1364: Dr. Max Butterfield | Challenging Viral Dating Myths with Science

1364: Dr. Max Butterfield | Challenging Viral Dating Myths with Science

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional Fortune 500 CEO, four-star general, astronaut, or real-life pirate.

And hey, if you're new to this show, or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, the internet has turned dating into amateur forensic psychology. A late reply means [00:01:00] avoidant attachment. An argument means narcissism.

A bad first date means there's no chemistry. And if your partner doesn't speak your love language, God forbid, apparently the relationship is already on life support. Dr. Max Butterfield built an audience of more than a million people online by challenging this stuff with actual relationship science. But there's a catch.

Science doesn't give us a magic formula either. Today, we're going to find out what psychology can genuinely tell us about attraction, red flags, conflict, breakups, choosing a partner, and what remains an unpredictable mess because human beings refuse to behave like lab rats. Here we go with Dr. Max Butterfield. I'm here with Max Butterfield, Dr.

Max Butterfield. It's cool that you came up with that almost like video/audio trademark.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah, and it was an accident, to be honest with you. I'm sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I just got started on social media not that long ago. It's been about 18 months. Wow. And so my very first video, you don't know what you're doing, and so I had in my head, make sure to introduce yourself as Dr. Max Butterfield, because I [00:02:00] don't... That's not how I talk in real life. People generally, I don't know what they expect, but in real life I'm just a regular guy. So I said to myself, "Make sure you introduce yourself," and I forgot, and I just said, "I'm Max Butterfield." And then I, to be funny, I was like, "Dr. Max Butterfield."

And people liked it, and so I thought, "Well, I could do that again."

Jordan Harbinger: It's the putting your nose within a m- millimeter of the camera lens without leaving a print on it, and then backing up. Oh, there's

Dr. Max Butterfield: prints. There's- No, there's prints.

Jordan Harbinger: That's how you know you're doing it right. You're cutting it so close, sometimes you step over the line.

You have that audio/video trademark. Everybody who knows your videos knows exactly... If they didn't know who you were before, now they're like, "Oh, that guy." You know, I was doing research on you, and it says you're an experimental psychologist and professor. So what is experimental psychology? I've never actually heard of that, which surprised me because, I don't know, it seems like I should know what that is.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. So experimental psychology is the oldest branch of psychology. It's what you think of when you think of the classic experiments, like Pavlov's dogs.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That's experimental psychology. So I like to say it's not the helping [00:03:00] people psychology, at least not one on one, and instead it's the seeing what happens when, you know, people are put in situations.

Jordan Harbinger: It's the torture dogs type of psychology, yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That's the downside, is all the kind of bad things that have happened in psychology have come from, for the most part, the experimental side. Most of us don't do that, but that is true.

Jordan Harbinger: Like Stanford Prison Experiment. Wow, I should have this right at the forefront, but the one where they're shocking people.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah, so that's Stanley Milgram- Milgram, yeah ... back in the '60s. Experimental psychology, Stanford Prison Experiment, Phil Zimbardo, experimental psychology. And that's what some people think. Experimental, do you mean, like, you don't know what you're doing?

Jordan Harbinger: That's kind of what it sounds like. We're just throwing shit at the wall.

That's, that's the whole field.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Right. No, exactly. And h- honestly, like, I think that's how it was in the '60s and '70s probably, just let, let's see what happens here. But truly what it is is, like, experimental physics, where you're designing experiments to find out why people do what they do and why people are what they are.

[00:04:00] And so it's the scientific arm, really, of psychology.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Thank you for that. I feel dumb, but also educated, so good job there. So what I love about your videos and your content is that most viral relationship advice, it converts ambiguous human behavior, which I guess most behavior is, into this, like, very confident universal rule.

And real relationship science is frankly far less satisfying. There's all this context and nuance and all this stuff that makes it useful that doesn't do well in, like, a 90-second or 60-second, I don't know how long TikToks are, but short. And I have some examples here that we'll get into in a bit, but- People rely a lot on pop culture or trendy science, and I get it, right?

I think it's called accessibility or availability bias, right? It's like it's on your phone, you're on the toilet, it's right in front of you. You didn't have to go take a class from Professor Max Butterfield to learn about it and then study it and take an exam on it. So if you don't have a lot of life experience, right, you're in your 20s or maybe even your 30s, but you spent a lot of time [00:05:00] in school and your career, and then you see a video that says, "You know what?

I've noticed soulmates all look like each other." And you're like, "Wow, that totally makes sense. I do know some people that seem kind of happy that sort of, I guess, look kind of the same. This must be a rule of life, and my girlfriend is a different color than me, so it's never going to happen."

Dr. Max Butterfield: It doesn't play well on social media for an expert to come in and go, "Maybe.

Sometimes. That's possible." And so that's been the challenge, I think, for a lot of experts in joining social media, kind of joining that fray, is figuring out, "Okay, well, how do I talk like that while still also communicating kind of the truth?" And it's interesting you mention the toilet because it occurs to me that most of education today is probably the classroom is the bathroom to the toilet, and that's weird if you think about it.

That's a big change.

Jordan Harbinger: At best, the couch. Yeah, it's true. Even just in your car. So I ordered something called a squirrel box, which is like a, uh, a birdhouse for squirrels that has cameras in it. Oh, [00:06:00] yeah, yeah. Have you heard of these? Squirrelboxes.com. And I ordered it, and the guy was like, "Are you the Jordan from the podcast?"

And I was like, "Yeah," because I had a problem. My order, like, didn't go through, so I called. And he goes, "Yeah, I listen to you all the time, but only when I drive," which actually is quite a bit. But I thought, huh, imagine your number one point of learning as an adult who's been out of school for 30 years is your vehicle.

It makes sense in 2026, but you're right, it's weird. It's weird to be like, I educate myself solely while commuting and going to the bathroom. No time in between that is spent learning anything that's just regularly. Hopefully not

Dr. Max Butterfield: simultaneously on those two

Jordan Harbinger: things. Oh, you mean commuting and going to the bathroom at the same time.

Probably not that. I thought you meant educating. I'm like, uh, what are we doing then? No, that'd be good.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah, the, both of those. Uh, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's funny because a lot of these videos that you have that have gone viral, there's got to be a lot of arguing in the comments. I've looked at the comments on a few, and I think it's quite hilarious that somebody will sit down and go, "Listen, Dr.

Max Butterfield with a PhD in [00:07:00] psychology, I do think that soulmates are a real thing, and I do think that they tend to look like each other." And it's like, at some point you just have to realize that people have cognitive bias and you can't talk to them anymore. But you can only talk to the other, I don't know, 80% of people that don't have their head in their butt.

I don't know. What, how do you feel about this?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Well, and that's the truth. You're always going to make somebody mad. It d- literally, it doesn't matter what I say. In the comments, someone will say, "How dare you?" And I, I could say the opposite thing that I just said yesterday. "How dare you, sir?" So interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: I have a similar issue where people say, "You're a right-wing kook," and then the next email or review is, "This left-wing libtard bla-" And it's the same episode.

100%. They're talking about the same episode.

Dr. Max Butterfield: No, 100%.

Jordan Harbinger: Something for the first half, and the other person heard something for the second half, and so it depends on what they paid attention to that offended them. Soulmates is probably a good place to start because I never thought that made any sense. Just even in high school when people would talk about it, I would be like, "Isn't it weird that you met your soulmate in your high school?

Isn't it weird that [00:08:00] everybody who met their soulmate met them through one friend or lived in the same town?" What are the odds that there's eight billion, or at the time, I don't know, when I was younger, six billion people on Earth, and your soulmate's not, like, a person in a village in India. It's a person who lives in the exact same town as you who's your best friend's sister.

The odds are just so in your favor.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Isn't that a happy coincidence?

Jordan Harbinger: It's amazing. Yeah, so that alone was enough to be like maybe you have a few hundred thousand of these soulmate people that would work as your wife or girlfriend.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Definitions for experimental psychologists matter a great deal, so I really wonder what do they truly mean when they say soulmate?

So if we're talking about there's one person that the universe has designed specifically for you, okay, absolutely not. But I also wonder how many people truly believe that. Like, how many people truly would say, "No, there's only one person for me," and in fact, that is because of stardust that has made that happen.

But I think a lot of times what people actually mean when they say soulmates is [00:09:00] there is an ideal person out there for me. That's probably true to some degree. There are people who are going to be better for you and people who are going to be worse for you. But I also think the reality is that we grow our soulmates.

We create our soulmates. So you can choose to live a life with someone. You can choose to become better and closer together over time. Most people are going to agree with that, but we get stuck on the words. That's my point, is a lot of times I think we're just talking past each other.

Jordan Harbinger: For me, maybe I'm biased not to believe in the soulmates looking like each other thing because my wife is Chinese and that wouldn't go well for me.

But yeah, I do wonder what you think, what is the most popular piece of relationship advice that sounds wise and feels emotionally satisfying, but has probably damaged more relationships than it's served or saved? You

Dr. Max Butterfield: can't make me choose just one. There's infinite horrible advice out there.

Jordan Harbinger: How about a few that come to mind right now?

How's that?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Well, okay, so the first one immediately just kind of jumps to my mind, I don't know why, [00:10:00] is if he wanted to, he would. And I think that applies to if she wanted to, she would as well, but I- it's most often said if he wanted to, he would, which just says that essentially guys are going to put in effort, and if they don't put in effort, if they don't immediately overwhelm you with their love, that they just are not interested in you at all.

And the fact is, if I wanted to go to the gym, I would. That's true. But sometimes, like, I literally, I don't have time. I want to eat ice cream for dinner every night. I don't. So just because I want to doesn't mean that I will. There's a variety of reasons why people are legitimately afraid of being in a relationship or legitimately unable to get over themselves or don't have the skills or whatever it might be, and I think we don't give people the benefit of the doubt enough.

And sometimes people just need room for growth, they need space, they need all sorts of things to be able to do what they want. Motivation and desire are two separate [00:11:00] cognitive systems.

Jordan Harbinger: I had a friend who had been engaged, and he had put so much effort into ... This is when we were kids. We were, like, 20-something.

He had put so much effort into this relationship, and then she rejected him, so in his next several relationships, he was like, "I need to invest way less because that scared her off, and also it hurt more when she and I broke up because I had invested too much." So then his later girlfriend, I remember one of them was like, "He just doesn't- put in effort and I hear about his ex and how much he invested in her, so I don't think he loves me."

And I'm like, "Oh, let me explain something to you. She took his heart and threw it into a wood chipper, and he's not investing in you because he actually does like you and doesn't want you to run away while drop kicking his feelings all down the staircase on the way out." So I had to sort of reframe this for her.

Like, "No, the reason he's doing nothing to further your relationship is because he actually really likes you." And, uh, he basically had to reprogram himself, right? Because he was in hardcore defense mode. So if he did like a girl, he wouldn't do anything, and then he, he had a couple [00:12:00] casual relationships before that where he, like, put in medium effort because he didn't care if he scared her away.

He's like, "Eh, it's a new thing. I can buy her flowers. If she runs away, it's just some flowers." Meanwhile, he really liked this one girl. He dated her for a few months, and he's no flowers, no date nights, no trips, no words of affirmation. And I'm like, "I don't think this recipe is for you. I don't think this is working for you."

Dr. Max Butterfield: And that's the wild part, is we get in our own heads so easily, where you might know exactly what it is that you need to do, but because of this history and these wounds that you carry, you do the opposite of what you actually legitimately know you should be doing. We're complicated animals, and we think too much, and those anxieties get in the way of happiness.

Jordan Harbinger: I noticed that you are not a huge fan of the five love languages type of stuff. That has an absolute cult following. I would love to hear your opinion on this.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I'm going to be generous for a moment. And I think the love languages give people who are, [00:13:00] and I don't mean this in a bad way, but give people who are largely unskilled in their vocabulary a language to talk about what's important to them. So that to me is important, and if it's important to you and it gives you vocabulary to voice what you need to your partner, I think that's great.

However, there are other languages that you can learn, to use that same metaphor, that are much more effective at helping you communicate. So what I'm saying is it's like a horoscope. Horoscopes give people a language to say, "Hey, you know, I feel a certain way," or, "I am a certain way." Are they accurate? No, of course not, and the love languages just don't hold up in the research literature.

We have much more effective ways to help describe what our needs are in relationships, what our relationship styles are like, and love languages were... They were invented by a Christian pastor, and that's fine if you're into that kind of thing, but they're not the most effective language that's out [00:14:00] there for love, which is really weird, because that's their marketing.

Jordan Harbinger: And what's funny is I have friends who've covered this or done roundup videos on this, and they're super litigious, and I remember when I was like, "Oh, I want to do this on my podcast," because I used... My podcast used to be about dating for years and years. That was it. That's why I like this topic, because it's sort of like throwback to something I used to do when I was a relevant person who was dating.

And I don't have a PhD, so I can't keep doing it after I'm married with any sort of shred of credibility, right? Like you can.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Hey, there's still time,

Jordan Harbinger: Jordan. Yeah, yeah. Hey. My wife is Chinese. Anything could happen. Our relationship is automatically on the rocks because we don't look like each other. No,

Dr. Max Butterfield: I meant the PhD.

Oh. You, you s- you've got time. Your

Jordan Harbinger: relationship's great, I'm

Dr. Max Butterfield: sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I thought you meant you could... Your relationship could dissolve. You could be single again. That's where my head went. You're right, I could get a PhD, but I don't plan on doing that. What were we talking about? So this guy, the guy who invented that, I remember was like, "You have to pay me to join your show," and then they sued this YouTuber, and I was like, I thought this guy was all, "I just want to spread this as far and wide as I can," and it's like, no, not, not really.

It's quite the business. And look, I [00:15:00] don't blame people for copyright, enforcing copyright and trademark, but, uh, it just struck me as a little bit extra aggressive, and I thought it was quite funny, and they're very not receptive to criticism on any of this stuff. The love languages thing, you're right.

They're convenient and they're horoscopy. I don't find them completely useless, but I'm curious. You said they just don't hold up in the research, and that's more important than sometimes they're useful. It doesn't mean it was scientific.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Exactly, and that's the love languages. They haven't been thoroughly investigated either, to be fair, because researchers know that they're a little too horoscopy.

It would be like thoroughly investigating a horoscope. Part of it is we don't actually need to do that because of the nature of the way these have been designed. So they haven't been designed in what's called a testable way. In other words, i- if I say there is a hidden secret monster living under your house that's undetectable, prove me wrong.

You don't need to go looking because [00:16:00] it's impossible to falsify. And love languages, they're not as bad as a secret monster hidden under your house, but at the same time, they have that flavor. It's very hard to falsify them.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Some people like these, and I will say just knowing my wife likes acts of service, it just reminds me to do her favors sometimes, and that's useful enough.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. And so I would put them in the category of probably not harmful for most people, maybe even helpful.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Notice how I'm couching that, you know, very carefully, very specifically, because it might work. Truly, it might. But things like working on your communication skills, far more efficacious and concrete.

You can actually do that today. Whereas if you know that your wife's primary love language is acts of service, you can also work on that today. So again, that's not bad. But if you get stuck there, that's where the problem can occur because just doing acts of service and then being a jerk in the rest of your daily interactions, that's not going to [00:17:00] fix the main issue.

It's the communication thing that's really it. So that's truly, for me, what the problem is, is if people use them as their only tool, if they get stuck in that box. But if you want to use that as part of your approach to a happy and healthy relationship that's also based on some of the more efficacious interventions that you can do, great.

That's amazing.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember back when I was single, my friend ran speed dating events, and she's like, "You can come to any of these." And I was like, "I definitely want to go. I might meet some girls, but also I get a chance to test out all kinds of funny stuff." And she's like, "Just don't piss anyone off," right? So one of the things that I tested, because I was also doing experimental psychology without knowing what it was, I would say something like, "What is your astrological sign?"

And the right answer for me was, "I don't believe in that stuff." But people would go, "Oh, I'm a Sagittarius," or whatever, and then they'd be ... And they'd go off and talk about that, and I would just be like, "I don't need to deal with the rest of this because I don't believe in that at all, and people who do believe it, I just

I'm a man of science," even though I didn't know what your [00:18:00] science field was. It's like, "Yeah, what's your love language?" "I don't know what those are," that's a good answer, or, "I think it's probably this," or, "I haven't read the book." But if somebody's like, "I am a the gifts one," it's like, oh, run, because this person likes expensive stuff.

They're going to expect you to buy it all the time, and if you don't, it means you don't love them. Check, please.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I like gifts, too, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I guess I do, too. Damn

Dr. Max Butterfield: it. That's not my love language, but if you buy me a Camaro, like, I'll take it.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I think both the cost and the benefit of love languages is they give people this language to communicate what is important.

And so I never want to ignore that. It's like horoscopes have been around, star signs have been around for it's something like 3,000 years. They must be useful in some way, shape, or form if they've persisted for that long. Useful is not the same as accurate or predictive, but useful, why have they persisted so long?

And it's because people need a language to be able to talk about themselves, and truly, it might be a good starting place. Does it predict whether you're going to find your soulmate or achieve [00:19:00] your dreams or whatever? No. But is it helpful for human interaction? Yeah, probably, or else it wouldn't have lasted so long.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's an interesting point. Yeah, you look at anything that's antiquated, and you go like, "Wow, this is so stupid." It's like, yeah, but for 2,000 years it told people what was going to happen after they died and still does for some folks, and, like, that's not nothing. That's not nothing. I think it's interesting that you decided to start your social media career essentially because you wanted to write a book, and I think the publisher or your agent was like, "Nobody wants to publish a book unless you have an audience."

Is that- It's like, "

Dr. Max Butterfield: Nobody cares about you." That was the lesson.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So what did you just tell all your students to follow you on Instagram? How did you kick things off?

Dr. Max Butterfield: That was basically it. I asked them nicely. I didn't actually expect them to. I started in January of 2025, and I just decided I'm going to make a video every day.

I knew reels were kind of the way to go on Instagram for discoverability, and so I didn't know what I was doing. I like making videos. I've always tried to be entertaining in the classroom and elsewhere. So I [00:20:00] just, I made a video, and I showed it to my students on the very first day of the semester. I said, "Hey, look, I'm going to make an idiot of myself the whole semester.

If you want to follow the train wreck, please do." So I gave this personal pitch that like, "Hey, I'm an idiot, and I'm going to embrace it." And nothing happened for three or four months. And then I figured a few things out. I had a reel go viral, and I thought, "I can do that again." And I did. And by July, I think I had a million followers on Instagram.

Jordan Harbinger: And now you have two million, which is crazy.

Dr. Max Butterfield: It's crazy. I truly, I never expected that at all. I thought I might be able to get some attention. I didn't even know if it would be positive or not, but two million followers is, that's just wild. That's not something I expected at all.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm betting you were like, "Once I hit that 1,000 mark, I'm calling my agent.

Get that book going." Right? Maybe 10,000. And now it's two million. You probably have every publisher being like, "Hey, have you thought about writing...? Are you writing a book? Is that happening?"

Dr. Max Butterfield: I do have a book deal. Yeah, I have a big book deal, [00:21:00] and it... You keep mum about it at first, what it's about and when it's going to come out, but-

Jordan Harbinger: I can guess what it's going to be about.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah, relationships. Probably a pretty good bet, but it'll be coming out in about, let's say a year.

Jordan Harbinger: Never ignore a red flag, unless it's attached to somebody who's really hot, and then you probably need, like, I don't know, 12 more months of data. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp.

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So do your own homework, see the reviews, see what stands out, and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com/jordan. That's betterH-E-L-P.com/jordan. This episode is also sponsored by K12 Powered Online Schools. As a parent of two, one thing I've learned is that every kid is different. What excites one child might not work for another, and sometimes the best thing we can do is stay open to finding the environment where they feel supported, engaged, and excited to learn.

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When you use our promo codes, you are not just scoring a discount, you're giving the show a boost. We don't earn sales commissions from your purchases of the things that you hear online. But when companies see that listeners are engaging with the ad, it encourages them to keep supporting the show. So if you're planning to sign up for something or buy something, please use our deals page, jordanharbinger.com/deals.

Our code is usually JORDAN, but not always. It's a [00:24:00] win-win. You get an awesome deal, and you help keep the show going strong. We really appreciate your support. Now, back to Dr. Max Butterfield I think these viral videos, I love seeing somebody take them down, and I think that's part of the allure of your account, right?

Is because-

Dr. Max Butterfield: 100% ...

Jordan Harbinger: people who believe in the viral stuff, they might want the truth, and people who definitely think, "This is so stupid, my eyes are rolling back in my head so hard that it hurts," I want somebody else to articulately dismantle this type of advice because it is so stupid, and it's like, gosh, somebody please correct the record.

And that's kind of what you're trying to do here. I wonder, do you think that's why relationship misinformation is such an efficient growth market compared with other areas of psychology?

Dr. Max Butterfield: I think there are a couple of factors. One is that It's really easy to believe someone who's attractive. You see somebody hot, male or female, and they're saying something.

You're like, "Yeah, that's probably true." That's a cognitive bias that we have, and that everybody has. Yes, the halo

Jordan Harbinger: effect, [00:25:00] right? Is that what that's called?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Halo effect, yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: This good-looking person is tall, therefore they must be competent.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Exactly, and sometimes young people will call that pretty privilege, which, it's more alliterative.

But yeah, and I... So that's part of it. If you're attractive, you can say whatever you want, and it'll be believable. And so on social media, that just, attractiveness just sells. And so you combine that with something provocative. You say soulmates all look alike, just like we were talking about before. That gets the conversation going.

It gets both people who hate what you said, it gets people who agree with what you said, and then it gets people who are kind of curious about it. And so I think it's a recipe in a lot of ways for virality, and there was no one fighting back against that for the longest time, especially not experts.

Because it's hard to get traction on social media, and you do have to look like an idiot, and you do have to be willing. And people called me ugly for probably every day for the first year, and it still happens. [00:26:00] You just have, you have to have a thick skin, and so it's not for everyone. And I think that's why I was able to gain some traction.

I just went all in. I just took the plunge.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, imagine if you were actually ugly. That would really hurt your feelings.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I appreciate that. I also appreciate that most of your listeners are not going to be watching me, so they can't verify. They'll just take your word for it here.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. He's not ugly, folks.

Take my word for it. Trust me. Trust me, bro. Was your wife amused, horrified, or is she now suddenly expected to fact-check every argument in your marriage?

Dr. Max Butterfield: So she was both amused and horrified. That's the thing about me being on social media. All my friends, all my family, everybody who knows me, they say, "Yep, that's him."

Nothing about this is an act. Nothing about this is me putting on airs. This is just what I'm like in real life. Imagine if you're my mom, and I go, "No, false, wrong" ... as a five-year-old or whatever. But th- but that's the truth, and I've really had to learn how to tone that down personally, like, growing up.

That's been difficult for me to do. But social media [00:27:00] is a place where I've been able to in many ways be myself, but there are consequences for that. Some people get really mad, and my wife feels bad when that happens. She doesn't want me to get hurt, but she also knows that it's been An outlet for my creativity and my, just my intellect to be able to kind of shine forth.

Jordan Harbinger: When that book deal advance check gets cashed, I think many of her criticisms will melt away. I think-

Dr. Max Butterfield: It's a pretty good, yeah, it's a pretty, pretty good just, you know, you put a dollar amount down and you're good to go.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure it is. Yeah, I've got to wonder, I've seen many of your videos. Which one made people the most mad?

Because obviously nothing I've seen even makes my blood pressure go up at all. I can't imagine what that would be to trigger people.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That's the thing. I sometimes will say the blandest stuff. It'll be like, "Be kind to each other." And they'll go, "How dare you attack that woman?" Or, "How dare you contradict that man's personal lived life experience?"

And so I [00:28:00] think it's not actually the content often that makes people mad. I don't think it's how I go about it either. I try very much not to criticize anyone personally. I really go out of my way never to say, "Don't follow this creator," or, "This creator is bad," or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: You've never said, "Look at this dumbass.

I can't believe this guy i- is popular." I've never heard anything like that.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And let me tell you, I want to say that.

Jordan Harbinger: That's something I would love to say. Yes.

Dr. Max Butterfield: No, but it's rude. Honestly, there's a better way to do discourse than that. So I try to stick to the information, but people, this is another cognitive bias, people don't often have the ability to separate what you say from How you articulate it from who you're talking to and from that context.

So I think the things that make people the maddest are when I contradict someone who they love, and they're jumping to that person's defense. And so in that way, I actually, I can't get that mad at them for that because I'd probably do the same thing.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yeah, you listen to, I don't know, Sam Harris for five years, and someone [00:29:00] says, "Oh, this guy's a racist," you're just like, "Wait, wait, wait.

Okay." "

Dr. Max Butterfield: Hold on. I know him."

Jordan Harbinger: He's not... That's not it. Yeah. "Are you sure?" That's not the thing. Yeah. I do wonder, so I'm going to push back a little bit here.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: You criticize influencers for using certainty, right? But your breakthrough on social media came when you learned to use their hook, their format, and their algorithmic machinery.

Some people might say, aren't you fighting the junk food by making slightly more nutritious junk food?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Sure. And that is my counterargument is always tit for tat is the most effective communication strategy that exists. John Nash and a team of other people won the Nobel Prize for this. There's a movie about it, A Beautiful Mind.

And th- it's a well-known idea that if you... Let me phrase it this way. A lot of academics try to go onto Instagram or other social media and force Instagram to play by the rules of academia. The rules of academia don't work there. That's not what they were built for. So I went on Instagram and I said, "I'm going to play by [00:30:00] their rules."

They don't cite their sources. I don't really feel a need to cite my sources either. You can absolutely go find them if you're interested, but if somebody says X is true based on my experience, I say X is false based on the scientific research. If you want to check it, go ahead. So I think that is fair.

Jordan Harbinger: I agree with you.

Yeah, I think it is fair. If you cited sources, you wouldn't be able to do this.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And that's the thing. If I cite a source, people will go, "No, that one's too old."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: It's like the quote, if you've seen Parks and Rec, there's this great Fred Armisen bit. It's like No matter what you do, straight to jail.

Undercook the fish, overcook the chicken or whatever it is, like straight to jail. And so cite a source, jail. Don't cite a source, also jail.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's true. I, honestly, I don't even think people are waiting for that. They're just going to go, "Is there a source for this?" And you could probably even throw them in the caption.

A- actually, do you do that? I haven't-

Dr. Max Butterfield: Sometimes. I

Jordan Harbinger: feel like I've seen that.

Dr. Max Butterfield: What I try to do is [00:31:00] if I make a specific claim, like if I give a number, "47% of people are unhappy because of this," then I will cite a source. But if I say, "Kindness is good for relationships," and you're like, "Source, source, what's the source for that?"

That is like asking Bill Nye why water is made of H2O. How could you possibly believe that? I need a source. It's such basic information that it doesn't need to be sourced every single time. So that, that's kind of my approach is, yeah, the sources are there, but Instagram is not the place for that discourse.

We can have that. Absolutely we can have that. But not in a 90-second clip. You're just going to say you're wrong no matter what I say, source or not

Jordan Harbinger: So a lot of social media dating advice or whatever, human behavior that goes into this sort of universal diagnosis. He said this, therefore he's insecure. She did this, therefore she must be cheating.

And it's often something that's heads I win, tails you lose, right? [00:32:00] Like, "Oh, you accuse me of cheating? You're projecting, therefore you must be cheating." And it's like, "Actually no, I just really think you're cheating." "Now you're just projecting harder." And it's like, "Okay, so how do I tell you that I think that you are cheating without you saying that I'm just projecting?"

They pulled away, therefore they're avoidant attachment style. Why do people crave these simplistic rules? What do they provide relief from, or what do they offer?

Dr. Max Butterfield: We live in a very uncertain world, and uncertainty is scary. If you trace it back to something more basic, say you don't know where your next meal is going to come from, that is a huge problem for any organism.

But it's a huge problem for us as well, and so we prefer certainty over uncertainty. That might sound like a cop-out a little bit. It's like we like certainty better. Why? Because it's survival based.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We cover uncertainty on the show all the time, and it's one of these things that makes people believe conspiracy theories.

Because you'd rather believe that, I don't know, Jewish people are secretly [00:33:00] reptiles, there's a secret cabal that's doing all this stuff on purpose, rather than be like, "Hey, all of our world leaders have their heads firmly in their own asses and are preoccupied with getting rich, and they don't care about you, and we have no idea what we're going to do next week."

That's way scarier than secret cabal of Illuminati reptilian, I don't know, Jews or something like that, right?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Which is kind of weird if you think about it. I don't want my leaders to be wearing a human mask, but they are wearing a human mask in a lot of ways. And I don't mean that as in there's a reptile underneath.

Metaphorically, maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: But the world is so complex that we look to simplify everywhere. Our brains are designed not to think hard. That is what our brains are trying to do, is to try to streamline as much as possible so that when it comes to a life and death situation, we still have resources available.

It's like if you're running a marathon. You don't sprint at the beginning. That'd be crazy. And that's how it is in regular life. You don't use your mental horsepower on what you should have for [00:34:00] lunch. You just take a shortcut, and you say, "This is what I had for lunch yesterday, so I'll have something different today," or, "I'll have the same thing today."

It is just about conservation.

Jordan Harbinger: I think this explains perfectly why, and a lot of people wrote in asking, in some form or another, and asked me this, why intelligent people, otherwise intelligent people, become astonishingly gullible when the subject is their own love life. So you'll find somebody who's like a- Harvard-educated lawyer and worked at the Supreme Court, and they're reading all these dumb pop culture books on relationships and believing in the silliest old wives' tales type of stuff when it comes to dating and relation- And it's just, oh my gosh.

What's wrong with you? You're one of the smartest people I know, but when it comes to your own dating life, not even... The advice you give your friends is brilliant and on point. When it comes to your own life, you're a complete mess. That's always so shocking, I think.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And I don't know if there's another comparison.

Do you know any dentists with bad teeth, for example? Not, yeah, of course not. They take care of their teeth. They know what they're doing.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

Dr. Max Butterfield: But relationships [00:35:00] require some degree of cooperation from another person. And so even if you're an expert, if your partner's being crazy, what are you supposed to do with that?

And also knowing what to do is different than actually doing it. It's like the he wanted to, he would, where I might know that Doing 30 minutes of cardio, doing strength training, and eating healthy is the right way to live. Do I actually do that? Sometimes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. Sometimes. People often will ask me why I still have a trainer even though it's been, I don't know, five years, and I'm thinking, I love that you would give me enough credit that I would work out hard on my own.

That's cute.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Right? It's the accountability.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, exactly. I think it's interesting that an inaccurate label or idea is sometimes emotionally preferable to an accurate but incomplete explanation of something. We're more than willing to accept something that is certain but probably wrong, [00:36:00] and we know that it's probably wrong, versus a nuanced but sort of uncertain outcome.

And I wonder if this dovetails here. What psychological need is being met, aside from the certainty thing, when someone says, "Oh, here, Cheryl. Here's an article about seven signs your partner is secretly a narcissist"? What are we getting out of this?

Dr. Max Butterfield: It's a good question because it's different for everyone.

So what you might get out of it might be different than what I might get out of it versus what Cheryl or whoever might get out of it, and that's why it's... See, I'm hedging even now.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, you have to.

Dr. Max Butterfield: It's like, well, hey, wait a second. I just asked you a basic question. No, you didn't.

Jordan Harbinger: It's not that basic.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That's the subject of somebody's dissertation out there somewhere.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And so that's where relationship science, I think, and just psychology in general, it can be unsatisfying for a lot of people, is we're not willing to lie to you. Truly, th- that's what it is. I am not willing to say, "Well, here's why." And it's because the here's why is 50 different things.

And so you have to get to [00:37:00] know each individual person. I think that's the value of translating this science for individual people, but also the challenge because I can't just broadcast out there, "Here is exactly what each and every one of you should do." I need to talk to you to find out. And there are certainly some commonalities across certain types of people or certain types of situations.

And so that's the challenge, to translate that science into actionable things for everyone.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you have any rule of thumb that might help us differentiate between a useful pattern and a story we invent just because the uncertainty is intolerable?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. Even your phrasing there is super helpful. Pattern versus story.

Because the story is your interpretation of the pattern, so that takes it one step further. So you see somebody. Suppose you take a common situation, which is somebody doesn't text you back as fast as you want. So common.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That's a pattern. That is undeniable. You just look at the [00:38:00] timestamps. It took an hour.

It took a day. It took three days. Okay, that's a pattern. But what it means is the story, and that story you can tell in a very calm way. They are busy, or they have ADHD, or- "They hate me." Those are three very different stories, and each and every one of them, without additional information, it doesn't really give you anything to go on.

And that's why learning about the people you're interacting with is so important.

Jordan Harbinger: I remember when texting started to be a thing in the United States, and I'd already been doing it. I was an exchange student in Germany in the '90s, and people were texting, and I was like, "This is so stupid." But it was way cheaper than calling, because calling was, like, 25 cents a minute or whatever it was back then, Deutsche Marks.

So I came to the United States and I was like, "Oh, you can't really text on most phones yet." And then once texting started to kind of be a thing, I think it was a T-Mobile Sidekick, it had, like, AOL Instant Messenger on it or something. I remember I used it to talk to girls, and they were still girls back then because I [00:39:00] was, like, 19.

And the stories were crazy, and I remember some of these red flags where it would take me a day to get back to somebody, because again, texting wasn't something you were doing all day like you do now. It was like you would just check it like your email or something back then after class. And some girls would say, "You're talking to a bunch of other women."

And you're like, "What do you mean? How did you come to that conclusion?" "It took so long to get back to me. The only explanation is that you're talking to a bunch of other women." And I'm thinking, "No, the other explanation is I'm trying to get a degree at the University of Michigan, and I am buried. I'm drowning.

Talking to you on AOL Instant Messenger is, like, number gazillion on my priority list. That's the real reason."

Dr. Max Butterfield: Priority is the key word there. It absolutely is the key word. Everybody has different priorities. I remember when I first realized that this kind of generation of dating and relationships was taking over.

I was in class, it was about 10 years ago. I was a young professor at that time, and student was texting a guy, he was texting a girl, [00:40:00] and he didn't know, she had said something and he didn't know how to respond. And there was a crowd before class started of about 11 people around him looking over his shoulder, girls and guys, and they were like, "No, here's what you should say."

And I remember just watching and thinking, because that, that kind of uncertainty and insecurity, of course it takes a day to respond. You got 50 people telling you different things. That's wild.

Jordan Harbinger: As a married guy, do you ever think, "Thank God I'm not dating anymore. It's too hard"?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Oh, absolutely. My wife and I, we got married.

We were stupid, don't get me wrong. We got married when we were 20. Geez. So I haven't been dating in a long time, and a lot of people will say, "Well, Doc, you don't know what it's like out there." No, I talk to people. I read the research. The research is a wide swath of what's going on out there. It's the best picture we have, and it's bleak.

Yeah, it

Jordan Harbinger: sure is, man.

Dr. Max Butterfield: But it doesn't have to be. That's the good news, is some people are able to navigate this just fine. But man, am I glad I don't have to, [00:41:00] because I don't know if I would've been able to do it while at 20. Now I have the tools.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's the thing. People go, "Oh, imagine being single now." I can imagine being single now.

I think it would be way easier than it would be if I was 25 right now. Because again, I used to talk only about dating and teach the dating stuff back in the day 20 years ago or 15 years ago, and it was like, it was tough. We were reading behavioral science on how do we apply this in real life, but you didn't have dating apps back then.

It was all about going to the bars and meeting people on the street, and that was hard. But the apps were supposed to make it way easier, and instead just made it a million times harder. I saw this funny comic that I'm going to post on Instagram at some point, and it was two people at the end of a date standing by the door, and she goes, "Hey, do me a favor.

Tell everybody we met on Tinder. I don't want anybody to know I talked to a stranger in a bar." And I thought that was perfect because back then it would be like, "Don't tell anybody we met online."

Dr. Max Butterfield: Oh, there's such a stigma.

Jordan Harbinger: Your parents will freak out. If you met this person over the internet and you showed [00:42:00] up, you're lucky you're not in pieces in a garbage can, right?

Now, you met somebody in real life. Wow, what did he say? I've got to hear the whole story. This must have been a magical interaction. And now it's like, no, the guy just sent me a DM on Twitter and I showed up, and it was date number 87 that month, and I guess he was the only non-creep who didn't try to grope me under the table, and here we are.

That's like the modern day meet cute. I find it, it sad, and I think one of the things that makes it harder for people is people take one painful incompatibility and then reverse engineer it into a universal law about men or women. And you cover this at some points in your videos as well. Like, when they do this, it means this.

And it just, that can't be true most of the time.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah, and that's a major pain point for my audience, and I think the audience in general on dating and relationships. It's this idea that someone's personal story can absolutely be true, but that doesn't make it true for you, and that certainly doesn't make [00:43:00] it true for everyone.

If I dated a woman and she had a Saint Bernard dog and it didn't go well, because the dog breathed in my face all the time and I didn't like it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's one of those huge dogs that's, like, as tall as you when you're sitting down, right? Is that one?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Huge. Yeah, exactly. And I then make a video that says, "Never date a woman with a big dog."

Well, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Of course that doesn't apply to everyone, and yet that's exactly what sells on social media because it gives you something to go on. We have too many choices. And so what you can do is you can now cut everybody with a big dog. So actually, that's kind of nice, because you've got a million people to choose from on Tinder, now you only have 980,000 or whatever.

And we're always looking for these ways to cut. Never date a guy under six feet. Okay, now you've just eliminated a bunch of people. Is it accurate? No. But does it help you cut? Yeah, actually it does.

Jordan Harbinger: Dating apps give you access to thousands of potential [00:44:00] partners so you can reject all of them and text your ex at 2:00 AM.

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Jordan Harbinger: Now,

Dr. Max Butterfield: back to Dr. Max Butterfield

Jordan Harbinger: I've got-- I still have friends that teach dating to middle-aged guys or younger guys, and one of the things they say is, "If you are under six feet or you can't get away with saying you're six feet because you're not five foot 11 and a half or something, don't bother with the apps."

And I said, "Oh, is it because women are so shallow or whatever?" And he's like, "Actually, here's what my theory is, and you tell me what you think because I'm g- I want to run this by you. It's not that women are shallow." He said this, he goes, "I'm on the apps right [00:47:00] now," because he's currently single, and he goes, "I have two messages in here from last night at 6:00 PM, overnight, all the way through lunch."

He goes, "But if we were sitting with a woman that was reasonably attractive, she would have somewhere close to or possibly over 100 messages just from before lunch after this two, two and a half hour lunch in a big city like Toronto or Vancouver," which is where we were at the time. And I said, "My God, that's insane."

And he goes, "Yes. So if you have two messages from somebody, you're going to reply to both. If you have 102 messages from people, you have to figure out a way to stop the incoming flow. So what do you do? You raise the income slider all the way up to six figures or however high it goes. You lower the radius of people that it looks for to five miles from 50 miles or whatever it is.

And then that doesn't work. You're still getting 68 messages an hour, so then you raise the height thing to six foot and over, and then you go, 'Ah, okay, now [00:48:00] I'm getting 20,' and I can just sort of look at the opening line or the photo and see if I want to talk to this person." It's not necessarily that women have suddenly become way more shallow.

There is maybe an illusion of choice that's happening, but it's also just please stop the influx of crazy that's in my inbox. Slide all the sliders to 11, and one of the sliders happens to be height. And he gave an example of another slider that you could have, and I wish I'd remembered it, but it was basically like what if you had a personality compatibility slider?

You would slide that one up to 11, too. Or he goes, "What if guys had a slider that was how many men the woman had slept with?" That one would go all the way to one extreme, too. It would probably go all the way down to zero or one or something for a lot of guys, not because men actually care about that, but because, geez, I'm getting 100 messages.

I might as well find women that haven't had any other experiences other than me, right? So it's all arbitrary in many ways. At least that was his theory. What do you think about that?

Dr. Max Butterfield: I think it's an awesome theory, and it goes back to The ideas that we've talked about [00:49:00] being cognitively overloaded from a variety of sources, we have to have shortcuts.

Cognitive psychologists call them heuristics. Yes. It's just another word for mental shortcut. Rule

Jordan Harbinger: of thumb.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And these mental shortcuts help us navigate a world that's overly complex, and what's interesting is stress increases the difficulty we have in dealing with complex situations. So if you... Suppose the economy was bad, for example.

Suppose you wanted to buy a house and you couldn't because you have rising student loan costs and more inflation than you know what to deal with. Actually, that bleeds into your ability to make good choices, and so you have to make cuts somewhere, and you have to save resources mentally. And so one way that you do that is by shortcuts.

I like to think of it, too, this is not just in dating. Employers do this all the time. So Jordan, if you and I were competing for a job and employers only knew where we had done our undergrad, you said you went to U of M? Yeah, so you went to U [00:50:00] of M. I went to Calvin College right down the road. Calvin doesn't have the name brand that U of M does, and so if an employer's going to say, "Who should we hire for this job?"

And they only know some basic information, which is really common in both job applications and dating apps, they're going to cut everybody who's not from a blue blood. Why wouldn't they? Even if you and I are equivalent, it doesn't matter because we have to get past that first apron or that first weight, and dating is no different. There's just too much accessibility, and so people have to find shortcuts.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this is interesting. I ended up with a job on Wall Street, and I remember thinking, "I didn't need my legal education to come here. Why do they only hire from top-tier law schools?" And the answer, the only reasonable convincing answers were those schools require you to work 16 hours a day, and this job requires you to work 16 hours a day, so they want to make sure that you can handle that.

It's really competitive. The schools are really competitive, so they want to make sure you can handle that too. But the truth is really they [00:51:00] just pay a lot because the hours are terrible, and they figure they might as well get some of the, quote-unquote, best people. But what I found interesting was you go to work in New York, it's like Harvard, Yale, Michigan, UVA, whatever, Columbia, and then it's Hofstra w- and then all these other schools in New York because they're close by, and one of the other partners went there, and he knows that it's fine.

And it's like, wait, wait, wait. I should have just gone- And that's

Dr. Max Butterfield: a shortcut too. That's just a different shortcut. It's like, hey, I know that school, therefore those people are probably good.

Jordan Harbinger: Damn, if you want to work in New York, go to a school in New York. You don't have to go to Columbia, Michigan, Harvard, Yale, whatever it is.

Go to a, a decent school in New York, and you can get the exact same jobs, and you will be equally qualified as anybody else who went to a fancy bougie school who has a $300,000 bill to pay.

Dr. Max Butterfield: The challenge there is how do we translate that to relationships? Not that the job question isn't also very important, but what are the things you can do then to reach that second tier of evaluation?

How do you get past people's filter? And I think there are some [00:52:00] things you can do, but the reality is it's almost impossible on the dating apps because how do you ever get a chance to display that you are, for example, hardworking or that you are kind or warm or funny or whatever it is? That's hard to do, and the answer is you have to have an opportunity to meet with people in person.

That's the way to get it done.

Jordan Harbinger: So my friend, again, who teaches dating, he's like, the secret weapon now is the stuff we did 15 years ago where you just go to a bar or a party or an event, and you have rizz and charisma, and you're talking with people, and you're introducing people to each other because that's way more rare than it used to be because nobody's doing it.

And if you're 5'10", you can't use those apps, bro, so you better learn how to get the rizz going. And the thing is, even if you're awesome on these apps, I've got friends who are, like, models and stuff, and they clean up on the apps, but the problem is they eventually have to meet people in person, and if- You've got to be a real

Dr. Max Butterfield: human being

Jordan Harbinger: if you can't be a real human being, you hook up a lot, and then you come crying to me and go, [00:53:00] "Why don't I ever have the ability to get people to have a lasting relationship?" And I go, "You have a cardboard personality, and you're shallow."

Dr. Max Butterfield: And some of your listeners might be thinking, "Okay, well, why don't I just say I'm six feet even though I'm 5'10"?"

Guess what that signals when she shows up? It signals you're a liar.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, not good.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And that's even worse than not making it to the second tier. That is an immediate rejection.

Jordan Harbinger: Correct. Yeah, that's not cool at all. I, so I feel for guys who are not able to use the apps, but on the other hand, now you have the ability to develop a secret weapon, which is meet people in person.

The real awesome hack here, though, man, I've got to tell the audience at large, because I don't use it. Find a couple tall, good-looking friends who absolutely clean up on the apps. They invite a ton of people to a party that you host, and you show up at this party, and you do your thing. That has worked ridiculously well for some people who I, I've talked to about this because those guys can invite 40 people.

They went out with them before, it didn't necessarily work out, but [00:54:00] they're, "Hey, you want to come to a party? You were cool. We kind of jived, but we just didn't have a romantic thing going." Sure. So they show up, and there's a bunch of guys and a bunch of gals at a party, and then all of the 5'9" and, and u- up, but under six feet guys are cleaning up at the party.

And I'm thinking like, "That's genius. You guys have it together." I love this.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I think that's great. That's great. Another hack is literally just ask people out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Because we did a study in our research lab this past year, a couple of studies actually, and the very first question we were answering was, do people prefer to be asked out in person or on Instagram?

So if we say exactly the same thing, it's exactly the same person, same profile picture, whatever, these college students who we surveyed vastly preferred being asked in person, yet we know nobody's doing it. And so the next study was, "Hey, why aren't you doing it?" Dummies. I didn't say that. It's not that they were afraid.

It's not that they thought they'd get rejected more. It's that they thought it was against the [00:55:00] rules. They specifically, that is what they endorse, is that it's against the rules. It violates a social rule. So society is preventing these people from just doing the basic, "Hey, do you want to g- grab coffee? You want to go to a park and take a walk?"

Jordan Harbinger: I have some sympathy for both men and women in this situation because this is kind of an online meme. You've probably seen this. Guys who are attractive, if they ask someone out and that person has a boyfriend, it's fine and it's flattering. If an unattractive person asks somebody out and she does or does not have a boyfriend, it can be considered creepy, and the rejection can actually have career or social consequences that go well beyond not being able to go to that Starbucks anymore.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Correct. Most people don't know which category they fall into. Because I wouldn't even so much as say it's about who's attractive and who's not, although somebody who's obviously a 10, okay, they get the pretty privilege that we talked about before. But most of the time it's like, I'm a six and she's an [00:56:00] eight.

Is that gap okay? But if she sees me as a five and she sees herself as a nine-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, now it's insulting ...

Dr. Max Butterfield: now that's inappropriate, and I'm the weird creepy guy. I would be anyway as an old person with a wedding ring on. You get the point here, is that attraction is not as certain as we suspect it to be. Our level of attractiveness is not as certain as we suspect it to be.

And so there's this uncertainty of, can I actually ask her out? Can I actually go talk to him? Is that allowed? And people don't know. They legitimately, they're not sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's tough. And then you've got, like, women going, "That's fine. I'll take charge." But guys are too thick, because the subtle signals that a woman would throw off to me would go right over my head.

I remember being like, I'd finally ask somebody out, and she'd go, "What took you so long?" And I'd go, "What are you talking about?"

Dr. Max Butterfield: And she's like, "I've been looking at you."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I dropped a pencil near you and I came and picked it up and then I said, "Excuse me." And then when you were at the gym and then I said, "Hey, do you know where the other 20 is?"

And you said, "Over there." And I thought [00:57:00] like, then it might happen. And I'm thinking, no, those are not signals. What I need is for you to jump over while I'm bench pressing, sit in my lap, plant a kiss right on my lips and then sit there until I come up with the balls to ask you out for coffee. That's the signal I'm waiting for.

Anything less than that is not going to hit my radar. And it's tough. It's tough out there for everybody.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Because there's a huge penalty if you as a man over-perceive a signal from a woman. So you think she's sending you a signal and she is in fact not. If you're friends, you've just ruined the friendship.

If you're strangers, you're now a creeper. And so guys in many ways are trained to under-perceive those signals. Maybe they think that they see them. They might over-read them into the situation but they know socially like, no, no, no. I really shouldn't. That's actually a guy you want who's that socially aware and so he's going to miss those signals simply because he doesn't want to be wrong 'because serious.

Jordan Harbinger: It's tough. One of the things we used to teach again before you could get fired for doing something like this, you probably could back then too but we [00:58:00] were in our 20s and didn't care. It was if you thought there was something going on, you could literally say, "Are you flirting with me right now?" And if they were like, "No," then you're like, "Oh, of course, I was just kidding."

But if they go like, "A little," then they are and you proceed past go, collect $200. So but it's tough, right? Because now it's like, no, and also I'm your boss. What are you doing? Like, you have to really be careful of all these sort of things. And now there's those groups on Facebook, Don't Date Him, and you're thrown in there.

There's literal rapists in there and domestic violence people and then there's guys in there who like, I don't know, went to the same Starbucks twice in one day and are therefore now maybe a stalker that's dangerous. And it's like, yikes. And they don't know they're in there, right? The photos have all been taken surreptitiously.

So I feel bad for anybody dating right now. This has been a long tangent. I'm curious if you can create a practical exercise, this like a relationship rule audit. Give listeners a test they can apply the next time they hear a relationship rule online. Do you have any sort of [00:59:00] heuristics, to use your vocabulary, people can apply to these relationship rules they hear online or from friends to see if they're crap or not?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Two big things. First of all, does it come from personal experience and observations? So is it part of someone's personal story? That doesn't make it false, but that is the first layer of defense. You should do more digging and find out, is this actually going to hold up in my situation? So look at the source.

Is it personal, or is it based on big data? Two, is this something where they use simple words like everyone, everybody all the time?

Jordan Harbinger: Overgeneralizing? Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Exactly. So if it comes from a personal anecdote, if it generalizes to everyone or even to maybe too many people, those are two things that are pretty sketchy.

And then to put a positive spin on it, if the person couches it in words like [01:00:00] sometimes or the data tend to show, much, much better.

Jordan Harbinger: I like the idea that you should examine if something is a repeated pattern, because I think it's really tempting to find one isolated incident and just go, "Okay, blanket, because this thing really hurt my feelings, so therefore anybody who does X, has that Saint Bernard, is always going to do this."

It's like if you dated five women that had Saint Bernards, and all of them had stank breath in your face all the time and ruined your, your libido or whatever, okay, now maybe you got a rule or the makings of a rule, at least for you personally. I think also, and maybe if I can add to this test, maybe come up with three plausible explanations.

You kind of did this earlier, right? Does it mean that she doesn't like you, or does it mean that she's really busy because she has two jobs and is also in school, and therefore is deprioritizing her social life, and even her best friend doesn't hear from her for two days at a time? Maybe you're on the same tier as that person.

That's pretty good, actually, right? [01:01:00] Come up with other plausible explanations. And yeah, I think that's a decent test.

Dr. Max Butterfield: So I'll coach people individually, and what I implore them to do, so I think this is just so important, is to tell three stories about what's going on. One is the most likely story, one is the least likely story, and the other is the story you're telling yourself right now.

And so in other words, he didn't text me back for a day. So what's the most likely story for that? What's the most likely explanation? What's the least likely explanation? So in other words, like what's best case scenario? What's worst case scenario? And then what are you telling yourself? And my guess is most of the time people are leaning towards worst case scenario.

Sometimes they're full in worst case scenario, when in reality what we need to be thinking is predictively what is actually likely to be going on here? And what's likely is, like, he is busy. He's not the kind of guy that would just disappear.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:00] Here's an interesting example. He says every ex of his was crazy.

This is something I came across a few years ago with a friend of mine. Yeah,

Dr. Max Butterfield: I've seen this one.

Jordan Harbinger: Of course. Every ex is crazy, men or women. Most likely the common denominator is him, therefore maybe they're not crazy, maybe he's the problem. But I've also met guys, they're otherwise stable, great guy, and they love crazy women because, I don't know, it's fun for them?

I can't relate, but they love it. So yes, all their exes were crazy actually, but he filtered for that. He dated a stable woman for five minutes, got bored, and moved on.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And I think most likely it depends on what's this guy like. So if you phrase it as best case versus worst case scenario, so best case scenario he's had a run of bad luck.

He's dated a bunch of women that are just not right for him or for anyone. Two, okay, worst case scenario is he's crazy. In any variety of ways. Maybe he's selecting for crazy people, or maybe [01:03:00] he is just a maniac. Okay, what's the most likely scenario? It's a mix of those two things . You know, he's doing some selecting, but also, yeah, people have bad luck sometimes.

That's legitimate. And as he builds skills, is he likely to do that in the future? No, probably less likely anyway.

Jordan Harbinger: I want to talk about ghosting and things like breadcrumbing, which most people haven't heard of, situationships. You cover this, and first of all, what is breadcrumbing? I feel like this is way more common now than it used to be, but that could just be internet perception.

Dr. Max Butterfield: So I actually didn't encounter the term breadcrumbing until I came on social media, so like 18 months ago. I found it almost instantly. But I had no idea what this was, and so I thought researchers wouldn't have looked into this, because I know this research really well. So one of the first things I did was I looked at the research.

And so let me tell you, it is in fact there.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Dr. Max Butterfield: So let me tell you what breadcrumbing is. Breadcrumbing is when you lead people on with just little crumbs so that they are always hungry for more. It's like the old story of Hansel and Gretel. The wicked witch [01:04:00] leaves a little trail of breadcrumbs to her house, where she's going to bake you in the oven.

This is really gruesome in terms of a relationship analogy. But the idea is the person is leading you on, and they're just giving you just the bare minimum of what you need to keep you hooked in and to keep you addicted to them. And yeah, it turns out people do that, and it turns out it's a pretty effective strategy if your goal is emotional manipulation.

I don't think that should be, and this applies more broadly than breadcrumbing. People will say to me, "Yeah, but will it work?" It's like, yeah, it actually will work if your goal is to ruin someone's life.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, when is the ambiguity accidental, and when is somebody strategically preserving access to you for attention or manipulation purposes?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah, I think most of the time it's a mix. It would take a very insane person, and that's an inflammatory word, let's say an insane person. What I really mean is it would take a really [01:05:00] terrible person to do this on purpose 100% intentionally. There are very few people who are going to do that. Most of the time it's something they learned that's effective.

So maybe you learn it when you're in second grade, if you're a tease just a little bit, and just with friendship even. This is something that has been learned over time as like this works. But works how? That's always the question.

Jordan Harbinger: People want closure, usually in the form of one final conversation, maybe a few dozen follow-up texts, and light felony stalking.

We'll be right back. Also, our newsletter Wee Bit Wiser seems to be a big hit around here. The idea is to give you something specific and practical that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It is a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dr. Max Butterfield. thing, and it dovetails a little bit with [01:06:00] situationships, right? Which I guess are, what, relationships where one/both parties just refuse to negotiate the terms of what's going on?

They're sleeping together, but then sometimes they go out to dinner, but they're not really dating, but they kind of are, but it's not your girlfriend, so you can date other people. And, like, I find that most of the time, both parties are miserable in this, or the one person who wants something more is, of course, very miserable in this.

But then the guy might not want to say anything because he doesn't want anything more, but that means you're going to probably stop sleeping with him, so you can't have that. What is going on with these? Are these more common now, or, or again, is this just internet perception?

Dr. Max Butterfield: No, again, this is common enough that researchers, they've been talking about this longer than the term situationship has been around, except they use something, I think it's even catchier.

It's called sliding versus deciding, and the basic idea is that you just kind of accidentally slide into a relationship. Like, there's been some freezing rain in Michigan, typical Michigan February or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I was going to say, that's a Michigan analogy that [01:07:00] people are going to, some people are not going to have a clue what we're talking about here.

Dr. Max Butterfield: You hit a patch of ice, and you just slide a little further than you intended to go, and that's what happens in the relationship. Not because you intentionally decided to take the next step and move in together, but because your lease was up, and you needed somewhere to live. And so you're like, "Hey, maybe I could stay with you for a little while."

And she's like, "Yeah, I think that'd be fine." You didn't decide to move in together. That was just convenient. And so that's a situationship, is you haven't actually had the real conversation, which is, are we serious enough to live together? And the answer's probably no if you haven't had time to have that conversation yet.

But if it's easy and convenient, you just slide right into it.

Jordan Harbinger: That's actually quite funny, and it this is exactly what happened with my wife, too.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Is it?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, in many ways, because, so I met her. I needed an apartment. She's like, "I'm moving out of my apartment." So I basically stayed in the apartment that she was in for a while, and it was like, okay, we're roommates.

And then she moved, and I leased her apartment from her before she sold [01:08:00] it, and then I moved to San Francisco. And she's like, "I live with my parents, and this kind of sucks." And I was like, "Well, why don't you just stay with me? I live in the city. It's awesome." Why don't you just come stay here? And then I remember her parents were like, "Are you kidding me?"

And I jokingly said, this is a long time ago now, so it's okay, we have two kids. We'd better get married because if we don't, your parents are going to really hate this and they're never going to let it go. And thank God we got married, otherwise she was going to have that stain on her record forever.

Dr. Max Butterfield: So it worked out for you?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it did.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That is a perfect example of why people shouldn't learn that lesson from you. No, definitely not. Because it worked out, and maybe it shouldn't have, but it did, so that means it's true for your life.

Jordan Harbinger: I wouldn't do it again, and I remember people being like, "What are you doing?" And I was like, "No, no, no, I know this is a bad idea. I just don't currently care." And it was also the same thing with working with my wife. I remember I worked with her because I needed an assistant. My assistant, I had to fire her because her boyfriend stole something from my company, right? So I was like, "Crap, I need an assistant really bad." And everyone's like, "Do [01:09:00] not hire your girlfriend. Do not hire your girlfriend."

And I was like, "I just temporarily need to hire my girlfriend." She was awesome, and I was like, "This is great." And we still work together, and it's great. And when people go, "Oh, good. I was thinking about working with my wife," and I'm like, "Don't do it." And I'm the, the other dentist, right?

The nine out of 10. I'm the one who doesn't recommend this vibrating toothbrush. This just happens to work out for me. It's probably not going to work out for you. Everybody I've talked to that's had this, that's hired their sister-in-law or their wife, it's a fricking d- hot dumpster fire. Don't do it. And I'm speaking from zero credibility because I did it and it worked out fine.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And researchers have a name for this, it's called survivorship bias, which you probably have heard of.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Survivorship bias is everywhere. It's like you see an interview with a guy who's 100 years old, and the interviewer is, "What's your secret to success?" Yeah, I eat a lot of olives. And the guy goes, "Well, it's whiskey and cigarettes."

Yeah. That's not what makes you live to be 100. Might've been 150 had he not had cigarettes and whiskey.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, and then you get the blue zones and [01:10:00] stuff. This is a, a funny example. Y- you might know this. So there's this whole book about blue zone diet, and the blue zone, and these people live really long.

And I talked to another PhD health researcher, not on the show, and he told me that it actually is m- almost certainly some kind of government benefits fraud, where they're saying a person is still alive and is 113 years old because the government doesn't check to see if that person's alive and just keeps sending the check to their house.

Dr. Max Butterfield: So the family's just collecting the Social Security-

Jordan Harbinger: Correct ... or whatever it is. For another decade. And then finally someone's like, "Hey, we need you to come in and do X," and they're like, "He died last night." And they're like, "Oh, well." And they're like, "The jig is up on this." But they got 13 extra years of welfare from, I don't know, Greece or whatever.

So it turns out to just be complete nonsense.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Well, it's the survivorship bias. But again, like the blue zones thing, whether it's true, or fraud, or somewhere in the middle, the advice for the diet is actually not [01:11:00] harmful. It's eat healthy and live a healthy life.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. That's great, and that's where a personal story can be fine.

It's like back to the love languages things as a bookend here. That could be useful, but we have to verify. Let's find out if it actually is, and that's really what relationship science is all about, is just verifying some of these claims. And that's where I kind of try to step in and say, "Here's a good one.

Here's a bad one. I'm calling a ball on this one. I'm calling a strike on this one."

Jordan Harbinger: What about ghosting, man? Again, when I was dating, literally never happened to me. No. I don't think it happened to me one single time. And now it seems to be the default way of people ending relationships. It's like, well, she just hasn't answered any of my calls or texts, and so that's over.

Weird.

Dr. Max Butterfield: What I don't hear people talking about today is a lack of emotional skill. Causing ghosting. So in other words, it's easier to ghost someone than to say, "I don't like you. Let's stop talking." [01:12:00] And you might think that's easier for them, but it's not actually. And so I think people don't have the same level of communication skill today that they had when you were dating because of social media and because of phones, because they haven't grown up having hard conversations with people, having to face someone to tell them something difficult.

Instead, you can just disappear, and that's so much easier today than it used to be. It used to be you would see the person in your neighborhood. You couldn't ghost. You'd have to move if you wanted to ghost them, and that's a lot of work. Now it's more just, "I'm not going to respond. I don't think." Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: just blocked them on Insta and their texts turn green, so the end.

Yeah. When should a person seek closure, and when are they using closure as a respectable, I don't... euphemism, whatever, for one more chance? Because on our Feedback Friday segment, we've gotten letters like, "I just need closure." And I'm like, "No, you want to try again, and you are stalking your ex-girlfriend."

Dr. Max Butterfield: Well, it's so funny.

So when I do [01:13:00] one-on-one coaching, so often I'll hear people say, "I just want closure." And I go, "Hey, man, she told you she never wants to talk to you again." That's literally what closure is. What you want is a better resolution, and those are two different things. So that's my decision point right there is, what are you actually looking for?

Are you looking for an end to this chapter, or are you looking for a postscript? Are you looking for another chapter? And most of the time, we actually already have the end of the chapter. If they're ghosting you, it's over.

Jordan Harbinger: That is a really good point. I do understand why people want, quote-unquote, closure.

Like you said, they want a better resolution, and it is unsatisfying that somebody just ignores you. It sucks, but I think it's probably worse, "Hey, your breath is disgusting. Your teeth are a little bit messed up. Your style sucks. You're really boring, and I don't click with..." I mean, do you need to hear all that, or can you just move on?

Dr. Max Butterfield: So if you have the skill, if you're in the position where you're ghosting someone or you're thinking about [01:14:00] ghosting someone, the best thing you can do, truly, is provide them with some measure of closure. So you can say, "Hey, this is not working out for me, and I want to give you the courtesy of ending it personally, so I'm going to stop things here."

And notice I didn't say, "I hate you, you ugly fish." Yeah. Whatever. Like, "You look like a bass." "Your

Jordan Harbinger: breath smells like a Saint Bernard."

Dr. Max Butterfield: So you don't have to be mean. Closure can also just mean putting a period on the end of the sentence, and we don't even do that. In text, it's like you don't put in a period.

That's scary. You say, "Hey, see you later." But closure is, "Hey, I won't see you later, and that's okay. We're going different directions."

Jordan Harbinger: I do feel like that's harder for women to do because they have a actual physical safety concern- 100%.

Dr. Max Butterfield: 100% ...

Jordan Harbinger: with telling a guy they don't want to see them again. It's like you do the wrong thing, and you've got a violent enemy chasing you around.

Terrifying.

Dr. Max Butterfield: And so I think it's really important for women, and [01:15:00] men, too, but for women especially, to assess who they're talking to. If this is someone you've known since second grade, and he's never shown any indication of violence, but he said that he would like to date you and you never saw him that way, you could probably safely...

Again, I can't say this for everyone's specific situation, but if you've known the guy, you can say, "Hey, I don't see you that way," but- I can't say that with certainty. I'm couching it again.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you have to. It's crazy out there.

Dr. Max Butterfield: That guy might be a crazy person.

Jordan Harbinger: That's true.

Dr. Max Butterfield: So I think it's important to recognize that.

Jordan Harbinger: I'd love to talk a little bit about chemistry, right? Because it means so many different things. Physical attraction, maybe there's some uncertainty or there's some familiarity, or there's anxiety, there's reciprocity or some cocktail of all these things. But I do wonder why emotional instability for some people can feel like passion.

I told you about my friend who liked crazy, actually crazy sort of rude women. He loved it, and it's weird because he comes from like a totally normal, stable family. He's got a great job. He's a [01:16:00] totally grounded guy. It was actually shocking for me that he likes that, but he feels like that emotional instability is somehow a key ingredient in a relationship.

Dr. Max Butterfield: It's a lot like skydiving. You could die if you jump out of a plane, and yet thousands of people do it every year. Maybe more, I don't know what the stats are on that. But what that's doing is we only have kind of one system, and it's either on or off. It's the fight or flight system, and some people enjoy to have it activated a little bit.

Maybe not an actual fear of death. You don't want to be chased by a bear in the middle of the forest, but some people might actually get some amount of rise out of that. And so I think that's what we're seeing is individual differences in sensitivity to stimulation, and some people just need a little bit more, and some people need a lot more.

And so when someone is emotionally unstable, yeah, that gets you going. Gets your heart rate up, respiration rate up, gets your blood pressure up, and in some ways that's the [01:17:00] same as jumping out of a plane in a safe situation. You also know that relationship argument is not truly dangerous probably for most people.

It just gets you going.

Jordan Harbinger: I'd love to talk about red flags, because I think this is one of the most interesting elements. We have to define red flag in a way that does not turn every imperfect human being into toxic waste. Tell me what you think a red flag actually is.

Dr. Max Butterfield: For me, the best indicator of a red flag is a pattern that makes your life worse instead of better.

And notice that's not a specific behavior, because there are certain specific behaviors that are going to be obvious to everyone. Physical violence, emotional violence, being mean. Those are obvious, but the question is not, "Was my partner mean to me today?" The question was, "Is my partner usually mean to me? Is my life worse because they're in it, or is it better because they're in it?"

So it takes more of a bird's-eye view to get a sense of that, but we like the [01:18:00] shortcut. "Oh, he yelled at me once. That's a red flag. He forever is a problem." Maybe, but one episode of yelling is very different than 10 episodes of yelling.

Jordan Harbinger: So what's the difference, then, between, let's say, a red flag incompatibility and an annoying personality trait?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. Is there one? Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, there has to be.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. My experience is that everyone on Earth is annoying. I don't know if you've had this experience. At one time or another, not all the time, of course, but you could have the, just the greatest person on Earth, you're locked in a room with them for three days, that's not going to go well.

And a big part of that is we just don't deal well with the same stimulation over and over again. So even somebody being too nice, that can be a red flag. We see that as like, "He's nice all the time, that's a red flag because he's hiding something."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Maybe, but probably you just are annoyed [01:19:00] because you need some space.

So ultimately, I don't know that there is a difference between somebody who's annoying and somebody who is showing a pervasive problem, other than is it making your life better or worse most of the time?

Jordan Harbinger: I see. That's a good heuristic. I would love to hear some real red flags that you see people rationalizing away for whatever reason.

Dr. Max Butterfield: You'd be shocked at the type of things that people rationalize. We can all rationalize anything if it provides us with hope or if it provides us with some benefit. But the biggest one, it goes back to this pattern idea, is inconsistency, is this rationalization of, "I tried something and it didn't work once, and so I'm going to try it again and again," and you're not getting a just predictable, reliable response from this person.

You think, "Next time. Next time they'll do it right," or, "Next [01:20:00] time they'll be nice to me." What we're really talking about, to put it in concrete terms, is sometimes relationships are like a slot machine. You put in a dollar, you don't win. You put in a dollar, you don't win. You put in a dollar, you win a bunch.

That is an inconsistent relationship, and it's easy to get addicted to that in the same way that it's easy to get addicted to a slot machine. Nobody gets addicted to a change machine. You put in a dollar, you get four quarters. But actually, that's what you want in a relationship. It's just not as compelling for us.

Jordan Harbinger: It was a little bit of a, I won't say a dodge, but you gave me a better answer than probably what I was going to get anyway, so I accept that.

Dr. Max Butterfield: You're like, "Hey, but no, seriously, give me a universal red flag."

Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, domestic violence.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I'm not going to do that, other than someone who is unkind, someone who is cold, someone who is a jerk, and everybody already knows that stuff anyway.

That's the issue.

Jordan Harbinger: Here's a better version of that question. I would love to know the top internet red flags that are mostly bullshit and not really red flags, but people just [01:21:00] jump on these like, "Oh my God, never date this person because they did this thing." And it's like, no, that's called having a bad day, for example.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Totally. I think th- and this goes back to something that we hit on earlier, which is the idea of things like, if he wanted to, he would. Things like always, people everywhere do. It's not actually individual items that I see as a problem. Maybe this is a better answer. It's not individual things, it's an approach to information.

It's the approach to relationships that's the problem. So hitting on this idea of someone who is saying with certainty that this is always true, or someone who's saying, "This is true, and I have nothing to prove it other than my own experience." So what I'm trying to do ultimately is teach people how to evaluate every claim they see, because so many claims are just going to appear out of nowhere.

By the time this airs, there might be a new claim sweeping [01:22:00] the world that's totally bogus, and I want people to have the tools to be able to evaluate that rather than combating single claims at a time, i- if that makes sense.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course. I'm curious what you think of attachment theory. I've done shows on this.

I'll probably do more shows on it. It seems like it's science, but I think people jump on it too much and it becomes horoscopy, right? Oh, you're avoidant, therefore all of these other things must be true about you.

Dr. Max Butterfield: 100%. So I have always been skeptical of attachment theory as a whole because attachment theory says your way of being is set in the first year or 18 months of life.

Your way of relating to people is forever fixed. If something goes wrong in your first 18 months, you're cooked, bro. And I just, I find that hard to believe, and I don't know that the data supports the strength of that claim by itself. Early relationships matter. The data absolutely supports that. People do end up with attachment styles, but they're [01:23:00] not boxes that they get stuck into forever.

And I think truly the attachment theory researchers, they recognize that today. There's a second or even third wave of attachment theory that has advanced beyond the beginnings. This guy named John Bowlby, and that's from, like, the '50s. And so I think there's an acknowledgement in the research that these are not as fixed as people on the internet act like they are.

And that's the issue, is it's like attachment theory gone wild. That's what you see on social media.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Yeah. They do one thing, therefore they're avoidant, therefore th- and thus they will never change. Since this person is, I don't know, secure attachment, it's never going to work, or this behavior will never change.

Can a person behave, let's say, secure attachment style with one partner and then anxious attachment style with another partner? Is that true in your experience?

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yes. That is exactly what I try to emphasize when I talk about this with people, is that you and I can be really secure in our relationship.

That doesn't mean that you and I are going to be [01:24:00] secure when we go out and interact with other people, because we have a history together. Whereas you meet somebody new, if you're secure, you're a nut. Why would you be secure with someone who you don't know at all? That's wild.

Jordan Harbinger: That is a really good point.

Yeah. You're the weirdo if you have nothing... You're not worried about anything, and it's a brand-new relationship. I wonder, and I see this all the time, right? A lot of understanding someone's attachment pattern becomes an excuse for tolerating mistreatment or rationalizing, maybe pathologizing the fact that the other person doesn't want a relationship or something like that.

They're avoidant. No, they're, with a low level of skill, trying to tell you that they're not interested in you.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Exactly. Are they avoidant, or they just not want a relationship with you? Yeah, they're avoiding a relationship with you. That doesn't mean they're avoiding relationships with everyone. That's a totally different story.

And I think people, they use that avoidant label to absolutely demonize others, and that's not fair either. I think legitimately there are people who are avoidant across [01:25:00] all of their relationships or across most of their relationships, but that is widely overused in my opinion.

Jordan Harbinger: I've got to give you one last farewell question here.

When your children eventually ask you how to choose someone to love, what will you tell them that no algorithm or psychology textbook or viral video can teach?

Dr. Max Butterfield: It would be such a privilege if my kids would ask me that question. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: they're not going to. This is never going to happen.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Right. No,

Jordan Harbinger: exactly. You have no credibility in their eyes.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: But let's fantasize that it did.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I just hope maybe they'll watch my videos someday in secret. But the truth is, it's very simple. And so this is what I would tell my kids. This is what I would tell a six-year-old when choosing friends on the playground, but this is what I would tell a 60-year-old divorcee who's looking to find a new relationship, or a 16-year-old, or anyone.

Find someone you like, make sure they like you back, and then try really hard to make it work. And it's just that simple.

Jordan Harbinger: Love it. Simple, some might even [01:26:00] say simplistic, but-

Dr. Max Butterfield: Yeah. But it's not easy, and that's where it's not simplistic is-

Jordan Harbinger: That's true, it's not ...

Dr. Max Butterfield: the lessons are actually very simple. Applying them is the hard part.

That's why I'm here to do what I do, is to help people apply. It is legitimately very difficult.

Jordan Harbinger: Dr. Max Butterfield, we'll have to have you come back on the show and discuss some of these leftover notes. I shouldn't even say leftover, just the pile of things we were unable to get to, and then y- and then you got a book coming out.

Man, you're flooding the zone.

Dr. Max Butterfield: Absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: Your video a day content strategy is working really well. Thank you for coming on, man. This was a fun conversation.

Dr. Max Butterfield: I really enjoyed it, Jordan. Thanks for having me, and happy to come back.

Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview where Dr. Abigail Marsh unpacks why psychopathy is more treatable than we think, how kindness can quietly reshape lives, and why we may need to rethink labels like sociopath.

JHS Trailer: You know somebody with psychopathy already. So if 1 to 2% of the population has a clinically significant level of psychopathy, and most people's social networks [01:27:00] include 100 to 150 people, all of us know somebody with psychopathy. So that's the bad news. But the good news is that the stereotypes people have about psychopathy are usually a little off, and so the person with psychopathy you already know, you may just not have recognized that that's what their behavior adds up to.

Many people who are psychopathic themselves are like, "I don't want to be this way. I just don't know how to behave differently." No differently from somebody with any other disorder. It's just they can't find anybody who will help them. I fully recognize that people with psychopathy are totally capable of coming up with a code for how they want to live, including a code that dictates, like, what it means to be a good person, even if they don't have the same emotions and drives and motivations as other people do.

So I think that's... it's really important to clarify. However, in that context, people who are psychopathic just don't intrinsically value other people's welfare that much. They are just much more instrumental in their social interactions. Every interaction is about, like, "What can I get? What can I get out of this person?

What can I get out of this situation?" So that's why there's so [01:28:00] much manipulating and lying and exploitation, is it's because people, most of the time, are just sort of tools to get whatever the ultimate goal is. Every other psychological disorder can be treated, and so why would these be uniquely immutable?

And in fact, the evidence is they can be changed, they can be improved. They're totally treatable.

Jordan Harbinger: To hear the science behind who actually does the most harm, check out episode 1293. It might change how you see everyone around you. Thanks to Dr. Max for coming on the show. The hard truth here seems to be that relationships don't come with cheat codes.

A delayed text is not a diagnosis. Chemistry is not destiny. Understanding somebody's attachment style doesn't obligate you to tolerate their bullshit. But we can pay attention to patterns, communicate like adults, invest in people who invest in us, and frankly, stop letting TikTok turn every disagreement into a crime documentary.

As usual, all things Max Butterfield will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. [01:29:00] Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and this show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who watches way too many relationship videos online, believes a whole lot of nonsense, maybe they're on the rocks in their personal life, definitely share this episode. Or somebody who just loves relationship science, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time