Handling Difficult People, Healing Breakups, and the Science of Talking to Strangers | Shankar Vedantam

Practical strategies for navigating difficult relationships and building new connections. Shankar Vedantam is host of the Hidden Brain https://www.hiddenbrain.org/ podcast and radio show, where he explores the hidden patterns that drive human behavior. He is the author of the books, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Wage Wars, Control Markets and Save Our Lives https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Brain-Unconscious-Presidents-Control/dp/0385525222, and Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self- Deceiving Brain https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-City-Power-Paradox-Self-Deceiving-ebook/dp/B07ZTTD4TG/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=1loRS&content-id=amzn1.sym.46812076-4af0-47c5-a75e-57676168d49d&pf_rd_p=46812076-4af0-47c5-a75e-57676168d49d&pf_rd_r=141-9976842-2413604&pd_rd_wg=SU74V&pd_rd_r=ce723ea3-63d7-4e7d-99bc-b2ff685138bf. In this episode we talk about: How to stop trying to change your partner Useful tools for overcoming conflict The challenging practice of "eating the blame" The concept of "useful delusions" How to manage a breakup (of any kind) The real secret to finding closure The value of micro interactions with strangers And more Related Episodes: The Surprising Upsides of Self-Deception https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/354-the-surprising-upsides-of-self-deception/id1565881742?i=1000524998013 Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here https://app.danharris.com/membership Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Additional Resources: Shankar's TED Talks https://www.ted.com/speakers/shankar_vedantam Hidden Brain Live Tour https://www.eventticketscenter.com/hidden-brain-live-shankar-vedantam-new-york-tickets/1285708/e?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22874585407&gclid=Cj0KCQiA7rDMBhCjARIsAGDBuEDTE-sN8zgc6DY7U7BBM-6__6egHtdCqTnyDcz7RYy86TUFVDTmNFcaAh3xEALw_wcB Join Dan and Emmy Award-winning journalist Allison Gilbert at 92NY on May 17th for a live conversation about how mindfulness can deepen connection and combat loneliness, available in person and via streaming. Register here. https://www.92ny.org/event/dan-harris-with-allison-gilbert Join Dan, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18, 2026. Register here. https://www.eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party#9851 To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, gang. As somebody whose career revolves around the study of human happiness and flourishing, I am continuously struck by this fact. We know, from all the evidence, that one of, if not the, most important variables when it comes to mental health and physical health is the quality of your relationships. We know this. And yet, very few of us are actually taught any form of what I like to call interpersonal hygiene when it comes to our romantic relationships, our work relationships, our friendships, and beyond. We're just kind of left to figure it out on our own, to muddle through. And so today, we're going to talk to an excellent guest, a frequent flyer here, about some strategies

• 1:00Dan Harris?

  from the psychological research, so some evidence-based strategies to improve your interpersonal hygiene. Shankar Vedantam is the host of the Hidden Brain Podcast. It's also a radio show. And on the show, he explores the hidden patterns that drive human behavior. Shankar is also the author of several books, including The Hidden Brain and Useful Delusions. He's also somebody I've met and talked to many times and I like a lot. In this conversation, we talk about how to stop trying to change your romantic partners, useful tools for dealing with conflict, the challenging practice of eating the blame, i.e. voluntarily taking responsibility in a conflict. This needs to be done judiciously, as you will hear Shankar

• 1:42Dan Harris?

  describe, how to manage a breakup of any kind, romantic, friendship, work relationship, the real secret to finding closure, the value of micro-interactions, fleeting daily interactions with strangers, and much more.

• 1:57Dan Harris?

  Before we dive in, a heads up that today is the first day of a five-day meditation challenge that we're running over on my new meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris. The challenge is called "Even You Can Meditate," and every day it features a new guided meditation from the great teacher and my great friend, Sebene Selassie. And then twice during the course of the five-day challenge, we're going to do live video sessions where you can ask me and Seb questions. This challenge is available exclusively over on the app, again, 10% with Dan Harris. So head to danharris.com to join us. Just to say, this challenge is designed in part to celebrate a new audiobook, a so-called Audible original, that Seb and I co-wrote and co-recorded.

• 2:39Dan Harris?

  That book is also called "Even You Can Meditate," and if you want to check out the book, you can go to Audible. Last thing to say, then I'll shut up. If you want to meditate with me in person, I've got an event coming up at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on May 17th. I'll do some meditation, take your questions, talk about how this practice can help you stay sane in a world that feels on fire and out of control, et cetera, et cetera. I'll put a link in the show notes. I'd love to see you there. Okay, we'll get started with Shankar Vedantam right after this.

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• 4:07Dan Harris?

  Shankar Vedantam, welcome back to the show.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 4:11Dan Harris?

  It's great to have you back. Our last episode with you was a smash hit, so I suspect this one will be as well. You've been running this series on your show. It's called Love 2.0. You're just at a high level. What's it about and why are you doing it?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Well, we ran this series a few months ago, Dan, and I think the idea is that periodically we return to the topic of love and relationships, not only because I think it's perennially interesting to our listeners, but also I think because there's always new wrinkles or new ideas or new insights from the world of the academy that I feel can be helpful to people's lives. And so we published this series really as a way of highlighting new research, new ideas that have come up in recent years, ideas that I thought were really relevant to people's lives.

• 4:58Dan Harris?

  I'm so interested in love and relationships and not just romantic relationships, which we're going to spend a lot of time focusing on today, but all human relationships, from how we are with strangers, to friends, to colleagues, and beyond, children, parents. I say this as somebody who I think is kind of a traditional man of a certain age, who, you know, historically in my life, did not have much interest in anything having to do with love or relationships. I would not have purchased a book on it or listened to an episode on it. But I'm saying all this because I want to hear if you agree with where I'm going with this. Now I view it differently, which is that we evolved, as

• 5:37Dan Harris?

  every TED Talk reminds us, as social animals. And yet, we are not taught the basic skills of interpersonal hygiene. Therefore, I find, as somebody who's interested in happiness, relationships to be a really interesting sphere. Does any of that resonate with you?

• 5:55Speaker 03

  I love that, Dan. I love the way you put that. I will also add one wrinkle, which is I think when we think about relationships, we often tend to label the ones that are the big relationships, you know, the relationship I had with my mother, or the relationship I have with my partner, or the relationship I have with my child. And as you point out, those are in fact important relationships, but those are not the only relationships Our lives, when we say that humans are a social species, we're not just talking about intimate relationships. We're talking about the range of relationships. And it turns out that range of relationships is actually very important to us, that we benefit not just from the deep, meaningful relationships that we might have with partners and our children, but also with, in some ways, the more casual relationships we have, the more fleeting relationships we have,

• 6:39Speaker 03

  the person that we meet on the subway, the person we sit next to on a park bench. All of these people end up changing our mental health and our mental well-being.

• 6:48Dan Harris?

  Yes, and we're going to get to this target-rich environment of fleeting interactions. They're sometimes called micro-interactions and how they can be really powerful lever when it comes to just feeling better or doing life better. But let's start with the focus of this recent Love 2.0 series that you ran on your podcast, Hidden Brain. The first two episodes feature a really interesting expert, James Cordova, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Cordova, James Cordova.

• 7:17Dan Harris?

  Cordova, thank you for the correction. So James Cordova comes in to talk about how to fix your marriage. And I want to just signal to anybody listening, if you're not married or not in a long-term relationship, these are skills that are scalable beyond marriage. But how to fix your marriage is the way it's teed up on the show. And one of the things James talks about is this instinct many of us feel to try to change our partner. And he says that's futile. Can you tell me a little bit more about his and your view on this natural instinct?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Of course. In many ways, I think it's natural and in some ways inevitable that when any two people are in a relationship with each other, especially if the relationship is a long-lasting relationship, that there are going to be elements of disagreement and friction. That is just simply inevitable. Unless you're in a relationship with yourself, I can't imagine how you won't end up disagreeing with virtually everyone on the planet on at least something. Now, it turns out that many of those disagreements, in fact, are so trivial that we solve them relatively effortlessly. So let's say, for example, you've just gotten married and you discover that your partner likes brown eggs.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  And you have no real preference when it comes to whether your eggs are white or brown. So the problem is solved. Going forward now, you only buy brown eggs and you never speak about eggs again in the course of your relationship. Very easy problem. There's an intermediate level of problem, which requires a certain amount of creativity to solve. So let's say your partner likes to go biking and is an avid cyclist, likes to bike 100 miles a weekend. And you like to go biking too, but you're able to manage about five miles and not 100 miles. And so the problem becomes now your partner wants to go on a 100 mile bike ride. You want to go on a five mile bike ride. There can be friction. But here again, I think there are clever and creative solutions.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  So for example, you can get an electric bike. And now you can basically bike for five miles while covering 100 miles. And you can keep up with your partner. So there are technical solutions in some ways for a set of problems that we have. Or your partner might want to live in the city. You might want to live in the suburbs. And you compromise and say, you know, maybe we can find a part of the city that has a bit of a suburban feel. So there are what James Cordova calls these mezzanine level problems, where it requires a certain amount of skill, certain amount of compromise, certain amount of communication. The problem gets solved. A lot of his focus, and where your question was coming from, was about the persistent problems that remain in relationships long term, that are often not amenable to this kind of compromise or creative solution.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  So for example, you come home from a long day's work and the only thing you really want to do is you want to take off your shoes and you want to sit on the couch and you want to eat some food and you want to watch Netflix. And your partner has also just come back from work and has spent a week cooped up at the office. And your partner says, let's go out, let's have fun, let's go to a club. And at some level, the way you unwind is to be quiet and introspective. And the way your partner unwinds is to be extroverted and gregarious. Now, that's the kind of problem that is very difficult to solve in a creative kind of solution. Right? Because no matter what you do, one person is going to become unhappy. That's the kind of problem that James Cordova has spent some time studying.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  And he argues that this is a kind of problem where the more we try and change our partners, which we often try to do, we say, if only our partner was someone who likes to go out in the evening, we could have a happy marriage. If only my partner was someone who liked to stay in in the evenings, we could have a happy marriage. He argues that that's a futile way of thinking about the relationship. The only way forward is to actually accept your partner for who they are at a personality level.

• 11:10Dan Harris?

  I want to talk about acceptance, but in this case where one person, this by the way, is my marriage, one person is an extrovert, that's me, and the other is an introvert, and I many nights want to drag her out and she doesn't want to be dragged out, and so that can be the source of conflict. What would you and/or Cordova recommend as a way to reach an accommodation?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Right, and in some ways I think the word accommodation, I think, is a mistake, because you can reach an accommodation, you can say, for example, well, this weekend, we're going to stay home, and next weekend we'll go out, and so you can take turns, that would be what you would call an accommodation. But I think what Cordova is actually suggesting is something a little subtler. He's actually saying, at some deep level, part of our misery and unhappiness comes from our desire to change our partner's personalities. And that pain and suffering at some level is self-inflicted. This almost sounds like Buddhism. Our desire to change the other person is the source of our own suffering, the source of our own pain.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  And when you start to accept that the other person is who they are, the problem doesn't go away, but some of the suffering goes away. Because you're no longer saying, the reason I'm unhappy is because my partner refuses to change, you're saying, I'm stuck at home because my partner has a different personality than I do. Now, I'm not saying it solves the problem altogether, but doesn't it take a little sting out of the suffering that you experience?

• 12:39Dan Harris?

  Right, because you're no longer in the briar patch of trying to coerce change that isn't going to happen anyway.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. I mean, and if you think about your partner, and you say, I'm not talking about your partner in particular, Dan, but I'm saying, as one thinks about one's partner, and you say, what is it that drew me to this person in the first place? It's possible that one of the odd things about relationships is that people with opposite personalities often attract one another. The gregarious extroverted person is often drawn to the quiet and introverted person because they feel different than all the other extroverted people that the extrovert knows, and the same with the introvert. Opposites are sometimes drawn together. And so one question to ask is, what is it that drew me to this person in the first place? What is it that I can get from this person's skill set in an area that I don't have? That in fact could broaden out who I am becoming?

• 13:32Speaker 03

  And that's a different way of thinking about your partner. You're no longer thinking about your partner as an obstacle, as a rock in your path that you need to blast out of the way with dynamite. You're not trying to push your partner. You're actually saying, let me accept my partner for where they are. And my partner, if he or she accepts me for who I am, I will no longer feel now put upon to do what my partner wants every weekend. We might not always get to do what we want, but at least we'll understand where the other person's coming from.

• 14:02Dan Harris?

  Yes. I mean, he talks about the paradox of acceptance that actually when you really accept your partner as they are, then things can move because there's an erasure of this tension. And there's a feeling of safety. And that's the stuff out of which creative solutions can emerge, whether there's an accommodation that is possible or not. I think it's similar in terms of how we relate to ourselves. And I'm not the first to observe this, that the paradox is that if you can accept yourself, then you can start to change. Just to bring this full circle, you know, on the introvert extrovert thing with my wife, for example, I don't often try to drag her to things.

• 14:45Dan Harris?

  I just go, like last night, I went out with my friends by myself. And so both of us are happy.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  That's right. So one solution to the problem at a technical level is to expand our social repertoire to go beyond our one partner. In many ways, the demands that we place on our intimate partners today are far, far greater than the demands that people placed on their intimate partners even 50 years ago, to say nothing of 500 or 5,000 years ago. We expect this one person now to be our friend, our business partner, our lover, our confidant, our therapist. You know, this person has to play all these different roles. And this person might not be qualified to play all these different roles. This person In fact, might be an introvert when you're an extrovert. And so one question to ask is, is it possible there are other people in my life who could

• 15:37Speaker 03

  help me fulfill some of my needs in these other departments? That if my partner needs to stay home and sort of unwind on a Friday evening, and I need to go out on a Friday evening, is it possible that I find another friend who's also an extrovert? And I go and hang out with my friend and my partner stays home for a couple of hours and enjoys the peace and quiet? So there are solutions here, but I think the insight that you just mentioned a second ago is such a profound insight. Because when it comes to ourselves, very often, I think, when we try and change ourselves, we often see that, starting from a position of blame or anger, you know, I'm really unhappy with the fact that I broke my resolution. I'm really unhappy with the fact that I broke my diet. I'm really unhappy that I stopped going to the gym.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  The more we beat ourselves up, the less likely we become to actually be the people we want to become. And so much of meditation and yoga, these practices tell us, accept where you are. This is not a race against anybody else. You know, when you're doing yoga, you're not competing against anybody else. You're just noticing and observing and acknowledging where you are. And suddenly, when you do that, all kinds of looseness and flexibility suddenly start to emerge. And in exactly the same way, as that happens with us in our individual lives, it also happens in our relationships, the less we try and push somebody else, the easier it becomes for them to say, hey, you know, it's been a long time since I went out. Maybe I should go out with Dan and hey, it could be fun.

• 17:06Dan Harris?

  Yes, yes, well said. Couple of other concepts from before mentioned, James Cordova. He has this idea, he calls it the porcupine and the turtle dynamic. It's his way of describing a common. Conflict pattern where, you know, one partner deals with pain by attacking and the other withdraws.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 17:27Dan Harris?

  Can you say a little bit more about this?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  It's a very common dynamic in many relationships where one person basically is pursuing the other, the other person is basically withdrawing, and they're both doing it for perfectly good reasons. The person who is the porcupine is basically saying, I'm not having my needs met, I need to have my needs met. And you're approaching the other person and saying, get my needs met. And the other person's saying, I feel under attack, I feel like I'm vulnerable and this other person's coming after me, let me crawl under my shell and hide until the storm passes. And the more one person approaches, the more the other person avoids. And that's a very common pattern. Now, you can also have a problem where you have two porcupines, you know, and they're

• 18:09Speaker 03

  both sort of poking one another and they both want to be close, but unfortunately their quills get in the way of getting close because as they get close, their quills are sort of poking one another. So these relationship dynamics where we're often in partnership with people who have different personality traits is a very, very common thing. It's not necessarily a, if this happens to you or this describes your relationship, the correct answer is not to say, oh my God, what a tragedy. You really should say, this is the human condition. This is what it means to be in a relationship with other people where you're having these kinds of conflicts with one another. Here again, I would argue the power of acceptance is powerful, but with the caveat that I don't think James Cordova is saying that if you wanted to go out all the time and your wife

• 18:54Speaker 03

  wanted to stay in all the time and your wife was to, let's say, accept you, Dan, and say, okay, Dan wants to go out all the time and I need to accept Dan because that's what James Cordova is telling me, and now she goes out with you every week even though she's miserable. Because at that point, what you're doing is you're accepting the other person, right? You're taking their needs into account, which is wonderful, but you're not accepting yourself. You're not taking your own needs into account. And in some ways, both those things have to be satisfied. You have to be true to yourself, you have to honor yourself, you have to have compassion and acceptance for yourself as well as respect and honor and compassion for the other person.

• 19:31Dan Harris?

  Yes. The couples counselor that my wife and I have seen for many years, eight years almost, always talks about the fact that there are kind of three entities in any long-term romantic partnership. I think this is true for long-term business partnerships too. There's me, you, and us. And all three need to be tended.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  I love that idea, and I think one of the powerful ideas there is that when we are in conflict with another person, we often imagine that it's me against the other person. If only my partner would change, we could be happy. If only my partner didn't behave this way, we could be happy. When you start to think about the relationship from the point of view of the us, as opposed to from the point of view of the me, then you start to ask a different question. You sort of say, all right, this is an obstacle in our relationship. We're not happy. The relationship is not happy. How can we basically address this problem together? And now it's both of you, you and your partner against the problem, rather than you against your partner.

• 20:34Dan Harris?

  Along those lines, Cordova has this idea of externalizing the conflict. Like, basically, if there's a dynamic that keeps coming up, introvert, extrovert, or spender, saver, or whatever, you should give the dynamic a name.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:50Dan Harris?

  Label it as an it, as a way to make it more tractable.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  And in some ways, that speaks to exactly what you were raising a second ago, which is that when you start to think about the we, you can collectively then look at the problems in the relationship. You can give them, each of those problems, a name, a personality, and say, oh, here's that personality. Here's the evil monster surfacing once again in our conversation, where, you know, I'm coming home on a Friday evening, and you're coming home on a Friday evening, and I want to go out, and you don't want to go out, and we are in loggerheads with each other. And now you say, ah, here's the introvert, extrovert monster that has reared its head again in our relationship. And now it's you and your partner, hopefully, against the monster, rather than you against your partner.

• 21:33Dan Harris?

  It's so helpful. But there's more, because this guy is just like a font of useful stuff. What I'm about to say is, to some ears, going to sound a little challenging. And I should say that Cordova, you, I believe, kind of nodded at this earlier, Shankar, but Cordova basically says, you can take acceptance too far. You know, obviously, this is not like, this is for personality quirks and even meaningful differences, but not for abusive behaviors, or anything that, you know, diminishes the other person fundamentally. So with that caveat stated, Cordova talks about this concept of eating the blame, that you can sometimes just say, I'm sorry, even if you don't really think it was your fault?

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't know who said it, but it was a wise person who said, "You can either be right or you can be married."

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Those are the options. And if you want to be happily married, in any happy kind of relationship, there are going to be points where each party genuinely, genuinely and sincerely feels that they are the ones who have been wronged. You can see this in interpersonal settings, where two people are at loggerheads with each other and each genuinely feels that the other is responsible for whatever has gone wrong. You can see this in international conflicts, where each person says, "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I am the victim here, the other person is the perpetrator, and all I have to do is defend myself." And the other person feels exactly the same. Now, we can explore the psychology of how and why that is and why it is that two groups can each believe that they are the victim or two people can each believe

• 23:10Speaker 03

  that they are the ones who are being put upon. But I think the question is, what do we do in those situations? It is, I think, probably one of the most difficult things that Cordova is suggesting, because he's suggesting that in that moment, do you prioritize your sense of injustice, your sense of self-righteousness, your sense of, "I need to defend myself against this threat," or do you prioritize the relationship? And of course, I think all of us, understandably, we are human, we often prioritize defending ourselves. You know, if I feel under attack, I have these bodyguards who will come out to defend me. These bodyguards are my capacity for anger, my capacity for defensiveness, my capacity for reactance,

• 23:54Speaker 03

  my capacity to fight back, to hurl an insult, to minimize the other person, to diminish the other person. These are all my bodyguards and they have come out to say, "Shankar is under attack and I better come out and defend him." And so they stand in front of me to say with their armor up, "No one's going to come after Shankar while we are here." Now, the problem, of course, is if my bodyguards are talking to my partner's bodyguards, there's going to be a fight, because that's what bodyguards know how to do. They know how to fight one another. And again, you might win the fight or you might lose the fight, but almost certainly, you're not going to be in a happy relationship. And I think what Cordova is suggesting here is, I think, almost a spiritual practice of actually asking, are there moments when we can actually say, I accept

• 24:37Speaker 03

  that I am the one who is at fault here. Can you forgive me and can we move forward? And of course, that is just excruciatingly difficult for people to do because very often you're asked to do this at precisely the point where you say, I need to be understood. Amends need to be made to me. And James Cordova is now saying, I need to make amends to somebody else. That's unthinkable. But really, that's why I think it really is a spiritual practice. It's not just a relationship practice, but it's a spiritual practice. Because it's asking you, are you able to do this extraordinarily difficult thing? As I was talking to Cordova, I was reminded of this prayer. You know, I went to a Jesuit

• 25:18Speaker 03

  school growing up, Dan, and I learned the prayer of St. Francis. And, you know, I just, I learned the prayer as a boy. It didn't seem very meaningful to me. But over the years, I've realized that prayer is, in fact, incredibly potent in describing almost everything we've talked about the last 25 or 30 minutes. Because St. Francis says, ask not to be consoled as much as to console. Ask not to be understood as to understand. Ask not to be loved as much as to love. And the more that we can turn our attention outward, our compassion outward, our love outward, as opposed to demanding it inward, the better we are going to be at having successful and happy relationships.

• 26:01Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Shankar talks about how to get to the root cause of challenges in a relationship, the concept of useful delusions, how to manage a breakup of any kind, and the real secret to finding closure.

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• 27:23Dan Harris?

  Another, I don't want to say hack because that kind of cheapens it, but another very difficult, but I think potentially quite impactful strategy that Cordova recommends is to kind of get under the hood a little bit. If your partner has irritating, even infuriating habits, try to see like what's the root cause to find like the understandable reasons behind them. Can you say a little bit more about that?

• 27:51Speaker 03

  I mean, it's so interesting when we watch a movie. Part of the reason we enjoy a movie, let's say we're watching a movie about a comedy about a couple that's in conflict with one another. You know, there are lots of comedies like this and you watch the couple and you can laugh and you can laugh at both of them because you understand very clearly not just what they're saying, but what's underneath the surface and where they're coming from. That is so difficult to do when we ourselves are in the scene or when we ourselves are in the movie, right? And really what it speaks to is that when you are able to get a little bit of distance from your problem, you're able to see the problem at some remove. It allows you now to look at it with curiosity as opposed to looking at it with judgment. And it's interesting as we're talking here, so many of these ideas are tied up with the

• 28:36Speaker 03

  practice of mindfulness, the practice of basically saying, can I observe without judgment? When my partner does this, is my first response to judge and then to be defensive and then to attack? Or is my first response to observe and then to say, let me peel a layer and see what's one layer underneath the surface and let me peel another layer to see what's one layer under the surface. So when my friends come to me with problems, it's invariably easy for me to sort of think about them and think about their problems with curiosity. Interesting psychological technique, and this goes all the way back to, you know, the ancient Stoics, is to actually try and do the same thing with ourselves, not just with our partners, but with ourselves, to actually look at ourselves from some remove,

• 29:18Speaker 03

  to ask, what advice would I give to myself if I was coming to a friend and the friend was giving me advice? What advice would I give to myself as a friend? And when you do that, when you look at the problem from a friend's perspective, the friend wants to help you, the friend cares about you, the friend loves you, the friend is not enmeshed in the problem like you are enmeshed in the problem. All of a sudden, solutions pop up that become really easy. We talked a second ago about the challenge of eating the blame and how difficult it is to extend an olive branch at the precisely at the point when you feel like you are under siege. But of course, when you think about many, many of the conflicts that people have in their relationships, and you ask people, you know, you had this big blowout fight

• 30:03Speaker 03

  two and a half months ago, do you remember what the fight was about? And most people will say, I have no idea. I know that we had a fight. I know it was painful, but I actually don't know what we were fighting about. And what it tells you is that many of the things that cause conflict in relationships at some level are trivial. And this might be Cordova's ultimate point, which is that the reason you should prioritize your relationship more than the conflict is ultimately the relationship is many orders of magnitude more important.

• 30:32Dan Harris?

  Indeed. Before I move on from how to fix your marriage, Eleanor Vassili, who's producing this episode, sent me an article you wrote in 2021 in the Los Angeles Times about your parents and your dad, I'm tempted to call it a strategy, but it doesn't seem like it was actually a conscious strategy. He basically was of the view that your mom was always right. Can you just say a little bit more about this dynamic?

• 31:01Speaker 03

  It's interesting, I think, in many relationships. Part of the reason they work at some level is that we have fictitious beliefs about the other person. Now, sometimes those fictitious beliefs run in the negative direction. In fact, very often, they run in the negative direction, where you believe your partner is out to get you. Your partner doesn't like you, your partner is not supportive of you. But you can also have fictitious beliefs in the positive direction, where you believe that your partner is a better person than he or she is, or your partner in general is right, or has figured out things correctly. And I don't know whether this was conscious or unconscious, but my dad, in fact, did have this belief about my mom. And he genuinely believed that my mom, in some ways, was the oracle, that what my mom said ultimately was correct.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  I'm almost certain that, as a matter of journalistic fact, that was an untrue belief. My mom was not right about everything. But from the point of view of a relationship, you can see the value that this has, the value of basically saying, I understand what my partner is doing. I might not necessarily get it, but I believe that my partner is coming from a good place. I believe that my partner is able to see something that I cannot see. In some ways, it was almost, it's almost childlike, right? When you think about small children and the relationship they have with their parents, you know, when your child is three or four years old, your child genuinely believes that you make the sun come up in the morning, that the earth spins because of you. And of course, it's not true. You don't make the sun come up in the morning, and the earth doesn't spin because of you.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  But your child believes that, and the belief that your child has in you is part of what strengthens the bond between you. I wrote a book a few years ago called Useful Delusions. And this is one of the central ideas of Useful Delusions, which is that we often valorize and believe that the truth and right information is always the priority. And of course, from a journalistic perspective, I'm a journalist, I believe that that's true. At an interpersonal level, however, I don't think it's true. I think there are many, many beliefs that we have that in fact are obviously and provably false, that can actually be good for us.

• 33:05Dan Harris?

  Is there a way for us to, you know, for those of us who don't believe our spouses are the oracles, to adopt some other useful delusion in our marriage, like, and truly a useful delusion?

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, at some level, for it to be a delusion, I think you have to believe it, right? So I think this is the trick. I mean, you're asking, how do I actually make myself believe a delusion, but I think it's a delusion? For it to actually be a delusion, you have to believe at some level that it's real. I often talk about how, you know, the connections that parents have with children, I think, is shot through with useful delusions. You know, parents believe that children are special beyond compare. You know, when my own daughter was born, I not only thought she was the most special child in the universe, I thought she was the most special child in the history of the universe. Now, of course, from a journalistic standpoint, I know that that's not true, but from a functional

• 34:00Speaker 03

  standpoint, it is extraordinarily valuable because parenting is hard, it's difficult, it's expensive, there's a tremendous effort and frustration involved. But I felt like everything that I gave my daughter was because, my God, I'm helping and caring for what is clearly the most special person in the history of the universe. And you can see why a belief like that, over time, has been enormously functional for the species. So I think for the delusion to work as a delusion, you know, I'm not sure you can actually manufacture it. You can't tell yourself, I'm going to make myself believe that my partner is the oracle. Maybe you can try it. I'd be interested if you ran the experiment and reported back what you find there.

• 34:39Dan Harris?

  I personally don't think I could make that work. So your point is well taken. I do want to just signpost to the listener that Shankar's book on useful delusions, that was the subject of a whole discussion that we had here on the show several years ago, and I will post that episode, or I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Okay. So in your series on your show, Hidden Brain, in the series that you ran a few months ago, Love 2.0, you also talk about breakups, which can be incredibly painful and debilitating. And you talked to a guy named Antonio Pasqual Leon. And he had a lot of really practical strategies for, you know, just how to manage

• 35:24Dan Harris?

  your mind in the wake of a breakup. I think his advice could apply to romantic breakups, but also breakdown in friendships or work relationships or getting fired, any kind of breakup, really. And he talks about the strategy of differentiating distress that often in the wake of a breakup, we're dealing with like a kind of undifferentiated ball of emotions. I think that's actually the exact phrase he used, ball of emotions. According to this psychologist, Antonio Pasquale Leon, that we might want to make a list of the good things we lost, the bad things that you no longer have to tolerate, and then also like a list of hopes and dreams that have been lost too. Can you just say a little bit more about this strategy?

• 36:06Speaker 03

  In some ways, I think it's actually along the lines of what we've been talking about in different ways in this conversation, Dan, because I think it's basically asking, you know, let's say you've been fired from a job, or let's say you have a breakup, or let's say you you lose someone you love who passes away. You're going to be hit with a whole bunch of different kinds of emotions. And some of those emotions might be sadness because you basically are upset that you were fired or that you got divorced. Some of it might be relief because there were aspects of the relationship that in fact were not working well and that were a source of unhappiness. You might have had dreams together that you hope to pursue. You hope to do something at this job together, at this company together, or in this marriage together that you're not going to get to

• 36:50Speaker 03

  do going forward. And in some ways, I think demarcating them into different categories is just useful as almost like an accounting exercise to basically say, I'm feeling sad. Let me make a list of all the things that I am grieving about and just make a list, one to 10, of all the things that you have lost in this relationship and the things that you're going to miss. And then make a second list of all the things that you are so grateful that you are no longer going to have to deal with because every relationship, whether it's a work relationship or a personal relationship, involves frictions. And, you know, hallelujah, you're not going to deal with any of those frictions with this person anymore because you're not In a relationship with them anymore. And then the third list, and this I thought was unusual, I hadn't thought of this,

• 37:33Speaker 03

  was he was saying, make a list of all the things, the shared dreams that you had with this other person that now are no longer going to happen. So in a relationship that could be, I thought I was going to have children with this person and that's not going to happen. Or if I was in this workplace with this other person, I thought we would work on these projects together, or we would build a company that would turn out this way or that way. So these are lost dreams that in some ways are also not going to happen. And in some ways, demarcating them allows us to sort of look at them with a certain amount of distance, but also ask ourselves going forward now with the next relationship, what are the things that I really need? What are the things that I could really do without?

• 38:15Speaker 03

  What are the dreams that I have to accomplish that I want to make sure the next relationship accomplishes? And so in some ways, by categorizing and counting and being deliberate, it allows us to proceed to move forward in our lives in a way that is more, more mindful.

• 38:32Dan Harris?

  I like it a lot. There was something else that Antonio said in this series that I found quite bracing. As you and I were discussing before we recorded, and what I'm about to say will probably not be new to many people who listen to this show regularly. I went through what was for me a quite traumatic business breakup, a business divorce that ended last year after several years of to-ing and fro-ing. And Antonio says that one of the problems we can encounter after a breakup of any variety is telling the same old story over and over, that there's something about the way you tell the story of a breakup, again, a romantic relationship, a friendship, a business partnership,

• 39:18Dan Harris?

  that can pound into your neurons.

• 39:22Dan Harris?

  A sense of victimhood. And that was a real wake up call for me because I, I think I've been doing that. It's really not that helpful. And honestly, in my case, it's also just not that true. I just would love to hear you say more about this.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Antonio Pasqual Leona is someone who actually helps and trains other therapists. And in some ways, I think this is almost advice for somebody who's playing a therapy role, which is that when someone tells you a problem that they are having and you ask them, you're, you're in contact with this person and they're coming back and they're talking about this problem over and over again, over a period of weeks or months or years. Notice if they change how they tell you about the problem. If they're basically sticking to the same script, if they come up with the same themes, if they're doing it over and over again. In some ways, it tells you where their minds are. It tells you what the tripping points are, the tripwires inside their heads are, because they keep coming back to those same tripwires over and over again. Now, it might be a point of hurt.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  It might be a point of, this really distressed me. I can't get this out of my head. But really what he's saying is pay attention to the narrative that people are crafting. We had another guest on Hidden Brain some years ago, who had a wonderful, wonderful insight. He said, you know, as you think about any life, all lives have ups and downs. And you could be a king or you could be a pauper, but your life is going to have ups and it's going to have downs. Now, when you tell the story of your life, where do you start your chapters? And where do you end your chapters? And it turns out that where you put the chapter breaks is a very powerful predictor of what your life is going to be, of how well your life is going to turn out.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  And he argues, this was Jonathan Adler, he argues that when you tell stories that begin with challenge and obstacle and difficulty, and they end with success and redemption.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Telling stories that way is much healthier than starting your chapters with success and victory and triumph and then something goes wrong and then it's a story of contamination and regret and decline. Now, if you think about a life going up and down, almost like a wave, the truth is, you could tell any number of chapters that start on a low point and end on a high point, or that start at a high point and end in a low point. You're just deciding where to put the chapter breaks as you tell the very same story. But how you tell that story ends up making a difference. So I don't pretend to be a therapist, Dan, but as you think about the story of your

• 41:58Speaker 03

  own experience with the business, I think what Jonathan Adler would say is, how do you tell the story in a way that basically says this difficult and painful thing happened, but as a result of this difficult and painful thing happening, this other thing happened, this other door opened, this other window opened for me, in a way that allowed me to become or do something that would not have been possible otherwise? That's a story of redemption as opposed to a story of, I started out this great dream and I had this big ambition and then things didn't go the way I want and we had all this conflict and that's a story of decline and contamination.

• 42:35Dan Harris?

  I mean, you say you're not a therapist, but like, A, you've got a very soothing voice and B, that was extremely good advice.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Thank you, Dan.

• 42:44Dan Harris?

  A couple of other things to say about breakups. There's this idea that Antonio articulated on your show, that after a breakup, we instinctively want some sort of closure.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:59Dan Harris?

  And there can be a desire to look to the other person for the closure, but it can actually be an individual project.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  That's right. I think this was actually one of the most important and interesting insights that I gleaned from that episode myself, because he pointed out wisely that the relationship involves two people. Your relationship with your former business partner was a relationship that involved two people. Your relationship with a spouse involves you and another person. How you deal with a separation, how do you deal with a breakup, that is not a joint project. I mean, it could be a joint project, and I think many of us want it to be a joint project, right? So many of us say, what I really want, the thing that will help me get over this breakup, this divorce, this business collapse, is to have the person who broke up with me sit down across the table from me and tell me, you know, I am

• 43:54Speaker 03

  so sorry for everything that I did to you. I know that what I did was wrong. It was shameful. I am filled and consumed with regret and self-loathing. You were right in everything, and I am so grateful for the opportunity that I had to work with you, and I'm so sorry for all the pain that I caused you. That's what we want to hear, right? Yep. The other person at the other end of the relationship very often wants us to be saying the same things. What are the odds that you're going to sit down and tell your ex-business partner those things? Very, very small, right? And so all of us know that we're not going to be the ones who sit down and tell somebody who clearly has wronged us about all the ways in which we are sorry for what we did to them. And so many of us

• 44:39Speaker 03

  then spend years or months agonizing about, I just want to have one last conversation with this person. I want to talk with this person one last time, look them in the eye and get them to see that they did this thing that was really wrong. They should acknowledge that what they did was really shameful. And if they did that, I would then be free of this relationship and I could move forward with my life. When you do that, in some ways, you're giving the other party, the party that you're no longer in a relationship with now, enormous power, right? Because now you no longer can move forward because you're chained to the other person. And that's where his insight comes from, which is that the relationship is a joint project. The divorce, the separation, the breakup, is not a joint

• 45:23Speaker 03

  project. And the more you can think about it as a solo project, the easier it becomes to move forward. Now, there are different techniques that you can use. One of the Very powerful techniques he uses is a technique which he calls the empty chair, where he basically says, you know, imagine this other person is in fact sitting in this empty chair next to you. What would you tell this person? And if the person could hear everything that you are saying, I want you now to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and sit in the empty chair and respond back to you. And he finds that when he does this, many people experience an enormous feeling of relief because in some ways they're acting out the end of this relationship on a solo

• 46:08Speaker 03

  basis, but it feels as if the other party has been, you know, at least in the room with them.

• 46:17Dan Harris?

  Much more with Shankar Vedantam coming up.

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• 47:27Dan Harris?

  Okay, Shankar, you're doing great. I want to point out to the audience that he's playing Hurt today. He's getting over a bug and coming through with flying colors. There's one last episode I want to ask you about before I let you go. And this one comes from a prior series that you ran on Hidden Brain. So we've been talking about the series you ran a few months ago called Love 2.0. But many, many months before that, you ran a series called Relationships 2.0. And in that series, you did an episode where you talked to a woman named Gillian Sandstrom about the value of peripheral connections, which we were talking about at the start of this episode. Let's just start at a high level.

• 48:10Dan Harris?

  Can you say a little bit about the value of what are sometimes called microinteractions with people we don't really know?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think this is something that many of us underestimate, because I think when we think about our relationships, we're usually thinking about the big ones. We're thinking about who we are married to, or who we are in a long-term relationship with, or who we're in love with, or a child, or a parent, or a coworker even, whom we see every day at work. And those relationships obviously are very important. They play a huge role in our mental well-being. But there's also all of the smaller relationships that many of us have. You know, we greet the same hot dog person at the stand on our way to work every day. We see somebody pass, you know, who's a stranger, you know, sit across from us in a subway car every day. We meet somebody who is selling flowers on a street

• 49:01Speaker 03

  as we commute to work every day. These are small interactions. We might not know who those people are. And I think especially, you know, the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, when many people started working from home, you started to prioritize in many ways only the important relationships. And when I say the important relationships, I mean the ones that are close. You actually talk with your coworkers. I remember when I was actually going into a workplace, one of the joys of going down to the cafeteria for lunch was that you would meet 25 people, some of whom you knew, some of whom you knew only slightly, and some of whom you didn't know. You would exchange a glance with them. You would say hello to them. You would make a joke with them. And Gillian Sandstrom's work has really suggested that, you know, we underestimate to our own peril

• 49:45Speaker 03

  the importance of these weak ties. There was a sociologist many years ago who talked about the strength of weak ties, that, you know, Mark Granovetter said that when people were looking for jobs, he found that they were more likely to find jobs as a result of their weak ties. In other words, it wasn't just their moms and dads or their best friends who pointed them to a new job that was a great fit for them. It was somebody who was a casual connection. And he termed this idea the strength of weak ties, paper back in the 70s, I believe, very, very influential paper in sociology. But what Gillian Sandstrom is talking about is really at an emotional level, many of us underestimate the strength of weak ties. We underestimate how important it is these small, quotidian relationships are. And then when we lose them,

• 50:30Speaker 03

  for example, during a pandemic, we still have the main relationships in our lives. We still are talking to our friends and lovers and partners and parents and children and coworkers, but we're no longer seeing the person in the subway car who was a stranger. Something important is lost in our lives. And I think I need to remember this lesson more often because I am someone who works from home these days. And I'm so busy that I often tend to focus so much on what I'm doing that I forget what it was like to actually be out in the world, interacting with many people and enjoying those weak ties.

• 51:03Dan Harris?

  I have the same problem also in my cases, the additional problem of just being wired, as I often joke, as a frosty New Englander. But I want to get into some of the barriers to taking advantage of these so-called peripheral connections. But just to add one point of amplification to what you were saying about the power of these spontaneous interactions we can have with people we don't know that well, like the mythical hot dog vendor. And according to Gillian Sandstrom, who's again, who's done some incredible research on this, one of the sources of the power is novelty and surprise, which we often do not get from our close relationships because, you know, we know each other so well.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. I think that's such an underestimated part of what we could get from others, because as you make a catalog of all the things in your life, and you sort of know where you can get those needs met, we sort of list the important things in our lives. But of course, what you're not getting at is all the surprising things that strangers know, that strangers could share with you if you were actually in communication with them.

• 52:08Dan Harris?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Now, I have to say, this is not easy to do. There's been a lot of interesting work by Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, who's shown that when people are, in some ways, encouraged to have conversations with strangers on the train, you know, people dread these conversations. They dread being in conversation with somebody who, what if this other person turns out to be a cook? What if this person turns out to be a serial killer? You know, what if this turns out to be an awful conversation? And we come up with all these reasons why we should bury our noses in our phones and put on big headphones on our ears to block out the outside world. But he and others find repeatedly that the more people make these connections, reach out to the stranger, talk to the person sitting next to them on the train, the happier they are. It's difficult advice to follow, but

• 52:53Speaker 03

  I think there is some real truth to it.

• 52:56Dan Harris?

  In your episode with Gillian Sandstrom, there are some strategies that she recommends. Well, I'll just throw out a couple of them and let you comment on whichever ones you think bear amplification. One of them is to use what she calls the triangulation method, like to break the ice by commenting on like a third thing, which creates a triangle between you and the stranger. So it could be like the weather or sports. The other is to just use a simple question that indicates curiosity, like, what are you doing? But not in a accusatory way. Third is to know going in that you have a phrase in your back pocket that can extricate you something simple, like, I'm gonna move on now.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love those ideas. And in some ways, one of the things that we all have with these strangers that we meet is that when we bump into one of these strangers, we are in a particular context. You've met this person sitting on a train. You've met this person sitting on a plane. You're sitting next to somebody on a park bench. And what the context gives you, as you just pointed out, Dan, is the context gives you something that you have in common with the other person. And so you can talk about the weather in the park, or how unseasonably hot it's been, or how unseasonably cold it's been. And so these give you, in some ways, an avenue into the conversation that feels non-threatening. And it allows you also to feel out the other person.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  You know, maybe the other person's going through a very intense emotional period in their lives, and maybe they want to talk, or maybe they don't want to talk. You're putting out a feeler by basically talking about the weather with the stranger sitting next to you on the park bench. And how that person responds to your feeler tells you a lot about whether they want to talk some more, or they don't want to talk. If they respond, you know, monosyllabically, and they don't really make eye contact, that might tell you this person has things going on in their heads and want to be left alone. And on the other hand, if they respond gregariously and make a joke, or extend the conversation, that tells you this person really wants to talk. So it's really a gambit, if you will, that allows you to basically open the conversation.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  But I think the main concern that many people have with talking to strangers is what happens if this conversation goes wrong? How do I get out of it? How do I extricate myself? One of the things I've noticed whenever I fly on a plane is I'll notice that people will sit next to each other for, if it's a five-hour flight, they'll sit next to each other for four and a half hours and not talk to each other. And then, just as the pilot announces that the plane's coming in to land, they'll start talking with the person next to them. And I've noticed that people do this, and I think the reason they do this is because they now know if the other person turns out to be somebody who's really someone I don't want to talk with, the conversation is naturally going to come to a conclusion 20 minutes

• 55:45Speaker 03

  from now when the plane lands. If I open the conversation when the plane takes off, I'm stuck talking to this person for five hours. So I think it's the fear of not being able to extricate ourselves that keeps us from getting into conversations. And I think one of the smart things that Julian Sandstrom is suggesting is that if you can go into the conversation with some ideas in your hip pocket about how you can extricate yourself, you know, so let's say you're sitting on a plane and you do open the conversation when the plane takes off as opposed to when it's coming into land, you know, and maybe you find the conversation has run its course, so there's not very much to talk about anymore. Maybe you have something in your bag that you can bring out and say, it was lovely to talk with you and I need to attend to a little bit of work now. Please enjoy the rest of your flight.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  Or, you know, it was lovely to talk to you. I need to finish reading my book because I have an assignment due in my class next Tuesday. And so there are little tricks that you can use that give you an out. And I think more important than using the out, knowing that we have the out allows us to actually start the conversation. And I think that's Julian Sandstrom's point, which is not so much that we actually need to extricate ourselves, because very often we find when we engage in these conversations, we actually have wonderfully interesting conversations and there's no need to extricate ourselves. But it's the fear of not being able to extricate ourselves that keeps us from having the conversation in the first place.

• 57:06Dan Harris?

  One of my best friends met his wife after striking up a conversation on a plane.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 57:10Dan Harris?

  It can go very right.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  That's a great story.

• 57:13Dan Harris?

  This conversation has been a delight, Shankar, and I'm very impressed by your ability, as I said earlier, to play hurt. So let me ask one last question, which is, can you just remind everybody? Of the name of your podcast, your excellent podcast, and also of your book and anything else that we should be aware of that you've made?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Of course. I'm the host and founder of the Hidden Brain Podcast. It's available wherever audio podcasts are played. I'm also the author of the books The Hidden Brain, about the role that unconscious biases play in our lives, and Useful Delusions, co-authored with Bill Messler, about some of the fictitious beliefs that we have that can hold us in very good stead, that can help us lead better and more functional lives. I'm also on social media. People can follow me on X or on Instagram. And for the last year, we've been presenting some of the key ideas of Hidden Brain at a 16-city tour in 2025.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Depending on when this episode airs, we have new shows coming up in Philadelphia on March 21 of 2026, and in New York City on March 25 of 2026.

• 58:29Dan Harris?

  Amazing. And one other thing to say, to plug of Shankar's, he gave a great TED Talk a couple of years ago. I'll put a link to that in the show note alongside links to his podcast and his books and places where you can get tickets to his upcoming shows. Shankar, this is great. Thank you so much.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Dan. It's been such a pleasure.

• 58:54Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Shankar Vedantam. Always love talking to that guy. Don't forget, this is the first day of the five-day meditation challenge that we're running over on my new app, new-ish app, 10% with Dan Harris. The challenge is called Even You Can Meditate. It runs through the 27th. Head to danharris.com to download the app and start your 14-day free trial now. And finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Podpeople. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 59:44Speaker 04

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• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on Community Organizations. Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.