Richard Dawkins on Detaching Yourself From Irrational Thinking | Conversations with Tom

hey everybody this episode is brought to you by our very own relationship theory subscribe to relationship theory at youtube.com forward slash relationship theory or click the link at the top of the episode description and i will see you there along with my lovely wife [Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with the absolute legend richard dawkins and we are going to be talking about his latest book outgrowing god and hopefully a whole bunch of other things you've written such a library of seminal works that revolve around rationality the pursuit of truth secularism as a power for good and wanted to dive into something that i'm particularly obsessed with which what is the the advantage of truth why do you think it's so important for people to start there from an evolutionary point of view i think the truth probably helped you to survive i mean you need a realistic assessment of where the lions are where the waterhole is all that kind of thing in our ancestral past today i think it's perhaps even more important where we're actually assailed by uh political leaders who are who believe in alternative truth where um they actually want to distort truth for their own purposes so i think the truth is the biggest weapon against demagogues and demagogues are one one of the things we have to deal with today so in a world where truth is routinely distorted where you get social media rabbit holes where people can create that sort of echo chamber around themselves how do people because i don't know that everybody ends up there on purpose to be quite frankly to be quite frank so how do you recommend people um approach thought or thinking or to make sure that they are on a path of rationality i fear we all to some extent are susceptible to the echo chamber effect and it's a thing we need to fight against and i try to fight against it um well believe in evidence i believe in in rationality the organization that i'm a part of which is the center for inquiry which has merged with my own foundation the richard dawkins foundation is all about rationality all about skepticism all about testing propositions for their truth and so we have uh for example a lawsuit at the moment against homeopathy which not only doesn't work but cannot work define homeopathy okay this is the the pseudomedical belief goes back quite a long way that the way you treat a disease is by or a problem is by giving a very very small dose of of whatever the offending thing is and by very very small dose i mean very very very small i mean they dilute and dilute and dilute and dilute and dilute so much so that i think james randy once calculated that the oh they think that the more you dilute it the more effective it becomes which is crazy obviously um and he calculated that uh for the most effective according to them homeopathic remedies you would need uh a volume of water the size of the solar system the single molecule of the active ingredient in it and so that's homeopathy and what our lawsuit is about is not to prevent people selling it but to prevent people putting it on the same shelf as proper tested medicines so you're looking for a remedy for a cough or a cold or or whatever it is and you look along the shelf and you see homeopathic remedies sitting right next door to proper remedies and that's what we're fighting against they must have a separate shelf called homeopathy and preferably also called by the way this doesn't work what is it about because i find there's a certain type of person that's really drawn to that what is it about um human evolution that's led us to have what all i will lovingly term the woowoo gene where there's just some people that really respond to a more mystical answer versus doesn't that i i mean one of the things that's a bit depressing is that when people give up religion they sometimes switch to woo-woo as you as you say it's as though they somehow can't quite divorce themselves from from nonsense i mean what we want to do is to switch from all kinds of supernatural nonsense to rationality evidence-based thinking critical thinking is is the notion of a god neuron real like is is there a region of the brain that when faced with the supernatural makes it creates a neurochemical state where you feel that profound sense of on connection that people are chasing i would hesitate to say a neuron i mean i think that that human brains are susceptible in that kind of way and i think it's one of the things one of the weaknesses of the human brain um understandable perhaps and but i i wouldn't call it i wouldn't call it a single neuron no so and i i definitely say that more is just like uh when i step back and i look at this and i think okay there as somebody who won full disclosure i believe that a level of self-delusion is tied to happiness so there is like i'll often tell people when i'm thinking about myself i care necessarily less about what is true because i'm probably more likely to believe something negative but because i want to succeed at a certain level i'm obsessed with accurately identifying the world the way that it is and not the way that i wish it were be so homeopathy is a great place to start because you're looking for a health-based outcome and ultimately health-based outcomes come down to you're either alive or you're dead these are pretty like binary things they're very serious consequences so that to me is a really interesting place to start so if you have somebody who is they have a neurological state that they are chasing that i will in in a generous framing i'll call ah and i will say that ah is arguably one of the most profound and enjoyable states so if when i'm presented with this notion of hey there's this magical way to take this compound dilute it and it it becomes almost like a divine moment some magical mystical thing that i can't explain happens and that speaks to that sense of like connection and wonder that i have which it doesn't with me but i'm just saying like if i were to guess at what makes people go for that instead of tylenol or you know something that we know and can test and measure actually has an impact is the hope by shining a light on that if it really is a real neurological phenomenon is the hope that by shining a light on that people can sort of talk themselves through it yes i think i'll make it a contrast between say astrology and astronomy where both of them tap into that feeling of all that you describe and when peop people talk about um jupiter moving into the second house of aquarius or whatever it is that has the same kind of free song that you can get from talking about galaxies uh and and um galaxies rotating and and we moving around the galaxy it's the same kind of free song of awe that we get but one of them is nonsense and the other one is true and beautiful and beautiful because it's true and so um i we we want to promote the astronomy and everything like that like like um evolutionary biology like geology like physics these are all wonderful because they're true but they are wonderful and the thought that you can actually understand the universe in which we are and why life arose where it did and why it developed in the way it did that is absolutely wonderful and to deprive children of that wonder is an act of wanton vandalism cruelty that is uh that is something i i will very much agree with like when you stand on the i don't know even just stand somewhere where there's no light pollution and look up at the sky and that sense of like seeing the sky for the first time and and being so ridiculously small was that to create that sense of wonder in the face of of the real natural world was that the goal with something like outgrowing god which i know you aimed at a younger audience very much so um the first half of outgrowing god is about sort of debunking god in various ways um beginning with there are so many different gods that people believed in and moving through the bible and how unreliable it is and then to morality and how we don't need god for morality and so on then the second half of the book is about science uh mostly evolution because that's my subject and also that's because because that's probably the main reason why from a scientific point of view people do believe in god they they look at living things they look at the complexity of living things they think well that has to be designed by some master engineer as a master designer so the second half of the book is largely devoted to dispelling that illusion and then the final chapter is about the more wondrous deep questions of cosmology the origin of physics the origin of the laws of physics what happened before the big bang things like that and the idea is taking courage from darwin darwin solved the big problem in that field which was explaining life because life really is until you understand darwinism life is deeply mysterious darwin solved that and that should give us the courage to realize that one day we will solve the other problems like the origin of the laws of physics why is there something rather than nothing yeah that that to me the question and i i've heard you talk very eloquently about um einstein may have done a bit of a disservice by always using god language but his notion of you know i want to know god's thoughts and everything else is just details um that's always wrong with such a beautiful mystery to me um i love that quote um and one of my employees here has a degree in neuroscience and she was just absolutely transformed you you have shaped her view of religion as an adult and when she was telling me the story she was saying there was such a smile on her face as if you had opened that door of wonder for her there was there was no sense that you had diminished something um it felt like she had traded one thing in maybe that had served her very well when she was younger whatever but after encountering the ideas of that sort of pursuit of truth and and opening yourself to the beauty of what is real it was very obviously impactful for her is there something that you think particularly in this book or in any of your other books like if you had one thing to tell somebody and you wanted to open that door of wonderment to um the the real world the natural world however you want to define it what's that what you say about her of course is music to my ears that's wonderful here um i wouldn't think on one thing i mean the whole shebang the whole the whole of life everything about him and i in in this book outgrowing god i pick on one or two things like the chameleon's tongue um octopus skin i mean these are just two out of millions of possible examples you could choose everything about is wonderful about life is wonderful and in my other books like the blind watchmaker i picked on bat echo ranging for example um in climbing mountain bravo i picked on vision and i picked on spider webs in this outgrowing god i picked on the chameleon's tongue and and um the octopus skin the octopus skin you know changing color from second to second not like a chameleon which changes color from minute to minute um octopus and squids and kefla and kettlepods generally cuttlefish change color from second to second and they can actually kind of play movies over their skin almost literally play movies over their skin um at sort of real speed have you seen there was a recent video that i saw that was um it admittedly they don't know what it was doing but it looks exactly like the octopus is dreaming and it's rapid eye movement and its skin is like changing color so fast it was crazy i think they think with their skin and i've got on record of saying that whoa and dream with their skin is a lovely thought too that's really interesting um when was the first time that you saw something so profound or read something so profound whatever that moment was that made you go i'm going to be an evolutionary biologist what was that thing that just slapped you upside the head i don't think that happened to me i think i i had the other way around i kind of got to oxford and and um my second year there started getting interested in the sort of philosophical questions i don't think i ever had a kind of natural history i do plenty now but there wasn't one that hit me over the head when i was young and put me into that what are some of those things now oh gosh well i just mentioned some of them i mean just things i put into my and is what is it about that so i will say when i saw the octopus the thing that freaked me out and i'm i would guess maybe this isn't what you were uh drawn to but when i saw what looked like an octopus dreaming i thought oh my god they're more human than we think they're basically the aliens we've been waiting for like all the wonder like if if an octopus came from outer space we would freak out yes but the fact that it's in our oceans we're like oh well it's always been here so the the the way that it made me feel this like oh my god it's us even now just telling you that i'm getting the chills is it is it the nature of evolution that when you see how complex it becomes that that gives you an intellectual point of view yes but uh i mean you're right about aliens when i once went to a lecture by a man who was doing research on octopuses and he said began his election by saying the thing is these are the martians and that's that's right i mean they are very very alien and um they seem to be very intelligent uh i think we should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they probably do have feelings i don't know if this is actually true but i heard one time that it is illegal where i don't know but illegal to operate on an octopus without anesthetic because the assumption is that they're so highly developed i would hope so i mean i would i would like to think that's true that that's true in certainly in britain i think in america of vertebrates and i think octopuses keflapods generally have been admitted to that charm circle uh whereas arthropods haven't i think yeah that that to me is uh is deeply fascinating so what do you say when the the blind watchmaker i think makes a really amazing um it gives an amazing example of how you get something so complicated but yet leaves these telltale signs of things that are so obviously nonsensical if you were thinking of of intelligent design walk people through that aren't familiar with the the um the nerve that runs through the giraffes uh the laryngeal nerve which um all vertebrates have in one form or another um in our fish ancestors uh the equivalent nerve went to one of the gills uh and um it it passes um posteriorly to to um a major uh blood vessel in the in the um chest of whatever you call it of a fish when the fish started to evolve and and develop a neck and became eventually mammals um the nerve started to get stretched in a detour because it no no once there were there was a neck when i start again it starts in the in the brain and in mammals it innervates the larynx the voice box and it um doesn't go directly to the larynx it goes straight past the larynx down into the chest loops around one of the main blood vessels in the chest and then goes back up to the larynx which is a detour in a giraffe it's a very very big detour indeed and the reason for it is history as i was started to say in our fish ancestors that same nerve passed south of that equivalent blood vessel and so it wasn't any detail it was it was at the direct route but when the neck started to grow longer um it became a detour and it wasn't a very big detail to begin with it was just just a slight detour and as it got longer in evolution the marginal cost of each successive increment in the detour was slight so it wasn't worth it to radically change the embryological process and jump the nerve over the blood vessel that would have required a major rethink so to speak of the embryology so it just got longer and longer and longer and longer and in the giraffe as i said it's it's absurdly long so it's a wonderful example of how history explains what is obviously bad design yeah that's it what i love about that is when you think about how complex we are the the real temptation is to jump to um well obviously there's there's thought behind this this is so calculated but when you start to see example after example like that it really gets pretty fascinating you don't really need that i mean it's it's a it's a silly inference actually to say that it must have had a designer because i think as you said earlier um you've still got to explain where the design came from and so and so you haven't actually got done anything when you said that there's a designer it's a non-explanation what darwin provided was a real explanation which goes back to primeval ultimate simplicity and then gradually increases the complexity over time that's what you want and that's what we've got do you have a a mechanism uh metaphor that you use to really imagine time i've heard you say and i think this is so right people just cannot conceive of how long a million there are many i mean and they're all equally good really the one about making a clock be the whole of of geological time and um humanity came on the scene five seconds before midnight that kind of thing another one i like is you stretch your arm out and you say the middle of my neck my tie is is the origin of life and then my fingertip there is the present and the dinosaurs don't come in until about my wrist there maybe the middle of my palm the dinosaurs are very recent compared to the time that it's been available and um humanity comes in at about near the end of my fingernail and the whole of recorded history the ancient egyptians the babylonians the hebrews the greeks the romans all of all of recorded written history is the dust in one stroke of the nail fire yeah that is um that i think has that same sort of pale blue dot effect for me where it's like man it's the unimaginably long amount of time that it's taken us to get here is is so massive and ultimately everything we think of as important important and world shaking and defining everything that we know is this just infinitesimally small dot floating through space um that is uh yeah that to me is is really really interesting now when you begin to tease out sort of okay we have selfish genes which want to make sure that they replicate and so they're going to do things that maximize that behavior whether for the person or for the the lineage so that you know a mother would sacrifice for her kids that makes sense especially if she's past her age of reproduction the kids are reproductively viable she is not and so you would expect some sort of mechanism to arrive on the scene for that my real obsession is more along the lines of epigenetic changes and how much malleability we really have so if you had asked me five years ago i would have without intending it but i would have said something that sounded a lot like being a blank slate the more i research especially stephen pinker and you get into reading the actual blank slate and realizing just how much we come pre-programmed with it gets very interesting but i am still particularly fascinated by the amount that we can change do you think at all about um adaptation as a even if it's just cultural like adaptation within within a single lifetime or does that feel like just the absolute wrong word well i wouldn't use the same word i think i think it's very important obviously cultural adaptation is very important but it comes about through such a different mechanism than um darwinian adaptation that it's important not to not to confuse them like you i greatly admire steve pinker's blank slate um and matt ridley has written a similar book which i recommend to you um nature via nurture it's called um so i think that um for partly political reasons um nature is underestimated and i think there's a kind of political pressure how so well um it's becoming unfashionable to to suggest for one single moment that there might be genetic differences between male and female for for example i mean you get you get tired and feathered if you say that yeah um and um obviously um cultural influences are immensely important but so are hormonal influences and and uh you can't really deny that and there is a kind of tendency for political reasons to attempt to downplay the importance of biological have you by any chance this is an outside shot this is not strike me as your kind of book but have you read the book a billion wicked thoughts no is that again a billion wicked thoughts richard dawkins you must read this book it is it is salacious to say the least yes but it was basically these um google engineers who said every time you try to study sex you you can't get real results because people are gonna lie they're uncomfortable about it so even if you say this is all anonymous don't worry you know that people are gonna be they're gonna hedge their bets and then these two engineers thought wait a second there's actually been the largest experiment on human sexuality ever done already and it's called the internet and anonymous searching but you can actually tie it back to certain amounts of data so they went through i don't know how many millions of searches and they began to just group things this had a profound impact on me so i know you don't know a lot about what we do at impact theory but we're a media company so ultimately our goal is to make film and tv but i want to make film and tv that help shape culture so that people begin to think in a certain way that will empower them and make their lives more fulfilling long story so i when i'm reading this book and i'm seeing the profound difference between what men search for as far as porn goes and what women search for it is crazy and he took the they took i should say passages of males describing sex in like basically smut books and then women describing sex and their version of erotic novels it is the the exact same act it is hysterical the difference and it was one of those where i was like the the differences aren't slight they are massive and so that was one where i was just like as as a person who makes film and tv you must know your demographic because the the way the brain responds to stimulus is so different from men to women and people can tar and feather me all they want it's just like that's just naked in the data yeah so i'm not saying one is better than the other i'm just saying they are very different it wasn't it google where somebody was sacked for james damore yeah yeah yeah that whole thing look i think ultimately this all flips and so here's the good news the position that um myself and my wife and co-founder and it's like we want to help and we want to impact people but we're not beholden to anybody we're self-funded blah blah so um for us our thinking is the only way forward is the one that is real and whatever real is then we need to get to real now i personally think that the only thing that's really interesting is the when you get into differences it's going to be at the tails right if you're thinking of a bell curve so sure at the tails there's a lot of difference it's a lot of fun for the most part people that take up the bulk of the curve you're all going to be able to do whatever you want yeah it's like the bell curves yes so whatever you want to do you're going to be able to do it's not like anyone race sex ethnic anything is going to outperform the other yeah the vast majority of all the bell curves overlap so i don't give a [ __ ] about that but what i find utterly fascinating is is the sort of revelatory nature of what happens at the tails to hint at sort of where we've been pushed evolutionarily um to go so anyway i check out that book it's it's i think very very i will and i applaud what you're saying about what matters is the real this of course is the mission of the center for inquiry and the richard dawkins foundation that we are out there to try to promote the real and truth uh and skeptical examination of evidence-based reality and it's a very very important mission because as i said earlier we are living in a time where um where reality is being actively distorted and it's very important to counteract that so what's interesting to me is i think some of that distortion falls in line with what you call conjurers what i'll call magicians or mentalists um darren brown impacted me so dramatically and for a uk audience they will know instantly who that is for an american audience he's sort of uh there isn't really an exact correlate because he's a mentalist so he's not doing card tricks but he's using similar things but i was watching a video on a flight of all places and it impacted me so profoundly i thought about quitting my job moving to the uk to study with him because what he's able to get you to think you're seeing is so incredible do you think there's overlap between a magician stroke conjurer and some of the stuff that we see happening in uh the realm of politics and by that i mean specifically that they are aware of the psychological um sort of illusions and they exploit them well darren brown called himself a mentalist and um he gives i mean his his his act is to pretend to read people's thoughts and to influence people's thoughts um he's just a conjuring he's just doing tricks like anybody else um and um he even pretends to be using techniques he clearly isn't using i mean for example he will suggest that when he appears to telepathically read somebody's thoughts he will he will say okay i'll explain how i do it did you notice in my pattern before we started that i kept on mentioning the sea and sailing and ships and giving you the impression that he was suggesting to the victim something to do with the sea if that role he was doing then he would be right statistically maybe a majority of the time but he wouldn't be right all the time he's right all the time so he's doing tricks like any other magician so i mean i wouldn't be too bespoked by him if i were you no no not definitely not spooked but um the admittedly some of what i think he is pulling off may be entirely true sort of sleight of hand whether it's you know somebody in his ear or whatever saying something that they picked up from the audience um and that would be less intriguing yes but certainly his ability to enrapture a crowd to get everybody focused in one place to make the performance seamless i don't think i've ever seen it done better like he definitely creates this sort of incredible environment and to create that environment i think you even though when he is saying i'm using this psychological technique or that psychological technique that might be a bbs i think he really does understand psychology well enough to control a crowd and that's where i think he gets really really interesting but i mean what i think about all i mean he's a great great counselor but then so is jamie ian swiss so it says the amazing randy so a pen and teller there there are several of them um and what they make when the message i get from that is that what looks like a miracle isn't and um my emotions screams at me this is a miracle it's got to be a miracle um and but it but it's not and the same thing i've i i generalized that to them the big problems like how he really asked me to believe that the universe started as a random quantum fluctuation and then grew up through inflation and things uh that seems i can't believe that that's incredible you can't i cannot be serious no that's exactly my reaction to a great conjurer and that's only a trick well in the same way the universe starting from a random quantum fluctuation and nothing annihilating itself from becoming something whatever it is that's equally hard to believe and the fact that conjurers can fool you give me the confidence to say because that's a trick and there really is a scientific explanation for that we should not lose confidence in the ability to explain the origin of the universe by science i'm not saying that's a trick of course i'm not it's another matter entirely but our instinctive incredulity is something we should strive and struggle to overcome your laundry list of extraordinary books pointed a life mission that you then echo precisely on your website you just come out and flat say like i'm trying to bring the world to rationality and a more secular understanding so that we can move forward in a way that's productive um is there and so your life mission that becomes very understandable is there a way that you think the specific things that you touch on from an evolutionary biological perspective become usable in somebody's day-to-day life so take me i'm not an evolutionary biologist but i use these things tremendously like when i think about demographics and i think about telling a story i need to understand the differences in my audience where somebody is developmentally when they're a child where they are as an adult where they are as a male as a female to understand that and i have found that putting that in an evolutionary context has been tremendously helpful and even just understanding my own emotions where they come from why i should or shouldn't listen to them do you what are things that you want people to take away in their daily life i don't use my science very much in that way to try to um get where my audience is coming from i i don't um i don't think i quite do what i mean i understand what you're doing and i respect that but i don't think i i really do that do you think so more than i'm asking if you do it because i your mission is very clear you're i'll say operating at a societal level and now i'm asking at a personal level so if somebody reads your books let's say they read all of them do you think that there's an amalgamation of of information there that allows them to steer their own life instead of just trying to steer society i would hope that if if they come to a scientific world view they would lead a better more fulfilled life i would hope that if they understand about life about where they come from where they themselves come from their ancestors where they come from in evolution i would hope that they would feel more satisfied with living because they know where they come from they understand the world in which they live the process that gave rise to them that's what i would want to achieve i i think that somebody who dies without ever knowing why they were born in the first place uh has has died deprived of something important do you think there is a why or do we decide that why there is a you said um if somebody dies without knowing why by why i simply meant the causal chain that led to their existence i didn't i didn't mean a purpose yeah yeah do you if somebody were to ask you what's the meaning of life what would you say well i would say on the one hand the meaning of life is propagation of your selfish genes on the other hand i would say you make your own meaning and we and we all do that and we again lead a better life if we have if we develop something important i mean if in your case you you have a media company and that's very fulfilling in my case i write books and give lectures that's very fulfilling somebody else writes music or plays in music there's all sorts of ways you can give meaning to your life your your personal relationships your your love for your spouse and your children etc these these all give meaning to life do you look at that any differently like knowing the the evolutionary biological reasons for love i know that um you've had a long lasting not really no i i i i don't think i i think i just behave like a human being in that respect and just go through feel it it's interesting because the the reason that i asked my earlier question is for me i i have needed to be able to visualize the process once i could understand like i'll even just put it in evolutionary terms once i understood evolutionarily what was going on why emotions were arising the way that they were arising why my brain was developed in sort of this tri-layered thing that there's you know basically your lizard brain your mammalian brain your neocortex once i could understand all of that i could go oh i see like this fear response that i'm having i don't need to just act in accordance with it i can actually use my prefrontal cortex to interrupt the signal i can use what i call physiological hooks so breathing from your diaphragm which i'd actually love to know if you know why that works so well but breathing from your diaphragm when you're meditating instantly begins to shift you out of fight or flight and into the parasympathetic and so as i began to think of myself as a biological system that the doors of the universe opened to me and so i'm always i one of the weirdest episodes i ever did of conversations with tom the show that we're doing right now i got into this like two ships passing in the night the other person that i was talking to was just convinced there was there was like a mystical thing and i was just like dude we're we're biological material um you know phineas gage i'm sure and so phineas gage railroad spike through his head never the same after it i'm like the notion that there's some part of me that survives beyond my soul or that is in any way different than the sum total of my biology is crazy and so once i understood oh i'm a biological machine but i have even if sam harris is right and that my free will is a total delusion i feel like a writer on an elephant exactly yeah yeah no i i agree with that and of course the phineas gage type evidence means there's no question about it we are nothing but our brains but but nevertheless when you're in love it it doesn't diminish from it that you that you that you you know it's just brain stuff and hormones that is going on it's still an an intense emotion yeah i think that that is arguably the most important thing that somebody could derive from your work is you go into the biology you talk about the evolution you um you look plainly at whether religion is likely to be true or not but i feel like you hand people an entryway to a universe of of just unimaginable beauty yes talk a little bit about the greatest show on earth uh this is my book on the evidence for evolution um it's a the full quote is the greatest show on earth the only game in town which is i think a circus thing um so it it really is just simply laying out why why we know that the darwinian evolution is true and uh so it goes through all the all the evidence um and uh yes one of the books i'm proud of and what is it that is so awe inspiring in that that you called it the greatest show but the product of the only game in town is the immense diversity of life the complexity of life the elegance of it the profoundly convincing illusion of design the sheer beauty of it that is all produced by a very very simple physical process and uh so it is the only game in town and the product is the greatest show on earth and as somebody who i'm assuming you believe when we die it's essentially like a light switch you're just out and it's done um how does that influence how you think about living it makes me want to live life to the full and to encourage other people to do the same the only life we've got so let's live it to the full and let's leave the world a better place than we found it i think that is a perfect place to wrap up richard thank you so much for coming on the show man i i have been blown away by your work for years uh and i'm just grateful that you put it out there and i know that at times it is maybe a little tumultuous uh but i respect you just keep going man thank you thank you for everything you've done it was an honor to have you on the show all right everybody that's it you should follow this man you should read all of his books you can go to richarddawkins.net you can learn more about his um campaign to change the world for the better there but uh drop his name into amazon you will get a laundry list of extraordinary books i recommend them all all right everybody peace out thank you thank you man all right how do you know when it's time to break up will having kids ruin your dreams why can't you control that ugly jealousy when do you know if it's time to move in or get the hell out these are just a few of the no holds barred no bs conversations we'll tackle on the new youtube channel relationship theory along with my wife the lovely and talented lisa billy will bring our 20 years of experience juggling our entrepreneurial aspirations while maintaining a strong relationship through all the obstacles that have smacked us in the gut walloped us upside the head on a daily basis it's just as hard to maintain a relationship as it is to build a successful company maybe even harder but it is well worth it certainly more worth it than building a company and if you can't maintain a healthy relationship then there's no way you're going to be able to thrive in your business environment it's absolutely impossible we might be thriving now but it wasn't always the case for us we had to deal with family pressure financial struggles and a never-ending stream of obstacles and just when you think one problem has been solved ten others are going to slam right into you and let me tell you if you can't deal with the inevitable struggles that are coming your way there's no way that you're going to stay together like most of our success we've gotten to where we are by making a lot of mistakes and learning along the way and now through relationship theory we're sharing everything that we've learned lisa and i will tell you that if you want to stay together you better open up or shut up we'll also share some secrets on how to keep the sexual spark alive and practical tools to help you stop 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