4 Steps to Build Emotional Maturity & Make Relationships Last (Tom Bilyeu Interviews Jay)

When we're left alone to ourselves, we hear things that we may not be comfortable with. I don't like where my life is going. I'm not happy with how I look. Everyone else is doing better than me. Oh they just got proposed to, and I'm still alone. All those thoughts get space to actually be heard is when you're scrolling.

It's like, oh, they got proposed. Oh cute bunny. Oh like you, You're not even listening, you're scrolling away thoughts.

Tell me, what is the secret that you've learned from monks on how to master yourself?

I think one of the first things that I'd suggest and explain to people is that when I lived as a monk, a lot of the wisdom that we studied and the Eastern literatures that we spent time excavating, those were not aimed at monks. Those were just aimed at humanity when they were written. When they were written, they weren't talking about the Vaders. Correct, are the vaders?

Exactly?

So?

The Vaders are five thousand year old texts that literally talk about everything from aira vada, which is the science of health. So Veda means wisdom or science of and so ara vada is the science of life, the science of health. You have their own version of Vastu Vader, which is closest to FUNCTIONU. So like how to design your home, how to set up different things around your home for purposeful esthetics. You have the science of warfare in the Vaders. Oh yeah, so there's a whole text

But being prepared for it.

Actually allows us to potentially avoid it, potentially navigate it with more integrity and authenticity. And today, I feel like when you don't have codes for difficult things in society, you see people make really bad mistakes. You see people not having a codebook or a rule book on leadership, and that's what it leads to. You see people not having a codebook or rule book on how to navigate war,

It was really interesting to hear you talk about the part in I think it was in the Vedas about the guy who's to prepare for war and you're talking about even good people have to learn how to fight. Found that really interesting. But the book starts with solitude. Yes, why solitude, because that was a part where I was like, Okay, here's where the monk part is coming into this. And I think it's pretty important for people to be able to be alone before they try to get into a relationship.

Yeah, I think we've created this feeling in society where loneliness is the enemy, Like being alone is seen as a weakness. So when someone goes to school and throws a birthday party and not many people show up, you're unpopular, Whereas if lots of people showed up, you were really important, you were.

Significant, brutal. I can think of a few things that would be more devastating to a kid than no one showing up to your birthday exactly.

And that's how it's flamed, that's how it's talked about. And then the next thing is.

Like, would you tell your kids if they if they went to have a birthday party and nobody showed up to day? Would you really be like, hey, solitude is a good thing, Like how would you?

Well, I'm not that so.

I can't say, But what I would say is that I would change it in the invite process, So I would ask them to only invite people that they felt really connected to or they felt they've really vibed with them, wanted to celebrate their birthday with. So I think the challenges when you're a kid, you also hand out way

I'd rather have.

I saw this thing on Instagram and it was someone that posted like it was like a ten this is a British currency. It was like tenpence and then one pound, and so tenpence is larger circumference than the pound, but the pound is greater in value. And so the caption on Instagram said that my circle is shrunk in size, but is increased in value. And I was thinking that that, to me, resembles the kind of life I would want for myself and for my children if I had them.

Right?

You get to have that dialogue with yourself, and I feel we've lost the art of self talk and self dialogue.

Well, let's go into it. So what is that art? Like the if you put a human being in solitary confinement, you will break them in a deep and fundamental and scary way that I wouldn't have predicted. That seems very weird to me. I know it to be true, not because I've experienced it, but because you just hear it over and over and over and over, like, if you

Yeah?

So the first thing I'd say is that it would decimate you if you go into it twenty four hours a day.

And that's not what we're recommending here, right, I'm.

Not telling someone to twenty four hours be in solitude for a year, Like, that's not my recommendation. My recommendation is in your week, there has to be at least one hour that you spend by yourself. And in that hour, you're not watching a show, you're not reading a book, you're not on your phone scrolling, so you're not distracting yourself with anything or stimulating yourself with anything external, and

But the goal is it enough?

Like? Are you being kind? Are you trying to let people off the hook? Are you worried about people flaming you in the comments? Like you meditate two hours a day? I'm not mistaken, Yes, So what should people do for real?

I do believe that ten minutes is a good place to start, because I do feel that.

You shouldn't stay there.

You shouldn't stay at ten minutes. I should grow.

I think I look at it as like when you do a colpelndze right for the first time. So The first time I did a Colpelanze, I was doing it with a friend and they were they'd been already doing it for a long time, and I didn't want to walk out and I couldn't do it, and so I stayed in there. Yeah, literally, so I stayed in there for longer than I wanted to the first time I did it. So if I did it myself the first time, I think I would have been there for thirty seconds.

The first time I did it for five.

Minutes, because I was in there with someone who is in this we're fully simmid five minutes. It was great fully simmized up to here right, not fully summized. And so when I look at that, and I look at something that I found challenging when I did it, I was like, if someone told me I had to be in there for ten minutes the first time I did it,

But that's my mindset, that's who I am.

So I think the first thing I say is ten minutes alone every week where you sit and you just observe your thoughts and write down every thought that comes up.

This is weird. I hate this. It's boring.

I can't believe Jay and Tom told me to do this right, like whatever else is coming up, and write it down and just become comfortable becoming aware of your thoughts. And what you find is that the first time you do this, it is just going to be random noise like that, what shall I eat tonight? What's going on? It's just going to be that stuff. It might be I hate this, I'm uncomfortable, this is not fun on board like it will just be natural dialogue like that.

You're a self aware person.

I'm pretty sure you could tell me on any given moment what you're thinking about. You ask most people what they're thinking about, the reaction will be in an emotion like I'm just stressed. I've got too much on at the moment. But we can't be really clear. So what this is giving you is a clarity of what are those repeating negative thoughts and how do we want to change them? So that's step one is a even becoming

Thought you had?

Oh, I'm tired, that's the first thought for most people. You finally made it to coffee, You add your morning coffee, and you're thinking God, I hope this coffee gets through me through the day because I'm so tired. Second time you've had the thought. You get to lunchtime, you're like, God, is it only lunchtime? Like, and I can't even eat lunch because I'm busy working. God, I'm so tired. You get to six pm, maybe you've got to work an extra hour because no one finishes work at six anymore.

Repeat the cycle. Right, that's a six thoughts in the same day.

As people get that awareness of what do you want them to do with it? Or that's not the right what is the effective thing to do with it? If you're trying to better yourself in whatever, whether it's love or something else, but if you're trying to make progress and not just document, like, where do you go with that?

Yeah, so we want to disrupt that algorithm, right, that pattern that's been developed.

To just stop thinking negative.

No, so we're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to say I am tired. We're going to take that thought. We're going to accept it. We're okay with that, We're good with that. And I'm going to sleep early tonight. So I'm accepting the thought that I'm feeling. I'm not going to wake up and never feel I'm tired. I mean, I wake up and feel i'm tired sometimes, but our literally go, I'm tired.

I'm tired. I can feel that, I'm stressed.

I'm even getting a bit snappy with my wife, Like I can feel all those things. And I look my weekend and my weekend is decked with social events, and I go to RADI I'm like, I'm about to cancel everything this weekend because I don't think I have the resilience to get through. But if I didn't give myself that, and all I keep saying all week is I'm tired. Then it gets to the weekend. My friends are coming and I'm like, God, I wish they wouldn't come in today.

Yeah, that's the question I was asking myself. And now what and now what this bad thing has happened.

If now what, and if this, then that, like if I get tired during the week, then I will cancel my plans on the weekend. If I have weekend plans that are really important, I'll sleep early on the weeknight so that I'm ready for it. So like this week, I'm with you. I've got something every night this week. Every night there's an event, So I know that this weekend needs to be RESTful. I just gave myself permission to do nothing for four days. It was beautiful because

That's where the piece is.

That's interesting. So my experience of meditation is that is where I get literal peace. So I started meditating because I was going through really stressful period in my life is years ago, and it was just misery at a physical level, and so I thought, I've got to find some way to de escalate my stress and anxiety. I've been told a thousand times why people to meditate. Let me actually try this. So I try it, and at a physiological level, it just lowered my stress and my anxiety,

I'll take back the categoric way I said that, So I guess what I was leaning towards is I'm not saying that meditating itself can't be a peaceful experience, but I feel a lot of people who have stressed out, busy lives are just looking for a break from it.

And it can provide that, but sometimes.

It can't because you're too stressed and busy, and a lot of the times a healthy way of using meditation is to make sense of stuff so you can go back to your life and apply it. So for some people it is peace and that's fair, and I agree, I do find piece and meditation, But for some people it's giving them that break and that gap between experience and reaction. It's giving them that gap between stress and struggle that allows them to reorient themselves and say.

This is what I need to switch, this is what I need to move.

And I feel maybe you're someone that does that anyway and does that naturally, and then meditation can become just what it is and give you that piece. But I feel that for a lot of people, just sitting there with their thoughts is stressful just.

Observing it because they don't know what to do with it.

I think.

I think, first of all, there's a big fear around it, right, It's just we're scared.

I don't understand that at all. What are people scared of?

Well, I mean it's the same way as saying, like, why people scared of sitting in cold water?

Rights?

How I get because it sucks.

It does suck.

So what I'm saying is people that I've talked to you who struggle with their thoughts make those things.

Easy because they don't know what to do with them. Like the cold thing. It's e So look, I'm gonna have a massive physiological response. YEA, not fun. I'm doing it for reasons, so I do it. I can stop doing it at any time. But a thought doesn't have to be painful in the way that cold exposure. Like even wim Hoff says, I don't like being cold. I do it because it serves a purpose.

But even he says that the loss of love was more painful than any of the cold he's been through, right, Like that thought of losing someone you love is far greater than the pain of sitting in cold.

I think that's like the background thing that's really messing with you.

Yeah, Like I feel like I was even talking to I was even talking to Amar from Yestery and if you've have.

You ever had them?

I know, yes, Siria, but I've never. Yeah.

So they do loads of crazy stuff too, right, and they've they've gone. And so I was talking to Amar, who's one of the Yes three guys. They're awesome guys, and he was saying to me that, so this is really fascinating, and I love where we're going with this, by the way, and please keep going there because this I can only have this common session with you.

So I'm very happy right now.

The thing about what Amma was saying is that he said the whole point of yes theory was saying yes to crazy stuff that we wouldn't say yes to, and that's how it started. And he goes, we got to a point we're saying yes to crazy stuff was not difficult anymore. So now when we said yes to doing something crazy next year, we actually didn't find that uncomfortable. And yes theory was all about seeking discomfort. So he goes,

And he said this, man, I was like wow, like it was so profound.

So yes, let's go down and all that down to one. Yeah, I'm going to give you my hypothesis. Yes, people are afraid that they people don't respect themselves or their self respect is fragile, and being alone with their thoughts is just going to be intrusive and they're going to lose

That's it. I mean, it's as simple as that.

It literally is like I'll give a study and then I'll specifically speak to that point like. Men and women were asked to be alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes or give themselves an electric shop.

I know where this is going.

They did this experiment, thirty percent of women chose an electric shot. Wow, and sixty percent of men chose an electric shop.

Oh wow. I had that back. I guess the other way, And when asked.

Why, they said, because they didn't want to be alone with their thoughts. Because we're skinning our thoughts. Now, your hypothesis is accurate, I would agree with it. I think the biggest thing is that when we're left alone to ourselves, we hear things that we may not be comfortable with. I don't like where my life is going. I'm not happy with how I look. Everyone else is doing better than me. Oh they just got proposed to, and I'm

Now.

I'm not saying that I don't do any of those things to number feeling when it's really painful, or that we shouldn't ever number feeling at all, But our goal is we just want to numb things away.

And I don't think that That's.

Why sitting with your thoughts for fifteen minutes is really hard, because there's.

Nothing to numb it.

There is nothing that will numb it, and even sitting in the cold, nothing numbs that apart from your own senteredness and breathing.

You have to go to that.

And I think that's why sitting alone with your thoughts is such a powerful practice, because what you're saying, if you want to be happy, being happy about yourself when you're by yourself, that requires you to not numb anything about yourself, because that's the full acceptance.

So interesting. So I've been thinking a lot recently about distraction. Why distraction exists, because I think it actually serves a pretty powerful person if we didn't have the ability. So there's a part of the brain called the basil ganglia, which is known as the gear shift in the brain, and for people that have obsessive thinking, they get stuck and the basil ganglia is not able to let them

Yeah, I love what you just said about distraction.

I've always allowed myself five minutes an hour to be random, and I often have. I've either do a time or on my phone, or at one point I was really into like hour glasses or minute glasses, and I would just turn it over.

What do you do in that time?

So I would allow my to scroll, I would allow myself to search random stuff on YouTube.

I'd allow myself.

So it's giving myself the capacity to be random. And what I found in randomness is that you connect really interesting dots.

Yeah, that's why I like meditating.

Yeah, exactly.

And so I find like in space where I don't know what I'm going to type in, or I'd pick up a random book for my shelf, or I would find a random thing that I'm scrolling through. But allowing myself to do that for five minutes every hour allowed my mind to have that space, to have that gaps

Everyone's been there. That's not a good feeling.

Like, I don't think I want that feeling where I end up somewhere seven hours later, where seven minutes of randomness is really healthy and beautiful and can be amazing. And so why can't seven minutes of stillness? I can't seven minutes of listening to sounds or ambient noises or nature sounds, right. I think there's also a sense of

That is so weird to me. It's so strange, right, dude. Humans sink up to each other. The one that freaks me out the most is that women will sink their periods and they all sink to the dominant female. That stuff gets sad, super crazy. Wow, yeah, super crazy.

It happens to my wife and her sister all the time. But yeah, I don't know which. Yeah, nice question.

That's so fascinating. Yeah, so walk me through. Okay, so we get self awareness, so we're I love that you started the book with solitude. So we stop being afraid of our thoughts because we're doing the and now what So we have the saying it's overwhelming, it's freaking us out. We're going to deal with it, which I love that. And now in the context of becoming in fact, here is a thing that either you're going to be like one hundred percent or this will be where we debate.

Well that's very monkish of you.

I mean that you've put sex on a very sacred, high value facts, right, right.

So when you said earlier about loneliness, I was like, I've actually been the loneliest I've ever been. Was in the middle of intercourse, Yeah, which is a crazy thought, like I be anymore with the person, and because there was no emotional connection, I felt so alone.

Yes, crazy, I'm so glad you brought that up though, right, Like, that's what we understand about loneliness now that loneliness isn't about the number of people around you. It isn't about how popular you are. It doesn't matter how many people are surrounded by you. If you don't feel understood, if you don't feel seen, if you don't feel heard, you're lonely, right Like, That's what it is. And so when you're saying I'm having sex with someone and I still feel lonely.

That's real.

But you, from your definition of just how you broke that down, you're placing sex is extremely sacred as a high value.

There could be lots of.

People listening or watching, and or maybe people that we don't even that aren't in this community that would actually disagree and they'd just be like, well, sex is your sex?

Like what? They don't see it that way? Right, the way you see it.

Is probably more aligned with the vaders than the other perspective, for sure.

The idea that if you're about to do.

Anything intimate with anyone, physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, the amount of like exchange of we just talked about exchanging heartbeats and breathing. I mean, if you think about how biologically affected you are by a relationship, let alone how emotionally and then spiritually affected you are by a relationship, and how much karma you share from a spiritual level, how much energy and vibration you share on a spiritual level.

So how do you become worthy.

So I think that I mean, I don't think you have to complete solitude in order to move on. And so in the book, I break down the four things that the Vaders breakdown, which is preparing for love, which is solitude, practicing love, which is in a relationship right. The third is like preserving love because or protecting love because there's a part of us when we're burnt through love that loses the belief in love or changes. So there's a protection of love that comes at phase three.

That's big in a social media culture, right.

We accept the currency of attention, validation, compliments, comfort, random niceness. We accept all of that as love because we ourselves haven't defined and experienced what love looks like on our own. So, how you become worthy of another person is first becoming worthy for yourself. And what does it mean to be worthy for yourself? To me, it's doing hard things alone, when you've done hard things alone and you've grown through them. And when I say alone, I don't.

Mean without your family or without friends.

I just mean when you've broken through some of your own barriers that gives you a healthier sense of self esteem and self worth. I think self worth doesn't come from saying affirmations in a mirror. It doesn't come from just like pretending to be happy. It doesn't come from being positive. Your greatest self worth is going to come from breaking through stuff that you didn't think you could break through.

Do people expect you to say just look yourself in the mirror and say I love myself? Yeah?

I think people.

I think people sometimes project their own belief of like the word self love, right, So there is a form of self love, like I love going to spas, I love getting massages, So I'm into that form of self love. But I see that as more self care. I see that like caring for myself and things like that. When I think of self love is just telling myself I love myself. I've tried all of those things, and I've seen how they are not possible when I haven't done

Very possible.

So there's there's a big group of people, my mom included. I interviewed my mom recently, not on the podcast I want to, but I did what I'm happy I did. I interviewed her at a dinner just me and her because I really wanted to get to know her story.

But I realized it I didn't feel.

You record it. I'm guessing it didn't because that with my father in law recorded it. It was we shared that No.

No, I would love knowing the background of your father in law.

Dude, that's interesting. We should ask Lisa because it was dope, like that guy's story is crazy. Yeah, that's unbelievable.

And that's what I'm saying that we don't even know the people closest to us, right, so love again anyway, But that's that's a whole other thing. But I said it with my mom. I asked her questions like I would ask on the podcast. And I was talking to her and she was telling me that it's at like fifteen years old. I think fifteen sixteen years old.

She was born and.

Raised in Yemen. Oh wow, And so yeah, so she's living in Yemen. Yemen are trying and it was called Aiden at the time. They're trying to the Brits who have colonized the country are fighting against the Yemeny soldiers and she's studying for her exams while there's gunment on her rooftop. Like that's her story, and I'm like, Mom, like, you've never told me how bad this was.

You just told me you left Yemen because of the war and moved to England, Like that's the story I know.

And all of a sudden, I'm discovering that you were actually studying for an exam while there's people with guns on your roof defending tube and you're in the middle of all of that, and you're fifteen years old. And she never told me that. I was thinking, she's done how things and she doesn't even see it that way because to her it's normal.

Interesting do you think she thinks it's normal or do people confuse enduring which is extraordinary with Oh, but I didn't actively choose it, and therefore I completely discount.

It totally totally.

Well, I mean, at least from my mom, I can say that she just sees it as her life. She doesn't see it as like hard or easy or that that's her kind of way she sees stuff. It's kind of how I feel something the world. When I talk about my monk experience, it's very normal to me, Like there's a part and I chose to do it. There's a part of me, and there's just like it's normal. And people are like, that's crazy, like why would you ever become a monk after school? It's so bizarre, But

Right.

When you've experienced your strength, no one can make you feel weak. The right person will only make you feel stronger, right, And that's the key. When you've already done hard things, the people around you will only make you feel stronger. That's why you know they're great to be in your life because they're not making you feel strong, They're making feel stronger, whereas what we often find is that whoa whoa, whoa, whoa whoa.

They're not making you feel strong, they're making you feel stronger.

Correct.

So I'm saying like, we're not so even even in a positive relationship with us, Like when I'm around you, right and we have a healthy relationship, we know each other a fair bit. It's like, I'm I consider myself to be self aware and self confident and have a high degree of self worth, totally open about it.

I have no issues, no issues, No reasonable person will push back on that.

Yeah, no issues with it whatsoever.

And I feel that the people I like to be in my life are not people who I'm looking to support that or or do that, but they're able to help me discover more about myself.

So there's a sign of strength.

So I had a client I was working that was coaching with last yeah, and he did this for me and it was really powerful, And I was like, I only like working with clients who also I learned from. So I have a selfish motive there, but it's it's special.

He said.

I've never met someone who ties up spirituality, business, and practicality in one person like you do it. And I'm not saying that to self promote. I'm saying that because he gave me permission to be all three and that made me strong.

Second, and it was just really powerful.

I felt so like freed by that statement to be all three because it made me stronger. I know I adn't those things, but that person made me stronger. That's

That's there's something beautiful about that, agreed. I don't even know if I'm articulating clearly, but.

Very clearly from my perspective. So I think that there is a biological imperative hardwired into the brain that you must do hard things in order to feel good about yourself. And when I think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, and this is why I think rich kids implode. You just never had to do hard things. From an evolutionary perspective, I think it was just so hard to stay alive, Like for millions of years, it really was red in tooth and claw like to stay alive. You were kill

That's it.

That's the whole recipe. But it really has to be that you had to do something hard. If it came easily to you, it won't give you the sense of respect that you want. Like the stuff that I've gotten more easily in my life, I don't take a lot of pride in it. It's always the stuff that I grind out, like through pain and suffering, and I endure. In fact, I want to read you a quote, this is one of my all time favorite quotes. To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I

That is so rual. I definitely can't. I'm not gonna so good like and subscribe.

I think I get the sentiment I would not wish on anyone's amazing.

So pushback as hard as you can, because I love this. So if you agree, in fact, where where does it break down? Because this is why I don't have kids. That is what people need, in my opinion, and you can't. I can't do it.

Yeah I can't.

Well that's well, that's where we where we disagree, right because, like I get the intention and the spirit of it, But.

Do you think if they avoid it?

I don't think you have to. I feel like for.

Most people, for most people, life is already hard in some areas. I don't think there's many people I know at least where I grow up.

Does it make them better or worse?

Well, I don't think they have the tools, which is why we have TAD Again, we're doing to that, right, Like, I don't think that when I look at the people I grew up around or the areas I grew up in, and.

It wasn't the worst of the worst. It wasn't best the best. Yeah, it's it's not loved, right, it's not. Yeah you've been of course, Yeah, it's not nice.

And people made bad choices because they didn't have good role models, right, Like people made bad choices because they didn't have good tools. They didn't make bad choices because of just where they were. It's because they didn't have access. Today we have access, and that's what we're trying to do.

Like I could have so ended up there.

Like I literally could pinpoint three decisions that could have totally took my life in that direction, and none wan know who I am today, and I'd be a very different person, not because I'm a bad person or because I'm attracted to any of those things, just because I didn't have access. I got lucky, and I see that the access that I got to the monks at an early age just transformed the trajectory of my life. But

Are speaking to those people? So I feel, yeah, I just feel like that.

Going back to that statement, I wouldn't wish pain on anyone because I feel that life is already hard. I would just wish that people opened up their hearts and minds to the tools that would help them deal with that hardship better and not try and rely on what they currently have in their toolkit.

That would be my wish. It asks me what my wish is?

Right.

The only way I can like and subscribe to that state is if we modify slightly and say, I wish that people could develop a profound sense of self worth and avoid all of that. But I don't think they can, and so this may be a cruel twist of evolution. Like, I want to be very clear, I'm not saying I'm glad it is this way. I'm just saying I think it is this way. Now. My beef with the idea of I wish that, you know, these horrible things upon people is that it breaks most of the people that

So I think the compassionate monk and me can't wish that on someone in that way. And you could argue that real compassion is letting the right thing happen to someone that they need to go through.

I just don't think and that is what we're.

Ooh, that's interesting. So here here was my catch with one of the reasons I didn't have kids. I knew I would intervene if something bad was happening. Now, as I get older, I feel like I might be more capable of letting it happen. But at the time when I was sort of peak like should we should we not? I was like, I know, I will intervene. Would you intervene?

It's always do you want to have kids? I don't know. There's the answer.

We don't know.

We've been we've talked about it. We're very like we're probably at that stage, and so we've been very open about it.

We're like, we don't know. And partly it's these kind of things.

Partly it's how it affects service and impact how there's so many there's so many things, right, there's so many facets to that question of.

So, let's say darr who has two children, your co host on your show, Yea Darren Jay. For those that aren't liking and subscribing yet, would you want them to intervene?

When I saw so, I saw a couple of parents that I was friends with a few years back, and I remember that their two year old was like putting her hands through a candle, like on the other side of the room. So we were all hanging out here, there two yearlds running around, and there two year olds on the other side of the candle and they're doing that, and my natural instinct at the time, this is probably like maybe like eight years ago, my natural instinct was

And I was about to jump up and help her, and they're like, no, no, I leave it.

She's fine, she'll if it hurts us, she'll know next time not to touch that and let her learn by herself. And I was like, wow, that's really impressive, Like I'm scared your kid's gonna burn their hand and you're really Now I'm not recommending either or My friends are great parents and they're very loving, and that's the challenge today, right Like a lot of peop would be like, oh my god, they don't care about their kids. I think

I don't have to. But when I look at it with my the closest person I can compare it to is my sister. So my sister's five years younger than me.

When she was born, I held her in my hands and I felt like I've parented her in many ways. She's I call a kid like that's my nickname for my younger sister. And if I look at my sister, I made mistakes by intervening too much sometimes. So I didn't really want her to have a job growing up because I worked a job growing up when I was fourteen, and I didn't really think that that was healthy for her.

What is the formula, like if you want to be in a healthy relationship, what what's the number one things? The number one thing people get wrong? And what is the fix?

Yeah, so I'm going to give you three I break them each down in this book. So the three are and the first one simple and basic, then and then it gets more complex and interesting. So the first one is you have to like their personality, you have to like their company, you enjoy being around them, You enjoy being around them for longer periods of time, which is an important experiment. Like I read a study that showed to make someone a casual connection, you have to spend forty hours with them.

For a casual connection. WHOA.

If you want someone to be considered a friend, it's one hundred hours of time with that person. And if you can consider someone a good friend, if you consider someone a good friend a great friend, it's two hundred hours plus. If you can't like someone's company for two hundred hours of undistracted time, chances are you don't really like their personality. We both know people that we would love to spend a weekend with, but we wouldn't want to see them every weekend. That's okay, Those can be

We want them to like what we like. We want them to love what we love.

If I'm going to watch football on the weekend, I'd love for you to come with me. If I think that going towards this is really important, you should be there. So we demand that our partner respects our value rather than respecting theirs. And I'll give a tangible example. So, for example, Radi's number one, and I ask a lot of couples to do this exercise. If I'm working with someone, I'll ask couples to rank their top three priorities, including themselves in order.

And most of the time one partner will say.

You are you the partner, So you would say, Lisa, if you're the kids, you'd say the kids and then themselves. That's a general order that people will put. Now, sometimes you get a curveball where someone goes, me, you the kids, and every time someone writes that, their partner goes, how could you put the kids third?

How can the kids be third? Like how does that make any sense?

And how can you be first? And it's like, well no, because I know that I don't want to give you my leftovers. I want to give you the best of me. So when you look at respecting someone's value, when I look at rather these values, rather they's number one value is family, her family. My number one value is my purpose and my service to the world. Those are not the same values. A lot of people say you have to have the same values in a marriage. I don't

I think you have to.

I think if you're looking for someone with exactly the same values, you're going to take a lot longer to find that person. I don't know anyone in the world that I know that's happily married, and I'd love to break it down with anyone who genuinely could say we

That's something she deeply values and cares about.

If she's going to choose family over anything, I'm gonna be okay with that because she's made it very clear that's her number one value. Same back at me if I choose purpose over anything. She knows that's going to happen. It's not a surprise. I know so many people who are trying to get their partners to change their value, and I just don't see that happening. Or that person compromises their value and now feels less versions of themselves,

I love it.

I deeply appreciate you in the world. I think you have an amazing impact. But if someone asked me, Jay, you could feel this way about a friend. I'm not committed. I'm not actively doing something. I may support, a collaborate, a help, but I'm not committed. Whereas with my wife, I'm committed on a daily basis, going rather, what do you want in your life?

Where are you going? What do you need?

What support do you need? What can I do for you to help you get there? It's not about her helping me get to my goals. She's thinking about that, but I'm thinking about how is that? So those are my things for a happy relationship. Those are three key things. I mean, there's so many more things I could go into, but they have to give the overview formulas those three things.

So what trips people up? Are they? I'm assuming selection, if that's such a big part, they just select the wrong person.

Yeah, why I think people select the wrong person because they are looking for First of all, we select the wrong person because we make so many snap judgments off of a few basic inputs. So one of the things that the wady Is talk about is something called the six opulences. And we've talked about this before, we talked about them in a different context. But the six opulences are fame, wealth, power, beauty, knowledge, and renunciation. Those are

Right, we can all agree with that.

I love that renunciation made the list. Yeah, that talk about self awareness.

Yeah, it's a huge one. And so those six are the six opulences.

And what we do in relationships, which is really interesting, is when we find someone has one opulence, we ascribe them other qualities. So someone is wealthy, we assume that they must be organized and that they'll be organized in the home. If someone is attractive, we assume that they'll be able to articulate themselves effectively. If someone is powerful at work, we assume that they're really good at organizing

He said he was going to show up for this moment. He showed up.

That's trust. Trust is not built because someone was really nice to you. And so trust is something we throw away and I can dive into the levels of trust too, But you.

Know, yeah, I mean if those are the top notch sayings, let's yeah.

So I talk about four levels of trust. This is actually in Think Like a Monk, but it fully connects to this book. There are four levels of trust. My belief is that whenever you meet anyone someone knew, your relationship with them should start at zero trust. Now, what we do in life is we believe that there's only two things in everything. We think everything's binary right, black and white, left and right.

Trust. Don't trust? Now?

Is zero trust sitting at the zero point between trust and distrust.

Zero is sitting at no trust beginning yes, because you.

Don't have an active like you're not looking at them suspiciously.

Correct, So I'm gonna get yes. So I'm gonna give you the level. So the idea, So the first point being that we see trust as too binary. I have people I trust and there's people I don't trust. To me, that's too limited, and it doesn't help because what that means is if I like someone, I automatically trust them, which is massively unhealthy. And so what I'm saying is that zero trust is correct between distrust at the bottom and then trust higher, but there's three levels in between.

You have zero trust in them. The next step is transactional trust.

Transactional trust is I know when this person says they're gonna do something, they do it. I know there's an equal exchange in the transaction. I like, if I say I'm gonna do this work and you're gonna pay me this amount, I know you're gonna pay me at that time, that's transaction trust.

It's what you have to do.

Employees, it's what you have to do. Teams, it's what you have with colleagues. We don't want this because it's not sexy. It's not it doesn't feel like love. It feels too professional, it feels too corporate. But really, every single person has to go through these levels with you. The next stage is reciprocal trust, where you know someone loves you and appreciates you and will do good for you, but you're not counting, you're not checking.

You know.

It reciprocates naturally, it cycles around. This is a healthy level of trust after some time where the transaction has been proven over and over again. Now you don't need the contract right now, you don't always need to sign it. And then the fourth stage, which I believe is practically impossible, is unconditional trust, which is that god like trust that we all want in the person we end up with. The problem is we give unconditional trust away early and

Why do you think we have that instinct? Is it just the halo effect of you are kind to me and I'm letting not spill over into other areas.

I think we just want to be loved so desperately. We're so desperate for it because it's been put on this pedestal that this is the defining factor of success in life is could you find someone to love you, because then you'd be lovable then you'd be worthy.

Then you'd have what it takes.

If you were able to convince someone to spend their life with you, then you're worthy. And we're so desperate for that that we will happily speed through those Instead of two hundred hours, we'll tell someone we love them in two months, because we'd rather have it and think we lost it than to have never found it at all, because never having found it means we were never worthy, whereas if we found it and lost it, and even if it wasn't perfect, at least there was some part

And I think that's the challenge, is.

That we live in such a feeling world as opposed to a building, creating world, which is a doing world, which is an action world. I start the book with this beautiful statement of this conversation between a student and a teacher, often attributed to the Buddhen. So a student goes up to the Buddhen and says, what is the difference between I like you and I love you. And the Buddha replies, when you like a flower, you simply pluck it and throw it away, or when you love

It's really interesting now you say that nobody wants to be that person because of the effort and energy, Like this is something that Lisa and I say a lot, and I'll be curious to see if you agree with this. I think you will. That love love really isn't enough just to be super cliche for a second, that really

And it's un sexy, right. I keep using that word too, because it's not what's been portrayed. It's not what it's meant to feel like. It doesn't look like that Pinterest board. It doesn't feel like the wedding day every day, right, like the challenges that I think. I mean, I was looking at the studies the amount of money that gets spent on weddings. It says the more you spend on

That goes out of the window.

So you think about the amount of forget the money, the amount of effort that goes into planning one day. Imagine if you took all that effort and used it to plan a marriage. How successful would every marriage be?

Right?

It's a shift of energy, and it's a shift of mindset and saying we spend so much time, money, energy, resources, attentiveness, your word to plan a wedding, but there's no attentiveness to plan a marriage or a long term relationship if you don't want to be married.

Why do you think it is that if you're spending a lot of money on the wedding, that that's inversely correlated to the length of time that you stay married. Is it just messed up priorities? What is that?

I mean, I think it's hard to I'd have to look deeper into it. I mean, it's hard to stereotype because I guess there's so many of both, right, I'm sure there's other things that buck the trend. I think there's a part of it that you could say that the bigger the wedding or any gesture, not even wedding, any gesture you're trying to overcompensate for, trying to make

What do you think about now? It seems like the trend and I don't have the data, but I'm almost certain this is accurate, that people are getting married less and less and less and less. Yeah, I've seen having less sex less kids. Like it's a trend that freaks me out. Are you at all concerned?

That's a great question.

I'm not concerned about people not getting officially married if they're in committed, long term relationships that are healthy.

I think it's a catastrophic error.

Interesting. Why do you think the certificate and the commitments are.

Imporant abstracted from the certificate? You need to do something. There is a lack of ritual in our lives now. So I read The Power of Myth when I was I think maybe even before I met Lisa, but certainly before we got married, and the book was talking about how, hey, the big problem with society today is there's no coming of age ritual. Part of the reason the divorce rate is so high, he speculated, was because there was no like real ceremony that meant something, that reminded people you're

That.

I wanted something that would really remind me that I was a different person. So I wanted it to be painful, and I wanted it to be permanent, and so I, as an act of a ritualistic scarification, I got a tattoo and got married and had the priests and the waving of the smoke and all that. And even though it was all in not only Greek, which I didn't speak at the time, it was an ancient Greek, so whatever few words I did know, I really couldn't hang

So I love the idea of what you said about ritual, Like I think richual is a powerful They're important.

I mean they're totally part vaded culture. Like ritual's everything. Like rituals are those you know.

Me and weddings are like days, seven days Jesus.

To make you realize having put on this commitment is like you get married with someone over seven days and you meet all their family and they meet all of yours. Like there's an imprint, right, And that's the word is some scara, Like some scara means impression or imprint. These rituals leave imprints or impressions that are powerful to help you become new or to become more.

And so I agree with that.

And the only thing that I think I'm open to is that people take a little bit longer to decide before they commit, and that if you are in a marriage that I think there are just so many people today that are married that aren't using your mindset of I don't want to be in a loveless marriage.

What do we do?

Like?

I literally will And by.

The way, I see you and Lisa as just like I Talking to you about this stuff is so exciting for me because I love how you and Lisa love each other. I love how you talk about your rules. I love how you talk about your principles. I love how you talk about the lessons and I agree with them. Like I think we're very aligned and I'm very much earlier. This book isn't about my relationship. This book isn't about look at how successful my marriages. I've not been married

And the tools.

But the one thing I will say is that I check in with RADI regularly and I'll often do an alternative and I'll say, is this relationship going in the direction you want, and I'll check in with it. I'll say, is this relationship actually going in the direction you want? If it is great, what are we doing right? And if it isn't, what direction do you want to go in? And what is that require of you? And what is that require of me? And I'll be ready to commit

It's the container, it's the container, but it's not seen that way. Yeah, it's interesting. So Lisa and I got married. At the time, it's it did feel like we were young, but by today's standards, we were infants.

Aha.

It's really crazy. But when I think about how much if you can construct the right container, it will improve your life vastly. The reason I'm so celebratory of marriage is that nothing, and I mean nothing, not business, ambition and self improvement. Nothing has given me as much as my marriage now because I treat it like the flower that I water and keep the bugs off and make sure it gets sunlight and all that stuff. I mean,

I didn't spend a lot of time in the book on masculine and feminine energy only because I think that it's not in our current vocabulary, and it's not really how the Vedas ultimately treat everyone as a soul. And so that's already beyond gender and beyond energy in the

Because I'm not this body, right Like.

I genuinely believe that the core of my being is that I'm not a physical body, and so it's very hard for me to get lost in conversations around physical body and gender based or masculine feminine energy because at the core of it, that's not how I'm structuring my life.

How does that influence the way that you think about it? Because I'm the exact opposite. I am. I am of this body nothing else. When I die, it's a light switch, I'm gone. If you take a needle in jab a part of my brain, it's going to impact how I'm able to process the world. So it's very direct how I which is probably a big part of the reason I'm so tactical. I just view the world through that lens. It is my temperament. So if you don't have that,

No, So it's like, well so yeah, So in off Phloso it's called simultaneous one indifference, so it's both.

It's like you have the I'm I'm living in this body, but I am not this body.

So the idea you be separated from, Like, do you believe in an immortal soul that will outlive everybody? Yes? Yes, and sorry to be so grounded in the physical. Does that continue to exist in a physical place or there is another realm that we don't have access to when we're in this body.

Yeah. So the philosophical understanding that I have is that.

The consciousness continues to seek physical form to experience physical pleasure and physically experiences until the point that it is materially exhausted and is able to truly live in its full consciousness, not needing a physical form to exercise physical needs and.

Design, and how does that consciousness manifest itself once it's transcended the pursuit of physical pleasure.

It's described in quality, not in Obviously I have no experienced that, so sure my only experience of it is through meditation and practice.

And is it an intuitive understanding that you would be hard pressed to put into language.

No, it's a state.

Well, the state is described as full of knowledge, eternal, and full of bliss. That's the state in which we're living. And so what I'm explaining is that through what we call purification of consciousness, once the material body is no longer useful, you're then living in that full spiritual consciousness.

Would be a spiritual form, a.

Form that is not doesn't bleed when you cut it, it doesn't get damaged, it doesn't get hut. It is an eternal form that doesn't have those needs or fallibilities, I guess is the right word.

So if in the Christian tradition there is this place called heaven, which at least is sort of like a physical place that the spirit goes and lives out, it stays, and you will be reunited. Admittedly I'm not a Christian theologist, so I'm sure I'm getting some of this wrong. But there's, at least in popular culture, there's the idea to transcend into heaven. It's a place there are people that you know,

Yeah, So the Vedic tradition is there is an eternal divine relationship with the Supreme Being that in this space everyone has that unique experience and unique relationship with each other and Divinity personally.

So would you meet Radley again in that space.

Hopefully if we're both making back. Yeah, and Radley's definitely a vagage I take that back. Yeah, Rady's good, but not necessarily as my partner, not as the way I see her here, as a completely different version to what I see here, because this is just simply one lifetime on a notch of lifetimes.

And does that at all inform your marriage.

That informs our marriage in the beautiful sense of the detachment with the love, in the sense of there's a feeling of I love this person, I'm so glad I found them in this lifetime to do this life with, to serve in this way, to have this impact, to choose to want a better humanity, to leave it a better, a happier, healthier place, to leave it a more healed place that unites us in a profound way that I couldn't have have with anyone else who didn't feel that

It stops you from snipping the flower.

Absolutely, And even though me and you have very different overall and that's why I've always found fascinating to sit down with you. Even though me and you have very different systems of overall belief or philosophy of like what our container is, of how we view life, we approach life far more similarly than many people I know, Like I consider myself to be highly and as you say in the book, we have fight stars, we have the relationship problems, Like there's so much tactical, practical stuff in

Do you know, Donald Hoffman, I don't as.

In from the Hoffmann process. No, So.

This may be why, although you probably push back on this, so as somebody who's agnostic, meaning I literally just don't know. I have no idea what the truth is.

But I don't think anyone does. And I kind of live with that.

Like people always ask me, like, where do you see or someone, I'm like, I don't know either. But I'm having read the theology and spirituality and the modern day New Age everything that I have, I'm betting on this and so it's simply a hypothesis. And I'm very open about that. I'm very cool with that because I just think life is a hypothesis. Pretty much everything I do

I love that. Yeah, where can people follow you as you explore your hypothesis?

The best place right now is eight Rules of Love Dog. That is the place to find my new book, A Rules of Love, which will guide you through everything from finding love, keeping love, dealing with heartbreak and then finding love again.

That would be the best place to find me right now.

M