Thank you for joining us for episode 371 of Live Happy Now.

This week, we're talking about relationships, and you might be surprised to find out how little we actually know about them.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with best-selling author Eric Barker,

whose newest book, Plays Well

With Others, takes a deep dive into friendships, marital relationships, and every other

kind of relationship to explore what we're doing, right, where we could improve, and how the

pandemic has changed the way we look at our relationships. This is such an enlightening

conversation that we all have plenty to learn from.

Eric, welcome to live happy now. It's great to be here. It is great to have you. You have a new book

out called Plays Well with Others. I just told their listeners a little bit about it in the intro.

And this is about relationships, but it's about all types. It's not your typical relationship book.

So starters, how long has it been in the works? And where did this idea come from?

Well, it's been in the works. It was funny because my first book was basically looking at success

and all the maxims that we had around success and then looking at the

science and testing them. And so I thought, hey, you know, for my second book, I'm going to look

at the maxims around relationships like love conquers all. A friend in need is a friend in need.

And so I'll look at the social science and I'll test those maxims. And I thought that'd be pretty

straightforward. Well, two weeks after I closed the deal from

my book, like California, where I live, a lockdown for the pandemic. And I realized, oh, geez,

like, this is, relationships are going to be at an even bigger issue than I thought. This isn't just an

abstract investigation. People are, people are going to need this. So I felt like this was really

going to be something so

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