Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Aaron Ahuvia on Why We Love Objects and How It Defines Us EP 489

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, a renowned expert on brand love, delves into the powerful concept of brand love and its profound impact on consumer behavior. He illustrates how brand love transcends traditional marketing, emphasizing creating meaningful and lasting connections with consumers. Drawing from his acclaimed book, "The Things We Love," Dr. Ahuvia explores people's deep emotional bonds with objects and how these bonds shape personal identity.In this episode, Dr. Ahuvia also examines the influence of social media, AI, and chatbots on our emotional connections. He reveals the surprising potential for deep emotional ties with digital entities and the broader implications for human relationships, emphasizing the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in our relationships with objects and people. Relatedness, competence, and autonomy are crucial in building fulfilling connections.SponsorsBabbel is the new way to learn a foreign language. The comprehensive learning system combines effective education methods with state-of-the-art technology! Right now, get SIXTY percent off your Babbel subscription—but only for our listeners, at Babbel dot com slash PASSION.--► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to:https://passionstruck.com/deals/Order a copy of my book, "Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life," today!  Recognized as a 2024 must-read by the Next Big Idea Club, the book has won the Business Minds Best Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Award, the International Book Awards for Best Non-Fiction, the 2024 Melanie P. Smith Reader’s Choice Contest by Connections eMagazine, and the Non-Fiction Book Awards Gold Medal. Don't miss the opportunity to transform your life with these powerful principles!Full show notes and resources can be found here:  https://passionstruck.com/aaron-ahuvia-why-we-love-objects-how-defines-us/In this episode, you will learn:Brand love is about creating meaningful connections with consumers to establish emotional attachments to products, brands, or organizations.Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, a leading expert on brand love, discusses the psychology behind forming emotional bonds with objects and brands.Understanding the distinctions between loving things and loving people can provide insights into behaviors and relationships.The psychology of love can help us understand future relationships with AI, including the potential for deep emotional connections with chatbots.Chatbots with emotional intelligence can impact our emotional lives and relationships with humans and AI.The humanization of products, where we attribute human traits to objects, can affect our personal identity and sense of self.All things Aaron Ahuvia: https://thethingswelove.com/about-aaron/Catch More of Passion StruckWatch my solo episode on The 6 Key Steps to Bold Risk-Taking for Personal Growth.Can’t miss my episode withRusty Shelton on How You Build Your Authority AdvantageListen to my interview withHilary Billings on the Psychology of Attention, Mastering Short-Form Video, and Personal Brand BuildingCatch my interview with Jen Gottlieb on How to Create Your Own Success by Being SeenListen to Seth Godin on Why We Need Systems Change to Save the PlanetLike this show? Please leave us a review here-- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally!

Coming up next on Passion Strike. So brand love is just love. It's essentially just love in marketing. So if you're trying to sell something, if you want to get customers to love something, you're offering a product, a service, an organization, a nonprofit, a social message, whatever it is, that's what brand love is about.

It's looking at something that's not a person, it's something you're trying to market. And how do you build the sort of really meaningful connections to consumers so that they have an emotional connection to this brand or product or organization, as the case may be. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, Jon R. Miles.

And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show,

I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion-struck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 488 of Passion Struck. love it when you do that. We have these things called Episode Starter Packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. These playlists are things like episodes with veterans, women at the top of their games, interviews with leading psychologists, interviews with leading behavioral scientists, interviews with astronauts, and so much more.

Just go to passionstrike.com slash starter packs or Spotify to get started. I am so excited to also announce that my book Passionstruck won best nonfiction book at the International Book Awards, the gold medal at the nonfiction book awards, and was named a must read by the Next Big Idea Club. You can find it on the Passionstruck website, Amazon, or wherever you purchase books. In case you missed my interview from earlier in the week, I had an intriguing conversation with Dr. Chris Kenobi, a leading physician, nutrition researcher, and author of the Ancestral Diet Revolution. Could the diet of our ancestors prevent, treat, and reverse chronic diseases like being overweight,

coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, and autoimmune disorders? Dr. Kenobi believes so, and his answer lies in eliminating vegetable oils from our diets. Join us as we delve into his groundbreaking research that compellingly demonstrates how these oils, high in omega-6 fats, drive numerous chronic diseases. Discover the powerful impact of ancestral dietary strategies

and learn how to transform your health by making simple yet profound changes. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews and if you loved today's episode or that one with Dr. Chris Kenobi, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families. I know we and our guests love to see comments

from our listeners and that's how I found Dr. Chris Kenobi in the first place. Now let's talk about today's interview. I have a truly exceptional guest with us, Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, the world's leading expert on brand love. Aaron, a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Business has been pioneering the field since 1990,

examining the profound and intricate relationships we form with the products and brands we adore. His work dives deep into brand symbolism, consumer identity, and the nuances of contemporary consumer culture. An independent analysis of research impact symbolism, consumer identity, and the nuances of contemporary consumer culture. An independent analysis of research impact ranked him 22nd in the world and 19th in the U.S. for research influence and consumer behavior. His insights have been sought out by major media outlets like Time, The New York Times,

and The Wall Street Journal. He's also made notable appearances on popular shows, including the Oprah Winfrey Show. In our episode, we delve into his fascinating book, The Things We Love, How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are. This book is a revealing investigation into the secret tangled emotional relationships people have with objects, drawing on cutting edge findings from psychology, neuroscience, and marketing. Aaron explores why we often feel intense

passion for certain objects and what this reveals about ourselves and our society. Whether it's books, baseball cards, ceramic figurines, iPhones, or even nature itself, many of us have experienced a love affair with things that bring us immense joy, comfort, or fulfillment. Dr. Ahuvia presents astonishing discoveries that show us we are far less rational about our possessions and hobbies than we think. Our passionate relationships with these objects are influenced by deep cultural and biological factors. Packed with fascinating case study, scientific analysis, and practical takeaways, this episode offers an original and insightful look into our love for inanimate objects and how better understanding these relationships

can enrich our lives. Join us as we explore the astonishing world of brand love and the emotional ties that shape our consumer behavior Thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now Let that journey begin I am so incredibly honored to have Aaron Ove on Passion Struck. Welcome, Aaron. Don, thank you so much for having me. So we met through a common friend, Emma Cipella.

And I thought I would start out by asking you how you know Emma, who was a previous guest on the show. Emma and I are authors together. And she is both a common friend of ours and a very uncommon friend. She's a really spectacular person. So, yeah, she is absolutely special. And I loved her work on sovereignty and everything that she's doing around that happiness and all her research. As I was researching you, I understand that you and I grew up in similar anti-brand environments,

but we both found connections with certain objects. And interestingly enough, they were very similar objects. I remember wanting this Trek bike as I was growing up and finally buying one. And I bought it because I loved the look of the bike. I could care much less that it was a Trek, but it really supported the hobby that I had. And another thing that I loved at that time

because of my grandfather was photography. And I know you had a Canon camera, but I wanted to get this Nikon camera, but it was more because it was like the one my grandfather had. But I think it's interesting how we end up having these personal attachments, and I think they fit into your broader concept of brand love. Why do people form such strong

emotional bonds with specific items? That's a pretty complicated question to answer, but I'll start off by saying that it's not so much about the item itself. When we are just thinking about a product or an object, 99% of the time, we actually don't form very much of an emotional attachment to it. And your brain is wired up that way, I'll say on purpose, just to use that metaphor of a designer, but your brain is evolved that way for good reasons. It's not, you want to be able to relate to objects in a fairly objective way, you know, use them when they're helpful, get rid of them when they're not. Whereas emotional attachments really evolve for people. Emotional attachments make sense for your family and

your friends. When we form emotional attachments to objects, it's usually because our brain is treating that object as if it was a person in some way. And a lot of times that's because we see that object as part of our own identity. Our brain is thinking about it as a person because it's part of us, it's part of who we are, we've made it part of our sense of identity. But sometimes it's also because we connect it with another person, someone else who's important to you.

So if you think about objects you have an emotional attachment to, and you think, okay, what are the things in my house that like, I bet we all have some of these things. That maybe they're on a shelf somewhere, maybe they're hanging in our closet where we don't use them anymore. We really should get rid of them.

But every time we go and we pick up this object and think I should really just get rid of this, something tugs at our heart and we're like, no, I can't get rid of this, I really wanna keep this. That's an emotional attachment. That is psychologically a little bit of love that we're feeling for that thing. And if you think about what those things are,

I bet you will find overwhelmingly they're either things that remind you of another person in some way. Maybe they're a photo of a person or a gift you received from a person. Or they're something that reminds you of your own identity. There's something in your past that connects you to your past or that marks an accomplishment that you have. So the things that we love are really not about the things so much as they are about people, ourself and other people.

So that would explain how the camera for me related to my experience with my grandfather. And interestingly enough, the bike related to a friend of mine who was really into biking, who was one of my best friends, must have reminded me of the similar bike that he had. So it's interesting how those things you just said equate to that relationship we have. That's even a great phrase from a wonderful consumer researcher, Russ Belk, who did a lot of work a little before mine. And he did work very similar where he would go and talk to people just about, tell me about things that are important to you in your life. For you, it might have been the camera and the

bicycle, these important things. And what he said is when you start those conversations with people, they always start off and it looks like the relationship is person thing. It looks like it's me and the bike, me and the camera. But as soon as you start going below the surface, in the camera. But as soon as you start going below the surface, it always turns out to be person, thing, person. So it's me, the bike, and then my friend who's also into biking. Me, the camera, and then my grandfather

who is into photography. There's always another human being at the other end of that connection. Wow, really interesting. And I love doing definitions on this show because some people might not understand topics we're going into. You have spent decades pioneering research on a topic called brand love, B-R-A-N-D love. Can you start by explaining what exactly brand love is and why it's become such a significant area of study for all of consumer behavior? So brand love is and why it's become such a significant area of study for all of consumer behavior?

So brand love is just love when people love not just it could be a brand but it might be a product. It could be a charity, an organization. It's essentially just love in marketing. So if you're trying to sell something, if you want to get customers to love something, you're offering a product, a service, an organization, a nonprofit, a social message, whatever it is, that's what brand love is about. And so it's looking at something that's not a person, it's something you're trying to market. And how do you build the sort of really meaningful connections to consumers so that they have an emotional connection to this brand or product or organization as the case may be. So today we're going to be discussing a number of different things. One of those things we're going

to be spending a lot of time on is your book, the things we love, how our passions connect us and make us who we are. And in the beginning of the book, you start out by telling a really funny story of how you got into brand love, but you did it through an interesting backstory where somehow unexpectedly you got very involved into the psychology behind matchmaking. Can you tell us about the backstory and then the connection into brand love? Sure. So I was a PhD student at Northwestern in the Kellogg Business School studying marketing. And there's a professor there was very famous, some people may have heard of him, Professor Philip Kotler, who's very excited about marketing. And he felt that

everything was marketing. And he even in his seminar said, even dating is marketing because you are marketing yourself to this person that you're dating. Well, I was single at the time, and dating was way more interesting to me than real marketing. So I asked him if I could do my term paper on dating as marketing. He enthusiastically agreed and connected me with Professor Mara Edelman, who had some research on a dating service, which they were just getting started. Internet was a fairly new thing. Dating on the Internet was just getting going. Make a long story short, we ended up

working together for several years, Mara Edelman and I. We wrote a bunch of very, turned out to be important papers because they were the early papers in this area about the psychology behind dating services and how that worked. In order to do that research, I needed to understand the psychology of love, why certain dates work, why people fell in love with one person, not somebody else.

Well, after a while, I needed to change my topic and find something that was more mainstream in marketing, because I wanted to get a decent job as a marketing professor and nobody was going to hire the data services professor. But I done all of this research on the psychology of love, and I didn't want to let that go. So it occurred to me that people talk about loving products and loving brands all the time. What if I took all this research and knowledge I had about the psychology

of love and saw, does that apply to, or does that fit with people's feelings about products and brands? And that work that I did was turned out to be the first major scientific work in that area. And that, you know, in a paper with Barbara Carroll, we coined this phrase or popularized the phrase brand love. And since then, it's really taken off. And it turns out that, yes, in fact, taken off. And it turns out that, yes, in fact, the psychology of interpersonal love does apply sometimes to objects and brands and products.

And when it does, it's extremely powerful. But again, it doesn't apply every time. There's a much of the time we have a much more mundane relationship with objects. And that's really OK, a much of the time we have a much more mundane relationship with objects. And that's really okay because some of the time you just, you want a can of peas to be a can of peas, and that's plenty. But there are times when it's nice to have a richer

relationship with the things that are with us in our life. So you just mentioned how long you've been studying this and I wanted to recognize you for receiving the Consumer Brand Relationships Association's long you've been studying this and I wanted to recognize you for receiving the consumer brand relationships associations lifetime achievement award for industry impact. What a amazing recognition for you. Today I want to turn our attention from focusing less on marketing or what this means in a business environment, which we'll talk about a little bit, but more trying to personalize this on what brand love means to an individual. And you've mentioned the psychology of love a couple times now. Can you talk about that so that the audience can understand the framework for that and

maybe give them a foundation upon which we'll build the rest of the interview? Yeah. So I want to start at the beginning, and this is going to go back a very long time, somewhere around 500 million years in animals' evolutionary history. But one of the things that I find really fascinating is that people are not the only animals that love. Lots and lots of different species out there love, but not every species does.

There's a very clear demarcation. So some animal species, like people and dogs and cats, other mammals and birds, in many species, the parents will take care of the kids. But we all know that there's other species, like fish or insects, where they lay a lot of eggs. They have a lot of offspring, but the parents don't take care of those offspring, right? The children are on their own

the minute they crawl out of that shell and hatch the egg hatches. There is a 100% correlation. You animals where the parents take care of the children, there is love, what they call bonding, when it's an animal, that's really the same thing, between the parents and the children and in species where there isn't that kind of caretaken going on, you don't have love. So the first thing that you need to realize about love is that love evolved first in animals and later in people as a motivational system for getting us

to take care of each other. That's really what it is. Whether it's taking care of your parents, taking care of your children, taking care of your it's taking care of your parents, taking care of your children, taking care of your spouse, taking care of your friends, taking care of your community. Love is this amazing emotional motivational system that creates caring and concern for other people. Thank you for sharing that.

And I wanted to use that definition and go back to Professor Philip Kotler because you quoted him in the book explaining that marketing isn't just for businesses, it's for everyone. And when I think of a marketer, they're really trying to get you to love a brand or a product. So you have some type of affiliation to it. How do you see this connection between marketing and the psychology of love, not just being an application of marketing principles, but really influencing our life?

When marketers go about and do this, one of the things I talk to them a lot about is that love always needs to be a two-way street. Now people hear the word love and they think of this overwhelming passionate force and it can be that, but love also exists at weaker levels and it again is taking care of and caring for someone. So you can as a business take very seriously the idea that your job is to create services and products that actually help people.

And the extent to which you can create things that actually help people and really solve problems that they're having and do good things in their lives, you will make money. There is a lot of evidence behind this. There's other ways of marketing things that aren't about helping people, right? There's ways of marketing things that are about about helping people. There's ways of marketing things that are about tricking people or seducing people in ways that don't really help them. But that's not really the focus here,

because it's really when you have this caretaking focus, I'm going to create something, a product, a brand, maybe a podcast that actually makes a difference in people's lives and really helps them. People sense that and that's one of the things that triggers this ability for the person, the consumer out there to trust you because you're behaving in a trustworthy way. And by trusting you, they can also develop this emotional attachment. And it's when you have that emotional attachment really going back and forth two ways that you can have the most powerful positive impact.

And then from the consumer's point of view, being able to connect maybe with an object, maybe with a brand, maybe with a company, maybe with a nonprofit or an organization, a sports team, a band, whatever it is, having a powerful connection where you really feel that thing is part of your identity. If that's a positive thing in your life, it can make your life a lot richer.

And the show, Passion Struck, is about that. It's about those passionate emotional connections that people make to activities and to aspects of their lives that do make their life richer. Well, thank you for sharing that because I do think that there's an overall interrelationship between our love for things

and our love for people. And I think that's why brands, money, and spending, all kind of influence our overall happiness. Do you find that's true? Absolutely, and often very complicated ways. So you can have positive relationships to brands, money, and spending, and they can work really positively in your life,

and you could have negative relationships to those things, and they can work in a really negative way in your life. And I've heard on this show on other episodes of the show people talking about overspending as a potential problem but also people who are sitewadish that they can't enjoy the money that they have and they can't spend on themselves in a really positive way. So I'm with Aristotle on this. Everything's a happy medium, right? And that's also true with brands. You can have a very negative kind of a connection to brands.

You can think, oh, I love this brand. Well, if your approach to that brand is very status oriented, and what you're really trying to do is use that brand to show that you're better than somebody else, more elite than somebody else. Well, what's happening is that the brand is creating a negative kind of competitive relationship between you and other people. And it's not that the brand is good or bad, but it's that relationship to the other people, that competitive relationship to the other humans

in your life that's gonna really drive your happiness. And that's gonna be a negative thing. On the other hand, you can have activities that bring you together with other people. Some of the things in my house that I love the most, the objects that I love the most are things that I use when I cook and I entertain. And why do I love those things? Well objects that I love the most are things that I use when I cook and I entertain. And why do I love those things?

Well, because I love having dinner parties. And that's, for me, that's the best way that I connect with people. I cook them a big meal, I bring people over, we've got wine, we've got food, we've got conversation, and that's where I get the sense of connection more than anything else with people. And so those objects and those brands that I love, again, it's person thing person, it's me, that kitchen item, and then the other person that it connects me to. So the positive or the negative is going to come

through the way these objects and brands influence your relationships with other humans in a positive or a negative way. And I just wanted to recognize a couple of the other episodes you were talking about. I'll focus on two other professors that come from the University of Michigan. You were talking about Dr. Scott Rick and his book, Tight Wads and Spendthrifts, which is a great exploration of both of those topics.

And then another person I'll call out is my friend, Ethan Cross, which is a great exploration of both of those topics. And then another person I'll call out is my friend, Ethan Cross, who's a psychologist at the University of Michigan. And he really goes into the inner chatter that we have, that inner voice inside of us. Both of those are excellent interviews to go back to if you haven't listened to them. So thanks for bringing those up. used to go back to if you haven't listened to them. So thanks for bringing those up. I want to go back to your book, the things we love and in it, you provide scientifically grounded answers to question about love as we were talking about versus objects versus people and why we love certain things and not others

and whether loving things detracts from loving people. Can you explain how understanding these distinctions can help people gain insight into their own behaviors and relationships? Yeah, so some of this research, there's another psychologist, I don't know if you've had him on your show, but he is pretty well known, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

And many years ago, he, and actually his, it was mostly from his then PhD student, Rochberg Halton, that did some work on people's relationships with objects, it was one of the really early studies. And they went in and they were assuming when they started that the people who had the closest relationships with objects would have the most distant relationships to people, because these objects were going to substitute for the people. And what they discovered instead was that the people who had the closest relationships with objects also tended to have the closest relationships with people.

And there's really two reasons for this. One of them is, as I've been talking about using this phrase, person thing person, the reason we have close relationships with objects is because they connect us with people. That's what gives them their emotional weight. In my own research, a very simple study, we looked at the extent to which college students love their cell phones.

And interestingly, we found that the more friends a college student has, the more they love their cell phone. Well, why? Well, it's because their phone connects them to more people, and their love for the cell phone is really about the way it connects them to other people. So, it's the people who have the most relationships and the strongest relationships have the most connections that then get wound up with these objects and activities that they also love. It's also true, I think, that some people just are relationship-prone, right? They form relationships with people, they form relationships with objects, they just have that tendency towards forming close relationships.

So the things that we love really can connect us to other people. They don't need to substitute. There are some situations, though, where you do have negative kinds of events and cycles that happens. So sometimes people will get lonely. And if you get a little bit lonely,

the loneliness motivates you to reach out to other people. But there's this very tragic effect, which is if you get very lonely and you stay lonely for a while, you build up this defense mechanism. And instead of the loneliness motivating you to reach out to other people, the loneliness actually becomes a block and impedes your tendency to reach out to other people, the loneliness actually becomes a block and impedes your tendency to reach out to other people. And then you get into this cycle

where people start to look to things to secure their boredom. So maybe they watch a lot of television, maybe they get into collecting, maybe they have some other hobby that they do by themselves. And this hobby, they come to say to themselves, oh, I love this thing, but it's often a way of, it doesn't push out the other people,

but it's something they bring in like a bandaid. They've got this injury because they don't have the proper kinds of social relationships. And they try to cover up that injury by using this hobby or this activity or this object as a band-aid to make that a little bit less painful. That can be a very negative kind of thing and I don't have a fast easy solution for that but that does happen and so when you see someone who's got a strong relationship with something that they're passionate about, you really ought to think what extent is that passion, a positive relationship that's helping

them have a rich life and connecting them to people, which it most of the time is. But in some situations, to what extent is that passion a way that they're trying to cope with loneliness? And it's not really helping them because there's no amount of collecting figurines or buying another car or working on your car or whatever it is. No amount of that's going to really meet your social needs, which you can only meet with other people. I'm glad you brought up this whole topic of loneliness because it's a subject that I try to keep coming back to since it's such a large epidemic for so many people.

From your study of this, what do you think are some of the main causes for what is driving this epidemic? And what are some of the solutions to it that you think we should be looking at to help people overcome this burden that is really impacting lives, not just here in the United States, but it's impacting billions of people around the world. There's fundamentally two different dimensions to our social relationships, what I call closeness and status. Closeness is just what it sounds like, like how close, how intimate, how attached do you feel in this relationship?

Status is a part of all relationships. It could be a hierarchical status. If you're friends, hopefully you have a more egalitarian status to it. But we do, when we look at another person, very much automatically and unconsciously think about the status relationship of is someone higher in this hierarchy than somebody else. And we are all, as human beings, motivated

to move up in that hierarchy and at least be equal if we can to the people around us. So we've got these two aspects of our relationships where you get the most nurturance, you need to have a certain amount of status. People who feel like they're really on the bottom of the pyramid in all of their relationships, this is actually emotionally very unhealthy

and you don't wanna be there. So I'm not saying that you should ignore status entirely. You wanna get yourself feel like you're not on the bottom of all of your relationships. That's not a good thing. But if you get overly concerned with the status, it can drive you away from the aspect of the closeness in the relationship, which is where most of the emotional payoff

really comes. So I think what's happening in our society is that there's a lot of ways that we are focusing too much on status and not enough on actual closeness. And you see this in social media has taken social relationships and turn them into something where you can quantify status. Who has more followers? Who gets more hits? And so in a normal face-to-face relationship

in the conversation, that often is a way of really building closeness with people. Whereas as we shift a lot of those relationships online and we turn them into social media relationships, they're very rarely about building closeness or intimacy with that person. They're very transactional. And you're sending things around and you're hoping to gain status points by gaining followers and getting likes and all this other sort of stuff. And so your social energy gets pulled out of close relationships and pushed into status

relationships and that's not a healthy thing. No, it's not healthy at all. And as I was trying to examine this myself, I was actually talking to Ethan because I think something that is at the core of this is this whole phenomenon that we have now of unmattering people feel and like, as they get up first thing in the morning, that nothing. And their life matters and that they don't hold significance. And I think that bleeds into this as well.

And as he and I were talking about it, I couldn't really find any academic research on mattering except for some research that's come out of the University of York in Canada. And Ethan told me to turn my attention to self-discrepancy theory coming out of the University of Rochester. And it's interesting, my connection that I'm trying to make here is that what Edward DC and Richard Ryan brought up was that they found really three things are at the heart of intrinsic motivation.

It's autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And what you were just describing falls squarely in the role of relatedness or what Bob Waldinger has really been studying for decades now in the Harvard study of adult aging. And that if we don't have that relatedness, it completely impacts our overall happiness and creates a void to me that coincides with this sense of unmattering. Do you see the connection that I'm seeing at all? Oh, absolutely. And unmattering, I mean, think about it. Mattering implies that you matter to someone, right? Mattering, there's always like, if you're going to matter, there's got to be someone at the other end of that for whom you matter, who cares about you and who makes a difference. So those relationships, your closer relationships that are built in face-to-face contact in social situations,

those relationships are where you come to feel that you matter because there are people who you matter to. You also talked about competency. And so just for listeners, we're talking about a psychological theory that I've actually done some peripheral work on in my own research as well, that says that your psychological well-being

and happiness comes from focusing on what are called intrinsic motivations, of which we just talked about, three, right, which is a sense of mattering in the world and a sense of competency that you're doing good things and that you have abilities. And there's actually a number of other sort of intrinsic motives that get tied in there as well. Whereas we often get caught up in what are called extrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivations are just motivations to impress other people. We can impress other people with how good looking we are. We can impress other people with how much money we have. If you're in my line of work as an academic, you impress other people with how many citations that

you have or how many articles you publish. It really doesn't matter what you're focused on. If you're focused on impressing other people, if that's the aspect of it, it becomes an entrance, excuse me, an extrinsic motivation. And those extrinsic motivations, they're very powerful motivators. We do care a lot about them. But the problem is that even when you achieve them, you're left feeling hollow and you don't have a deeper sense of satisfaction. Whereas with the intrinsic motivations, when you actually achieve those motivations, you do feel better about

yourself and you do lead a happier life. And if we bring it back to the things that we love and these passions in our life, those can play a role in both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. So if you're interested, if you say I'm passionate about whatever this hobby that I have is, right, and I'm collecting things, and if your passion around your collection of teapots is that you just want to impress the other teapot collectors and you want to have the biggest collection of teapots of anyone that you've ever known, right? That focus on impressing other people, that's not going to pay off for you. But if you're interested in collecting teapots and that's a big passion for you, and you

actually get together with other teapot collectors and you talk about your teapots and you sit around, maybe you drink tea from some of your teapots and that becomes a basis for connecting with these other people, then it does create that motive, that connection that is the motivation around relatedness. And it also is very much related to competence. If you feel like I don't have to be the best teapot collector, but I'm a good teapot collector, I know about teapots, and I have competence in this area. That also can really help with your sense of identity in a positive way. And what you were just mentioning there with teapots made me think of something completely different, which is communities such as people who practice yoga, and how it has the same aspects to it, because you're developing that relatedness with people you're practicing the art with, you're trying to

better your skillset in it, which is the competence aspect. But I think yoga is something that also influences your autonomy because it's your personal agency that allows you to grow both of those things and how you're fostering that relationship with yourself and others. So interesting way to look at your work. I talked to a lot of people who love yoga as an example of something that people love and are passionate and it can be a really positive passion in your life. Like anything else I talked to, you know, earlier in the show a little bit about these two basic dimensions

to our relationships, the closeness with other people, which we can call relatedness. It's just another word for the same thing. And you're talking about extrinsic motives, which I talk about as status, which is just another way of talking about that. And even in yoga, if you're focused on developing yourself and your skills, that's competency. If you're focused on coming to understand yourself better, that's autonomy.

If you make friends with other people at the yoga studio, that's relatedness. If you're focused on who can bend over further, who can put their foot further behind their head, who's the better yoga person, You can take yoga and you can turn it into a status competition and then you're gonna wind up in the same trouble that you'll get into if you turn who's got a bigger designer person to a status competition. You're absolutely right.

Number of years ago, I was practicing as Shtanga, whereas you get into the really advanced poses, it is incredible witnessing some people who can bend their body like that, because you understand just how much flexibility and repetition they've had to do to reach that point. So I sometimes would sit there just in awe, because I knew the work effort that goes into it, but it also is a comparison thing because you see both the gap between you and them, but also that envy that you would have if you could do what they're doing. Yeah.

So I want to take the discussion in a bit of a different direction. We were talking about social media and cell phones and one of the topics that's on everyone's mind right now is AI and you recently wrote a blog post about this whole topic and I just want to remind the audience we talked about the psychology of love and how this has been evolving for centuries and you write in this article that this same psychology of love can help us understand our future relationships with chat bots. So given the increasing presence of things like replica, being chat GPT, what are the key psychological factors that you feel make it possible for people to form deep emotional connections or even fall in love with chatbots?

Most people who haven't really used a chatbot before think, oh, I would never fall in love with the chatbot. That sounds absurd to think that you would fall in love with the chatbot. And when you hear that somebody else has done that, you think, what a loser, what a crazy person that they could have possibly done that. You don't normally fall in love with things that aren't people. However, your brain decides two different times in two very different ways whether something

is or is not a person. So your brain decides consciously whether it's a person or not. And then unconsciously, you have these other sort of built-in mechanisms that also decide whether something is a person or not. Most of the time, those are in congruence with each other. They give you the same answer.

So the bookshelf behind me right now, my conscious mind thinks that's not a person. Unconscious mind thinks that's not a person. Everything's good there. 99.9% of the time, that's what's going to happen. Every once in a while, with something like a chatbot, your conscious mind makes one decision, and your unconscious mind makes a very different decision.

So your conscious mind knows that checkbox is not a person, but your unconscious mind is getting all of these cues. It's talking to you like a person. It's got this image on the screen, this avatar that sure looks a lot like a person. And your unconscious mind did not evolve when there were checkbox. did not evolve when there were checkbox. You never evolved this unconscious mechanism to sort this out, because this is all brand new. So your unconscious mind goes hook, line, and sinker for the idea that this is a person. Well, can you fall in love with this thing?

Well, part of that, the answer is, how much control does your conscious mind have over love, and how much does your unconscious mind have over love? And I have a hunch, when I say that, a lot of people are listening, the light bulb's going off, and they're saying, well, really, you know, there might be some influence from my conscious mind, but most of the time, when I fall in love with something,

that's mostly the doing of my unconscious mind. So if your unconscious mind thinks something is a person, and that something, that avatar, says the right things to you and empathizes with you in the right way and is attractive in the right way, it's quite possible for someone to fall in love. Now you can prevent that if you're very vigilant. So if you're constantly having your conscious mind intercede and say like, this isn't a person, I know this isn't a person, and you build this wall, you can absolutely prevent that from happening. However, a lot of people, people maybe who are a little bit

lonely, get tempted to let that defensive wall down a little bit. And if you let the defensive wall down or you don't put a lot of energy into keeping it up, then your unconscious mind just takes over and it doesn't think this isn't a person. It really believes this is a person. And what's more, chatbots are very good at being lovable because that's all they have to do. They don't have any other desires, right? They don't have any desires at all, but they don't have any other sort of needs structuring what they say and do. They've got a one track mind,

which is how can I be the most lovable person ever? And they're pretty good at it. So the possibility of falling in love with a chatbot is really quite high. And I think in the future, we'll see this happen quite often. I think it's such an interesting topic. I was recently watching Reid Hoffman, who's the founder of LinkedIn, have an interview with the AI version of him. And I have to tell you, as I was watching this, I actually found myself more drawn to the AI version of him than to the actual version of him, because the AI version seemed to be more charismatic in the way that it was answering the questions and engaging. And you

point out in this article that future chatb bots will possess not only factual intelligence, but what I saw play out with Reid Hoffman was also emotional intelligence. How do you think this advancement will affect our emotional lives and relationships that exist with humans and AI? Obviously, it's hard to say. And I don't want to be just another, oh my gosh, Armageddon is coming doom and gloom type person. So there are some possible positive things that could go on here. I'll start with those for a moment.

One article that I thought was fascinating that was on the web a while ago was about a guy who fell in love with a chap, but said he had this romantic relationship with the head of the chap bot. He said, saved his marriage. So I saw that headline. I was like, what the hell? That does not make any sense. But when I read the article, what happened was his wife was clinically depressed, had a very serious postpartum depression. He was not able to provide the emotional support at first that she needed. She was actually thinking about a divorce in this relationship. He started a romantic

relationship with this chatbot and the chatbot gave him absolutely selfless emotional support. absolutely selfless emotional support. And what he realized is that this is a model that he could learn from the chatbot. So he said, I'm going to give the same kind of selfless emotional support to my wife that this chatbot is giving to me. And by learning those skills from the chatbot, he was able to save his marriage and rebuild his relationship with his wife.

So that, I think, is a very surprising story. And it shows that there are potential upsides. We could learn to be better connectors through these role models that are built entirely around that. Having started with the positive, yeah, there's a lot of scary negatives on this as well. These chat bots, they don't have any personal needs. When you're talking to one of these chat bots, they're just interested in you and their only desire is to make you happy.

Whereas in a normal relationship, everything has to go both ways. If you want someone to listen to your boring stories, you in a normal relationship, everything has to go both ways. If you want someone to listen to your boring stories, you have to listen to their boring stories. With the chatbot, that's not true. It'll just listen to you forever. It's quite possible that instead of learning good habits from these chatbots, we'll come

to expect other people to indulge our narcissism. And everyone has a little bit of narcissism. We'll come to expect other people to indulge our narcissism the and everyone has a little bit of narcissism, we'll come to expect other people to indulge our narcissism the way these chatbots do. That could be very bad. I was recently doing an interview with Brian Evergreen that released a number of weeks ago, and he wrote a book that's all about

the need to rehumanize work in the era of AI. And he actually feels that AI gives us this great opportunity to reconnect and maintain human relationships even more, primarily because it's going to consciously he feels make us make choices like you point out in your article about choosing the equivalent of junk food over healthy relationships, meaning are you going to choose to double down on your relationship with chat or are people going to be more conscious about the need to have the healthier out options like the relationships they have with humans, not because it's easier, but because it's more fulfilling long-term. Do you see the same connections?

I do. I'm not super optimistic about that. I came up with this analogy to junk food, where junk food is very attractive and it often tastes quite good. And people want, and we eat a lot of it, and We're really killing ourselves, at least in the United States with the amount of it that we eat. But it doesn't provide long-term health or long-term nutrition for us. And there are junk food relationships as well.

A relationship with a chat bot that indulges your narcissism and is all about you and just wants to hear you go on and it never says a harsh word and is completely supportive of you, no matter how ridiculous whatever you're saying might be. That's not good for your growth and development as a human being, but like a chocolate chip cookie, it can be very attractive.

So when I think about the amount of time Americans spend eating broccoli versus the amount of time they spend eating Big Macs, I'm not confident that I wouldn't say that the presence of junk food in our environment has led us to be very conscious about eating a healthy diet. I think it's much more that junk food has substituted for things that are really more rewarding in the longterm. And these kinds of junk food relationships with AI could also substitute for healthier longterm relationships.

Well, thank you for going through that. And I want to stick on this topic of humanization for those who might not have listened to this podcast before and don't know my background prior to starting up passionstruck. I spent Over two decades primarily in retail internet technologies and trying to understand customer or consumer behavior patterns and one interesting thing of many that I Saw you bring up in the book is you mentioned how we anthropomorphize yes objects and we end up giving them human traits. How does this humanization of products affect our personal identity and our sense of self? In order to love something if your brain was a

factory right you could say that it's got two different assembly lines in that factory. One where it builds and processes your connections and relationships to objects and things. And a completely different assembly line where it builds and processes your relationships with human beings. Love is only available on the assembly line that creates your relationships with people. Now we do love things and the way that happens is every once in a while your brain will take an object and send it down the assembly line that it usually uses for persons, right?

So there's certain processes in your brain that are normally at a neurological, biological level, they're reserved for people, but sometimes your brain treats an object like an honorary person and processes it in the same way. And I was just talking about that with these chatbots, where they're not a person, but your brain treats it like an honorary person, thinks about it, and processes it

as if it was a person. Well, chatbots are an extreme example of anthropomorphism, where it's an object, but it looks or sounds like a person. There's lots of examples that are less extreme than that, but still have a very powerful effect on your brain. So your car, the front of your car looks a little bit like a person. Headlights look like eyes, the grill looks like a mouth.

If you get people to anthropomorphize their cars, one easy way to do this is get them to name their car. The minute you name something, that is a cue to your brain to start thinking about it as if it was a person. That anthropomorphization process, that's very central to creating love because love is connected,

is only really available to things that our brain is treating as people. So many of the things that people love are objects or things that have this anthropomorphic quality to them. They look a little bit like a person, they sound a little bit like a person. Siri on your cell phone, right?

Siri sounds like a person, she's anthropomorphic. And so many people say to Siri that they love her, that Apple's had to come up with a little list of replies that Siri can give when people make that comment. My favorite one is, I bet you say that to all the Apple products. So this tendency of products to mimic people, to look or to mimic people,

to look or sound like people, is something that marketers are very aware of now. And recently you've seen a big upturn. You may, as listeners to this, have noticed that more and more products seem to have human faces on them. More and more products seems to have names attached to them, or the people who are marketing them are encouraging you to call it by a name or relate to it as a person. And that's because it does create a strong emotional bond, uh, with that

object or that brand when it is a little bit more anthropomorphic. Very interesting topic. And when I was at Lowe's specifically, we were working on at the time, what we considered to be the Holy grail of retailing. We had this project called Total Close Loop, which was really about how do you obliterate the channels that a consumer goes through when they're trying to shop with a retailer, how do you make it just be seamless across the board? But behind that, what we were trying to build,

especially around the house, was this relationship that people have with their home and things in it, because you tend to love a house that you feel connected to. So we were trying to figure out because there are only so many major projects you're gonna do in a lifetime on your home. How do you recognize that affiliation

that a person has with the home and how do you make them fall in love with something that Lowe's has so that it will drive all their shopping decisions to be around that project or that conscious understanding, wanting to build out that dream that they see in the home. So all this is so interesting to me and how it all comes together and how much analytics and understanding all the things we've been talking about play out in our lives,

even though we don't consciously understand that oftentimes this is what, whether it's a website we go to or a physical store, they're doing in the background subliminally to us. And all this was happening for me almost 15 years ago. So I can't even imagine the types of things that they are doing now and have at their disposal. Well, home is great. And when I interview people for my research and I say, is there anything that you love that isn't a person, one of the most common things that people bring up is their home as something that they love.

And it makes a lot of sense because first of all, it's a place where you connect with other people. It's where your family is, right? This whole person thing person, the house itself is an object, is a physical object, but your love for the house is very caught up in your love for the people that you connect with and provide for in that house.

It's also an area of creativity. And we've talked about this a little bit so far, but creativity is a really important aspect of being passion struck in a positive way about things. So one of the things that we do, I mean, you used to work at Lowe's, all right, there's a lot of creativity and that people go into with their home when they are designing how they want it to look and if they're a little bit handy,

doing those construction projects or part of those construction projects themselves. And that creativity helps us feel competence. It helps meet our need for competence. It's also very self-expressive. And at the core of love, and this is a really major point that I'm glad we're having a chance to address, so psychologically, what is really happening when you love another person or love an object. It's the same thing. In both cases, you have the sense of identity, the sense of who you are. You are opening up your sense of identity. You are expanding your sense of self so that now you include this other person or this activity or this object that you love. So when you love your home,

you see that home as part of yourself. That's part of the reason you want to care for it. Just as you have a natural instinct to take care of yourself, you have an instinct to care of your home because it's part of yourself. It's part of the reason we want to take care of other people. We take care of our children because we see them as part of our larger sense of identity. Now, there's possible negative ways of doing this. There are people, this doesn't happen that often, but there are people who see maybe their children as part of their identity, but it takes a negative turn.

And instead of saying, oh, they're part of who I am, therefore I need to care for them, they say, oh, they're part of who I am, therefore I need to care for them, they say, oh, they're part of who I am, therefore I get to tell them what to do all the time. They don't respect the autonomy of this other person. So it can take a negative turn if you do it wrong. Fortunately though, most of the time, people are able to see other people

as part of who they are in a larger sense and still respect the autonomy of that other person. When you fall in love with an object, you're also making it part of your own identity. And one of the ways that you do this is that you invest your creativity in that object. So when you move into a home, the minute you buy it, you start to see it as yours psychologically and part of your identity, but it becomes much more part of your identity when you've redecorated identity, but it becomes much more part of your identity when you've redecorated it. And it becomes much more if you actually get your hands

in there and you build something or you paint something. And that really builds that connection to your own sense of self. Now, it absolutely does. And in our groups that we would do looking at customers, we saw this stuff play out time and time again, which is why for us, the holy grail was not only having that single entry point where the consumer felt like they were shopping through all verticals in the same way. It's why

we were trying to become the general contractor for the homeowner because once you get into a person's home, it's really game over because then if you're adapt at what you're doing, you can see what the person loves and you can sell them things based on their emotions. And this leads me, Aaron, to the last topic I wanted to cover with you. And this is chapter 10 of your book. And I love the quote that you used to begin this chapter with the rise of self-driving with the rise of self-driving vehicles.

It's only a matter of time until there's a country song where the guy's truck leaves him love that because it's probably going to happen. But in this chapter, you explore three types of technology, brain computer interfaces, conversation generators, and consensual telepathy. And we've been talking about your brain warmers throughout today's episode. But can you discuss these technologies and the implications that they can have? Absolutely. So it's a good follow-up to what I was just talking about. How the core of love at a psychological level is opening up your sense of self and expanding your sense of self to include other people. And maybe if you are a Buddhist, a very accomplished Buddhist, you expand your sense of self, you become one with the universe, right? And you have the sense of love for all of creation and all of the universe because you've broken down the boundary between and the rest of the universe in a positive way. These technologies all do this and they're really developing very rapidly.

So I talked a little bit about conversation bots already, chat bots, we don't need to go into that so much. But there's something called a consensual telepathy, which I am not making this up. You can now, well, with animals, they've done this in mind, they have been able to put electrodes into the brain of one mouse and have it learn certain information. And those electrodes are connected via computer to another mouse on another continent. And this other mouse learns the same information directly through these electrodes from the brain of one mouse

into the brain of the second mouse. And people, Elon Musk has a company called Neuralink that's working on this for human beings. There are lots of other companies that are working on this for human beings. And as this develops, which it really seems like it's not just science fiction, it's not going to be here tomorrow, but it's going to be here, It's not just science fiction. It's not going to be here tomorrow, but it's going to be here. You're going to be able to have a real sense of merger or fusion with another person.

So I've been talking about objects as sort of person, thing, person, right? You love your house not just because it's you in the house, because it's you, the house, and then all the people that the house brings you closer to and supports and connects you with. Well, here you could have a technology, an object, that connects you to another person in an incredibly intimate way. And I don't know where that's going to go, but it's something really to think about. The other aspect of this is just with objects. So you can control.

There's people who have experimental connections to their brain that are connected to computers that allow them to control the computer directly with their brain. And we're going to see a much stronger connection emotionally to objects. If you think about it, a baby learns that its hand is part of who it is and not some other object.

Because when it thinks about its hand, it can raise its hand or lower its hand just by thinking about it. But the rattle in the crib, it can't control that directly with its mind. Well, we're approaching a point where people will be able to control things directly with their mind. You already have situations where you can,

people can learn through electrodes that are put on their scalp to drive a car and move the car around by thinking about where it goes. So when you get this type of direct mental connection between a person and an object, we're gonna come to feel that object is as much a part of who we are as we think our physical body is part of who we are, which after all our physical body is just an object that we control with our mind.

So we are looking at much, much stronger connections, possibly stronger connections to other people through a connection through an object and also stronger connections directly to objects as they get connected directly to our minds. And Aaron, it's both fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Yeah, on both of those. Double down on both of those. Absolutely. Where is the best place that a listener or viewer can learn more about you and your work? If you're a business person, you're interested in a keynote talk or something around the business side of this, I have a website called Dr. Brand Love where you can find my work that has business focus.

If you're just a normal US citizen anywhere and you're interested in how this affects your life as a consumer, what it means to be passionate about the things in your life, you can look at thethingswelove.com or find my book, The Things We Love. I'd be happy to connect with you through those as well. Well, Aaron, such a great conversation. Thanks so much for joining us today on Passion Struck.

John, thanks for the opportunity. It's really been exciting. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Aaron Ovea, and I wanted to thank Aaron and especially Emma Cepella for the honor and privilege of having them appear on today's show. Links to all things Aaron will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles, our main channel, and our clips channel at Passion Struck Clips. Please go check it out

and join over a quarter million other people who subscribe and tune in weekly. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. If you're looking for daily doses of passionstruck inspiration, then join me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles. And if you want to expand your courage muscles, then sign up for our weekly newsletter Live Intentionally, which goes out to over 25,000 listeners. And in it, every single week we unleash a new courage challenge that's based on the previous week's episodes. You can find it at passionstruck.com. Are you curious to find where you stand on your own journey of becoming passion struck?

Then take the passion struck quiz today. It consists of only 20 questions, takes you about 10 minutes to complete, and it will show you your starting point on your journey to becoming passion struck. Also head over to passionstruck.com to take the quiz. You're about to hear a preview of the passionstruck podcast interview that I did with Rachel Rogers, the CEO and founder of Hello Seven and author of the groundbreaking book, We Should All Be Millionaires. Rachel has sparked a revolution in how we think about money and wealth. Now she's back with her highly anticipated companion guide, Million Dollar Action, your step-by-step guide to making wealth happen. Rachel shares the core principles of her Million

Dollar Action Plan, offering practical tools and transformative insights to help you achieve financial abundance. If you're providing $500,000 worth of value to customers and clients, why don't you deserve to be paid for the value that you're creating? And it's such a struggle for people. I think we can want so much for other people. We can want so much for our love. We want them to be successful. We want them to have successful. We want them to have wealth. We want them to pursue their dreams and to see it all come to fruition. But for ourselves, a lot of us judge ourselves very harshly.

Well, I'm not good enough, or I wasn't a good son, wasn't a good daughter, or I did this one thing that one time. I made these mistakes. And so we're so harshly judging ourselves. We think we're not deserving of a good life, right? We're not deserving of wealth or abundance or financial freedom. And so I think forgiveness is an important ritual

so that we can move past that and really start to recognize that we are worthy and to recognize that the same people we wanna help, we also are deserving of help. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who could really use some more information

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