  Three-body nuclear forces are essential for explaining the properties of
light nuclei with a nucleon number greater than three. Building on insights
from nuclear physics, we extract the form of quark three-body interactions and
demonstrate that these terms are crucial for extending the quark model fit of
the meson spectrum to include baryons using the same parameter set. We then
discuss the implications of our findings for exotic configurations involving
more than three quarks, such as the $T_{cc}$ and $\chi_{c1}(3872)$. We find
that the quark three-body interactions provide additional repulsion on the
order of 10 MeV for the compact configurations of both the $T_{cc}$ and
$\chi_{c1}(3872)$. This result, combined with previous calculations, strongly
suggests that these tetraquark states are molecular rather than compact states.
