Matthew Hussey

Lemonade.

I went up to this bouncer. My friends had already all got in, and I gave him my id and he looked at me and he went, what year were you born? I think. No, I was gonna say I haven't.

The first thing you should do is practice the year.

Yeah.

Do you know what? I think I had studied? I was gonna say I hadn't studied it, but I think I had. And my mind went.

Yeah, you got nervous.

Welcome to podcrust. We're your hosts. I'm Penn.

I'm Nava.

And I'm Sophie. And I think we would have been your middle school besties forming a rock.

Band in your parents garage. And no, we won't keep it down.

Hello. Welcome to Pod Crushed, you know.

Oh, you're doing it.

Yeah, I'm doing it. I'm taking the reins today.

Wow, we just lost thousands of listeners. Sophie. They just dropped out.

Sophie's here.

Sign up for this.

Not a m. Not a deep male voice is the first thing greet my ears.

It's really what people have come to expect.

We've asked each other a lot of questions about love over the years.

I know. I'm so tired of it.

But I have a new question. I want to know about the first slow dance you ever had. Do you remember it?

I think. I don't know if this is my actual first slow dance, but the first one that I remember, I was in sixth grade. I want to say sixth grade at a back to school dance. It was the first week of school. I had gone dress shopping with my dad and had picked out a dress at Contempo Casuals, which I think doesn't exist anymore. And I think my first slow dance was with my friend Luis Oscar Sanchez. He was my best friend in elementary school. He was gay.

Did you know it at the time?

He had not come out at the time, but we kind of knew. But we were just really good friends. And it was a comfortable person to have my first low dance with. And it was really sweet.

Oh, sweet.

How about you, Sophie?

Well, my first dance slow dance was also with someone who was gay, but I didn't know it at the time.

He was your boyfriend?

He was my boyfriend. But it was really sweet. It was to the song hey there Delilah in the cafeteria at my. At the elementary school. It was a middle school dance, but it was the elementary school cafeteria.

Yeah.

And it was really sweet and like, you know, heart racing. It was very pg, you know, like.

Room for the holy spirit.

Yes, exactly. But it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

That's really sweet. What about you, Pen?

He's trying to say something snarky, but he's lagged.

I don't know when it was happening, but at some point you're talking about your gay boyfriend and then you said pg and then I said, like, pretty gay.

No.

How about you, Pen? What was your first slow dance like.

From what I can recall? So there's like three memories I have and I don't know that they happened all at the same time. These are the, this is the dances. So first of all, I wore a suit with my friend Jack Saffle. I know that also around that time, Casey and Jojo was very huge. Huge, Absolutely huge. And then I just remember dancing with one of the. Very clearly, like she was one of the hot girls, one of the popular girls, but she clearly did not want to dance with me. It was, it was, I mean, it was abundantly clear. You know, it's like, it was like, it was like a mercy dance, you know, and she kind of kept it at arm's length and we were sort of dancing. It was just, it was humiliating in this way. Quietly, quietly. Obviously I was trying to just act like, yeah, this is cool. This is what we do, you know, whatever. But I just felt like such a chomp. And a friend came up and just, you know, made some like, joke that, that I recall now doesn't. It doesn't even like, make sense. It's just, you know, the way kids are so awkward and they're like all laughing about it and it's like you just, you just don't know what the hell you're doing. Your body seems so foreign. So that's, that's what I can recall. And then, you know, that stuff didn't.

Get.

Fun until I was in my teens.

Well, today's guest is the perfect person to help us all process sort of the.

Yeah.

The childhood wounds that hold us back in dating.

Yeah. Today we have Matthew Hussey, New York Times best selling author, speaker and relationship coach. He's known for his practical advice on love and relationships and he's helped millions through his YouTube channel, his seminars and his books. Get the Guy. And now his latest one, Love Life. It's out. Now we. Am I going to say we loved having Matthew on. But yes, we did. We, we loved having him on. The relationship gets really deep. Oh, see what I just did there? That was a slip. The conversation gets deep and, and I really, really loved hearing about Matthew's early life. He's a really sweet Humble guy. I think you'll also love this conversation. Please stick around.

Hi, I'm Megan and I've got a.

New podcast I think you're going to love.

It's called Confessions of a Female Founder, a show where I chat with female entrepreneurs and friends about the sleepless nights, the lessons learned, and the laser focus that got them to where they are today.

And through it all, I'm building a business of my own and getting all.

Sorts of practical advice along the way that I'm so excited to share with you. Confessions of a Female Founder is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcast.

Hi, everyone. I'm David Duchovny. Join me on my podcast, Fail Better, where we use failure as a lens to reflect on the past and analyze the current moment. I speak with makers and performers like Rob Lowe, Rosie o' Donnell, and Kenya Barris, as well as thinkers like Kara Swisher and Nate Silver to understand how both personal setbacks and larger forces impact our world. Listen to Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts. We start with adolescence, you know, because it's a unique formative period. There's things happening then that are just not happening in any other phase of life. Nava and Sophie, my co hosts, are previously in former lives. They were both middle school administrators and. Or teachers. You go ahead, pick which one you think.

The one with the blazer was the administrator.

I mean, it's pretty obvious.

Okay, so your most recent book, Love Life, you actually, you start. It's dedicated in part to your mom. Your mom, who seems to be a very big part of your life. You know, she's like been involved in your, in any of your stage appearances that seems like she's, she's there. So, you know, if we're going to talk about adolescence and growing up, a huge part of that is your parents. So. So can you tell us a bit about your relationship with them growing up?

Well, my parents are from the East End of London. They're like your classic Cockneys. I don't know if that means anything to a lot of Americans, but I, I always think whenever, if you don't know what Cockney is, it's just always, if there's ever a villain in a movie, they always seem to have a Cockney accent. But the. That my parents were from the East End of London, which is that. That world. And from very humble beginnings. And my mom, my mom have always had such a close relationship with her. She's. I've always been very protective of my mum, and that never really changed. I as you say, Penn, she's. She comes to. I've run a retreat every year and she comes to every single program that I do. She's actually coming out here to Los Angeles to be with me and my wife Audrey, in two weeks. So she's just a very big part of my life. But I was lucky. I had an entrepreneurial father, so I got a lot of entrepreneurial spirit from him. And I think a lot of that. That drive to do things and to try something that people might think is a bit silly from the outside or think is an unorthodox path, I definitely got that from my dad. And my mum was always much more craving security and safety. And so she. I remember when. When I started my path, which was like, can you imagine telling your parents, like, oh, I'm helping women in their love lives. That was like, not a. It wasn't a career. It wasn' anything anyone thought would be anything. And this was also, I feel like pre. It was like very, very early days. YouTube, pre. Instagram, pre. You know, seemingly every fourth person being a coach of some kind, giving advice online. And so it really was at that time, this was going back, you know, 16, 17 years now. A strange path for someone to go on, but it was normal to my dad, who'd always, you know, done unique and different things. He owned a nightclub when I was growing up. So I started my first job was as a pot boy in this nightclub and. Which is what the person picking up glasses and whatnot. And my mum kind of was scared. She. She had been through an entrepreneurial life with my dad and she did not have any romance about that whatsoever. So for her, it was like, can't you go and get a nice, like, safe job as a banker or something? Like, do you have to? Like, that was her in her mind, coming out of the East End. It was like the safe jobs were the guys who, like, when and, you know, use their ability to talk to go and trade in the financial center in London. But she. The world I was walking into was kind of everything she wanted me to get away from.

So how old were you when you were working in a nightclub? You said like, nine.

Oh, 13. Thirteen, yeah. Way too young. It was very. I look back now and it's like, that was wildly inappropriate. I shouldn't have been. It wasn't like a glamorous nightclub either. I don't want anyone picturing. Picturing my accent immediately gave you a different impression. It doesn't sound like I'm from the posh part of London. So you were like, this wasn't some nice club in Chelsea. No, I, it was a club in Essex, which is just outside of London and it was a rough club. I mean it was like, you know, I saw all sorts of nasty stuff there and people getting in fights and being thrown through doors by bouncers and it was, it was a kind of a weird environment to grow up in. But I, I started working collecting glasses at 13 and then work my way up to 15. I was the warm up DJ in the club on Friday and Saturday night.

This is amazing. So, so you're, well, we call it middle school, but you're at, you're like your early adolescent years were spent in like at nights partly in a nightclub that was your father's. That's definitely a first on our show.

Yeah, it was a weird, it was a weird experience and it was sort of, it was, it was cool kind of, you know, like when you've got friends that want to drink and they're not old enough to go and drink, but you're sort of their ticket to like sneak into places and I didn't.

Think you needed a ticket in, in England for that. It just kind of starts, doesn't it?

It's so funny. I remember. Well, people do start early in England. My first experience, a really embarrassing experience of going out one night was all my friends getting into a local club and me having a fake ID. I was 15. So. Yes. Like the fake ID, the beginning of fake IDs in England, I think starts earlier.

Yeah.

I don't think in America, what you might.

Drinking age is younger.

Yeah. Like in America you might be using a fake ID in college.

Yeah. 17, 18.

Yeah, yeah. So I was like 15 and I had a fake ID, which did.

Can I, can I ask, were you like, were you, did you happen to be a tall 15 year old?

No. Or did you completely underdeveloped, like, just not looking like I should have been out at that time of night, couldn't grow stubble and I, I went up to this bouncer, my friends had already all got in and I gave him my id and he looked at me and he went, what year were you born? And I hadn't, I think no, I.

Was like, the first thing you should do is practice the year.

Yeah.

Do you know what? I think I had studied. I was going to say I hadn't studied it, but I think I had and my mind went completely.

Yeah, you got nervous.

Yeah, yeah, I got nervous. Which by the way has not. Like, I still have those moments in adulthood. I can tell you another story of going blank on the Today show live with Kathy Lee as an adult. But I. I went. Like, the exact same thing happened to me. I went completely blank. And I went, I don't know. And the guy just looked at me. The guy just looked at me and went, prick. And then. And then took my id, pocketed it, and I just walked away with my friends all in this. I was like. It was one of those moments. I look back. It was hilarious to look back on.

Yeah.

At the time, you know, when you have a moment where you're like, I'm gonna think about this for the next three years.

Yeah.

Like, this is just gonna be this moment that I replay over and over again.

So, yeah, I'm picturing you 15 years old, DJing some nights at your. Your dad's nightclub, and I'm trying to figure out how you ended up where you are and what was your path towards becoming a relationship coach. Like, how did you.

What were.

What made you interested in it in the first place?

It's such a funny story. I really enjoyed playing music and mixing and all of the things that come with. With playing out as a dj, but the thing that I really had to work up the courage to do was speak on the microphone. And actually, you know, they would keep telling me, like, you got to talk to the crowd more. You're not talking to the crowd, you're just playing, you know, And I was. I had to, like, learn that part. And I did actually learn a lot about reading and how to. How to work a room through that. And that still serves me today. But from the kind of self development perspective of what I do now, I was. My dad, being that kind of entrepreneurial person, he was always interested in self development. So he had a bookshelf full of books. And we had ups and downs. When I was growing up, you know, we'd live in a nice house, and then, you know, my dad went bankrupt when I was a kid, and we got moved into a trailer because he had a plot of land but no money to put anything on it. So we ended up living on a. In a trailer in this plot of land. But it doesn't. Wherever we were, there was always books, and they were usually books around psychology or success or, you know, like all the kind of stereotypical kind of books that people listen to when they're trying to motivate themselves. And one of the books on the shelf was how to Win Friends and Influence People and by Dale Carnegie, obviously a seminal book, almost a cliche These days, that book. And I was 11 years old, I think, when I saw that on the shelf and picked it up, and I became a kind of mildly obsessed. I was reading it in every free period I had at school. I just loved this idea that because I was a shy kid and I was also introverted. So there was. It was kind of a magical moment for me, this concept that you weren't stuck with however you thought you were, and that you could actually make more of an impact by learning certain things. That was a big moment for me, and it sparked an interest. It sparked a passion at that time that led me into devouring lots of books like that. And then, weirdly, when I was. I was either 14 or 15, I think my friend, his dad used to take his whole company to see Tony Robbins every year, and it was like, he was in English, obviously, this was in Essex in England. But he would. He. Tony Robbins would come once a year to do a show in England at this huge arena called the Excel center in London. And he was coming this year. And the friend came up to me at school, my friend, and said, my dad's dragging me to this thing with this guy, Tony Robbins, and he says, I can bring a friend, so do you want to come? And what he didn't know at the time was I had already read, like, half of Tony Robbins book. It was part of, like, that experience of devouring all these books. So I played it cool in front of him, but I was like, yes, I want to come and see Tony Robbins live. I. I couldn't afford to go myself. I. This is the funny thing. I had even spent. I'd even had a phone call with one of their sales team, like to talk to them about an event, but I didn't have a credit card, so I don't know where I thought it was going. I just had the phone call and wasted some salesperson's time. But I ended up going to that event, and it became the marriage of the. The content I'd been learning about, but with someone who had this unbelievable delivery and this impact that none of my teachers seemed to have at school. It was like, I can't believe someone can command a room like that. And so that became the birth of, like, I feel like I want to do something in this area, but I don't know what. And then my next kind of step was realizing that all of these things that I was learning as a very shy and introverted young guy would probably have some utility for me in trying to talk to girls at that age. And so that became my like, first, you know, practical use of all these things I was learning was to try to be a bit more courageous with girls at the time because my whole experience of being a teenager was not in choosing the people that I wanted to date, it was being too shy to talk to the people I wanted to date. And instead having a, a girl's friend come up to me and say, my friend likes you and wants to go out with you. And then basically after the 20th time of saying that, me going, okay, I'll go like, because I just knew I was like, I'm not going to go and talk to anyone else, so I should just go on a date. I should just date you because you're asking me. And so my experience was that of being chosen rather than doing the choosing. And that weirdly ended up after some years leading me to work with women because in a strange way I actually came to relate to the female experience because I was like, oh, one of the reasons women are struggling so much is because they're waiting to be chosen and they're not doing the choosing. They've been taught they can't be proactive or that it's not, you know, it's, it's not old fashioned and it's, you know, the right thing to do is to kind of play it cool. The last thing you want to be is desperate. So I ended up learning, oh, there's a lot of women who don't want to make a move for different reasons than I don't want to make a move. Being brought up as a guy, I've been taught it's my job to make the move, but I'm still too scared to make the move. So weirdly I ended up relating to that feeling of being chosen instead of doing the choosing. And, and that became my first kind of, I suppose, lesson into the world of helping women, which I started at. I must have been 20 years old when that started.

Wow.

Yeah. Which also doesn't make any sense and feel free to ask me questions about that. But yeah, it's like I, well, it's a strange place I ended up in for sure.

I don't think that anybody comes to a calling in life like this by sheer, I don't know, accident or happenstance that if part of your work is to sort of see people's pain, to sit with them in their pain. I'm curious if you have any insights into where that comes from. Like what's that, when that might have. What happened to you, Matthew? No, I'm just curious, like, you know.

It'S a great question. I think that throughout my life as a, as a, as a teenager, as a kid, I got used to having to adapt to new circumstances very quickly and, and in many ways not being given the space to actually process anything, but just to have to adapt. You know, whether it was, you know, I said we, we had some hard times in life and having to, you know, have our world upended and then being forced to go, well, now you just have to get on with this new reality and, and losing things over and over again. That was a big experience of mine. For my, my, my childhood was kind of this feeling of the other shoe is always about to drop and when it does, it's going to be painful and messy and difficult and you're going to have to learn how to be happy with these whole new circumstances. And that created a hell of a lot of hyper vigilance for me. I mean, I still, to this day I have to work on not having this feeling of the other shoe is always about to drop then going into adulthood. You know, I worked really, really hard in my 20s, got to about 27, it hit a real crash because I wasn't happy. I felt very numb to everything. It was, everything was going very well on paper, but I felt very numb.

And that you must have, you must have already been at this point in I think la, and you were successful.

I was in la. I, I had my first book, get the Guy, had become a New York Times bestseller. I had had a couple of TV shows, I had had a team, a sizable team. I had about 20 people in my company and you know, it just is. I had bought a house in LA and I, I remembered I had a company retreat where everyone came out to, you know, do some vision stuff for the next year. And I just remember having a really, really scary moment where I was, I just was not in a good place. And I think that I'd been running for so long in my life, I don't think it was that. It was not I became successful and then couldn't handle the success or anything like that. It was that the same thing that made me successful hadn't gone away. And the things that made me successful were quite negative in a lot of ways. You know, it was me running from something. It was me trying to create security, it was me trying to create safety where I didn't feel a sense of safety. You know, it was just a constant like running, running, running. And then one of the things I talk about in the book is I started to develop chronic physical pain.

Tinnitus.

Right. It started with tinnitus, even on its own was really freaked me out because I kept waking up every night, month after month, thinking, okay, like, I would wake up in the middle of the night and think, please go away, please go away, Please let me. Like, and then it would still be there, this loud ringing, and I would like break down every time because I thought, I don't know, I, I don't know what to do. I'd been able to fix everything in my life until that point, or so I thought, but I, that was like something I couldn't fix. I couldn't make it go away. And I went to doctors and they were like, well, we can't make it go away. It's very, it's not very well understood tinnitus and it's not there' I couldn't, there's not a cure for it. And then that ended up, I think the way that I agonized and stressed and made myself deeply, deeply depressed over that ended up creating even more symptoms. And I had pain in my head and ear and all sorts of symptoms. And over a seven year period that became like one of the biggest, one of the biggest battles of my life was me feeling like life is not worth living anymore because I'm this physic. This pain is making me so unhappy that I don't know what to do. I don't know. I'm. I, I literally. I went to a therapist at the time I started therapy because of my chronic pain. And I remember saying to a therapist at the time, I think I'm just gonna live for everyone else now because, you know, I was, in a way, I was lucky. I had a family that, that loved me. I had a team that I was, you know, the, the company that I was running was supporting. And, you know, I, A lot relied on me and that kind of saved me because I had all these people that I was like, every morning I get up and I can do something for those people, not to mention an audience of people that I was helping. I said to him, like, I'm not, I'm like gonna have to live for everyone else, I think, from now on, because I just don't, I don't feel joy anymore. Anything I do. And he was like, that is Hallmark depression. Like, what you're experiencing is. He said, it's, it's has its origins in physical pain, but it's a distinction without, without a difference. You know, you, you, the result is that you are. You're in a place of real depression right now. And I went through a really bad heartbreak over those years as well. I'd always been in the driving seat in my love life, and then I was in a relationship where I wasn't in the driving seat. And by design, by the way, I'd always been in the driving seat in my love life. I'd always picked people that I felt like I, you know, was in control. And then I was in a situation where I wasn't, and I got very badly heartbroken. And so that just was like. There was a period of my life where it felt like it was just one big kind of cataclysmic heartbreak after another, where it was whether it was a heartbreak of, like, I'm never going to be happy in my future because I can't get rid of this pain. And with this pain, I can never be happy. Whether it was the heartbreak of, you know, a relationship ending or the heartbreak of achieving things and none of it working for me, it just felt like a huge portion of my life was defined by pain at the same time, by the way that I was helping all of these other people in their lives, which is a really weird, paradoxical position to be in. And so I got really, really comfortable empathizing with people and talking to people about their hardest moments. I was really comfortable in a dark space like that that just became fluent for me. And I think in a way, it became my superpower because while there were so many, it seemed like there were so many self development people out there who were constantly in this state of, like, peak performance and optimization and happiness and passion and this and that. I was coming from a completely different end of the spectrum, which is like, if you're in deep pain and you're struggling and you're figuring out how the hell to get up today, I'm your guy. So I think that's where that came from.

And we'll be right back.

Hey, Julia, Louis Dreyfus here. If you listen to me on my Wiser Than Me podcast, you probably already know that I'm an investor and an evangelist for the Mill Food recycler. There are a lot of reasons to love mill, but for me, it's all about the impact. Keeping food out of the garbage is one of the most powerful things we can do to help the planet. Every single day, talking banana peels, carrot tops, old takeout. When that stuff heads to the landfill, it becomes a huge driver of climate change. If you already compost, great. But of course there's the smell, the flies, the running to the curb every day with a little leaking compost bag made of cornstarch. That's where mill comes in. It makes keeping food out of the trash as easy as dropping it in. It can handle nearly anything from a turkey carcass to like 20 avocado pits. It works automatically while you sleep. You can keep filling it for weeks and it never ever smells. Mill makes dry, nutrient rich grounds that you can use in your garden, add to your compost, feed to your chickens, or mill can get them back to a small farm for you. But you kind of have to live with mill to really get it. And that's why they offer a risk free trial. Go to mil.com wiser for an exclusive offer.

Is your child struggling with a specific subject in school? Maybe they've started asking questions on their homework that you don't feel equipped to answer. Whatever it is, IXL is here to help. IXL Learning is an online learning program for kids. It covers math, language arts, science and social studies. IXL is designed to help them really understand and master topics in a fun way with positive feedback. As a former teacher, I have seen firsthand how powerful personalized learning can be, which is exactly why I recommend ixl. I remember using IXL for my students to practice literary skills like determining the theme of a short story. That was a surprisingly tricky skill for them to grasp. So it was super helpful to have IXL to fall back on and give me ideas for exercises or just even like put them on IXL during some of their independent practice time, IXL goes beyond basic practice by adapting in real time to each student's skill level, giving them the support they need exactly when they need it. It's honestly amazing. A nice little perk is that if you have multiple kids in the home, one subscription gets you everything pre K to 12th grade, so all the kids in your home can benefit from it. IXL is used in 96 of the top 100 school districts in the U.S. make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now and Podcrust listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL memberships when they sign up today at ixl.com podcrushed Visit ixl.com podcrush to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Have you got any fun summer travel planned? Any trips coming up? Imagine how much more enriching your travels will be when you can speak the language. Rosetta Stone gives you the confidence to connect with locals and experience cultures more authentically. With 30 years of experience, millions of users, and 25 languages offered, Rosetta Stone is the go to language learning solution. Rosetta Stone immerses you in your new language naturally, helping you think and communicate with confidence. There are no English translations, so you truly learn to speak, listen, and think in your chosen language. Rosetta Stone uses an intuitive learning process, starting with words, building to phrases, and progressing to full sentences. Because I grew up all over the world, I grew up in seven different countries. The first question that anybody asks me when I tell them that's how I grew up is, oh, my God, how many languages do you know? And I always have to admit to them, I actually only know English. I was conversational with Mandarin at one point, but sadly, it's only English. I wish that weren't the case. And so I use Rosetta Stone when I can to help me work on some Spanish. Because a lot of the people where I live speak Spanish. My dream is to become fluent. And I love that. Rosetta Stone makes language learning so accessible. I can learn anytime, anywhere, either from my computer, at home, or from their mobile app when I'm on the go. And their lessons fit into my schedule, whether I have five minutes between meetings or calls or an hour to spend on the weekend. Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership is an incredible value. It gives you access to all 25 languages, so you can learn as many as you want whenever you want. Don't wait. Unlock your language learning potential. Now. PodCrush listeners can grab Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. That's unlimited access to 25 language courses, free for life. Visit rosetta stone.com podcrush to get started and claim your 50% off today. Don't miss out. Go to rosettastone.com podcrushed and start learning today. On the first page of your book, Matthew, you said that. I'm gonna read it. You said, and the great joke of life is that from the moment we start ranting righteously about any one thing, life will conspire to make us trip up in that specific area. And when I read that, I was wondering how you have found ways to guard against that when you give advice on such a large, large scale. And I think probably you answered that a little bit with what you just said, that you, you're open about your own struggles and your own pain. But I wonder if there's anything else you would add.

No, I think you're right, Sophie. I think you have to. You. You either keep the essing people or you start to live more authentically and you embrace that and you hope that you'll still have an audience at the end of it. And, and that was kind of my journey was in my 20s. I think I was trying to be something, trying to know it all, trying to sound like I knew more than I did. And then I hit a point in my 30s where I thought I just want to, I want to connect with people. And I don't need to be impressive to connect with people. I just need to be authentic and impre. And connecting became the game over impressing people. And the nice thing about connecting was that it allowed me to be a student again. Because there's something really like if anyone asked me, you know, someone's decided to start giving advice at an age where they don't know it or what would be your advice to them? Be? I'd be like, just document your learning and talk about that. If you, if you try to know it all, you're going to delay your growth by many years because you'll be, it'll become your prison. And, and so for me, I like kind of got out. I feel like I broke free of that prison and now I'm in the best place I've ever been because I get to, I get to really be myself. I don't have to come to this conversation with you guys who are all impressive people and you're people that easily. If I came to this being like I'm trying to impress, I'm immediately anxious and intimidated and you know, because these people have done so much and I don't want to, but actually instead if I just come to connect and I can't really fail at that, so I, it allows me to relax. And I actually think that's an interesting lesson for dating in general is it's, you know, people, people come to the table to try and impress instead of connect. And I think that's the source of so many people's issues in their love Life.

Matthew, in 2017 or 2018, I think you came to New York City and you did like a day long seminar and I had two friends, I lived in New York at the time and I was going through a really difficult situation that was of my own construction. Like I had authored a story that I couldn't get out of and I had a friend sort of visiting and she was like, let's go to this. You know, Matthew Hessey has this retreat. Do you know who he is? I was like, no. I was like, I don't want to go And I think I just didn't want to be vulnerable on any level. And my friend, like, truly dragged me. And then at like one or something, she was like, let's, you know, we can go. I know you didn't want to come, and we've already been here a long time. And I was like, no, no, no, we're staying for the whole thing. And it truly, like changed my life. And I took notes on that day that I still revisit, I still share them with friends, but it helped me just like change the story that I was telling. And it was sort of like it released me from a prison that I couldn't get out of for several years. So I wanted to thank you personally for that. But I also want to read a quote from your book that I think summarizes a lot of what you were saying that day. And then I want you to help us unpack it. Actually, Sophie, can you read it? Because I'm too emotional.

Yeah, of course. A real relationship requires bravery from both sides. It requires us to be vulnerable enough to allow ourselves to be seen. It requires curiosity and vision to fully take in who the other person is, to really see them, to accept their on camera selves and their hidden behind the scenes mess. To view their worst parts with acceptance and generosity, not contempt. And to have enough faith and strength to trust the other person to offer the same latitude to our darker sides. On top of all this, it requires two people who actually have a vision for where they want the relationship to go and the daily execution to move toward that vision. Exceptional relationships are not found. They're built.

And I wondered if you could just share more about that concept of like choosing, building, like working as a teammate with someone even from the very beginning, like, what are the signs that you could do that with someone early on?

Do you mind? Feel free to say no, but do you mind, Sophie, telling. Sharing with us what you connect with about that that brings up emotion for you?

Me? Yeah.

Never.

One is the idea. I think the idea of being brave and being vulnerable enough to be seen is like something that I have struggled with, particularly the vulnerability part. And not in other areas of my life, like just in my love life. And that's something that Penn has told me. Like in other areas, like, you show up like you're so bold. Like, no one would think of you as someone who lacks courage. And like, I'm vulnerable with him. But in your love life. Penn called me one day. I was like, you're. You need to level up. Like you're being super strange in your love life and like, it doesn't add up with who you are in other places. And so I still struggle with.

Yeah, we have that in common. I, I, I know that in the beginning I, I kind of always thought I was a vulnerable person and it took me until my relationship now. You know, ironically, I, when I started writing this book, I was single and I finished the final edit on my honeymoon, which is crazy. But I, so I really, I've experienced every stage because, you know, anyone who would say, well, easy, you wrote this book, you know, from a place of safety and security. I really didn't. I wrote this book from a place of not knowing if I would ever find what I was looking for. And, you know, one of the things that was really clear to me early on in my relationship is that I hadn't been nearly as vulnerable as I thought I had been in previous relationships, that I always thought I was this open book, but actually what I was was quite happy to tell the parts of me where I thought I was impressive and leave the, all the parts of me that I thought were too shameful or ugly or pathetic out. And that, you know, I think that we do that a lot in life in general. I think that that's a lot of online culture is, people will talk about their past, but only in the way that they're, they're kind of outlining their hero's journey in their life so they'll like, talk about their, you know, the time they were sleeping on their, you know, brother's couch trying to start a business or whatever and how, and that sounds like vulnerability, but it's not really, because it's really a story of how awesome I am, that, look, I started there and now look where I am. It's not, there's nothing vulnerable about that. It's not a hard story to tell. Vulnerability doesn't necessarily feel good. It's when we say the thing that we're actually deeply afraid that someone will find unlovable about us. And it took me being in a relationship where I, I shared something and, and I had all of the reactions that I would normally have when I shared too much, where I thought I would have anxiety and think, she's not going to want me now she's going to find that, like, that's going to change her whole impression of me. It's going to make her think I'm someone other than the person she's fallen for. And when that was met with love and compassion and her not seeing me differently as a Man, that. That was a real game changer for me. It became what therapists call corrective relationship. And. And I think we all need corrective relationships, ones where we test the waters in being more vulnerable, more brave than we have in the past. And. And we find, much to our surprise, that someone doesn't run away as a result of that. And that becomes the ultimate test of the right relationship. It's the person that runs away. We. We take the wrong lesson from that. We think that it means that we're unlovable instead of realizing that that person wasn't. They weren't the person that is right for us. It's not. It becomes really egoic when we're like, they didn't deserve you if they ran away when you said that, or whatever. It's like, that's just another kind of egoic framework. It's not that. It's that just. They're not. They're not your person. I. I think the right person is not someone. I think the right person is someone who's good at handling us. We have. We don't come to people perfect. We come with a whole bunch of baggage and things we're trying to figure out in real time. We certainly don't come to relationships. Like, you know, whenever someone says, you've got to be ready before you meet someone, I always call on that because I'm like, the. Half the time. The people that say that, married people who, if you really go back and you look at the day they met their partner, they weren't enlightened beings who had it all figured out. Right. So it's easy with the beauty of hindsight to be like, no, you have to be ready in order to meet someone. Most of us aren't ready. We're working our stuff out. But do you find someone who's a good partner to work stuff out with? That, to me, is the real test of a great partner. And so, like, I. I think, Nava, I mean, for you, it's like finding those people that, like, I'm sure the. The people that you're surrounded with on this show that are old friends. When you find people.

Which one of us are you talking about?

I was assuming both you and Sophie.

Are incredibly loving presence. Thanks, Penn.

You know, when you find people like that, those are corrective relationships because you. You see what it's like for someone not to run away when they know more about you. And it's then about translating that to situations where it feels like the stakes are higher because it's romantic.

Yeah.

But I think doing that in small ways, it can, it can. And, and seeing that it can go better than before is. I find that to be a life changing experience. It's like, what happen. Try this. Even if I just try, I think what, what I try to encourage people to realize is all change just starts with curiosity. What happens if I do a different thing than the thing I normally do?

Yeah.

And, and you know, we all have our well trodden path and usually we can see it like show up in our entire history. I, I can see the way that I was avoidant with my wife Audrey when we first met and the ways that I like shied away from being truly vulnerable. I can see that throughout my whole life. I remember when I knew I was coming on the show, I was like, possibly they're going to talk to me about something from my childhood. What would be a story I would tell from my childhood? And the first thing that came up for me was me playing in the garden with friends at around 11 years old. 10 years old maybe. Maybe, yeah, around that age. 11, maybe 12. And we were all in the garden playing football. And then something happened. I don't know what it was. I don't remember. All I remember is that my mom must have yelled at me in front of people or something like that. And I got embarrassed and hurt and I remember going up to my room and like slamming the door and being like, screw everyone, screw my friends, screw my mom, screw the whole thing. I don't want to talk to anyone. And then what happened while I was gone was my brothers, I got two younger brothers and my friends, they all decided that they were going to take the sleepover that had happened at our house that the night before and they were going to carry it on at my friend's house. And they all came knocking on the door and they're like, matt, Matt, we're gonna go over to Alex's house now. Like we're all gonna go there now. And I was so stubbornly hurt that I ignored everyone and I was, I wouldn't answer the door. And they all left and my mum came to me and she was like, Matt, they're all going like, come have a nice time. Like, don't, don't do this. Like go and have a great time or whatever. And I was so angry and hurt and upset and I was like, no, screw everybody. Like, no one's gonna get me going and having fun or whatever. And I, and I bobbed my mum off. I will never forget the next morning when my brothers Came home and talked about how great the night was and how they had such fun and they played games and they did this. It killed me because it was like I denied myself that good time. And I know that I missed out because my pride and my anger was really just this. Like, I was ashamed. If I actually tell everyone how I'm hurt or I'm embarrassed or whatever, then that's, like, something I can't put back in. Then I'll have, like, revealed all of this weakness, and it will make me ugly and unlovable. And I didn't know any of this at the time, but I think about it today, and I'm like, I was just terrified of, you know, letting that weakness out, so I'd cover it up with all this anger and slamming the door and screw you guys. Go have a great time without me. I'm not coming. And no one lost in that scenario except me. Like, I'm. I hurt myself. I'm the one who robbed me of that night that I'll never get again. So then I fast forward to, like, my early relationship, and I'm like, I did the same thing. If I got hurt or insecure or jealous about something, rather than share, what I was really feeling was that thing. I'm jealous right now, and it's probably because I'm insecure or because I don't think I match up or because I. Whatever it may be, I just closed down and got angry and passive aggressive. And it's like I was. I was in danger of literally, like, this is. We're talking about the person who's now my wife. I could have cost myself the. The person who is there for me in every way in my life out of that same thing that cost me the sleepover when I was a teenager. And if I can encourage everyone to do anything, it's just have enough curiosity to say, well, look, firstly, this hasn't worked for me in the past, so let me just try something different. I may not know what the right thing is, but let me just try something different than the normal path that I go down. And for me, it was actually sharing with Audrey what I was feeling, and then realizing that I got a different response than the response I thought I would get. And when that happens in life, you, like, it's like becoming aware of a different world that you didn't think existed. And you suddenly realize how small your life has been because of the way that you've been living it. And there's all these other realities that you can experience by just shifting your behavior 1 millimeter to the left or the right.

And the.

So that's how I have come to think about that.

Yeah, that's really helpful.

Matthew, you talked about your wife, Audrey, and I have wondered, because you said in the beginning, maybe in the intro of your book, that, you know, people would. Before you got married, people would question you and ask, like, well, are you in a relationship now? How's your love life? And because of the work that you do and that you felt pressured by that, which I can totally understand. And then your critique, your response to that critique was that, you know, being in a relationship in and of itself isn't really a badge of honor, and it doesn't guarantee any wisdom, which I totally agree with. But I also. Do I wrestle with it because I also think there is something to be said about advice that comes from a place of experience. And I wonder, now that you're married, how has it changed your work, if at all?

I.

This is so funny. I. I've thought about this question so much because I have had to resist the urge to, in any way, since being married, start almost weaponizing that for fun, for. For credibility.

Yeah, like.

Like now I'm more credible because I'm out. I just. I. I really don't. That would be such an easy thing for me to start trading on. And I don't. I almost resent the idea that I'm somehow more helpful now than I was a year ago or two or two years ago. And I think we have to be careful with that with ourselves, because it is the same logic that leads people to think that they are somehow less than. Because they haven't found that in their lives yet. There's a bit of a different situation when someone's, you know, taking it upon themselves to give advice. That definitely changes the equation. But we're still talking about what value do you have to offer as someone who is single versus in a relationship or married? I think that some of the smartest, most wise people I know are the people that have spent 20 years in a marriage and are now divorced, and they have so much to share because of the experience that they've had. And I know many people who are more successful and more credible the moment they leave a relationship because they did the hard thing. So has it changed anything? I. I think it's always fun to go through new stages and to then get to, you know, I'm sure I will have, you know, Pen, you're ahead of us in terms of the road with children, and it's like learning, you know, understanding your experience there would be valuable to me right now. And we're not there yet, but I know that when we go through that, you know, let's hope that we're able to go through that when we get to that place. It will then offer me all these new experiences of life that will be really exciting to share from. So I think to that extent it's really exciting. It really strikes me that there's a, a discipline that is required for any kind of long term relationship. And I don't think that we think of discipline in, you know, when we think of long term relationships or marriages. Discipline is love comes up a lot, but discipline doesn't come up a lot as a word. And I kind of feel like it should because I think discipline is about what's your standard for that thing? What's your standard for loyalty? What's your standard for the way that you show up regularly? What's your standard for what you value? You know, because at a certain point though, your, your values have to shift into the gears that make a long term relationship possible. And you know, I, for me, you know, back as a single person, it was, it was clear to me at a certain point that like, oh, I am on some kind of like dopamine cycle here that is not healthy for me long term. It's like this is the, the dopamine of messages and new people and this kind of variety and anything can happen. And like that's, it's like this constant dopamine rush if you're not careful. That is the kind of antithesis of the peaceful, connected experience that I think a long term relationship offers. And so at a certain point it requires you to get off of that dopamine cycle and to go, I'm, I'm going to start valuing something else more than I value this. In the same way that if you want to be healthy at a certain point you start to value the way you feel when you're eating well more than you value the taste of pizza every night. And that's not easy to do because pizza tastes pretty great, you know, but, but there's a, if you, and I'm not talking about, I'm not a rigid person, I just spend the whole weekend eating terribly. But it's, you know, if you, if you value the way you feel when you're healthy more, then you'll do that even if it means that you don't get to eat whatever fast food you want every night.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think that that to me is one of my biggest things right now. I almost, ironically, as someone who's experiencing a lot of things as a married person right now, I feel like I would have a lot to say to guys who my audience has typically been women, but I feel like there's a lot I could say.

Gotta get back on the guy track.

Get back on the guy track. Well, I, I feel like I have so much to say to every version of me there is from five years ago. And, and I feel like I have a lot of, there's a lot I could do perhaps to help guys with the anxieties they feel in that stage of their lives where they're in transition and they're not quite sure what they want. And guys who aren't sure what they want cause a lot of pain.

Yeah.

You know, so I, that's, that's, I kind of feel like I could probably do as much for women by helping those guys be less confused as I could for women by helping them with, you know, how to avoid guys like that in the first place.

Stick around. We'll be right back.

Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you are stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com creditcard based on the February 2024 Nielsen report. As the temps start rising, I am feeling that familiar urge to get into my closet and do a little refresh. I'm trying to do this new thing, though, actually, where I am not wasting money on pieces that I'll only wear once or just for one season. Thanks to quints, that's possible. Their clothes are timeless, lightweight, and far more elevated than anything else. At that price, it finally feels like my wardrobe matches my standards because, you know, I'm maturing. Quince has everything I need for summer, like 100% European linen shorts and dresses from $30 Luxe Swimwear, Italian leather platform sandals, and so much more. And the best part, everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middleman, Quince gives you luxury without the markup. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. I just got a blue suede bucket bag from Quince and I, I got it like a couple weeks ago and I have gotten so many compliments on it. It's completely replaced every other bag in my closet and I am actually obsessed with it. It's like my personality is this blue suede bag. So if you are looking for something to just give you that little oomph this summer, give your summer closet and upgrade with quince. Go to quince.com podcast for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E.com podcrust to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com podcrushed lately I have been trying.

To be more intentional about where and how I shop, especially online. And I gotta say, one of the easiest swaps I've made is using Rakuten. It's so it's it's basically this free browser extension that rewards you for doing what you are already going to do. In this case, shop. Rakuten is the smartest way to save money when you shop because you earn cash back at over 3,500 stores. We're talking fashion, beauty, electronics, home essentials, travel, dining, concert tickets, and a lot more. So your favorite stores like Sephora or Nike or Levi's, they all pay Rakuten to send them shoppers and Rakuten passes on a part of that payment to its members as cash back. So cash back is deposited directly into your PayPal account or Rakuten can send you a check. You can even maximize your savings by stacking cash back on top of other deals like store sales and coupons. You're already shopping at your favorite stores. Why not save while you're doing it? It's a no brainer. Get the Rakuten app now and join the 17 million members who are already saving. Cashback rates change daily. See rakuten.com for details. That's R A K U T E N Your cash back really adds up.

I want to ask just one more since we're since you just used the word avoid, there is a chapter in your book about avoiding sort of being be careful with an avoider. Beware avoiders. I think. And you say avoiding. This isn't necessarily about them, but you say avoiding conversations that reveal intentions is an incredible waste of time and demonstrates a lack of respect for oneself. And you point out that there can never be one avoider in a relationship. Both people have to be avoiding the difficult conversation. So that's the other thing that I really struggle with. And I realized very recently, like oh my Parents were chronic avoiders. Like, to this day, my question for you is, like, I'm sure there are listeners who will relate to this. I have a really hard time initiating a difficult conversation in person. I can do it over text. Is it really important to do it in person? And if it is, are there any tricks? Because, like, I'll literally. I'll practice. I'll be like, three, two, one. Say it. And I. I just won't. I'll be like, I'm gonna throw up.

That's so hard, though. That's the hardest way. Don't ever three, two, one, yourself.

Pressure.

If it's important to have a difficult conversation in person, and I will just say that a therapist once told me that it is. He was like, the outcome of those conversations are different in person because eye contact really helps someone bring their walls down. So as much as possible, have these sensitive conversations in person, but to this day have never initiated a difficult conversation in person. So just wondering if you have advice about that.

Yeah, well, firstly, I think Navajo for you and anyone else in that position is having extraordinary amounts of compassion for yourself in why it is that that's a pattern in your life in the first place. It's not. It's not. This didn't come from nowhere.

Yeah.

Like, it's not. You're not deficient, you're not broken. There's not, like, something wrong with you that everyone else seems to be so great at confrontation and dealing with difficult. Firstly, many, many, many, many more people than let on have a hard time with confrontation and difficult conversations. But it's also, you have to have compassion for the fact that these patterns were developed in a time where you weren't choosing any of your patterns. So what's happening is you're thinking of having a hard conversation with someone, and even before you get there, your nervous system is having a response. And that nervous system, you know, there's fight, flight, freeze, faint, fawn. All different nervous system responses. And you're having one of them, right? And we hate. We. We beat ourselves up and we shame ourselves when we're having a nervous system response, as if, like, there's something wrong with me, but it's not. It's. That was a response developed at a time in your life where you weren't choosing any of the way that your brain and your nervous system was getting wired. And so, of course, of course, like, of course you feel terrified of having a hard conversation. It threatens your fundamental sense of safety. And. And so understanding that is actually a really valuable thing because not only does it allow you to have maximum compassion for yourself, but it also allows you to depersonalize how valuable this whole nervous system response is making this person in front of you. In other words, it makes you realize, oh, this, My nervous system is telling me that this is life or death if this person leaves. And actually it hasn't got anything to do with them, because I've experienced this with many, many, many people in my life, and I'll experience it with the next person after them. So it's not a reflection of how important they are or how powerful they are. It's a reflection of how powerful my nervous system response is to a situation that was created long before I had any agency or say in how my nervous system got linked up. What we can then do is from that place of awareness and compassion, because once you're compassionate with yourself about that, actually it gets easier because you no longer think you're broken. You're like, oh, of course I struggle with this. And then you can say, what are some small ways that I can start to build this muscle that I never, never got encouraged in me in childhood? And then you start to work that muscle in those small ways. And you can start with smaller conversations. You can start. Have things in the book that help people with just some ways of bringing things up that aren't antagonistic, but allow you to be honest about how you're feeling about something. You know, this is how it's made me feel. It doesn't. I'm not trying to make you wrong. I'm not trying to make you the bad person. But this is. This is how I feel in this. And. And if you follow the rule, this is a really important principle. If you follow the principle that I am gonna spend more time thinking about how someone makes me feel than how I feel about this person, your life will change. Because it's in your anxiety about bringing something up. Part of what you're telling yourself is, this person is so important, and I don't want to lose them. And they're really great. And. And all of that is like, how you feel about them, but none of it has anything to do with how they make you feel. And there's a huge distinction. Who we want to be around are people that make us feel great. And the people that make us feel great aren't just the ones who come to the table giving us everything that we want and meeting our needs. As a mind reader, the people that make us feel great are the ones that when we express a need, it goes well. When we talk about something that's hurt us, it makes the relationship stronger. Those are the best relationships. And if we then. So now we're into, oh, there's a reframe I can give myself that. Any relationship worth having is made better by a hard conversation, not worse. So if someone leaves because of this hard conversation or because of me, God forbid, expressing a need, something I need a little more of, something I'd like a little less of. If it gets worse as a result of that, then this person has failed the test of being someone who makes me feel good. So it doesn't matter how I feel about them. They failed the most fundamental test that they need to pass for me to continue investing in them or thinking that they are an important person for my life. And that can make you braver because all of a sudden, the stakes don't feel high anymore. The stakes are really high. If I have a hard conversation and you leave and I'm like, oh, I left and I lost another person who was right for me. No one can be right for you. That leaves. After a hard conversation, you started.

Sort of advising or speaking to men about dating and I guess relationship dynamics. Right. And then at some point you transitioned because you found women were more interested. And so, you know, I mean, there's a lot of. Maybe there's caveats to be made as we have this, you know, increasing awareness of queerness and other identities, but heteronormative relationships do. They've written so much of our history and the way that we all see society, the way that we think of men and women and our interactions with our parents and all this stuff. So, you know, as a man, I couldn't help thinking, reading your book, that there is this profound crisis. And it's not the first time I've thought of this, but somehow reading it in a book that does feel oriented, I mean, for anybody but it. But, you know, your experience now, by and large, is. Is. Is with women, which is great. So I just felt like I was. I was deep in this, like a glimpse into this world where. Where women are desperate for meaningful relationships with men and men are somehow not as aware of their own need for meaningful relationships with women, and that it's creating a profound struggle for self worth for. For all people. And, you know, I think that generally, as people, whether men or women, there. I'm not. I'm not about to say something like, men are trash and men need to get with it.

We all know that.

Yeah, because it's a given. No, no, no. Because because actually I think like probably there is some equality in the flawed of virtue ratio thing that just most people are working with. Right. But, but, but there is this thing, this dynamic where I was like it, it feels to me like men are being evasive and immature, which, and I'm thinking of those words very sensitively, like it's not, I think a lot of times it's not conscious. What do you think is causing this fear and insecurity in men that leads to this evasiveness and being immature?

I think firstly there's a lot of men either consciously or unconsciously choosing to be unaware of how much damage they actually do by being either directly dishonest or just pretending that they don't know that someone wants more until it's like the elephant in the room all the time. Or pretending that they don't know that someone likes them more than they like that person. And I think that happens on both sides. But the number of women who come to me at a place in their life where they are ready for a relationship is extraordinary. And they are so often coming, they're meeting with people who don't seem to be in the same state of readiness that they are. I think some of this is men feeling like, you know, they've been taught that they need to live a certain kind of life and that what would be cool for them is to hook up as much as possible and to feel like they're a big shot because they're able to do that. They've been sold this idea that this is where happiness might lie for them. And then when it doesn't happen, they almost never extinguish the idea that that's where happiness might lie for them if they could just scratch that itch. But I think that happens to an awful lot of people. It's the, you know, the. Was it Jim Carrey who. He said, like, I wish everyone could get rich and famous by the time they were whatever age 30 or something so they could realize that it doesn't work. You know, I, I think many men think that it's going to work if they're able to go and sew their oats in the way that they've always wanted with the kinds of people they always wanted to do it with. They, they're still chasing the cheerleader, they're still chasing that person, that they think if I could just get that person, it would make me happy. And it doesn't happy happen for them. And a lot of guys then become very bitter and resentful and they're constantly chasing this thing that they wish they'd have had and that they see other guys getting and thinking, oh, those are the happy guys. I'm not like them. Or, you know, I wish I could be them. I think social media has created this version of perfection in people that creates an unparalleled level of entitlement these days where people feel like they're entitled to someone who looks a certain way, that like five people in the world look like and everyone else is using filters and it's. And so it gives people this impression that. But, but all the people, all the guys that they're following are seemingly with those people and their heroes in whatever form are all getting some version of that. So surely I'm in, I'm being told I'm entitled to a version of that. And so I think that there's a lot of guys chasing this image of perfection and never coming to realize like what makes a relationship really great, like what, you know, they're plaguing themselves and torturing themselves, going, you know, they might have an amazing person in front of them who would bring them so much happiness, so much peace, unbelievable connection, you know, they'd be able to build this extraordinary life with this person. And they're in their head going, but could I, like, could I do a little better than this in this way or this way, or could I still get that? And maybe I can get someone with all of these things and this other thing, you know, that I feel like I'm missing and life doesn't, Humans don't work like that. You don't. Optimization is a, it can be very counterproductive when it comes to your happiness in love because you don't, you don't upgrade a human when you move from one to the next. You exchange one basket of ingredients for a whole new basket of ingredients and you'll get some stuff that's not great, that you didn't even have last time around. And you'll get some new things that are less of a headache or more attractive or you'll, you'll just get a new basket of ingredients, but you're not going to keep tweaking to the point of perfection. And I truly believe that when you find someone with the core fundamentals that are going to make you happy long term, things that you need to decide in advance, like, this is the stuff that I'm really going to value if you find that, and then you find it in someone that you have some chemistry with and you find attractive and is an amazing partner like, that's your. If you lean into that, that's your person. It's not like, let me wait and see if I get more chemistry with the next person. Like, I don't believe in that. I, I don't. Like, there's a section of the book I say, don't comparison shop for chemistry. Like, because even that, so much of that is an illusion. Right? It's like you, you're comparing the chemistry of someone you're with right now to someone that you dated for two weeks three years ago on a vacation. This person's never going to win. That person had the benefit, all the benefit of being someone who was going home in two weeks. And all of the excitement that that creates, you're not going to match that in a normal scenario where healthy love is present. So that's, that's the stuff that I think people don't realize. And I think a lot of guys, they, they, they think that settle is a word that is really misunderstood. We think of settling as a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It all depends on the context in which you use it. Yeah, settling for someone has all the negative connotations, right? That's like, I'm getting shortchanged here. I could do better. I could have more. That's what makes people resentful. And then men stay in relationships that they're constantly torturing themselves going, should I leave and try and find something better? And like, that's because they thought they settled for something, but now change the phrase to settling on something, and it changes the whole meaning of it. It's. Selling on something means resolving to take this thing and make it the best it can possibly be. And that's what makes an amazing relationship, is resolving to make something the best it can possibly be. But it all depends on what your association is with that word. Because you're never going to find a perfect person. You're going to find someone that you believe is worth settling on, and then you're going to spend your life making it incredible with that person. And I'll say one more thing on this, because I think it's really relevant to this whole thing. So many men struggle because of their associations with commitment. And again, I wish I could, I could pull this up right now. In fact, I have. Is my phone around? Maybe I can pull it up. There's a, There's. If you, if you were to go on Apple Dictionary and pull up the word commitment, there are two definitions that come up. One is commitment restricts freedom and creates an Obligation.

Oh, geez.

And the other definition of commitment is a dedication to a cause. Now think of how much of a different life you will create depending on which one of those associations you're following. If you're a guy, and this is true of women too, but since we're, we're zeroing in on what I think are some of the real issues that men face. If you're a guy and you have been taught, brought up, educated by society or by your friends to think that commitment is something that restricts freedom and creates obligation, that's the, like, you know, you're with your friends and they're like, oh, another guy got married, another one bites the dust. You know what definition they have of commitment? It's restricts freedom and creates obligation. If you compare that with the life someone will create if they think of commitment as a dedication to a cause. I know that my life changed. And I'm not judging anyone here because I've been through all different stages as a man. I've got stages I regret. I've got things I wish I'd done differently. I've got people I wish I hadn't hurt with being ignorant or not understanding a better way to be at the time, or not being conscious enough about the consequences of my actions. So if you're a guy out there listening, there's no judgment from me. But I, I can tell you my life changed dramatically when I shifted my different definition of commitment as being something that would restrict freedom and create obligation to a dedication to a cause. My marriage now with Audrey, who is sitting to my left, my marriage. We're like, it's so exciting, man. We're building, like, that's what's so fun about it. I'm like, we're building something that's so wildly exciting to me. I'm so happy to be in that place of building like we're on a mission together. And that's because it's, for me, it's now a dedication to a cause. And as a result, I'm so much happier. I feel so much more peaceful. I don't have any of the anxieties that went along with living that other life. And, and I, and I feel like I'm more grounded and able to share from this place. I'm more open and more vulnerable. I'm more myself. So it's a life changing thing. And I think if more guys spend more time. If you're a guy, the best thing you can do is spend time around other guys who have already made, had those Realizations and then get curious with them. Give them your challenges, talk to them, tell them what you're struggling with, tell them about your anxieties, your fears, you know, all of the things, just say it. Say all the things you're afraid to say. And I, I, I can tell you my mentors in life became the guys that were really peaceful and happy. And I noticed some patterns in the guys in my life that were really peaceful and happy.

Matthew, I want to ask you one more question about your book. And then we have a final question that we ask everyone to close the show. But in your book, you talk about this idea of being happy enough and why it's helpful to focus on being happy enough rather than pursuing blissful happiness. Can you share about that?

I think happy enough is unbelievably profound and powerful. Phrase it. You know, we, some of us on this call live in la, and LA is the land of never enough. And it makes people really, really unhappy. So at a certain point, it's about looking at what's, what's enough for me. And I actually think that happy enough is a superpower, because when you're happy enough, you kind of have nothing to lose. If you're a single person who's happy enough. It doesn't mean that people, like, they want to come up with these phrases that don't really hold true for them. Like, I'm just as happy single, I don't need a relationship to make me happy. And it's like, fine, but like is, you can even admit that if you found the love of your life, you'd be happier than you are today. You can do that. It doesn't cost you anything to admit that so long as you feel happy enough today. Because if you're happy enough with your friendships, with your life the way it is, with the things that bring you meaning, with the things that make you proud of yourself, with the love of the energy that you're putting into the world. If you're happy enough with those things, then no one has any power over you. It's just, it's actually the same as the TV show example. I honestly don't, nothing ever needs to happen for me in that department. I don't care if it happens. And it was amazing and it brought me loads of joy, then great. But it's not something that I feel I, that needs to happen. I'm happy enough today. And in love, you can be happy enough to say no to someone, happy enough to have a hard conversation with someone without fearing that if they Left or, or decided they didn't want to be with you, that your happiness would leave with them. It's Happy Enough is to me, it's an incredibly powerful foundation from which to take risks in life. You can actually take more risks when you're happy enough because no one has any power over you. So that, that's how I think of Happy Enough. And that's why I finished the book there. Because guess what? Not everyone finds the kind of love that they're looking for. Not everyone has. Not everyone's love life turns out the way that they thought it would. And we have to get out of this mindset that if that doesn't happen, we'll never be happy. We can get to a place where we realize that there is a kind of magic that no one can take from us or our lives, that we can author ourselves. And when you connect to that power, you know you'll always be okay. And, and you might even be able to be more than okay. You might actually be able to find more happiness in this world than you ever realized was possible outside of the narrow confines of the way you told yourself your life had to be for you to be happy.

So I'm going to turn the. The final question into a bit of a two parter.

Has Penn ever asked a one parter, I wonder.

The final question is always a one parter. I think it feels to me that that part of the difficulty we all have in this, in the realm of love, dating, whatever you want to call it, is that no one seems to have prepared us adequately for either. What will foster a true love relationship, but then also like the confusion and wildness and chaos of the modern dating world, you know? So what do you think would genuinely prepare kids going through adolescence, middle school, high school, for entering that world, this world of, you know, quote unquote love that they're inheriting.

Teaching them to chase the right things and teaching them to accept themselves. Those would be the two big ones. If they could put on a pedestal kindness, a great teammate, someone who brings them peace, someone who actually sees them and acknowledges what is awesome about them, someone who has, who. Who actually is a great teammate. If they could put those things on the pedestal instead of all of the things that we're taught at a young age to put on a pedestal that have us have our ego essentially directing our love life instead of our happiness, that would change the game. And then, like I said, accepting ourselves, learning to have ultimate compassion for who we are and how we got here. Because you spend your life As a teenager thinking there's something deeply, deeply wrong with you. Most people, anyway, there are some special people that seem to find a different level of security. But for most of us, I think we feel like there's something really wrong with us and we don't realize that we're just exactly a product of, you know, I'm a little bit of a determinist. You know, I kind of feel like we're a product of everything from our parents to our own brain chemistry, our own DNA, our society, our mentors, and the mentors we didn't have to. You know, I feel like we're a product of those things. And so, you know, by the time you get to 15, I, I feel like everyone should just be told, what chance did you have of being anything else other than the thing that you are today? But that's okay because the, the past does not have to equal the future there. But while you're looking to create who you're going to be in the future, don't shame yourself for who you are today because you really didn't have much of a say in the matter.

So this is our final question. If you could go back to 12 year old Matthew Hussey, what would you say? Or do you.

Honestly, I, I think I'd tell him that. I think I would say. And I'm, you know, Nava, this is why when I, when I was speaking to you earlier, I'm, I'm not speaking to you from any kind of a pedestal because I relate to you. I really relate to the things you've said and I think we shame ourselves so much, so much. I have no doubt if you're anything like me, Nava, that, that it's not just that you have a hard time having those hard conversations, it's that you shame yourself for having a hard time having those hard conversations. And I think, you know, I, I would go back and tell myself, it's, you are not broken and it is not your fault that you are struggling with these things, that all these things you're struggling with, they're, they're a product of everything you've ever been through and the way that you've been wired. How could you have been something else? And, and guess what? Almost everybody else is experiencing some version of this thing too. So you're not worse, you're not worse than everyone else. You, I know you think you're especially bad, especially worse than everyone else. You're not. And there's freedom in that. There's freedom in that. So, yeah, I would give myself completely different level of compassion than I've ever given myself and a level of compassion that I am still working to give myself today, which never comes naturally and is never easy and I'm still learning to be better at it. But that's what I would try to give myself.

Do you think 12 year old Matthew would have been like, oh, I off?

Oh my God.

I think, I think that he would have probably gone back to how to win friends and influence people. Been like, just give me another tip for how to talk to people. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think he would have had been able to cope with the depth of that. But yeah, I like, I want you to do a whole, like, can you do some sort of entire comic series pen of your interpretation of me as a 12 year old?

No, no, no. You know what it was, it really. I actually feel like the, the picture you painted earlier is that you were, I mean what you were just saying was so. Was so sensitive and compassionate. So I think what you're saying is that we all actually feel that way at 12, but our ability to demonstrate it or like receive it from others, well, that's really what we spend our adult lives trying to return to.

You shouldn't take it personally, Matthew, because all Penn wants to do ever is do his cockney accent. That's all.

He's just trying to find.

You were very modest at the beginning of the show then. Because when I was talking about what cockneys were, you didn't interject.

I didn't do it all. I was listening.

He also does a little Victorian British boy.

Yeah, I don't, I actually don't really do cockney. I only do a little Victorian boy. That it's, it's a, it's something I developed when I was shooting the fourth season of my show in London. It just kind of started happening on set and then it was like, God.

I'm now, I'm now gonna live for the day where you get to play some sort of Victorian cockney. I like. It's gonna, that's gonna be like a little dream come true. Now when you doll.

Yeah, I'll do Jane Austin and then I'll be the man picking up the handkerchief and I'll give a little wink.

Where I come from would never have made it into a Jane Austen.

That's true. Yeah. We would have been the colliding worlds. It's all the same to me.

I think we have the TV show idea that we're going to bring to.

You, you're just, you can be in a Jane Austen novel, but, you know, adaptation. But you'll have to be the surf. You won't be able to be, you won't be one of the main love interests, that's for sure.

You won't be picking up any handkerchiefs. Yeah.

Unless it's to wash it, I suppose.

Exactly.

Matthew, thank you so much for coming by.

Yeah. This was so lovely. We're so appreciative, Matthew, and it's a wonderful, so helpful. I have pages of notes already and I know I'll be rereading it.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. For anyone who wants to get it, you get it wherever you get your books. But also the website Love Lifebook has all the information on the book, so check it out. And it's been such a pleasure to be on the show with you always. You're all so lovely and warm and vulnerable, and this is a great show. I love, I love what you guys are doing here. It's really, really cool.

Thank you so much.

You can get Matthew's new book@lovelifebook.com or wherever you get your books. You can listen to his podcast, Love Life with Matthew Hussey, and you can follow him on Instagram at the Matthew.

Hussey, we are so excited that you can now listen to podcrust ad free on Amazon Music. In fact, you can listen to any episode of podcrust ad free right now on Amazon Music with an Amazon prime membership.

Pen does the introduction later. He doesn't like to do it live, so there will be a very nice and complimentary introduction to you.

I will just completely relate to that. I, I Whenever it's our show, I hate having to do the intros live.

When I watch Jay Shetty's podcast, I'm always so impressed because he does it totally. He's just like keeping eye contact with the guest and totally live. It's crazy.

It's so funny you say that. I thought, jay's a friend of mine. I thought the same thing the other day. Like, listen, I was watching one of his things and I was like, he just did that live. I that would be, that would be the most anxious part for me, was trying to remember someone's resume.

Exactly.

I watched his Gabor Mate episode and he's staring either at the camera or at the guest the entire time and it didn't cut away. And I thought, oh, it's interesting. He's doing like, they're cutting what they did after together, and that's like, kind of ballsy. Like, it seems pretty. And then it just cuts right to gabber. And I was like, oh, that's live. He's staring at him, like, undeviating eye contact. I was really impressed.

That's a.

This is why I'm in my aesthetic environment. I'm getting my Jay Shetty years in while I can.

Parents, we know the child care crisis is not just another headline. It's a daily struggle playing out in millions of homes across this country. I'm Gloria Rivera, and this is no One Is Coming to Save Us. This season. We're demanding a child care system that actually works for kids, parents, and educators.

We mean free birth to 5.

Full day nearby, easy to apply. No One Is Coming to save us. Season 5 from Lemonada Media, out now.