#747: Seth Godin and Dr. Sue Johnson

Okay, this is going to be part confessional as some of you know. I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess as many of you probably know. I've tried all the dating apps and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is the league. I've been using it for a few months now and I found some great matches. I am going to use this ad, the sponsor read, to selfishly share my own profile.

With the ladies listening to this podcast, my handle is Tim Tim. That's at Tim Tim or just Tim Tim. I think you can search by person and just put in Tim Tim and you'll find me. And then you can match with me. I'll tell you more about what I'm looking for in a bit. But before that, why did I end up using the league? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck on the league. You're starting with a baseline of smart people and you can then easily find the ones you're trying to find.

It's very practical. It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the league users wants to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work. And that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn. So you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit.

And then you can go to the club and get a job together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. For instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding have those as interests. Just I like to spend say two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The U.I. is a little clunky. I'll warn you. But it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces.

But it's an interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it standout features available on the league include Multi City dating linked in verified profiles ability to block your profile from co workers bosses family, et cetera. That's very easy to do. You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the absolute. There's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for?

looking for a woman who is well-educated and who loves skiing or snowboarding or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just, I'll leave it at that for now. Someone who's default upbeat likes to smile, smiles often, class half full type of person, who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years. Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful and she would love polarity in a relationship.

She's athletic and has some muscle, I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea. It could be a rock climber dancer, whatever, but has some muscle. Loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag date Tim. So hashtag date Tim in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up. Again, you can also find my profile under the handle Tim Tim. That's all one word, T-I-M, T-I-M.

So these are all reasons why I was excited when the league reached out to sponsor the podcast. Not the least of which is that I get to pitch my dating profile on the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So check it out. Download the league today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it.

I found it to be super fascinating. You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So hopefully today on iOS or Android and check it out message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. Check it out the league on iOS or Android.

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Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris, welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary which is insane to think about and past one billion downloads.

To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes and internally we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to yes and enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Of course, they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.log slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

First up, Seth Godin, entrepreneur, speaker and author of 21 International Best Sellers, including Purple Cow, Lynchpin, the dip. This is marketing and his new book, The Song of Significance, a new manifesto for teams. You can find Seth at S-E-T-H-S.blog. I've been very impressed in some of our conversations by the rules that you've established for yourself for saying yes or no to certain things. And perhaps we could start if you're willing to talk about it with speaking engagements.

Speaking engagements, as you've experienced, if you have a successful book, I went from kind of zero to 60 very quickly unexpectedly and said yes to everything. And it just turned into a parody of Up in the Air. I mean, I felt like a traveling salesman or Jack Lemon and Glen Gary Glen Ross, who is horrible. What are your rules for, for instance, speaking engagements to whatever extent you're comfortable talking about them?

Oh, I'd be happy to. And then I'll scroll back a little bit and tell you why I have to have rules for things like that. For speaking engagements, I don't want to do more than 30 a year because they are at least for me not additive to the joy of my day except for the hour I'm on stage. So I am prepared to do an unlimited number of speaking engagements in ZIP code 10706. One day I'm going to Carnegie Hall to talk for free to 25 music students who have devoted their lives to doing what they do.

And it's a privilege to do something like that. If I have to get on an airplane, it's a whole other project. So I think really hard about what impact am I trying to make and will this help me move things forward, which is where this nest is into. My mentor and late friends, Ziegzikler used to talk about the idea. He used to say, I've never changed anyone's life with a speaking gig. But sometimes I do a speaking gig and they buy my cassettes.

And if they buy my cassettes, I got a shot at changing their life. And for me, my mission and has been for a long time is to make a certain kind of change happen. I want to help people see the world differently. And if they choose to make a different choice after they see the world differently, I want to help people connect to each other and to use that connection to make things better. And I don't want to be a TV personality. So the question is, how do I bring that teaching to people?

And what I found is it's a very unique situation when you have 500 or 5,000 high powered people in a room who didn't expect that you were going to be there, but now that you're there, are eager to hear what you have to say. And they set aside their Twitter account and they set aside their preconceptions. And for 45 minutes or an hour, you have a screen that's 30 feet by 20 feet and you have a microphone that's amplified. And maybe just maybe you can get under their skin.

And if you do, maybe just maybe they go back to their office and get 10 copies of your turn and hand them out to their team. And then I can do that practice that I seek, which is to change the conversation. So that's why I do it at all. And the further away it is, the less likely is that fair to say? Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, what I did was having studied a little bit of economics is I changed the price.

Los Angeles costs three times as much as New York, and if you don't think that's fair, then don't make me go to Los Angeles. You said you're going to elaborate on why you need rules and maybe you just did. Maybe that was the answer. But because the phone rings, right? And lots of people want a thing. And if it doesn't align with the thing that is your mission and you say yes, then now it's their mission.

And there's nothing wrong with being a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific. But don't expect to make the change you seek to make if that's what you do. You know, the thing is, and Derek, I thought your interview with Derek was one of the best ones you've ever done. Oh, thanks. Derek makes it quite easy. Derek has a serious, amazing, awesome. Yeah. I adore him. And he talked about offense versus defense.

And if you think hard about one's life, most people spend most of their time on defense in reactive mode, in playing with the cards they got instead of moving to a different table with different cards, instead of seeking to change other people, they are willing to be changed. And part of the arc of what I'm trying to teach is everyone who can hear this has more power than they think they do. And the question is, what are you going to do with that power?

Because it comes with responsibility right out of spider man, but that responsibility is, you're going to make change happen or you're going to ignore it. And if you make change happen, that's on you. This is maybe going to turn into a therapy session for myself, but I've found myself, I mean, we're just talking about books and their place and culture, feeling like I'm in a transition point.

You've been so consistent and so present for so many people for so long, your readers, and your own blogger, how do you navigate big transitions in your own life? And that's a very general question. But for instance, I find the reason the podcast started is because I was burned out on books. It was after the four hour chef, 670 some odd pages. I just felt so battle weary and run down by publishing that I wanted to take a break.

And the podcast was a side project that then became its own entire thing altogether. But when you find yourself wondering maybe what to do next, I mean, how do you navigate some of those larger transitions? And I mean, if you have any examples that come to mind, I, well, the good news is you did exactly the right thing and I applaud it.

It's not easy to do that because it means going from a place where by outside measures you're about to succeed again to a place where by outside measures, you might not. Hence the motto, this might not work. And so on a good day, my story to myself is this might not work. That's my job to do something that might not work. And the number of projects I've done, big and small exceeds most people and the number of failures I have dramatically exceeds most people. And I'm super proud of that.

More proud of the failures than the successes because it's about this mantra of is this generous, is this going to connect? Is this going to change people for the better? Is it worth trying? If it meets those criteria and I can control myself into doing it, then I ought to, right? And the transitions aren't easy. I regularly spend months telling people that I'm unemployed and in between projects.

How did you decide, or what is the thinking behind daily blog versus say a longer blog post once a week or at some other frequency? So the daily blog evolved and it's one of the top five career decisions I've ever made. In terms of having a practice that resonates with the people who I need to resonate with, that I can do forever and have been doing for more than eight years now and that leaves the trail behind. I don't need anyone's permission. I don't need to go out and promote it.

I don't use any analytics. I don't have comments. It's just, this is what I noticed today and I thought I'd share it with you. And for a while, it was an intermittent blog and then it was a five times a day blog. I do write five posts a day. I just don't publish five posts a day, but it became clear that I could get the appropriate amount of mind space. Do you draft by hand in word in a particular program? I type right into type hat. So I learned this from Chip Conley.

Have you had Chip on the show? I haven't, but I love Chip. He's a great guy. Great guy. So Chip and I went to business school together and he was the third youngest person in the class and I was the second youngest person in the class. So he got five of us together and every Tuesday night we met in the anthropology department for four hours and we brainstormed more than 5,000 business ideas over the course of the first year of business school. It was magnificent. It wasn't official.

It wasn't sanctioned. It was just Chip said, let's do this. And we did. And he picked the anthropology department because he knew someone there and could get the conference room and he said, this is the only place we will ever do this. And the reason is when you walk into this room, you will associate this room with what we do here. That's all. And I feel the same way about my blog. If I am in the type hat editor, I know exactly what my brain needs to feel like and then the writing happens.

What is your writing warm up look like and when do you typically write? One of my fans said that you at some point this could be a misquit but said that you had an elaborate or extreme sort of mental warm up for writing. Do you write in the mornings or what time do you typically write? Okay. So now I need to tell you about Stephen King's pencil. Yes, please. Because I feel very strongly about this.

Stephen King often goes to writers conferences and there will be this question and that question and the next question and inevitably someone raises their hand and says, Stephen King, you are one of the most successful, revered writers of your generation. What kind of pencil do you use? I won't go there. It doesn't matter. It's a way to hide.

It's not interesting to me to talk about how I do it because there's no correlation that I have ever encountered between how writers write and how good their work is. So we should just move on because it doesn't matter. All right. I'll make a confession then, which is when I feel blocked, which does happen with writing, I take a long time to get to the point where I feel like I have the balls in the air well enough to put pieces together.

It just takes me a long time to synthesize but not unlike some coders I guess. But the point I was going to make is that I went to a conversation between Poe Branson, a writer and another gentleman in his name. And I asked Poe during Q&A what he did when he felt blocked or couldn't figure out what to do next in writing and he said, right, what makes you angry, right about what makes you angry. And I found that very helpful.

It was a very helpful way to at least get the hand or the brain moving to break the ice. I totally agree. That's not the question. If you said to Poe Branson, how do you write these books that are remarkable and thoughtful and generous, I don't think his answer is every morning I get as angry as I can and then I'd type. Agreed. Agreed. So you and I could list 25 tricks that help us get past the resistance and start the flow of writing.

But that's different than saying I need to do it like those other people do it. Agreed. I guess in the buffet of things that have been helpful along those lines, if for whatever reason didn't get a good night's sleep feeling off, you sit down to write. Right. This is easy. All right. The answer to this question is, right, right poorly, continue writing poorly, write poorly until it's not bad anymore and then you'll have something you can use.

People who have trouble coming up with good ideas, if they're telling you the truth, we'll tell you they don't have very many bad ideas. But people have plenty of good ideas. If they're telling you the truth, we'll say they have even more bad ideas. So the goal isn't to get good ideas. The goal is to get bad ideas because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up. What are some of the top business decisions that you've made?

We'll go way back and I would say the first one which is useful to everybody is sell something that people want to buy. My friend Lynn is a brilliant, brilliant thinker and designer and for years, she was in the business of designing toys and soft goods for moms with toddlers. And every toy company in America was mean to her, rejected her, had nothing to do with her. And I said, Lynn, it's simple. Toy companies don't like toy designers. They're not organized to do business with toy designers.

They're not hoping toy designers will come to them. I said, come with me into the book business because every day, there are underpaid, really smart people in the book business who wake up waiting for the next great idea to come across their desk. They're eager to buy what you have to sell. And within two months, she did the Dex of Cards, the 52 Dex and sold more than 5 million Dex of Cards. And that's because they appreciated her.

So if you think about how hard it is to push a business uphill, particularly when you're just getting started, one answer is to say, why don't you just start a different business, a business you can push downhill? This is a good lesson. Yeah, sometimes there's a fetishizing of the sort of rolling of the stone like Cisophus. And you know, it's Silicon Valley. There's just like fetishizing of it of the pain. And I'm like, maybe your model's just too difficult.

You should choose a different business. Okay, that is a good lesson. Any other. Well, so then the other lesson happens all the time, which is knowing when I'm wrong is a youthful skill. And lots of people who do good work have trouble knowing when they haven't done good work and they think they should stick with it. Other people have done good work. Don't think they have and they pivot too soon. So figuring that moment out. In 1994, I'm running one of the first internet companies.

We invented commercial email and Mark Hurst shows me this thing called the World Light Web. And I say, that's stupid. It's just like Prodigy except it's slower and there's nobody to pay us money. And for six months, I persisted in pointing out that the World Light Web made no sense whatsoever. And then one day just woke up and said, wait a minute. Let me look at that again. And we completely changed how we decided we were going to do our business.

The same thing is true with the cover of all marketers or liars because the cover and the title was super clever and wrong. It was not a matter of me persisting in persuading people that they needed to get the joke. It was merely a matter of persuading the publisher. We should make the paperback have a different cover and a different title.

But if you're going to try a lot of things, you're going to fail a lot and figure out the difference between the failures of your judgment versus the failures of not persisting long enough is a useful skill. And I'm still not great at it, but I'm better at it than I was. You've interacted with many more entrepreneurs than I have, I would say at this point.

One of the questions that I get constantly that you might have a better answer for because I don't have a great answer for it right now is, how do I discern between? An idea that I should keep persisting with despite many, many, many rejections versus a bad idea that I should abandon that is getting the same type of rejection that I'm equally enthusiastic about. And that's a very wordy way to put it. But I get some version of that question all the time. How would you answer that?

Well, first we have to scroll back. There's a difference between freelancers and entrepreneurs. Most people who are independent are freelancers. They get paid when they work. They do good work and get paid for it. A few people are entrepreneurs building a business bigger than themselves, a business that makes them money when they sleep, a business where they don't actually do the work that the customer is buying and a business that they can sell one day. So we look at Larry Ellison.

Larry Ellison doesn't code at a work call. Larry Ellison doesn't make most of the sales calls. What does Larry Ellison do actually? His job is to think about something that needs to be done and hire someone else to do it over and over again, building something bigger than himself. So the first thing I would say to the person who's confused is, well, are you an entrepreneur or a freelancer? If you're an entrepreneur, then you have signed up for a series of choices and challenges.

And again, start with selling something people want to buy. There's no reason to try to invent a need when there are so many needs and wants that are unfilled. So people didn't wake up 10 years ago and say, I need an Uber, but they did wake up 10 years ago and say, I need an easy and expensive way to get from A to B. Correct. Once you could go to someone and say, I have that, people would say, I want that. But if you're just saying, I'm really clever, I know what you should want.

And when you tell people what it is, they don't want it. You're either talking to the wrong people or you made the wrong thing. The blog post I point people to the most is called first 10. And it is a simple theory of marketing. It says, tell 10 people, show 10 people, share it with 10 people, 10 people who already trust you and already wrote like you. If they don't tell anybody else, it's not that good and you should start over. And if they do tell other people, you're on your way.

So the reason I don't use Twitter is I saw Twitter early, which is unusual for me. And I said, wow, I could do this and have a lot of followers. And then I said, well, what would that mean? A, it would mean less time spent writing my blog. B, it would mean exposing myself to anonymous comments from people who want me to pay attention to them. Will either of those two things make me better at the things I want to be good at?

No. Will it be a thrill in the sense that there will be a little fearful edge to it every time I interact? Yes. But I have conservation of fear. And I have to be really careful because if I'm busy sorting through more stuff, the cognitive load goes up. And I can't do what Neil Gaiman does. Like Neil famously has said that the way he writes a book is he makes himself extremely bored. And if he's bored enough, a book's going to come out because he needs to entertain himself.

Well, the problem, most people don't understand about social media. Social media wasn't invented to make you better. It was invented to make the company's money. And you are an employee of the company and you are the product that they sell and they have put you in a little hamster wheel and they throw a little treats in now. And then, but you got to decide what's the impact you're trying to make. And this still comes back to the fear of thing.

And one of the biggest misunderstandings of the people who are into that whole quantified self thing is they are confusing quantifying the self with dancing with the fear. And they're completely different things to do in a given day. That one is terrorism. It's scientific management. It's productivity. We need to move these widgets from one place to another what's the most efficient way. And I'm glad we got good at industry because it makes our lives way more rich, right?

But, our economy, our world and our soul aren't fulfilled by that. They're fulfilled by people who do something that has never been done before. And if it's never been done before, you can't quantify it because it's never been done before. And so to be good at it doesn't mean you quantify your way to it. To be good at it means you clear the decks so that all that's left is you. And the muse, you and the fear, you and the change you want to make in the world.

I can't think of something that's more productive for the kind of people who are lucky enough and blessed enough to be rich enough to be listening to this to focus their energy on. We don't need folks like that to go from 90 words per minute to 105 words per minute when they type. It's not a factor. What we need is for them to type something that's worth reading. What opportunities were you offered doesn't have to be specific that you're glad you turned down.

Are there any particular examples that come to mind? And if not, I can move on. But I'm just curious if there are any opportunities that you've turned down. For me, for instance, one of them would be every reality TV show invite I've ever had. I'm thrilled. And I was extremely tempted early on. But in retrospect, extremely happy. I said no to all of that. Yes. Here's a great point, TV runs deep in our culture. So they wanted me to be on that super famous one and then that other one.

And I never hesitated in saying no because that's the moments when you decide who you want to be. And so I paid extra careful attention to the question and extra careful attention to my answer. And it resonated. I would say the biggest shift, which is for Silicon Valley people, hard to get your arms around because there's a game being played there.

And it's just a game I've opted out of is when I was at Yahoo during the Renaissance in 1999, Bill Gross, who's a super nice guy, came to me and asked me to be head of marketing for the company he was building. It had Steven Spielberg on the board. It was teed up to be the seventh next IPO. And there were a billion dollars in stock options on the table.

And I said to myself, well, if I say yes to this, I've decided what I do for the rest of my life, which is say yes to the next one because I don't need to say yes to this to buy cilantro and vodka. Why would I say yes? It's because I like the game. And I didn't say yes. And even those that billion dollars in stock options never came around, I think I'd be even more proud of it if they had because money is a story.

Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. And you can tell yourself any story you want about money. And it's better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? What is your story about money? Is it what you just said? Because this is a really important point. It's something I've been trying to mull over in the last year or so in particular.

Well, let me start with the marketing story about money, which is take a ten dollar bill and go to the bus station and walk up to someone and say, I'll sell you this ten dollar bill for a dollar. And you should actually do this. No one will buy it from you. And there are a few reasons for this. The first reason is no one goes to the bus station hoping to do a financial transaction.

The second one is only an insane person will try to sell you a real ten dollar bill for a dollar and dealing with insane people's tricky. So it must not be a real ten dollar bill. And you should just walk away. Now let's try a different thing. Put a ten dollar bill in your neighbor's mailbox when he's not home and run away. Do it the next day. Do it the third day. On the fourth day, ring your neighbor's doorbell and say, I'm the guy who left three ten dollar bills in your mailbox.

Here's another one. You want to buy it for a dollar? You'll sell it because your neighbor knows you're crazy, but you're crazy in a very particular way. And you've earned the trust that it's a real ten dollar bill, right? So we assume that ten dollar bills are worth ten dollars, but no, it's a mutual belief and if the belief isn't present, there worth nothing. Now we get to our internal narrative about money.

There's money, that number, it's not even pieces of paper anymore, it's a number on a screen. Is that a reflection of your worth as a human? One of the things that Derek said on your podcast that I sort of disagree with is that being rich is a symbol that you've created a lot of value for a lot of people. I think lots of times that's actually not true. And there are lots of ways to create value for people and most of them do not involve money.

So what we have to decide, once we're okay, once we're not living on three dollars a day, once we have a roof, once we have healthcare, is we have to decide how much more money and what am I going to trade for it? Because we always trade something for it unless we're fortunate enough that the very thing we want to do is the thing that also gives us our maximum income.

And I don't think that merely because some blog decides that people with big valuations are doing better, that doesn't mean you should listen to them. A lot of the questions from my fans on Twitter and Facebook were related to education. And they generally came in the form of in a number of themes. One was, you know, could you have him elaborate on his education manifesto?

The other was, hey, I have a kid who's in fourth grade, I have a kid who's just going to be entering school, what would Seth do in my shoes? And you don't have to tackle those right off the bat, but as that is context, could you tell us more about what you're up to? This is a rant and it's not about what I'm up to, it's about what I was up to.

And the rant is this, sooner or later, parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is endeading them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn't want cogs anymore. And parents get to decide, I'm a huge fan of public school. It's at my kids' to public school. I think everyone should go to public school because it's a great mixed master of our world.

But from three o'clock to ten o'clock, those kids are getting homeschooled and they're either getting homeschooled and watching the Flintstones or they're getting homeschooled in learning something useful. And I think we need to teach kids two things, one, how to lead and two, how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is there are plenty of countries on earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us.

So we cannot out-obidance the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people, I don't care what country they live in, Wyoming or across the world who want whatever is scarce. The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then, they'll criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren't stupid.

If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they'll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what's in the textbook. It's so important here, and I spend an enormous amount of time with kids. I produced the Wizard of Oz, the Musical in Fourth Grade. I used to help run a summer camp. I think that it's a privilege to be able to look at a trusting, energetic, smart, 11-year-old in the eye and tell them the truth.

And what we can say to that 11-year-old is, I really don't care how you did on your vocabulary test. I care about whether you have something to say. And we can teach our kids from a young age to be the kind of people we want them to be. And anything that's worth memorizing is worth looking up now. So we don't need to have them spend a lot of time getting good grades so they can go into a famous college because famous colleges don't work anymore. Famous college isn't the point anymore.

The point is, is there an entity that will have trouble living without you when you seek eternal living? Because if there is, you'll be able to make a living. If on the other hand, you're waiting in the placement office for someone to pick you, you will be persistently undervalued. You talked earlier about writing daily as a practice. Listening to the audiobooks as a practice.

Are there any practices that you would suggest to the kind of overwhelmed, busy parent who wants to start to be more proactive in this department? They have an 11 year old. Are there any practices or exercises that you would suggest? Well you know super well that busy is a trap and that business is a myth. So what could possibly be more important than your kid? Please don't play the busy card.

If you spend two hours a day without an electronic device, looking your kid in the eye, talking to them and solving interesting problems, you will raise a different kid than someone who doesn't do that. And that's one of the reasons why I cook dinner every night. Because what a wonderful semi-distracted environment for the kid to tell you the truth, for you to have low stakes but super important conversations with someone who's important to you. Right?

So this idea, get home from work, put on your sneakers and go for a walk with your kid. My friend Brian walks his daughter to school every day. That's priceless. Well how can you be too busy to do that? Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible.

That's why you have to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals or your team faster and for free. LinkedIn isn't just a job board. LinkedIn helps you hire professionals you can't find anywhere else. Even those who aren't actively searching for a new job but who might be open to the perfect role. In any given month, more than 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other job sites.

So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, if you're not using LinkedIn, you are in the wrong place. More than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring with 86% getting a qualified candidate within 24 hours. LinkedIn knows that small business owners, leaders, execs are wearing so many hats, they're stretched then. They might not have the time or resources to hire in any drawn out way. So LinkedIn is constantly finding ways to make the process easier.

In fact, they just launched a feature that helps you write job descriptions, making the entire thing a-disease faster and much simpler. So hire professionals like a professional on LinkedIn. And now you can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Tim. That's LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And now, Dr. Sue Johnson, who was a leading innovator in the fields of couples therapy and adult attachment.

And the primary developer of emotionally focused couples and family therapy or EFT. Sadly, Dr. Johnson passed away in April of this year. Her impact on the field of family therapy will be felt for generations. To learn more about how her work can improve your relationships, check out her best-selling book, Hold Me Tight, and visit Dr. Sue Johnson.com. Dr. Johnson, welcome to the show. Hey, I'm delighted to be with you, Tim. Thank you for inviting me. I am also thrilled to have you.

And we have an abundance of questions in front of me. We may cover some of them. I don't get too attached to trying to cover them all because we'll run out of time. But I thought we would start with something that was mentioned in the intro and that I know will interest my audience, and that is the peer-reviewed clinical research or research depending on where you happen to be in the world. Could you speak to the actual science and research related to your work?

There's now over 20 outcome studies. Outcome studies in psychotherapy are very hard to do. And there's a lot of noise in the system. There's lots of things going on in people's lives. You know, life gets in the way. So you have to work very hard to get results and the follow-up is the real thing that matters. And we are the only couple intervention, as far as I know, that has the size of results we get, the impacts people, the way we do, that knows why we get these results.

I can tell you exactly what needs to happen in therapy to get the results. And that gets fantastic follow-up. We can work with a couple of 14 to 20 sessions. We can look at them at the end of therapy. We can see that they are happier, more secure, more securely bonded. Their sex life is better. They feel less depressed as individuals. And we follow them up three years later. And the results hold. Which is just so that everyone knows. Astounding.

The latest one we're doing is we've got a great big one with the heart institute in Ottawa because the cardiologists have realized that actually if their patients have good relationships with their partners, they're much less likely to have another heart attack. They take their meds, they go to the gym. So then they said, well, could you do something? And we said, oh, are you kidding? We'll design a 16 hour program for you and we'll research it. So we're doing that.

But to be honest, I do the research because we learn and because it's our way of testing what we think we know. But it's not what really turns me on in the end. What turns me on is watching these couples learning from them and watching them make these huge changes in their lives. I've been doing it for 35 years. And it turns me on like, I dance Argentina and tango. It turns me on like the best Malonga ever and dancing with the best partner ever.

So I have many follow-ups, of course, as questions. Just as a side note, I lived in Argentina from 2004 to 2005 and went to Malonga probably five or six times a week and did a lot of tango. So we have that in common. And if we focus just for a few more minutes on the research, because this is a way of backing into defining EFT for folks, I think. So I've read that EFT has something like a 73 to 86% success rate in studies with distressed couples.

And I would love to know what or how success is defined in these studies. I think that would be helpful for people listening. And then later we'll return to the durability of effect, because that's incredible that you're doing follow-ups three years later and seeing that persistence of effect is really incredible. But how do you define success with distressed couples? That's a good question. And it depends on the study.

But in general, we define it with a measure of, it's called marital adjustment. And it basically looks at the couples take perception of their marital satisfaction. It's a bit more than satisfaction, because it has different elements to it. So we use a scale that's been used in all kinds of research that's got all kinds of validity. But we've also used all kinds of measures.

The one that I think is the most interesting is that we did a big study a few years ago looking not just at whether we can help you change your marital satisfaction, your adjustment, the way you see your partner. We can help you change the security of your bond with your partner, which for me is much more significant than satisfaction. Or saying, yes, we have an adjusted marriage. We have a good marriage. I trust this person in this marriage to be able to say, we have a more secure bond.

And we know how to create that bond ongoingly in the future. That still amazes me that we know that, because we've talked in our society forever about how romantic love is this great mystery. And it just sort of comes and hits you in the head. You fall in, you fall out. There's nothing much you can do about it. Well, actually, that's rot now. And personally, I think it should be all over the front of the New York Times. We've cracked the code of love.

But the New York Times doesn't agree with me. So I think that's real big news for people. When we can show in our study, which we did, that we can take people, very distressed people who don't trust each other, who can't talk to each other, who aren't intimate. And we can, in 20 sessions, create a bond where they can turn and be vulnerable with each other. And they can say, I trust this person. I'm close to this person. I can be open to this person. This person is my special one.

I trust this relationship. And they can do the things we can see on tape. They can do the things that securely attach people do in loving, lasting relationships. That's very significant. We also find things like depression goes down when people are more securely connected with each other. Anxiety goes down, people deal with trauma better. We see a lot of folks with PTSD. When you face dragons to recover from that experience, you need to find comfort in the arms of another.

And that's just the way we're wired. And if you cannot find comfort in the arms of another, you are hard pressed from my point of view, no matter how many times you meditate, no matter how many tips you've learned, no matter how much insight you have, if you can't find comfort in the arms of another to heal from trauma, it's bad news. So we have a lot of different results, but they're all on measures that are accepted by the field as valid.

They've all been in peer-reviewed journals and believe me, reviewers are brutal to psychologists. They're brutal. Let me ask a few questions if I may jump in. Then we're going to continue, of course, on the path to defining what characterizes or describing what characterizes the EFT. What scale do you use or scales do you use when assessing marital satisfaction and bond?

And just for those people listening who may not know what we're talking about, they're different questionnaires and scales for different types of conditions. For instance, you would have the HamD for depression, you might have Cap5 or Cap5 for PTSD. I'm sure some people will be curious if there are any particular scales they could find themselves just to look at their own. I believe I put some of those scales in my book, Love Sense, actually.

We use the Diadic Adjustment Scale, which has been used in marital research for decades, for adjustment. We use various things for things like depression, like the Becht Depression Scale. For attachment, we use something called the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale, which is used in adult attachment research has only been going for the last 20 years. So it's young. Attachment research was really confined to mothers and children for decades.

And the belief was that once you hit 12, you were supposed to become self-sufficient. So attachment didn't matter very much. But that's changed. So now we have a whole field called attachment research. And the Experiences in Close Relationship Scale is the measure we use. However, we have also used observational measures like coding couples interactions as they talk. And we can talk about that. We talk about something called a whole me type conversation.

We can code the behaviors are totally different when they come into therapy and when they're finished. And my favorite one, which I can't resist talking about, is that we did a brain scan study with a wonderful colleague of mine from the University of Virginia, called Jim Cohen, a neuroscientist, where we put the women, we hadn't got enough money to do both partners. So we had to choose. So yes, I know.

So we put women in an MRI machine at the beginning when they were distressed and insecurely attached and didn't believe that their partners loved them or cared for them. We put the women in an MRI machine at the beginning of therapy and then at the end of therapy when they'd had these hold me type conversations. And we were a bit brutal when I think about it.

We put them in the MRI machine and we said, when you see an X in front of your face, there's a good chance you're going to be shocked on your ankles and it's going to hurt. And it did hurt because we tried it on my research assistant and she told us very clearly. I did hurt. Okay, so we turned the machine down a bit.

But what was interesting is at the beginning before therapy before EFT, we showed these women this X and their brains went into immediate alarm on the MRI, high, high alarm state because they're expecting the shot. And once we delivered the shot, we asked if it hurt and they said it was painful or extremely painful. This is in a journal called PLUS1.

And after sessions of therapy after EFT, when they'd had these bonding conversations, by the way, we put them in and we, central interested in research, I'll tell you a bit of detail. Basically, they saw the X when they were alone in the machine, when they held their partner's hand, when they were in the machine and when a stranger held their hand. And before therapy in all three conditions, their brains went berserk and they said that the shock is extremely painful.

After therapy, we put them in the machine again, did the same thing, they saw the X, when the stranger held their hand or when they were alone in the machine, same thing as before, their brain went berserk and they said it was extremely painful. This time, after EFT and the bonding conversations, when their partner held their hand, reached into the machine and held their hand, their brain stayed completely calm. It looked like a resting brain. It looked like they were just resting there.

Their brain stayed completely calm. And if you ask them if the shock hurt, they said it was uncomfortable. And so I'm not a neuroscientist, so I saw these brain scans and there was some blue lighting up after therapy. And I said to my colleague, Jim, what does the blue mean? I can't see any red for alarm anymore, but what does the blue mean? And he said, it means they're not dead soon. Oh, okay. So that's, so he said that's just a resting brain. Oh, okay, jolly good.

So that spoke to me amazingly because psychology is often dismissed as a sort of soft science. And indeed we deal with many intangibles. But for me, that was incredibly neat because you could see it and you could see that we're talking about biology here, but we're talking about the biology of a social being, a being whose brain is wired for connection with other people and who needs this connection with other people to thrive and survive. Love is an ancient, wired in survival code.

We have all these silly misinformation in our society, silly what we call love stories. There's still out there. Psychology puts out a lot of misinformation about love is some strange mixture of sex and sentiment. No, romantic love is about bonding and it's an ancient, wired in survival code and you could sure see it in these MRIs.

These women's brains when they had this secure connection with their partner, these women's brains were completely different than in the beginning when they felt no safe connection with their partner. So it was very, very interesting. I would love to dig into what sounds like the glue involved in some of the bond enhancement as demonstrated in the follow up, FMRI. And that is the hold me tight conversation.

Maybe this is a way also of coming in sideways to basically demonstrate what EFT is or at least a component of it. Could you walk us through what a hold me tight conversation is? A hold me tight conversation, very briefly, is a bonding conversation. The tricky part is that as adults, some of us have never seen this conversation. So it's a dance that is foreign to us. We've never had it with our own parents. We've never had it with siblings. We've never had it with previous lovers.

And we get married or we get committed to a partner. And it's reasonable that we don't know how to go there because many of us, it's just not a drama that we've ever seen in active. A hold me tight conversation is where one person is able to open up and reach for the other person and share vulnerabilities, talk about their needs and fears in a way that pulls the other person close. It helps the other person reach back and respond.

Could you give any examples of freezing or questions or guidelines? You provide, that would be, I know I would love to know and I suspect others would too. Well, when you don't trust and you don't feel safe and you've never seen a hold me tight conversation, the way it usually goes just naturally as human beings, I catch myself doing this with my husband if I'm upset about something like he's been going to bed very early. And that means that we don't have our snuggle time.

We don't have our little chat time. Okay, it doesn't seem to bother him at all. It doesn't seem to bother him, this isn't happening. So this will go on for a couple of weeks. And even though I'm doing this work, there's a certain point where I start to get self-protective and I start to blame him in my head and I say, he's always too busy, he's got his lists, he's got lists.

That's what he, and he's a man and he's got lists and all he cares about is his list of tasks and he's just into problem solving and he doesn't think about me at all. And this dialogue will go in my head. So I turn to him and I say, you're going to bed very early. These days, listen to my voice, it's the emotional music. He says, no, I'm not. Because he hears the threat in my tone. I say, yes, you are.

And you've been going to bed for weeks and I guess it doesn't matter to you that we're not having those close moments. Listen to me. I mean, I'm on the attack and we are a hugely sensitive as human beings to signs of rejection or abandonment by the people we love. A hugely sensitive, that's how we're wired. So he hears that he's blown it. He hears it that I'm rejecting him. I'm telling him he's done something wrong. So he says, I don't want to talk about this right now.

I say, oh, let me guess you have to go to bed because you're so tired. Right. So we're off, right? Okay, that is the typical demand with draw, demand-defend dialogue that you'll see in a distressed couple. And it's totally predictable. You can also have it with your kids. I can remember a glorious argument I had in Starbucks with my Adless at Sun that was just a perfect example of the way distressed couples talk to each other.

So I'm blaming and pointing fingers and he's rolling his eyeballs and basically telling me what a dreadful mother I am. So you can have it with anyone, but with partners, it's very predictable and it has everyone feeling completely threatened and unsafe and unable to dance together. If you shift that into a whole me tight conversation, the way it would go is that I would be more able to tune into my own needs, more aware of my own needs, accepting of my own needs.

And I would realize, oh, I'm really missing those conversations with John who'd been married for 32 years. We're both very strong people, so it's been quite an adventure. So I think, oh, I'm missing those relationships with John and maybe he doesn't miss them. And oh, that makes me feel really somehow anxious and uncomfortable if he doesn't miss them because the big question in love relationships is are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Can I count on you?

Maybe those conversations don't matter to him but they really matter to me. So I am aware on a different level of me and I'm specifying that scares me a bit that maybe these conversations don't matter to him. I can tune into my own emotions. Then I take the risk and reach for him and say to him, I'm open, I say to him, you know what? We haven't been having our usual talks later tonight.

And somehow it doesn't look like you miss them and somehow that makes me feel kind of really sort of uncomfortable, you know, it almost feels like I'm not sure that that closest matters to you. And so I could get angry about it, but actually what's happening is it sort of scares me a bit because I need those conversations. Now I've talked about my fears and my needs.

I can only do that if I have some sort of model that it's okay to do that, that doesn't mean I'm a wimp or mentally ill or weak or pathetic. From my point of view, it's strength to do that and that's what we teach and it's strength to do that. And that's what security attach people can do. They can reach for a position of vulnerability. So I say that to him. And that pulls him, he says, oh, you're right. Yeah, yeah. I really like those, I really, I do all those conversations.

I've just been so exhausted and I've been doing this and I haven't wanted to tell you how stressed out I am. So then it becomes reciprocal. I say, oh, I didn't know that you were so stressed out about this decision we've made and that it's taking up all your energy and you're worried about it. So then we start to have an open, responsive, engaged conversation where we can share vulnerabilities, comfort each other and you're literally better at tuning in to each other.

And I think that's because when I feel safe, I can tune into you. When I think about the people I can dance with in Tango really well, it's the people I feel emotionally safe with. And I know that there's no mistakes because mistakes don't matter, we're just playing. Then I relax, I'm in my body, I tune into their cues and we move together naturally. So that's kind of what happens and it's a hold me tight conversation and it's sort of cascades.

Each time you have this conversation, it's your nervous system goes, oh, this is comfort, this is home, this is safety, this is what I need. And you see your partner as a resource, you see your partner as somebody who can provide this safety, comfort, caring, reassurance, social support, if you want to use a psychological formal term for it, you see your partner as this person and your partner connects and you know how to do this dance. This dance is innately rewarding. It creates joy in people.

You don't have to persuade people to keep doing it like going to the gym or meditation or their communication skills. People will do this. Once they know how to do it, they'll keep doing it.

And that's why I think we get good follow-up results because once you start having these conversations and it's very moving sometimes to see people's response like people will start to cry and say things like, when they discover these hold me tight conversations, people will say, thinking of one man who said, I never knew that you could talk to somebody like this. I never knew that you could ask for these things and that she wants me to be vulnerable to her. I never knew that.

I never saw that growing up. I didn't know people did that. And then he wept and he turned to the therapist and said, I've been alone all my life, haven't I? And that, what attachment science tells us is that emotional isolation is toxic for human beings. Yeah, I mean, we found out that in the pandemic, but we still don't get it. I wish we would get it on a different level. It's toxic for human beings. It's not who we are.

And when people start to have these hold me tight conversations, what kinds of amazing things happen? They don't just understand how relationships can be and how you can shape relationships. You don't have to just have them happen to you. You can shape love. They understand something very deep about themselves. Couples grow each other in same relationships. Couples grow each other.

I watch severely traumatizing people learn to trust another human being by having these hold me tight conversations with their partner and it changes everything because they have a secure place in life for the first time. They feel seen, they feel accepted, they feel held. And once you feel seen, accepted and held is a natural human growth process that happens. Attachment of science is all about development of the personality. There's a natural growth process.

So we tune into that natural process in the hold me tight conversation. And those conversations predict over study after study, after study after study, those conversations predict success in EFT. They predict more secure bonding. They predict better sex, more sexual satisfaction in couples. They predict any sort of measure of good positive functioning. You can imagine those bonding conversations predict all the good results we get in EFT and they predict results follow up.

So I would love to ask more about the hold me tight conversations and I'll share a bit of the context from which I'm asking this. So I, we don't necessarily have to get into details we could, but I had quite a bit of a severe early childhood trauma. I could chew to four. And have not only felt largely alone my entire life, but have created isolation. It's been constant for me.

Yes. And so what you're saying about these conversations, helping to create the feeling of bondedness and sort of counterweight perhaps someone's historical tendency to isolate or feel isolated is really appealing. I would love to hear if you're open to sharing and perhaps another hypothetical hold me tight conversation or other phrases or questions that are helpful for people who want to get a better understanding of what this might look like in real life.

Where we start with couples, many of whom have experienced being alone most of their lives traumatized or not, where we start is we help couples see the dance they're caught in. Love is a dance, we help couples see the dance they're caught in. We help couples see the negative patterns. The most popular one of all is I become aware of the disconnection between the two of us. I get worried about it, it makes me anxious and I don't feel safe enough to turn and really share my vulnerability.

So I demand, I blame, I tell you, where are you? What I'm really saying is where are you? Where are you? I can't find you and that alarms me. But what I say is things like you don't talk to me enough or you never tell me how you feel or if you're a man you'll say, you never tell me you want to make love, you don't ever show me you want me, what's wrong with you? I said, we turn to our partner, we say, what's wrong with you.

So we help couples see how they scare the hell out of each other and create even more insecurity and stop each other from being able to be vulnerable and risk.

When they start to see that it's the pattern that's the problem, the dance that's problem and the fact they don't know how to do a more positive dance, they start to blame the dance rather than each other and they start to be able to say, hey, we're stuck in that thing, we're stuck in that thing we do, where I shut down and shut you out and you must be getting alarm right now. And the other person says, yes, I'm started to freak out and they say, oh, let's not do that.

Let's try and help each other feel a bit more safe. So we create that platform first, but then you have to start where people are. And sometimes we the hold me tight conversation with somebody who's been very traumatized and has all the reasons in the world not to trust another human being with the softness of their heart, all the good reasons in the world, you have to start there.

I've worked with lots of traumatized folks and you have to start with somebody saying, well, I understand now the patterns and how we've been caught in this dance. I understand that you're always trying to hurt me or have me prove myself to you or prove me wrong, but I want to tell you the idea of really opening up to you and showing you who I am just feels impossible. I don't know how to do it. It's impossible. I don't think I can do it. So you start with people are.

You don't get people to do it in spite of how they feel. You get them to trust their feelings. My experience is someone will say that and I will say, could you turn and tell your partner please? I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can risk letting you really see me. I'm so sure that you won't want me or that you'll find some way to hurt me. Then I don't know what would happen. I don't think I could tolerate it. I don't think I can do it. Could you turn and tell her?

What I do is I hold the person and I help them speak their emotions and say their emotions clearly and I hold them in there. I support them in there. So Guy Transan tells his wife and his wife says, and this is the amazing thing about bonding. This is who we are. We are empathic creatures. That empathy is blocked by all kinds of other things. But we are empathic creatures. My experience is the partner will say, I never knew that. I just felt that you didn't want to share with me.

I never knew it was so hard. I never knew that it was scary for you. I never understood that. I can't believe. I understand. I understand that. Now you've helped me understand how scary that is. I can't believe that you're even here telling me this. And I love you for taking that risk. Thank you for taking that risk. And then the door opens wider. And then I say, usually I say, because we always have this catastrophe in our head.

When we're afraid, we create catastrophes in our head to try and prepare for them. So I say, what is going to happen? If you really show her who you are, and you show her how scared you are to really open up, and show your vulnerability, what is going to happen? And he says, she'll tell me what I've always known. She'll tell me that I'm weak. There's something wrong with me. And the reason that I've been alone all my life is because there was something wrong with me.

And the reason I was so hurt when I was little was because I wasn't a good enough kid or a special enough kid. I didn't do it right. One lady broke my heart. She said, I was so careful when I asked my mother for attention. I was so, so careful. I plan it and plan it in the dark for hours. And no matter how I did it, it never worked. It never worked. She was always angry at me. So I said to myself, it's me. It must be me. There's something wrong with me. I'm just not lovable.

Then she weeps when she does that. Her partner reaches for her naturally. Her partner reaches for her and says, this vulnerability, when you really help people move into it with safety, evokes caring and compassion. It just does. So then the partner moves in and supports and gradually, gradually the other person's able to open up. It's not something that you do once. It's not something that you can do mechanically. You have to be involved in it.

And for some of us, if we've been desperately hurt when we were niddle and we learned that that kind of openness was desperately dangerous, it's like jumping off a cliff. And you have to respect. You have to respect. Emotions are in no way logical. That's one of the big mistakes we've made in psychology. There are no way logical. They have their own logic. There is supreme information processing system that wires us to see the world in a particular way, to move in a particular way.

And we haven't taught people how to understand them, how to listen to them, and how they make sense. They always make sense. If someone's terrified of that kind of openness, it's because they have very good reasons to be. And often they haven't told their partner. They haven't told their partner anything about it. So their partner has no idea. The partner says, you just don't want to be close to me. You just don't want me. No, I do desperately want you. I'm just terrified to let you see me.

In psychology, we're very good at looking at the behavior and the problem. And sometimes I feel like we're not so good at what we are supposed to be the experts in, which is looking underneath the behavior and the problem and seeing the emotional realities that push that problem forward and keep people stuck in that problem. And don't be if I answered you, Tim. There's so much to talk about here. I tried to ask you. I think you did. No, you did. And I mean, the examples are just heartbreaking.

And I think they're heartbreaking. I mean, I was feeling myself getting really emotional as because they resonate, I think, with so many people. They resonate with me, I should say. But I suspect that these types of situations are really, really common. But when you're experiencing them, I think it's so easy to view yourself as uniquely flawed in some way. Yes. Yes. But it's so common. It's so common. It seems so common, at least. I mean, you'd be more qualified to speak to it.

I think it is common. And I think the power of attachment science is it tells us who we are. It tells us that we are social beings wired for connection. We need safe connection with others to survive and thrive. Dependency became a dirty word somewhere through our history. And we all fell in love with the image of the lone cowboy riding over the range. The eagle song, Desperado, I love that song.

It's my favorite song because it basically takes that image of the lone cowboy and basically says, buddy, you better find someone to love you because you're in deep trouble. OK. So it takes this strong image and says, not you're in trouble. And dependency became this dirty word. And I think what attachment science says is we are interdependent human beings wired for connection with others from the cradle to the grave.

And when you present that to people, not the way I just said it, which is abstract, when you move people into that reality and you accept it and say, of course, this is who we are as human beings. And we all get stuck here and we all need this. People go, oh, oh, you mean I'm not crazy, bad, deficient, defective, unlovable? No, no, you're not. You're just a human being who needs that connection with another human being and who is terrified of rejection and abandonment.

And the reason you're terrified of rejection and abandonment is because those are pure danger cues to your mammalian brain, danger cues are a young or vulnerable for longer than any other species. And while our brain is developing, we know perfectly well on a visceral level that if we call and no one comes, we die. And that's the truth. And that reality of our long term vulnerability has wired our nervous system in particular way and creates these social dramas, wired our social dramas.

What the father of attachment science, John Bolby, who was an English psychologist, really did, which is brilliant, is he linked biology and who we are and how our nervous system works to our social interaction patterns to the way we dance with other human beings. He linked within and between.

He linked those two together in an elegant, beautiful, testable way that gives us a map to love relationships, how to shape them, how to fix them, how to repair them, how to keep them, and to who we are as human beings. And this map is the way human beings have survived through the centuries is through tuning into others, reading their cues, collaborating, cooperating, moving close, supporting. That's the way we've survived.

And if you look at the problems facing our world right now, we better be learning from this science because we better be able to do that or we're not going to survive. We've got to be able to come together. You mentioned the child crying, so I must ask you a question to scratch my own itch and satisfy my curiosity.

But I may accidentally invite you into a religious war, not with me, but because I've seen very heated debates between, and we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but I would love to get your opinion on, and the backdrop of this is that I'm hoping to begin building a family and the near future. And I have two camps of friends. One camp is they're devout, attachment parenting, the devotees, and then on the other hand, you have sleep training.

And there are many different types of sleep training. Do you have any thoughts on, because the people who are in the sleep training camp, and their arguments make sense, the arguments on both sides make a lot of sense. In so much as what I hear is, you know, attachment parenting, the way they would position it is this constant contact and sleeping near with the baby is most natural. It is in the baby's best interest. If you look at evolution, that is what's supported.

The people in the sleep training camp would say, that's great, but if you're not sleeping and we're no longer living in a village, we don't have the type of support that we had. If I don't get any sleep, and my partner gets no sleep, we're going to be terrible parents, and ultimately that is going to be bad for the baby. So I don't know what to make of this, and would love to get your perspective.

Well, my perspective is that what attachment says is that emotional balance, when you're securely attached, and you feel safe in the world, and you know you can count on others for support, you have your emotional balance. And sometimes when we take on huge, complex issues, we lose our emotional balance. I don't think to create secure attachment in your kids that you have to sleep with them. Okay, I don't think so.

You're kind of you want, and I think you have to balance things like if you sleep with your kid in between you all the time for three or four years, what does that do to your couple relationship? And what your kid needs is a good couple relationship in the parents who can cooperate. Believe me, that's what your kid needs. So that's an issue I think people sometimes go over the top.

They take the good sense and the science of attachment, and they turn it into rigid life rules, which I think you have to make your own rules there. I think being emotionally responsive to your kids is the key, and for them to know that you're there for them is the key, doesn't mean you have to always show up in the same way and you have to be constantly available. For me, I don't think so. On the other hand, I do have a visceral reaction to sleep training.

I would like to suggest that when you do sleep training, your child does not calm down and learn to rely on itself. What your child does is numb out. What your child learns is that no matter how I cry, nobody will come. From my point of view, that's a bloody disastrous lesson for any child to learn. So I have a huge bias against. Now again, it depends on how it's done and it depends on what else is happening. So let's not get too judgmental here, but why not? Let's get judgmental.

I think it stinks. So if that's a religious war, I'm on the attachment side because it seems to me that the sleep training thing feeds into a myth that we have that is so dangerous. The myth is about self-sufficiency and regulating our own emotions. And the bottom line is, the only self-sufficient human being is either numb down on some drug or dead. We're not wired for self-sufficiency. And shutting down a numbing out is a fragile strategy. You can't keep it up for your whole life.

It shatters under any kind of pressure. So I'm saying it glibly because this is an interview but why I just said to you, I can give you research studies to back that up. Okay, I'm not just saying it. So no, I don't think sleep training. But on the other hand, I can remember, I adopted my son. He was a premature and he came home. He was the tiniest little thing. He scared the hell out of me. He was so tiny. And he had something wrong with his digestive system.

And for the first 18 months of his life, he would wake up every two hours at least, but maybe sometimes 90 minutes. And the only thing that would help is that one of us would go in and sing to him and talk to him and rock him for 10, 15 minutes and put him down. And we got into the habit of that and we did that and we accommodated to that. We thought about having him sleep between us, but we usually slept at that point.

We adopted him very soon after we got together, which we were incredibly lucky. So we adopted him about a year after we got together. And so we slept pretty entwined. So we didn't really think it was, and also he was so tiny at first, I didn't think, putting him in the middle, I thought I'd call him gonna crush him if I turn it. So my husband's a big man. Oh, we're gonna crush him this little one. So we didn't do that. And then it changed and it was fine. My daughter was totally different.

Very shortly after she was born, she went to sleep, you know, regularly went to sleep, but same time at night, slept through after a few months. And providing you, gave her all kinds of hugs in the morning. She was this happy little clam. So it was different. So I understand that parenting can be hard. I think for me, it's the hardest thing I've ever done. For one thing, parenting's a moving target. You accommodate to your child. Then your child changes. You think, wait a minute.

Like I just figured it out. And now you're changing. You pick up, good Lord, you become an adolescent. I don't know what to do with this. You know, my son turned in from this wonderful, bubbly, charming, delightful little being into this dropping, judgmental moral person. He was poignant at how wrong we were about everything. I thought, you know, who is this person? When did this guy come from? So parenting is hard.

And if you take the social implications of attachment science, we should be supporting our parents like crazy. We should be teaching people how to have good, secure relationships. We should be teaching them about relationships, educating them. We should be having more leave for parents. We should be supporting the basic unit of our society, which is our family. We don't seem to be that keen on that. We seem to be more keen on supporting economic security or corporations.

So I don't think we support parents enough. And maybe that needs to change. Maybe our understanding of supporting human families needs to change. I mean, attachment has changed parenting. It's changed the way we see our children. It's changed the way we see their emotional needs. We understand that to be emotionally alone, traumatizes a child, we need to apply that to adults. Because in that sense, we never grow up. Attachment goes from the cradle to the grave.

It's just very basic things like I talk in one of my books somewhere about that I think it loves sense. There's a movement called Nobody Dies Alone, where people get together in certain cities and their commitment is to go in with somebody who's dying and who has no human figure to be there with them and simply be with them, but their most vulnerable moments. And for me, that speaks to the fact that maybe one day we could have something called a civilized society.

A civilized society would not let anyone die alone. A civilized society would support families and support parents help us learn how to parent. So I don't think it's just the couple who are stressed. I think it's the demands of our society. You have to go back to work at a certain point, whether you're a parent or not. There's no accommodation in most workplaces for parenting. Was it the Prime Minister of New Zealand who bought her baby into the parliament? I thought, yay, lady.

Whoa. That is like, yay. She bought her baby into the parliament. That takes maths, I think. So good for her, but boy, I can't even imagine that happening. And I'm obviously, you can hear I'm English. I was going to say, I've heard Stroppy from my friend from New Zealand, but you don't seem to have a Kiwi accent. Nor do you seem to have an Ottawa or Canadian accent. No, I'm from England. I came to Canada and Rob's 22, but you never kind of lose the accent.

But I cannot imagine even today a woman Prime Minister walking into the British parliament with a baby and holding that. I would love that. I think that would be progress for Britain for me. Hey, Ray, but never mind. Sorry, I got off track there. That was on track. No, no, no. The whole podcast is about freely going off track when necessary. I would like to ask a very specific question. And it may be a dead end, I don't know. But I was doing a bit of reading on EFT.

And there was a phrase that stuck out to me, which related to micro interventions. So the wording of this is micro interventions from Rogerian models of therapy, such as asking evocative questions. Yes. Now, I like evocative questions, so this drew my attention. What would be an example and what are micro interventions from Rogerian models of therapy, such as... Evocative questions. Exactly. Evocative questions focus on the process of how you're experiencing not the content.

So I would say to you, Tim, what happens to you when you sit and do interviews with crazy people like Dr. Sue Johnson? And she tells you stories that have you moved into your own softer feelings. What is that like for you, Tim? And you might say, oh, I don't know. You say, well, what happens in your body, Tim? Can you tell me a moment when you felt that rush of emotion? You say, oh, well, it was when you said this. Oh, so that's the trigger.

Well, and I'll help you put your emotions together with evocative questions and reflections. And I'll say so when you heard me say this, that was important for you, that stood out, and you started to feel a lot of feelings. Can you help me what happened in your body? So, oh, well, I felt this tightness across my chest, and I felt like I wanted to cry. So, ooh, and then what did you say to yourself?

I said to myself, my goodness, that's just how I felt when I remember feeling that way when I was three years old. And I say, I understand. So, I'll reflect it again. I'll hold it for you. I'll specify it. I'll ask evocative questions. I'll get you to stay with the experience. And then I'll say, what do you want to do when you feel that way? And you might say, I want to stop it. I want to get out. I don't want to feel any more of that right now. I want to shove it down.

I want to stop the feeling. I said, okay, so you want to run, yeah. And we've put your emotion together in a safe, specific, safe way. People can deal with emotions that when they make sense, when they're acceptable, when there's another human being there accepting them, and when they're made specific. We can't deal with big, vague, huge, overwhelming problems. We just want to run away from them. So I'll use evocative questions. I'll use reflections.

I'll use repetition to help you stay with that feeling. I'll use an image. If you said to me, this fire across, I can remember one client, said, it's like walking into a fire. When you asked me to turn and open up to him, I can tell you that I'm afraid. I can look into your face until you, because you're just a silly therapist. You don't matter to me, much. Actually, that's what I said. I said, that's because I'm just a silly therapist. I don't matter to you much. You said, yes, that's right.

So I said, so, and I can tell you about my fear. When you asked me to turn and tell him about my fear, you're asking me to walk into a fire. And I knew that this lady, she was a trucker. There was an accident in front of her truck. And she got out of her truck and she walked into flames to pull out the trucker who was trapped underneath the truck in front of her. I realized that this is an enormously powerful image.

And if I want her to move more into it, if she can handle it, if she can't handle it, I'll stop. But if I want her to move more into it, and I think she can handle it, I'll say, let's stay with that image. It's like fire, fire burns, fire is terrifying. You're telling your partner, it's too hard for me. I can't, I can't do this right now. It's too hard. It's like walking through fire to turn and open up to you. I just can't do it. And she says, yes, that's right. I say, good, tell him that.

Now create, I'll clarify the emotional music, help her with it, help her accept it. And then I'll help her move this into a drama with another person. And by the way, when we do individual therapy, we've just started to really teach EFIT, which is emotionally focused individual therapy, is a book coming out next month, September, on that. When we do individual therapy, we still do this. But we use the representations inside people's heads. So you have a cast of characters inside your head.

So do I. I'm very thankful on my main attachment figure when I was a child was my father. And I'm very aware that all through my adult life, especially through moments of failure, moments of joy, key moments, I can hear my father's voice. My father's still a reality for me, right? He's, I carry him inside of me. And that's what we do with our loved ones. And we talk to them and we have these dramas with them.

So if I'm doing individual therapy, I might use these same reflections and evocative questions. Instead, I'll say, you planned every interaction with your mother, you planned it for hours, you planned how to go and ask her for a hug, you planned, right? Right. So can you see that little girl who always got smacked and taken back to her room and left in the door? Can you see that little girl sitting on the bed by herself? What would you want to say to her?

What would you like to have been able to say to your mom? And she says something like, I tried so hard, mom, I tried so hard, but I could never reach you. Was it really my fault? Was I really such a bad little girl? I just think you weren't a mom. You weren't a mom to me. Say, good. What does it feel to say that? She says that feels different. I've never said that before to myself. I've always said, I didn't plan enough. I wasn't a good enough little girl. So can you say that again?

Can you see your mom? Was your mom look like in the chair? Close your eyes. She closes her eyes. She says, yes, I see her. Say, oh, what? Two see on her face. She says, she tells me she's tired. She doesn't have time. She's tired. And she's working three jobs. And I should just be quiet, go to bed, and stop my grizzling. Stop me. That's where she's telling me. And what do you want to say to her? I want to tell her, mom, that's not fair. I'm just little. And I can never reach for you.

I can never reach for you. You're not a mom. You're not a good mom to me. I need a mom. And I say, how do you feel about that? She says, I feel fine. That feels good. That feels different. Then she emails me after the session. She says, you know Sue, the sessions with you are hard. So I don't understand why I sing all the way home. And it's because she moves in the session. She moves out of her obsessions, addictions with not eating addictions for planning, anxiety, she moves.

And so she gets exhilarated because she starts to feel more whole as a human being. Some of the cliches we have about love are really awful. Misinformation. One of the cliches that's really true and that this is true in most religions is that when we're loved, we grow and expand. We grow. We find more resources inside ourselves. We find more strength inside ourselves. We're better at problem solving.

When we're safe and secure and we feel we matter to others and that they have our back, our potential and our resources come out. Now again, I'm having such fun talking to you. I'm not sure I answered your question. Oh, yes, it was about micro interventions and things like reflecting and evocative questions. You gave a number of examples. And I like to think of it as much conversation as interviews. So even if the interview is just a cue to take us in a different direction, that works for me.

I want to come back to some of your evocative questions though because I wrote them down because they, I think, will be helpful for me. And they were follow-ups to the question of what someone is feeling. So when I said that, the hypothetical was asking me how I felt when you said certain things in the interview. That was the example, which could be a real one.

And then I would answer that and then you had follow-ups such as what did you say to yourself when you felt that or what did you want to do when you felt that way? But I want to go to the initial question, which is how did you feel and what did you feel in your body? And I have a little bit of experience as a client with something called the Hikomi method. Yes. The question of how you feel and what you're feeling in your body comes up a lot.

And I feel for reasons known and unknown that I have a very poor, which is surprising to me, very poor vocabulary when it comes to identifying bodily sensations. And I'm not aware of much outside of, for instance, almost every time I would be asked what I was feeling in my body, whether it was sadness, anger, you name it, it would be tightness in the throat or tightness in the chest.

And that was really all that would come up for me were these two options, maybe some retention in the forehead, and I'm curious what you do when you have a client who really can't come up with more than one or two answers to that question. What do you feel in your body?

Maybe that's not a problem, but I felt kind of ridiculous because when I've done some couples work with my girlfriend who's extremely kinesthetically aware and very self-aware, she always has this rich landscape she can describe and she closes her eyes and she's so specific and I'm like, you know what, it's just the throat again, tightness in the throat and I feel kind of ridiculous and I don't feel like it gives me much to work with.

But how would you respond to that word salad that I just threw at you? Well, you have to put it in context. I mean, the point is when I go in to something like that, there's always a specific thing that's happened, a client's told me a story or is feeling something in the moment or is having a specific emotional reaction or if I'm working with couples, there's a piece of drama going on, so there's usually a specific trigger.

And the thing about attachment sciences, it gives us a map to our emotional needs, vulnerabilities, feelings, it gives us a map. And what I think is a relatively simple, elegant map. So if you say to me, I hear you that you have a more limited vocabulary, there's a good reason for that. You were brought up as a man in an North American society. You weren't taught to look inside and pay attention to your emotions and develop a vocabulary. Your girlfriend was taught to do that.

She was acceptable for her and so women have more language. The bottom line is though, you are human beings. So you have the same basic emotions. We talk about six basic emotions and you have the same basic physiological responses. So if you said to me, Sue, I don't know how to talk about this. That's great, right? Sue, I don't know how to talk about this. All that happens to me is when and then it's specific. When I hear that tone in her voice. What's the trick?

When I hear that tone in her voice, all I know is that I just go tight. I just go tight and I just stay there with you and I say, so help me. What do you hear in her tone? Well she's irritated with me and you know, she's going to be irritated with me and nothing I say is going to make any difference. I say, oh, so in your, in you hear her tone and you say, I've already blown it. I've blown it. I've blown it again. And when is that right? She says, yes, that's what I say to myself. I've blown it.

She's irritated with, oh my God. Now we're going to get stuck in that thing. I've blown it again. You said, and you feel this tightness. She says, yes. I said, you help me with the tightness. It's like you shut down. Is it shutting down? You say, yes, it's like shutting down soon. So I say, oh, it's like shutting down. Of course there's something here that's dangerous, isn't it? Then if you're a regular guy, you say something like, no, it's not dangerous.

I mean, you know, I'm not like really worried or anything. Yes you are. Okay. You're just bigger than the guy. Right? So I say, all right. It's not dangerous. It's just a bit, this gentleman said to him, I loved him. He said, it's disconcerting. I said, oh, I said, oh, it's disconcerting. This is just, it's very disconcerting. I understand. So I say, so let's go over this again. So then I go over it again when you do this happens. You hear this in her voice. And then your body does.

And it's disconcerting. And there's something here. Disconcerting, could you help me? It's like, you don't know what to do. No matter what you do, it's not going to be right. He says, yes. He said, when I show that way, it's a little bit alarming, isn't it? He says, yes, it's alarming. I said, oh, so when you feel this tightness in your chest, it's a lump. You lead people in. The point is, you lead them into their emotions. The point is, I know where I'm going.

And so does every good efty therapist. I know where I'm going because I've got a map. And so attachment gives us a map to how we dance together with the people we love, where those dances go in terms of outcome. It gives us a map to our own vulnerabilities and emotions. It tells us how supremely sensitive we are to signals of rejection or abandonment by other people. And that this sensitivity is wired in.

There's nothing weak or strange or we've framed these vulnerabilities in very strange ways, very unexcepting ways. Some of the ways we've talked about love have been so misleading, but when you help people have the words, and there aren't that many words. There aren't that many core emotions. There aren't that many ways to dance with a loved one. You can basically reach from them when you're vulnerable.

You can shut down and numb out and shut them out, or you can up the ante and get anxious and demand all kinds of responses from them. That's about it. There are the main moves in the dance of love.

And they can all be useful at times, but if you get stuck in one of the negative ones like blaming and pushing and demanding and upping the ante to try and get the other person to respond or shutting down and withdrawing, that generates a dance that ends up in disconnection and more anxiety and more problems for both of you. What would be an example of upping the ante? I understand the phrasing is that it applies to the poker, but could you give us an example of that?

Upping the ante is what I did with my description of my husband and me, where instead of turning and saying, I'm missing our conversations. I say, I guess you're tired again. You're tired and awful lot of these days. I guess you're really tired. Listen to me. I'm pushing. Foolishly, but I want is for him to turn and say, oh, well, have I left you alone? I'm so sorry. Yes, I do want these conversations, but of course I'm using a club. So I'm smacking him to get him to respond.

And the trumpet that one is the smacking pushes him further away. That's one of the ironic things as human beings that sometimes when we love people, we're so unable to really reach for them or know how to reach for them the way we do try to reach we push them further away. How do you work with or help someone work with anger? So you have a couple and you're working with them.

One partner says, whatever they say, and then the other, and then you ask the other partner how that makes them feel when they hear that. They're like, it pisses me off. I've heard this a hundred times. God damn it. Why don't we go to this should be open shut case or whatever it is. It could take a million forms. Well, most people start there. So I say, so could you help me when your partner says this, that's hard for you to hear. That doesn't really make sense to you.

And you just say, he would go again and you get angry. They're saying, and then I'll stay with that. Because underneath the anger, before the anger, there's some sort of threat. There's some sort of threat going on, right? It pisses me off because that's not what I do. That's just the way she sees it. I don't do that. You know, she tells me that. So I say, okay, so it pisses you off because from your point of view, you're trying really, really hard to be a good husband.

Yes. And from your point of view, she somehow picks on this one thing and it kind of proves that you're not a good husband. Yes. That makes you really, really angry. It does. And that must be very, very difficult to hear. Yes. It is. Well, then what happens to you when you hear that? I don't want to hear that I'm a failure all the time, okay? Oh, no. So in the moment before the anger, what you hear is, you hear your wife saying, you're failing. You're a bad partner. Did I say that? Well, yes.

Lots of therapies teach that emotions have to be controlled and contained and got passed. We don't do that. We honor emotions. We take people into them, listen to them, help them hear the key messages about survival and what they need that are in them and then take them through them. And if you look at a couple at the end of EFT, they're much more emotionally balanced. And when they feel vulnerable or hurt, they're better at dealing with it. Security attached kids in all the research studies.

There's thousands of studies on infant mother attachment, child parent attachment. There's hundreds and hundreds of studies on adult attachment now. When you look at them all, they all basically say, we need this connection with other people. We need it and we have these incredible sensitivities. And there's only so many ways of dealing with them. And there's only so many emotions that come up.

The main one that people are dealing with when they get stuck in fights or incredible distance is fear. Fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of disconnection, fear that I don't really matter to you. I'm really on my own in life. And that intimidates us all. We all know that that is disempowering for us. We all know on some deep visceral level how much we need others. And strongest among us can accept there and learn how to connect.

One of my most fascinating characters in history is Winston Churchill. I find him completely fascinating, I read all these books on Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill had the most horrible childhood relationships. He had a father who was mean and blaming and rejecting and distant. And he had a totally distant mother who was too busy having affairs with the king and having wonderful parties.

They sent him to boarding school and he would write these letters that just break your heart like dear mummy, which could you possibly possibly make it to the one this big event once a term and come and she wouldn't even reply to his letter. So Winston Churchill grew up deprived. But I don't know how he managed it. Sometimes human resilience is amazing. But what he did as an adult was he created a bond with his wife. And all the evidence is all through his life he relied on that bond.

And that when they got into a fight, this man, this powerful man who sort of took all these impossible stands in his life. I mean, and what he would do apparently is if they got into fights, he'd go and he'd sit down outside her bedroom door and say things like, are you mad at your winy? You were out to somehow he knew how he found a way to reach for her. And she responded enough that he had this secure connection because they were British, British upper class.

So they still slept in separate bedrooms, which is just kind of weird. But anyone from me, from my point of view, but they did that. Now my class consciousness is coming out here. So. Do you have any favorite books or if you were to recommend a resource or a book or a place to start for people interested in learning more about Winston Churchill? Do you have any suggestions? There's a wonderful, but I think it's called the last lion.

It's a biography in three volumes of Winston Churchill, but it takes it from childhood until him him dying and it's fascinating, fascinating. I'd love it. In terms of books, I just read what happened to you with Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry. Bruce Perry, both of them are splendid. I love Bruce Perry. He's a child and adolescent psychiatrist. So he comes at attachment science in a slightly different way than me. His work dovetails with us totally brilliantly.

And he says all the same things about how emotional isolation is traumatizing and how sensitive we are and how to grow human beings. He says all the same things. That's one recent one that I just read. You know, it's funny. I just came home and literally that book is sitting on one of the dressers. So I think my girlfriend just bought that book. So it seems like she and I are having complementary explorations at the moment. Which is great. And the book that you named, you actually got it right.

The last lion by William Manchester, the last lion box set. It is a three volume set. And it has average of five stars out of five on Amazon 260 reviews. So it seems to be well liked. What I love about it, I think I love Winston Churchill because from my point of view, he was a successful human being. In that he was always honest to himself. He was always Winston. He was always, he took huge risks.

Even though some of those risks made him massively unpopular, there were periods of time when he was hated in the House of Commons. You know, his peers despised him, criticized him. He was creative. He was always honest. He was always who he was. I love that he used to go up in the blitz. Everyone else used to go into the shelters. He used to go up on the roof. And on watch the blitz as it was happening.

Okay. In the first world war, all his upper class colleagues, if they were in the battle at all, they were way behind the lines in a nice hotel somewhere. Winston gave up being a member of parliament and asked to go into the trenches. He said he wanted to see them. He wanted to see what they were like. He wanted to be there in the trenches. And mind you, he took his butler with him, which most of the men in the trenches did for the butler. But nevertheless.

Man, I would love to hear the conversation with the butler on that decision. Yes. So probably the butler didn't want to go into the trenches. But he was a risk taker. He had huge integrity. He was passionate. He stayed with that passion. Even though there were a lot of periods of time and he was completely rejected socially, he was true to himself and he was passionate. And I think he was one of the few human beings who could have led England through the Second World War and made it.

I don't know who else could have come forward to do that. So I find him fascinating. I find figures like him that have courage and stand for something. And even when the prevailing winds are going the other way, I always find that fascinating. Do you still dance tango? Is that something that you still pursue? I still dance tango and COVID has been so awful. And of course the parallel with couple relationships is obvious.

You know, when I first started to learn tango, my tango teacher would be teaching me and I suddenly say things like, stop. I got to write that down because it would be relevant for therapy. I mean, tango is about attunement and so is love. tango is about standing up, moving with somebody, changing weight with somebody, tuning into somebody and there's a safety check there. There's a, can I find you? Are you going to respond to me? Are you there? Can I feel you?

And then if the answer is yeah, if sometimes you go through the motions, the answer is no. And you go through the motions, you do the steps. But if it's a good dance, you find the other person and it's like, oh, there you are. There you are. Oh, I can feel that. Oh, and we tune into the music at the same time when we start to play.

And there's a synchrony there that is, happens in hold me tight conversations, happens in good sex, happens in its play and synchrony and it's two human beings impacting each other, responding to each other, sending cues, tuning into the cues. There's something intoxicating about it. So when I realized the parallel, I was not good at it. I want to tell you my teacher who was not big on empathy said something like, why do you want to teach tango? You're uncoordinated. You don't have any balance.

You're not 22. I said, thanks very much. I'm in my late 50s, actually, so thanks very much for that comment. At the time I learned tango, right, said, you're, you know, this is going to be very difficult for you. And I said, well, then shut up and stop teaching me because I'll just work hard around it than everyone else. That's all. He said, why didn't you want to do it?

I said, because there's something here, these, I get these little tiny moments where we're both moving together to this beautiful music that are just joyful. He just looked at me and said, all right, then, but you're going to have to work really hard. There's so many parallels. I can remember one lesson when I said to him, I got angry and I said, you're not sending me any cues. It's a bit like a couple. And just for people listening, this happens all the time.

These arguments between tango couples, they get into these bickering fights all the time. So please continue. So this is, so this is my teacher, right? And he says he's trying to teach me this new move. And I say, you're not saying anything. You're not sending me any cues. He says, the cues I am sending you are enormous. I said, what are you talking about? You're not sending me any cues. You're being, you be just being ridiculous. So bless his heart. He does what we do in the FT.

He says, feel it. He moves his shoulders slightly to the right about a millimeter. Can you feel that? He says, no. Do it again, feel it. Can you feel it? No. He does it 20 times. I say, oh. And sometimes what, this is what you have to do in a couple of relationships. You have to slow everything down and give people time to listen to a new thing. They're not used to hearing or can't take it. You have to slow it down. And you can't just do all this stuff fast. So then I go, oh, I got it.

And then he says, right. They says now, follow it. And I turn. This happened all the time. The parallels in relationships. And they were the same. So I'd go to Tango lessons and get completely enthralled, intellectually, emotionally, physically, I adore Tango. And I have to say, I probably shouldn't say this on air. I'm sorry. Oh, no, you're allowed to please do. I find, mostly I find it's easier to dance with women. And there aren't many women leaders.

And I can't figure out why that is, but I think it's because women have had to learn to tune into other people in order to survive socially over the years. They've had to do that. So maybe it's a little easier for them. But I find with women leaders often, or maybe I just feel a little safer with women leaders. Maybe that's what it is. I don't know. But often I find it easier to dance with women. Although I've had some amazing male partners too.

One of the big arguments in my marriage was that we started dancing Tango and then my husband said he wasn't going to do it. He didn't like it. So I won't tell you what, Sue Johnson said to that. He was not positive evening with both. That was like, you can't do that to me. I mean, the partner. And he basically said, it hurts my back. I'm not going to do it. And so that was very difficult. But we got through it. He goes hiking.

And I don't particularly like it when he goes hiking up mountains or by himself, it scares me. And for quite a while, he didn't particularly like it when I would go off to the Malonga. And as he put it, insist on dancing very, very close to other men for hours. I'm dancing Tango. It's very, very close. It's just the way it is. Anyway. What are my close friends? Does not dance. He does not dance. And his wife loves ballroom dance and dances a variety of different styles.

And I remember one Saturday, it might have been a Friday. It was a Saturday. He said, here's my wife's evening. And he sent a photograph that she'd sent him. She's in this really sleek, super sexy dress, all done up, looking gorgeous, dancing with this Latin guy. They're face to face. You know, sweating all over each other. And then he said, here's my evening. He sent a photograph and it was a table with arts and crafts with like a half a dozen kids going totally bad shit crazy.

And he painted quite a picture for himself. And I just want to backstep into what you were saying about Tango. It's making me really want to dance again. I haven't danced in a very, very long time. But for people who don't know, so a few things on the gender split. And Argentina, a lot of the Tango began in the port town of Buenos Aires with men dancing with other men. It was actually very common. Very, very common.

And even now you can find an eye trained because oftentimes in the classes when I was there, we wouldn't have enough women. Or you wouldn't have enough men. So women would dance with women, men would dance with men. And there are two brothers, I can't recall their names. I know who they are. Yes. They're incredible. Do you remember the name? No. No, but they're amazing. Oh, incredible.

Yeah. If somebody goes to YouTube and just searches, you know, Argentine dancing, Tango brothers or something like that, you'll see the two of them dancing. And it's a very aggressive masculine, almost violent type of Tango. It's incredible to watch. And you're bringing back so many memories for me. I remember being at different milongas like Niño Bien or Sundarland, Sunderland and all these different milongas.

And what struck me so much when I went to some of my first milongas, which for people wondering, start really late and end really late in Argentina. They often don't even really get going until midnight. It could be a Tuesday. It doesn't matter. And I went in and I noticed that many of the best female dancers danced with their eyes closed. Oh, yes. And the complexity of the movements were one thing.

And you watch and you just, you just can't understand how it's possible for someone to dance so deftly with such subtlety, so quickly with their eyes closed. But on top of that, as a beginner you walk in and you think to yourself, these two must have been practicing for months and months and months, years and years together. And then you find out it might be the first night they ever met. It's all cues and improv. It's just mind blowing. It's so impressive. And it's the synchrony.

That kind of physical and emotional synchrony moving with the music. That synchrony in this, it's joy in human beings. It's the reason why birds have mating rituals. Swans move there next in unison. They do this ritual. They move into synchrony. It happens with mothers and children. They move into synchrony. The little child opens his eyes. The mother leans forward and opens her eyes wider. A synchrony in tango, synchrony in love making between lovers, synchrony in hold me tight conversations.

This is our nervous system buzzing and say, yes, this is belonging. This is safety. This is joy. And our nervous system blases with this. And it's so rewarding. I tried to explain to my husband why I needed to keep tangering at one point. And I said, when I dance with, I was used to woman as an example.

You know, when I dance with Mary Ellen in 12 minutes of dancing, I'll have four straight moments of this incredible synchrony when my brain is out sitting in a chair looking and saying, how are you doing this? I don't understand you doing this. You don't know any of these moves. And what happened there? I don't understand how this is going because your prefrontal cortex isn't subtle in enough. You're picking up on the tunement and moving with someone. And this is what human beings can do.

We can read these cues incredibly fast. We have these mirror neurons in our brains that kick up the cues from somebody and feel them in our own body and uses the basis of empathy. And it's a beautiful thing. And so, yeah, when I first went to Malonga, I stood there and said, how do they do this? This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen and it's impossible. I don't understand. I want to do it. I want to do it. So, but it takes a long time.

And in a way, it's kind of the same discovery that our couples go through where, you know, somebody will say to me, I never felt this before. I never knew you could feel this. I never knew people could have these kinds of conversations. I never knew that I could talk about my feelings like this.

I never knew that I would talk about my feelings and I would look up and see in the other person's face that they wanted me and that they wanted this, and you know, someone will say, you don't have to keep problem solving or taking care of everything. You don't have to keep solving all the problems. What I want is you. If you tell me you're overwhelmed by this problem, that's what I want. I want the connection with you. And the other person goes, I've had people say, what did you say?

And the person has to repeat it like four times. It says, when they look at me with this blank look and I say, you can't take that in. You've never imagined a drama with another human being where somebody might say that to you and they go, no. And then they weep. Because in the end, what none of us can bear is the feeling that we're alone and that we don't matter to another human being. That's, you know, in our world, doesn't talk much about that.

You know, when I first heard that you wanted to talk to me, I thought, why does he want to talk to me? He's into business and he's into teaching people how to make money and he's into, and then somebody said, no, no, he's into success. And what helps people feel successful.

And I thought, oh, well, that's okay because from my point of view, success is about being really alive and being really alive is about being connected with others and knowing that they are our greatest resource and that that's where we are most alive, where the Reddancing Tango making love, responding to our child. It's such fun to talk to you. You're fun. I never know what questions you're going to, sometimes you ask quite intricate questions. That's really fun. You're fun too. You're fun too.

And I only have a few more questions because I know we're getting not necessarily too time, but we're definitely covering a lot of ground. You've mentioned sex a number of times. Good sex. And this is important to many, if not all, couples. And I'd love to pose a situation and hear how you might approach it. And that is, couple who love each other dearly, they actually do not seem to be shutting down, at least obviously.

They've been together a long time and maybe the passion, the fire has simply died down somewhat. They're more, I don't want to say roommates because that has a pejorative sound to it, but they're good parents, they love each other, they maybe still go on dates and so on. But for whatever reason, that sexual spark is not as strong as it used to be. How would you approach that situation, that couple?

What's always interesting to me about sexuality and sexual conversations is that our world arguably, sex is everywhere now compared to, even say, 20, 30 years ago, theoretically, we're more open and we're more accepting about sex, we're not so restrained and all that. So what's fascinating to me is, it seems to me that people, couples have an incredibly hard time having a conversation about their sex lives. And that's still true, and it was true 30 years ago, and it's still true now.

And I think it's because in sex people are literally naked. They are vulnerable. And they don't know how to even begin that conversation. So what we do is we create safety in the relationship, we have them look at the relationship and we walk into that conversation. One of the big conversations about that one is, there's a lot of evidence now, I think it's really good research about the difference between male and female sexuality.

And there's a lot of evidence that women respond differently to physiological to sexual cues. A woman can be physiologically aroused, for example, by a sexual cue, if you look at her in an MRI study, I think this was by a man called Gillath, Basel, Canadian researcher also talks about this. There's quite a few people. I think Chisim talks about it. So the evidence is a woman can be physiologically turned on.

If you ask her if she's turned on, she'll tell you no. Whereas where the man, physiological arousal and experience just goes together like that, they have an erection, they say, I'm aroused. The woman is something else that seems to happen. What seems to happen is that the woman's physiologically aroused and then her prefrontal cortex cues in.

And her prefrontal cortex, the theory now is, released studies, that her prefrontal cortex basically checks out the safety of the relationship, which makes sense because women are, I mean, let's face it, if you look at the sex act, women are vulnerable. They're naked, they're going to open their body, they're going to be penetrated by a stronger animal. This is a basic thing.

So it's almost like women check out the relationship and the connection and the safety before they then feel, they actually let themselves feel aroused. And so women take longer often to be aroused. Somebody said to me, what's the best for play I can do with my wife? I said, well, have you heard of talking here? I think what she's telling you is the best for play you can do with your wife is to talk to her and share with her.

And turn that, basically I didn't say turn that emotionally, but that's where I was going. Like show who you are, stand out on the dance floor, open your arms, it's like, and so women have a slower pace often, women have responsive desire. They don't start off from last. They start off from being open to their partner or being curious. They don't start from the same place as men. And people haven't known how to talk about that. And so men and women miss each other.

And also men, men talk about how the classic story is that men start talking about how they want sex. But time and time again, when we're dealing with a couple of sexual relationship, if you really go in and you really stay there, it's not just about orgasm because let's get real. It's just about orgasm, men can give themselves an orgasm very efficiently and so come women, there's amazing vibrators out there. Okay, so that's not an issue.

So it is not just about orgasm because if you listen to the man who says who's always badgering his wife for sex, what it comes down to is on an emotional level and he has a hard time getting there. He wants to feel wanted. He wants to feel desired. And in that, men and women are the same. And when that somehow a couple give each other the message, I don't particularly desire you.

One way of dealing with it, if you have other good things in the relationship, is to just shut that part of your relationship down and numbing out. But you can bring it alive, but you have to be able to be A-R-E. You have to be able to take some emotional risks. You have to turn and say, you love this kind of sex. Well, I want to tell you that for 20 years, I've hated it. I hate it. And then he said, you think it's the sexiest thing in the world to come up behind me and bite my neck.

I hate it when you do that. And he says, what are you talking about? And she just didn't feel safe enough to turn and say, I hate that. And here's why I hate it. People hang back. They shut down. But passion is about feeling safe enough to be completely absorbed in the experience and that it take you over. Passion is about full engagement. We talk about it, and that he's all about novelty. He's not all about novelty. Not novelty can turn passion on.

But the research is clear from people like Laumann at the University of Chicago. The people who have the best sex have it most often and who feel most enthralled, find it most thrilling are people in what you would call safe long-term relationships. Because then you can let go. You can passion is about erotic play. You can let go and play. And lots of couples have sort of put that part of their relationship off to the side. They haven't known how to tune into each other.

They haven't maybe accepted their own emotional needs. They haven't known how to talk about it. So we simply create safety and we open it up for them. And they start to share and talk and find it again. They have to have acceptance. Somebody has to be able to say, I was brought up a Catholic. There's some part of me that can never quite accept my own sexuality. And some part of me just needs you to be dominant, to demand it of me. And then I can get turned on.

Well she needs to be able to tell that to her partner because he's always comes onto her, consider it. And low key. He doesn't want to offend her in any way. But it doesn't work. So people have to be able to examine the way they dance together and share. Then they can find each other. And it's the same with sexual problems who hold me tight. One of my favorite stories I've got in the book of the man who has a rectile dysfunction.

And the trouble is, not that he has a rectile dysfunction, the trouble is, it freaks out every time he has a rectile dysfunction and shuts down and withdraws from his wife. And then she gets upset and feels rejected and abandoned. So the whole relationship starts to go to hell. And they can talk about it, connect with it. And I suggest that sometimes I think we call his penis George, I can't remember no, that I say sometimes George goes for a nipple nap.

And it's no big deal if they can stay connected with each other. And she can help wake George up. You know, she knows how to do that. They laugh and they play. And there's no problem after a while because they deal with it differently because they have this safe connection. But the trouble was the sexual problem was interfering with their safe connection and everyone was playing it safe and being nice to each other and keeping everything calm.

The thing is, what we've learned about attachment science can help us shape our emotional relationships and our sexual relationships. It gives us a map for how to do that. And it really challenges the old cliché that love and passionate love has a best before date. It really challenges that. Love has to be remade and passion isn't the same over 30 years, but it can still be made and remade. And there are times when people are more tuned into that than others.

But anyway, that's we could talk about sex forever. So that's a huge topic here, Tim. They are. We may have to do around two or three and four. There's a lot to talk about. Let me ask a follow up, which is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum with respect to one example you gave. So one of the examples you began with was that of female physiological arousal often preceding psychological arousal.

And I'd be curious to know because this seems to be common, at least among many men that I know and many men who write to me in some fashion, that they're extremely attracted to their partner for a period of time. And they see this in relationships one after the other for six, nine months, whatever it is. And then it's not that they stop being attracted to their partner.

They still can objectively and subjectively look at their partner and find them sexy and attractive, but they just do not have as much sex drive as they would like at a certain point in their relationship. Do you have any, not necessarily advice for them, but could be advice, but thoughts on how to approach that. So not a situation where the male is demanding or hoping for more sex, although that might be the case.

But in fact, a situation where the woman has more sustained sex drive than the male. Well that's an interesting one. I don't know. I mean, we condition men to think about physiologically their sexual need and their sexual response is very available to them compared to women. And it seems to be immediate and we condition men to accept their sexuality and to accept sort of last and to expect a certain amount.

So I don't know, I think it depends, and I may have been prejudiced because the cases that I've seen in that situation have usually been that there's another whole element going on, which is that there's a certain point in relationships where people realize that they're vulnerable and that this person holds their heart in their hand. And for some people, before that, the infatuation and the excitement and the novelty and all that stuff can carry them forward.

And then there's a moment when it's kind of like the bonding scenario kicks in and they realize they're vulnerable. This other person can hurt them and that they need this person. They need certain responses from this person. And for some folks, that is exceedingly difficult and they can't even really put their finger on what that's about and they start to shut down.

And I can remember one very dramatic case of this with this guy pursued this woman and adored her and everything was great and then they got married. And literally they got married and she became immediately pregnant and was very ill with the pregnancy so she was kind of withdrew. So from his point of view, he took the ultimate risk which he said he was never going to do and got married.

And the minute he did that, from his point of view, this person became unavailable, he completely shut down his sexuality. To completely, he numbed it out. Except in his mind, in his mind, she was still the most attractive woman in the world. He still had all kinds of active fantasies. I mean, he still had lust, he just shut it all down and that was all about the emotional reality of him suddenly coming up against this reality that he needed her. He'd risked and suddenly she wasn't there.

And of course, that was a very familiar experience for him from his childhood. And then she got angry, of course, because he wouldn't. He shut down and the whole relationship went bad. So these emotional scenarios can be complex. You have to ask what's going on.

I think there's also a point in couples' lives, especially in our present world where they get caught up in parenting, caught up in tasks, caught up in what we've decided is success, which is working longer and longer hours, being on your devices all the time. Literally, they don't pay any attention to the relationship and to the emotional music and to the connection. And then they suddenly expect it to be their own bed. Well, it's not because it all sort of goes together.

So we don't find it that difficult to help people if they want to go through those blocks. We don't find it that difficult to help people deal with their sex life differently with problems or to reawaken that passion. In fact, what we find is when people start having hold me tight conversations, we don't even talk about sex, they tell us their sex life improves.

Because they start to be able to play and take risks with each other and tell each other things they'd never been able to tell each other before and accept their own sexual desires or sensitivities in a new way and share them. So then this openness, this emotional openness and responsiveness turns into physiological openness and responsiveness. It's very hard to be open and physiologically responsive when you're afraid and guarding yourself all the time.

Yeah, those two sounds almost entirely mutually exclusive. Well I would like to, if you're open to a few more minutes, just to hear your description since people will want to explore this more of hold me tight online, the relationship enhancement program, what brought you to develop that and what can people expect if they engage with that? You can develop it with insanity because it's... The story of my life, mostly. Yes, it was insane amount of work.

And I got obsessed with the fact that we, from my point of view, this science and all our work had created this enormous possibility for people to have much better relationships, much more secure families, better mental health and somehow people weren't getting the message. I just became so disconcerted by that that I said, we got to do a hold meet, we got to do an online program, this is the only way it's going to reach people.

So my colleagues, bless their hearts, I seem to have this ability to go in and say insane ideas and then people pick them up and suddenly we're working for about four years on this huge project. So we created this, the online program is it's got little talks, it's got three couples going through the process, when you see the three couples working, it's got little bits of music, little exercises, it's customized, we put a huge amount of work into it.

I don't know of any other program like it out there, especially not based on tested interventions and a clear science of what love relationships are about, we get very good feedback on it. I'm very encouraged by the fact that the military, the US military I believe and the Canadian military are using it now and the government of British Columbia where I live on the west coast of Canada has just bought a number of them.

I think they're going to give them to first responders whose relationships are having a whole time, the heart institute is talking about creating an online program because they haven't a live program in their hospital now in Ottawa. So I'm very encouraged by the fact that institutions are picking it up, but it's supposed to take the hold me tight book and turn it into a live engaging online program that you can do with your partner.

And there's some research on the educational program based on hold me tight. There's no research yet on the online program, but we're still working on it. We want to, for example, the three couples who agreed to be filmed through this, we just took the first three couples that came into the studio in Ottawa and did it with me, did those conversations with me in a very snowy winter. So when I look at them now, it looks middle dated those three couples.

There's a young couple, a couple that are facing all kinds of other difficulties and an older couple. They're still useful, you can still see, but we've added, we started to add conversations like we have a black couple right now with a black facilitator talking about that and talking about issues with racism and how that impacts your relationship. We're trying to put new conversations in. You can see a couple go through it. You can hear me talk about it. You can learn about it.

You can hear the stories about it. You can do exercises. I mean, it's really designed to lead you into being able to have your own hold me tight conversation. And I think, well, I'm a bit crazy about all this, but we need books and we need online programs. We need to educate people about relationships.

It's insane that we have all this science and understanding and that we are not sharing it and putting it out so that we can have more positive, loving, cooperative relationships and more secure families from my point of view, it's insane. So we created the program and we're going to keep adding to it and hopefully institutions will keep picking it up. And for a while, we did it and online wasn't popular. And so it just sat there and I thought, what do I have to do to get this stuff out there?

But it has picked up quite a lot of people are hearing about it. I think this conversation will help at least with a handful of people. Yes. So that's the hope. And this has been so much fun. Dr. Sue Johnson, you are blessed to talk to and I will of course add show notes with links to everything and people can find you at Dr. Sue Johnson, DR SU E Johnson, J-O-H and S-O-N, Dr. Sue Johnson, dot com. They can find the hold me tight online program at hold me tight online dot com.

You're on all the social. I'll link to those in the show notes and people can find you on Twitter at Dr. DR. That's at DR underscore Sue Johnson. Is there anything else that you would like to say and closing comments and requests of my audience, anything at all that you would like to add before we close this first very enjoyable conversation for me at least I don't want to speak for you.

The only thing that caused me is to say on a personal level that one of the enormous realities of my childhood was that I understood that my parents loved each other and they forked continually. That was something that distressed me, puzzled me, alarmed me, freaked me out. And I think way back there somewhere, sitting on the stairs in the dark, listening to the fight, I somehow felt that there had to be a better way. There had to be a better way.

And I think the other thing was I adored my father and in the end, the fact that marriage didn't work destroyed him, whereas the Second World War didn't destroy him or because of other things didn't destroy him. But the fact that that marriage didn't work destroyed him.

So I knew how important relationships were and for me, when I started to see couples and I started to see patterns and then I started to link it to attachment science and I suddenly realized that there was a way that we can understand love, that we can understand and shape our most precious relationships. That is just something that I just feel like we need so desperately.

It's so important on so many levels that I just want people to know that you don't have to fall in and out of love and that even if you've never seen this kind of bonding, you can find it, we can show it to you on a video, we can tell you a story about it, you can do it. It's wired into us.

But there's incredible hope for relationships because more and more people are living alone, more and more people are giving up on love relationships, more and more people are saying things like monogamy is impossible, doesn't work. This just brings up despair in me because it's like we have this, we have the way forward and we're not using it. So that's why I do things like make crazy online programs that take me four years and anyway, it's been amazing fun to talk to you.

Thank you, it's been a great time and I'm so glad that you were able and grateful that you are willing to carve out the time to have this conversation. I really think it's going to help a lot of people, this has been incredibly helpful for me personally. I've taken a ton of notes, I have a lot of things to follow up on.

I'm going to have some very, very, I think some very bonding and engaging conversations with my girlfriend and this has inspired me to further seek out the tools that help us to shape the love that we need and want instead of just waiting for some miracle to fall from the sky or a disaster to fall from the sky and it's very enabling to hear you speak and to get a better understanding of your work and certainly I can only imagine to engage with the work that you've developed.

I'm very grateful to you for the time and for the work that you're doing. I think these tools are invaluable and never more needed certainly than right now. I think that word despair that you mentioned is something that a lot of people have become intimate with in the last year but that the last year has really just magnified I think an underlying despair that many people already felt. I agree. I'm so glad that we were able to take the time together.

Thank you very, very much and perhaps if you have time in the future we'll do around too but we'll, we'll, we'll no need to rush that but really, really tremendously enjoyed this conversation. So thank you again. You're welcome. Lovely to talk to you. Lovely to talk to you and you asked wonderful questions so I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Oh, my, my pleasure entirely and for everybody listening, I'll have links to everything in the show notes as usual at Tim.blog forward slash podcast and until next time thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles on reading, books on reading, albums perhaps gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on.

They get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

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It has a multibitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and antioxidant immune support formula that just events times and adapt to genes to help manage stress. Now I do my best always to eat nutrient dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement. That is why things are called supplements. Of course that's what I focus on. But it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily.

It's on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1, that's just like brushing my teeth part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports and professional athletes trusted to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 band substances.

That's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and 5 free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Okay, this is going to be part confessional.

As some of you know, I am recently single in navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess as many of you probably know. I've tried all the dating apps and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is the leak. I've been using it for a few months now and I found some great matches.

I am going to use this ad, this sponsor to selfishly share my own profile with the ladies listening to this podcast. My handle is Tim Tim. That's at Tim Tim or just Tim Tim. I think you can search by person and just put in Tim Tim and you'll find me and then you can match with me. I'll tell you more about what I'm looking for in a bit. But before that, why did I end up using the leak? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck.

On the leak, you're starting with a baseline of smart people and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the leak users want to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work and that is one of the reasons that I use it.

People verify using LinkedIn. So you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. For instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding.

Have those as interest as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a tourist and mountain guy. The UI is a little clunky. I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out.

Features available on the leak include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from coworkers, bosses, family, etc. That's very easy to do. You can search by interest. You can get profile stats and there is a personal concierge in the app. There's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for? I am looking for a woman who is well-educated, who loves skiing or snowboarding or both.

These are, and I use this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just, I'll leave it at that for now. Someone who's default upbeat likes to smile, smiles often, class half full type person, who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years. Her friends with a subscriber has feminine and playful and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle, I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea.

It could be a rock climber dancer, whatever, but has some muscle. Loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag, date 10, so hashtag, date 10, in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up. Again you can also find my profile under the handle, Tim Tim. That's all one word, T-I-M, T-I-M. So these are all reasons why I was excited when the leak reached out to sponsor the podcast.

I'm not the least of which is that I get to pitch my dating profile on the podcast. They even have daily speed data where you can go on three three minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So check it out, download the leak today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who aren't in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating.

You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download the leak today on iOS or Android and check it out. Message hashtag Tim to your in app concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. Let's check it out the leak on iOS or Android.