Pheromone Parties, The Muppet Dating Mistake, and My AI Interior Designer
Passionate psychological insights covered in the last Provoked Community Call
Welcome to Provoked, a vibrant community of over 10,000. Explore our mission [here] as your go-to source for fresh insights on Purpose, Curiosity, Happiness, Friendship, Romance, Creativity, Courage, and more with a playful edginess.
If you want to know the wide-ranging topics, dip into three popular articles:
Everything You Wanted to Know About Curiosity But Didn’t Ask
Learn the Math for a Serene Life: Less Addition and More Subtraction
How Fathers Matter: From Soccer Fields to Risky Relationship Choices to Jail Time
One of my greatest joys is hosting monthly 1-hour Zoom calls. With a growing, close community, each one lends itself to a very different series of topics.
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🎧 NEW: Listen In On Our Latest Call
What happens when a psychology professor, an attorney at the 98th percentile of energy and ambition, a slow creativity advocate from Chile, a PhD candidate from New Zealand, a leadership coach from Australia, and a few other brilliant misfits get on a Zoom call at midnight?
You get 70 minutes of the kind of conversation you wish you could eavesdrop on.
Here is a taste of what you will hear:
🧠 First Exposure to The Well-Being Lab’s Newest Findings — I share a graph from a paper I am submitting today that nobody outside my co-author has seen. It is a comprehensive comparison between purpose and happiness.
🛋️ The Statler & Waldorf Dating Disaster — I confess a deeply embarrassing story from the annals of dating in the aftermath of divorce.
💔 Personality Mismatches That Doom Relationships — We get into the personality traits I advise people to screen for in romantic partners (hint: one involves the need for cognition, the other involves placating tendencies).
👃 Pheromone Parties Are Apparently Real — The success rates of these matchmaking events are unsettling. Expect to be fascinated + terrified.
🔄 The Psychology of Coasting — Why do some people (like me, with my “hyperthymic temperament”) struggle to sit with accomplishments? And what does this have to do with bipolar disorder?
👗 The Doppelgänger Hack — Get ready for a clothing shopping metaphor that is fantastic for capturing personality stability and change.
📊 My AI Has a Built-In Critic — I reveal the subprogram I added to AI that automatically produces a hostile peer reviewer on retainer.
Plus: John Gottman’s multiple marriages, why “tell me your story” is a questionable conversation opener, the paradox of tolerance, and why the question “Who am I?” and “What is the meaning of my life?” might be the same.
This is a bunch of smart, curious people thinking out loud together. Sometimes we interrupt each other. Sometimes we go down rabbit holes. Antonio stayed up until midnight in Chile. That is the energy.
Want in on future calls? Premium subscribers get access to the live community Zooms where these conversations happen. You can lurk. You can jump in. You can share your own doppelgänger experiments. Your call.
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