or careers that they derive an enormous amount of satisfaction from or friends and family relationships, they are diversifying the sources of their confidence. and that's a very powerful thing now romantically there's always going to be this incredible draw to that square in our identity matrix and you know for so many people i would argue universally whatever form it comes in we are looking for love we want that feeling of having a mate we want that feeling of being attractive to the people we're trying to attract.

23:07Um, we want to feel fulfilled in our love lives. So that desire to find that becomes so in some cases anxiously driven, especially when time is running out or it feels like time is running out. That's true from on a very literal level for everyone who's looking for a family of their own biologically. Um, and for women more than men, although for men too, more than a lot of them realize, that fear of time running out amplifies this feeling of, God, I have this really important position that I want to fill in my life. I'm trying to fill the position of my life partner. And we get so obsessed with how important it is to fill that position that the moment we go on a date and we see even the faintest hope that this person could represent a candidate for that position, which by the way, Scott, normally is not based on any deeper character traits because how many of people's deeper character traits can we really ascertain on a one hour first date?

24:11Usually it's based on the fact that they were charming or they were charismatic or they kind of swept us off our feet a little bit or they made us feel really good about ourselves in that hour or they were sexy or they had the body shape we're attracted to. We see those things and our brain kind of lights up and goes, oh, this could be it. This could be that person. And all of a sudden is very subtle, but insidious move. All of the importance of the role we're trying to fill suddenly gets shifted over to this person sitting across the dinner table from us. and then you know a week in we're wondering why am i obsessed how i'm obsessed with this person and we you know cognitive dissonance i think makes us tell a story about why we're obsessed like no i'm obsessed because i really do feel an amazing connection with this person i haven't felt this in a long time and we try to tell ourselves a rational story about why this person we just met is instantly so important to us.

25:16But the reality, I think, is one we have to confront in order to actually let the air out of that balloon in a healthy way, which is that I do not know this person. All I know is their impact at this stage. I don't know their character, much as in a job interview. I don't know about you, Scott. I've been humbled by... I've always thought I'm an incredible judge of character. I really am. I'm great at judging character. And then I hire someone for a role because in the first hour, I thought this person's incredible. They're going to do wonders for our company. And then six months later, I'm humbled by how wrong I was.

25:53Yeah, it's very hard to tell. And so the idea of, oh, I know this person from this first hour is just, it's an arrogance a lot of us have. The truth is character is consistent and consistency can only be measured over time. We'll be right back.

26:41Best idea, win! On brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere tonight on NBC. If you could give men and women, or maybe it's different for each, one or two best practices or behavioral modifications that would increase the likelihood they might end up in a healthy relationship, what are those one or two things? You know, I think, firstly, set your path before you go out there into dating because otherwise you're going to be swept away by whatever is the shiniest thing, not by someone that's actually aligned with your values, not that someone presents as someone who's going to make your life better now and in the future.

27:27You know, we've all seen men and women attracted to sex appeal, charm, charisma in a violent way where that just becomes everything to get that person and secure that person without ever really assessing, am I really going to want the thing that I'm working hard to get? And there are plenty of marriages that people end up in where they find that, oh, I got the person. Now, what does my life look like with this person? And it's like that actually becomes a secondary question in the equation. And it should be the primary question before all of our, the chemicals kick in that make us suddenly run headfirst into a situation that brings us an enormous amount of pain and suffering and sometimes are very hard to extricate ourselves from, especially when our life becomes enmeshed with a person like that.

28:20So first decide what is valuable to me. And one of the ways to decide that is looking backwards. Most people, myself included, can look at a relationship where they overvalued the wrong thing and undervalued the right thing. And as a result, were miserable. I remember a relationship where I was trying desperately to hold on and to keep this situation, this person. And yet it was making me miserable. And I was terrified that if I lost it, I would be in hell. But the truth is I was already in hell by being in it. I was just telling myself that if I could just secure it, then I'll be okay. I'll be happy.