A (3:04)

So when we actually. Daniel, one thing really fast. Your mic is bumping on your shirt or something. So if we can, that would be very simple of a solution.

B (3:13)

Okay. Yeah. Do you want me to start over?

A (3:16)

No, no, no, we're absolutely fine. So when I think about emotional intelligence or even iq, I. The question I always want to know is how malleable is this stuff? You know, is this something that we can get better at or is it a trait that's locked in?

B (3:32)

Yeah. So here's the good news. It's learned and learnable. It doesn't matter where you are now. You can get better. And there's a methodology for that. And also this is why I'm a big proponent of teaching this to kids in school. Because there's a developmental window. The brain, its emotional social circuits don't become anatomically mature till the mid-20s. So there's a chance to get it right in the first place. It's not too late in adulthood, but you may have to unlearn some habits and then relearn new ones. So it's a little harder.

A (4:07)

What are some of the things that you. Because I know that you've actually worked really hard to get this turned into curriculum in schools. I assume you focus K through 12. What does training emotional intelligence look like? Like, what are the muscles that we have to strengthen?

B (4:24)

Well, first of all, the best programs cover the whole range. Self awareness, self management, empathy, getting along with other kids.

A (4:35)

Go into some details, like one thing. So when I think about self awareness, I think about it in terms of trying to not only recognize that you're feeling something, but then put an interpretation to that feeling. Is that how you approach it in the curriculum that you teach? And if so, how do you walk kids through that?

B (4:56)

Yeah, so I don't teach the curriculum, but I'm proponent of the curriculum. And for example, with a little kid, you might start every day with the feeling circle. This happens in a lot of schools where kids say how they feel right.

A (5:11)

Now and why is it called a feeling circle? You're there just because they're sitting.

B (5:15)

The kids in a circle. Sit in a circle and the teacher has them go around and say, well, how do you feel? Why do you feel that way? It's just that. But that is the beginning of self awareness. And you might do it 5 and 6 year olds. Let me tell you a story. 5 year old kid who's in one of these classes. It's a snowy day. I don't know where you live, Tom, but you have to imagine a snowy day. And the kid says, I want to go out and play mom. And mom says, fine, but you have to put your snowsuit on. And he has a tantrum. No way. I'm not going to put on my snowsuit. He's pounding the floor and yelling, no, no, no. Then all of a sudden he stands up, goes to his room, comes back with his snowsuit on and starts to go out. And his mom says, hey, what just happened? He says, oh, my guard dog got upset. So I had my wise owl talk to it. So what is that? That is neuroscience. For a five year old, it's taught in these courses. He's talking about his prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive center. That's the wise owl, the amygdala and the emotional circuitry and the midbrain that get you so upset. That's his guard dog. And he has learned how to manage his emotions, his disruptive emotions, his anger or whatever with his prefrontal cortex. And that is one of the circuits you want to strengthen as a child ages. Technically, it's called cognitive control. It's the ability to see and realize, oh, I'm getting upset. Oh, that's anger. I'm upset because of this. And talk yourself through it, or find a way to calm down physiologically and change your state before you respond, before you act. We get in trouble in life today, in our private life and at work, when we have what you have to call an amygdala hijack, where all of a sudden that radar for threat thinks, oh my gosh, there's an emergency, and it takes over the prefrontal cortex and we are really pissed off or really scared and we maybe send an email or say something to someone or do something that we regret later. That's the hallmark of the hijack and the federal.

A (7:26)

Lisa, do you know Lisa Feldman Barrett by any chance, in her work?

B (7:31)

I know who she is, but I don't know her work that well.

A (7:35)

I think you guys would be in very close to lockstep. You guys cover a lot of the same ground. So when you were talking about the guard dog and the wise owl, there's a concept that she talks about where part of as people begin to develop an awareness of their body, it's having a concept that you can put that into. And I've heard you both talk about this idea of the brain is sort of always trying to Predict trying to guess at why I feel this way and put it into a box. And it seems like part of what you're doing is giving kids more boxes or giving them names, ways to conceptualize this stuff that helps them. Is that part of the strategy?

B (8:13)

That's part of cognitive control. And she and I are both working from the original underlying neuroscience of Joseph LeDoux at New York University. She's at Northeastern, I think, or Boston. But at any rate, he's done the foundational work on this very important interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the emotional centers.

A (8:34)

Can you go into that a bit?

B (8:35)

Yeah. So the emotional centers have as a trigger, the amygdala. The amygdala is constantly scanning our world, our reality, as we go through it to see is there a threat? And this, of course, in evolution was no doubt highly important for survival. Rustle in the bushes, run away. It's going to eat me if I don't. You have to have a very quick response. The problem is that in civilization today, we have the same biological response and the same wiring of the central nervous system where this one part of the brain can declare an emergency and take over the thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex and neocortex, and make it do what it thinks it, we need to, to survive. And very, very often that just doesn't work in modern day life because it might be, oh, I'm being treated unfairly. And then, you know, the amygdala says, oh, how unfair I'm going to be. You know, I'm going to slug this guy. The amygdala thinks like a child.

A (9:37)

I think you refer to that as symbolic threat.

B (9:40)

It's a symbolic threat, not a, not a physical threat. Yeah. So I'm being treated unfair, not being listened to. Someone's taking credit for my work. These are all symbolic threats. The biological response is very powerful. And if you're lucky, the impulse to slug the guy goes to your brain. And information from other parts of the brain can come in, like, oh, that's your boss, so you're not going to slug him. You're going to do something, you're going to smile and change the subject. So emotional intelligence is the smooth integration of the emotional centers and the prefrontal, the thinking part of the brain, the executive part of the brain.

A (10:19)

So, all right, so that takes us into the beginnings of self awareness. Do. When you're talking to kids about that connection in the body. Let's talk about the hidden cost of diy. When you're running a business, most Founders think they're saving money by piecing together their own financial system.

B (10:39)

But.

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B (13:26)

So I have to say there's more than 100 different curricula in social emotional learning, which is what this called. And so they all do it differently. But generally what you want to do is to help the child learn that when my stomach feels this way, or, you know, when I start to get a little jittery, it's an early sign of maybe a hijack coming. Whatever language you use, and these programs use different language, but you want children to be able to recognize what's going on in them so that they can take control. It's a way of giving them actually more agency, more ability to manage their own life. And you can do that in different ways at different levels of maturity. So you might do it one way for the five year old, the guard dog and the wise owl. You might do it very differently for 10 year old or 15 year old because they can comprehend at higher and higher levels.

A (14:25)

So what about for people as they get older, somebody that's watching this now, they're 35, whatever, they're long past that sort of age where the brain has baked itself in, there is hope for them for sure. Brain plasticity obviously continues until the day you die. But you talked about people might have to unlearn some of that. What does that process look like?

B (14:46)

Well, let's say you're quick to anger, but you wish you didn't yell at your kids so much or your wife so much or whoever so much. So the first step in changing that habit is mindfulness, paying attention to what's going on in you and starting, as with the kids, starting to recognize the early warning signs to that you're about to lose it, because then you can intervene. You have a window of opportunity. So you can say, are those universal? Pardon me?

A (15:18)

Are those universal? The window of opportunity, the signs, the early warning signs?

B (15:22)

Oh, I think they vary from person to person depending on what the habit is you want to change. And then once you recognize, oh, I'm heading down that path, which is a direction you don't want to go, what can I do that's different? Well, one thing that we find in neuroscience tells us this work from ucla. If you can name the feeling I'm getting angry, it already shifts energy from the circuitry for anger to the verbal cortex, which is naming the anger. So that starts to weaken the path. Then ideally you want to have something else you can do. Take a deep breath, count to 10, pause however you going to do it, think about what's effective in the situation and then respond. That's what I was calling cognitive control. And the best programs for kids teach cognitive control. And it's never too late to increase your cognitive control. So that's basically.

A (16:28)

I'm interested in how adults really beef this up. So you've written pretty extensively. In fact, this. Even before I knew you were the one behind the book Emotional Intelligence, I came across the notion of altered traits and meditation and how impactful that can be.

B (16:43)

Sure.

A (16:44)

And you started this off with mindfulness. When did you start meditating?

B (16:48)

I assume you started a long time ago when I was in college.

A (16:53)

And what got you into that?

B (16:55)

I was really uptight and anxious and it relaxed me.

A (16:59)

But how'd you even find that? Like, I'm guessing this is. Are we talking, what, the 70s?

B (17:04)

It was a long time ago. However, I was at Berkeley at the time. Was very easy to find in the Bay Area. It was probably very hard to find in middle America. It was probably only in certain urban centers, university towns at that time. Now it's everywhere. Businesses are teaching mindfulness.

A (17:24)

As such an early adopter, though. I'm really curious. So did it just seem self evident to you that this could be useful? Were you already studying psychology? And so it seemed like anything that attacked your physiology could be interesting.

B (17:36)

The psychology of the day paid no attention to meditation, paid no attention to altered states or altered traits. And in fact, I found that out because I went on to graduate school in clinical psychology and spent two years in India. When I came back to Harvard to my program, which was very psychoanalytic at the time, and said I wanted. I met a lot of people in India who seem really cooled out and they all seem to be meditators. And I think there's something. There's a there, there. And I like to do my research, my dissertation research on it. And they thought that was the stupidest idea they'd ever heard. That was the kind of reception. So that was the atmosphere at the time. So it took. It was a little bit of a risk back in those days to be so interested in meditation.

A (18:25)

That's even weirder. So what did you study in undergrad?

B (18:32)

Behavioral science, generally.

A (18:34)

Okay, so you're at Berkeley, you're studying behavioral science. You yourself are feeling sort of stressed out. You come across a monk one day, like, how does. How. What was your first introduction?

B (18:44)

Oh, no. When I was 13, my sister gave me a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. This planted a seed. It was about Zen satori. I thought, what's satori? Satori is a momentary enlightenment experience. Like, aha, I got it. You May not keep it, but you got it then. So you can remember that it's like a psychedelic chip. Oh, I got it. And then the chemical leaves your body and you lose it. But at least you had it for a while. So, anyway, that was inspiring. I got very interested in Eastern schools of thought, all of which said, there's this other way of being which transcends, you know, ordinary life. I was very intrigued by that, and I thought I would try meditation. And as I said, my immediate motivation was I was pretty anxious. And I found it actually worked for me, cooled me out.

A (19:45)

And now, what kind of meditation were you doing in the beginning? Was it. Did you learn to breathe from your diaphragm?

B (19:50)

No, no, it was tm.

A (19:52)

Okay. I don't. You know, I hear about TM all the time, and I actually think I asked somebody about this. Talk about a momentary enlightenment. I've since again forgotten. TM is where you repeat a word or a sound over and over to sort of calm the mind.

B (20:05)

And at the time, I paid a lot of money for that mantra. And then when I went to India, I found my mantra listed among other mantras in the appendix of a book that was published in Calcutta. I thought, oh, man. But then once I was in India, I started. I had an opportunity to learn mindfulness.

A (20:25)

How old were you when you went to India?

B (20:27)

I must have been 23, 24.

A (20:30)

Okay, so you encounter meditation, I'm guessing sort of late teens, early 20s. You're doing TM. You're repeating a phrase that you've paid a fair amount of money for, but you're finding that it lowers your anxiety.

B (20:43)

Oh, yeah, it works. Every kind of meditation seems to do that. So the book you mentioned, Altered Traits, which reviews the meditation research in good journals, shows that no matter what meditation you're going to do, if you do it regularly, it does two things. It calms you. It makes you less triggered less often. And when you're triggered, you're not triggered so intensely, and you recover more quickly. That's the calm. And it also focuses you. Meditation is a direct training for the mind in paying attention. Because every meditation says you do this thing, repeat the mantra, have a certain stance toward your experience. That's mindfulness. And if your mind wanders off, as it's going to do, and you notice it wandered, bring it back. That's like a rep in a gym with a weight. Every time you lift the weight, the muscle gets that much stronger. And in meditation, every time you bring your mind back, you're training your neural Circuitry to pay attention. So those are the two big main effects of any kind of meditation. By the way, I don't advocate any brand. I really believe that the best meditation is the one you'll do whatever one it is. And I don't care because.

A (21:59)

Because the key is just the focus or.

B (22:02)

Well, you know, there's different levels of benefit. And I would say for most of us, just getting calmer and staying more focused means we're going to make better decisions. Taking information better, it helps with our life. We're going to yell less at the kids, whatever it is.

A (22:18)

And why would that be true? So as a meditator, I get it. Experiential. Oh, you're a meditator. Yes. It changed my life. What would you call it? I call it just breathe. So I took it from box breathing as a method. But I found that the four equal parts of the breath were. They left me actually almost short of breath. So what I do is I just sit super comfortably and I breathe each part of the cycle to maximize the pleasure. So I inhale only as long as inhaling feels good. I hold on the inhale only as long as it feels good. I exhale in a way that feels good. And I hold the exhale as long as it feels good. And as long as I. Like you said, I'm bringing my mind back to just focusing on my breathing or a big thing for me is I listen to natural sounds. So it might be waves crashing or it might be a thunderstorm or rain, but that like when I'm aware of the sounds, then like I have the chills right now just thinking about it when I'm aware of the sounds and I'm not sort of zoned off, but I'm actually there with that sound and I'm just focused on my breathing. I get super calm. And for me the hook was diaphragm breathing. That it literally in a single breath, it changed my life forever. I was in a period where one, my diet was such a mess that I was just drinking so many artificial drinks and was creating anxiety. Plus I was in a very anxiety provoking period of my life. And so I was like, yo, I have got to figure something out. Came across a Navy SEAL because I always thought that meditation was too sort of soft. And I. My life journey was about toughening up. And so anyway, I shoot it for a long time and this guy finally was like, tom, stop being a dumbass, you got to try this. And so I did, literally with that first diaphragmatic breath I could feel myself shifting into the parasympathetic nervous system. And I was like, oh my God, how did I not do this for so many years? This is absolutely insane. And now I'm a devotee to breath work, meditation, cold exposure, like anything that I can do to, I think, like you're saying, largely stay focused, increase that the ability to bring myself back to focus. But it's also, and you wrote about this in the books, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how they do this, how some meditators, and you reference specifically one swami, I forget his name, but that can control his autonomic nervous system, which of course is the big draw of people like Wim Hof. And that has been transformational for me.

B (24:49)

Well, I have a lot of things to tell you, Tom. One is I'm just, I'm writing a book now with a Tibetan lama and I just finished a chapter on exactly the kind of controlled breathing. You're doing that four, four, four, which the Navy SEALs use to calm down. And it has, the research shows it has a very strong impact physiologically, just as you said, it shifts you from the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight, the anxiety mode to calm, to the parasympathetic or relaxation response, whatever you want to call it. And it does it very powerfully if you stick with it. And if you do it regularly, you can do it once, it might happen and you'll stay there for a second or two if you do it day. Do you do it daily?

A (25:34)

I do, yeah. Not seven days a week, but five.

B (25:37)

Pretty regularly, yeah. So if you do that, it's like working out in the gym. You get better and better at it and your brain and body get better at getting into that state. However, you added something which I want to point out, which was attention control. You're also working with your attention in that every time your mind wanders off, you notice, I hope, or you try to notice and bring it back. That's a good beginning. Now, as I pointed out in the book Altered Traits, there's many levels to meditative accomplishment. And there are people who meditate like a thousand to ten thousand hours lifetime, and they get better benefits. There's dose response relationship and then there are the yogis. These are like industrial strength meditators. They devote their whole life to it. And my co author, Richie Davidson, who by the way, I've known since graduate school at Harvard, he too was interested in meditation. He was told that would be a career ending move. However, he's now got A lab at University of Wisconsin which has 100 people. It wasn't career ending.

A (26:45)

It's so big now.

B (26:47)

Yeah, it's very big. But the interesting thing was he flew these yogis over one by one, put them in brain scans and so on. It turned out at the upper level, like the Olympic level of this. Brains are different, physiology is different. One of the things that I mentioned in the book, which I really am struck by, if you or I have great insight. Aha, I got it. Our EEG wave shows a high intensity gamma for about a half second. Or if you imagine biting into a peach and the sound and the taste and you know, all of that all at once, you get a same gamma. These yogis had that gamma all the time in the resting eeg, which suggests that they are in what we call an altered trait of consciousness. So it's great to begin and we all will get benefits, but if you keep going, it seems to get better and better. So at my age, at my point of life, I'm feeling like, hey, I better get going, you know, I'm taking this seriously, I'm paying, I'm putting a lot more time into it.

A (27:58)

That's interesting. Well, tell me about India. So you go to India in your sort of early middish twenties. Were you just still at too driven a period in your life to say, I'm going to set this aside and become the industrial strength yogi?

B (28:12)

Actually, I was really.

A (28:15)

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I got to sit in the driver's seat.

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It felt like I was the captain.

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Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.

B (31:00)

Interested in hanging out with people who are accomplished yogis, lamas and swamis? By the way, the Swami X that you mentioned, he could control his autonomic nervous system, but he didn't know what he was doing. He was a little bit of a phony, actually.

A (31:17)

Really?

B (31:18)

Oh, yeah.

A (31:19)

Oh, I've heard this guy mentioned so many times. Tell me more.

B (31:21)

Well, when he said he was going to increase his heart rate, he slowed it. When he said he was going to slow it, he actually went into tachycardia, which is very dangerous.

A (31:31)

I remember you saying that in the book, but I didn't catch that. You were saying that this was basically bs. Now, what I heard is that he could. He would claim to stop his heart, but he was more. I think this is what you're talking about with tachycardia. He was speeding it up so much that you basically couldn't differentiate between beats.

B (31:50)

No, but he's also sticking off to the bathroom to smoke cigarettes. I mean, the guy was like, not what he made up. I actually, I got a telegram from someone in India who knew him before he came to America who said, don't have anything to do with that guy. He abandoned his wife and two kids used to be the manager of a shoe factory. So this guy was a. You know, this was the problem. Americans are so naive. We had no discrimination on who's a real. Who's the real McCoy and who's a phony. So a lot of.

A (32:23)

But do you find it interesting that he could adjust his heart rate, even if it was in the wrong? Like, let's say, he couldn't tell which way he was doing it. The fact that he could change it is unique. Even if it, you know, is a genetic fluke or something.

B (32:37)

Well, I would be more impressed if he knew what he was doing.

A (32:43)

Now, are there people now that that can do it on purpose?

B (32:48)

I've never met any. You mean stop their heart?

A (32:52)

Stop the heart? Seems a bit dicey, but in terms of consciously slow it down or consciously raise it, probably.

B (33:00)

I wouldn't be surprised. But, you know, the research interest has moved on from that. That was very naive. We're like, oh, wow, there's a guy who has some autonomic control. This was in the day of biofeedback, you know, when, you know, we thought you needed a signal to slow your heart rate or speed it up. And this guy said he could do it without that. So we were very interested. But, you know, now we're more interested in what happens in the brain. Partly we're interested because now we have the technology that lets us. Look, we didn't have it then. We only had external measures. So I go to India, and what I was interested in was actually studying Eastern systems as systems of psychology. And because it seemed to me that there were psychological systems, ways of working with the mind that were millennia old, they're completely unknown in the West. And, you know, I thought, well, okay, I'll bring some of these back. And also, they're practical. They have an application. And the application was mainly through meditation, not solely. And I was very interested in bringing meditation to the west in a sound way, not through selling some brand of meditation, but in getting good research done on it. And, you know, I had two friends from those days that have stayed in that track. One is Richard Davidson, who really is leading the neuroscience research on this. Then there's a guy named Jon Kabat Zinn who has introduced mindfulness based stress reduction. He was like the father of mindfulness in America. And his approach was developed in a medical setting to help patients who medicine could no longer help, just help them have a better quality of life. And now it's spread in all sectors. But one of the reasons it's spread is because there's very good research behind it. And I'm still a believer. For the west, it's important. Our belief system to a great extent hinges on the credibility of science.

A (35:14)

Why do you think this matters? Why does it matter to you so much to bring meditation here into the West? I think, having read your book, I know the punchline, but I'm curious to hear.

B (35:27)

Well, I think meditation is a kind of mind training and emotional management that people will. People can benefit from immensely. So I think it's actually, it's a kind thing to bring it to the West. I think that's my motivation. And also it's interesting, you know, emotional intelligence kind of does the same thing.

A (35:52)

I was going to say, like, to me, the things that you're into, from focus to. To altered traits, meditation, emotional intelligence, all feel like you need them all. If you're going to pull this off, you talk in the book Emotional Intelligence. You talk a lot about one of the studies I find just beyond intriguing, looking at couples and why they divorce and the Four Horsemen, this notion that if there's contempt in the relationship, you're really going to be in trouble. And then the idea of being able to give people the tools to unwind that stuff.

B (36:24)

Stuff.

A (36:25)

And how much of that is going to start with what we've talked about already, the awareness, being mindful, recognizing body emotions, translating that into a concept that you can sort of hold onto. You even talk in the book about taking a break if you feel like, whoa, we're escalating, we're moving towards an emotional hijack here to take a break so you can settle down. Where this really starts to get interesting to me is, is how it plays out in leadership and how when you look at people that perform just at the top, top, top of their game, it's no longer about IQ because they all have high iq. What are those elements? How do we begin to get good at that interpersonal stuff? The notion of the social brain, like, talk to me about that.

B (37:13)

Okay, so the research that you're talking about, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, comes from John Gottman, who studies couples. And he found that if a couple is having a fight, basically those are two amygdala hijacks. Think about it. It's helpful to separate for at least 20 minutes so that you can calm down, then come back. Now, let's look at the workplace. Everybody who's at a certain level of management has to have had an IQ about a standard deviation above the norm. It's about 115. It's what it takes to get an MBA or a master's in any subject. And that is what's called a threshold competence. Everybody needs it to get in the game. What it's more interesting are the distinguishing competencies once you're in the game. What makes one person so successful while someone else is not so successful? And it turns out emotional intelligence makes the difference how you manage yourself and how you relate to others. And the most successful executives, the most successful leaders get top performance out of people. And there's lots of research that shows this. People like them more. People are more loyal to the organization. They want to help other people out. There's a host of kind of a halo effect from that highly emotionally intelligent leader. And it makes an organization, you know, you see it in profit and growth. So, you know, hard metrics, soft skills have hard consequence. And so think about it. What I don't know if you've worked for many different people, but I ask people around the world, what are the qualities of the boss you love the most and what are the qualities of the boss you hated the most? And invariably, wherever I am, it's emotional intelligence that characterizes the boss we love.

A (39:07)

Do they say that or do they have different words that they use to describe.

B (39:10)

No, no, no. I asked them. I asked them, just give me one characteristic of the boss you love and then one of the boss you hate. And then I list it. And all of, lo and behold, the list describes emotional intelligence. These are people that you trust. These are people that give you psychological safety. These are people who are honest, you know, on and on and on.

A (39:35)

And then psychological safety. As somebody who wants to be a good boss, I really want to know what these are. So psychological safety is.

B (39:44)

Oh, psychological safety is critical for a relationship. But what is if you. Okay, there's three kinds of empathy, Tom. One is cognitive empathy. You know how people think, you know the language they used, you can be a good communicator. The second is emotional empathy. This has to do with the social brain, which we should come back to. But brains create an invisible, instantaneous, unconscious brain to brain link. And emotions pass back and forth so you know what the other person's feeling because you feel it too. And then the third kind of empathy is empathic concern. Each of these is based in different part of the brain. Empathic concern is based in a parent's love for a child. It's the mammalian caretaking circuitry. And it means it's not just that I know how you think and know how you feel, I can manipulate you with that, but I actually care about you. I want what's good for you. That creates psychological safety. So if you can actually feel that, if you can communicate it to people and you do it verbally, non verbally, you might have a one on one conversation with the person who works for you. Not about their job, but about the person just getting to know them. What do they want from life, from their career, from this job. How can you help them? That creates a real sense for that person of being known and cared about and seen by you, the boss. And that is invaluable. Then you become the kind of boss people really like because you care about them.

A (41:22)

I want to go back to the social brain, which was one of the most interesting concepts from your book. And it's something that I've seen other people sort of touch on. I forget the name of like the person who's basically a little more dominant or higher in the dominance hierarchy or whatever. But like if you put women together in they live together other, let's say that their periods, their menstrual cycles will sync up, but it will cue off of the woman who's considered to have the most high social standing. How many different things happen like that. So women's periods, posture, facial expressions, like what are the things that.

B (42:03)

Oh yeah, it's very powerful. So let me tell you a little bit about the social brain. Then I talk about the most powerful person in the group. The social brain was actually, it's a fairly new discovery. Social neuroscience is a new field. And it emerged as the neuroscientists stopped just looking at one brain and one body, and one person started looking at two brains and two bodies while people interact. And they discovered, well and behold, there's all this circuitry in the forebrain, the front part of the brain, which is designed to link in to the brain of the other person. One of the famous discoveries was mirror neurons. Are you familiar with that concept, mirror neurons?

A (42:42)

I am, yeah. But please say something about it so.

B (42:44)

That the audience knows, you know, there's a story. I don't know if it's neuromythology or true, but mirror neurons were discovered in a lab in Italy. When they're looking not at two brains, but one cell in a monkey that only activated when the monkey raised its arm. And one day, the monkey standing stock still and that neuron is firing. Nobody knows what's going on. And then they realize, hot day in Italy. Lab assistant went out for a gelato. He's Standing in front of the monkey, and every time he lifts the gelato to take a lick, the monkey's neuron for the same movement activates. That was the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons pepper our brain, and they tell us instantly what the person in front of us is feeling, doing, intending. And it's a back channel for emotions to pass. And there are many other circuits now discovered in the social brain. But what it means is that we are biological actors in the people close to us. And if you're powerful, if you're the most powerful person in the group, it's human nature to pay more statistics to and put most importance on what the most powerful person in the group says or does. So, for example, at Yale School of Management, they did a series of studies where the leader of a team is put in a bad mood, and people on the team catch that mood, performance goes down. Leaders put in a very positive mood. I feel really good. People on the team catch that mood, performance goes up. So it has real consequence, even though it's invisible. And we're biological actors in other people's physiology. One of the.

A (44:29)

What do you mean by that? Say that another way.

B (44:32)

I'll tell you. I'll tell you the study that says this because it makes it very unique. So there's. So women are getting their brains scanned one by one, and they're told they're going to get a shock, an electric shock, in about 30 seconds. And their amygdala, which we know is the brain's radar for three threat, goes nuts, and they go into the anxious state firefly. If someone holds their hand, then they calm down a little bit. If their husband holds their hand, they go completely quiet. The amygdala goes quiet, goes calm. What this means is that the people we love and the people who love us are connect to us, connected to us silently, biologically. You go to a hospital on the day when you could go to a hospital and visit a loved one, and you're just there with them. Your presence is important biologically. And it may not be evident to us, but it's clear that this happens. So, you know, the most powerful person in the group has a lot of influence that we just don't know about or we don't notice.

A (45:40)

Man, that's when I think about, while we're recording this, we're still in the middle of COVID and people not being able to be there when their loved ones are struggling profoundly or even passing away. I've heard horror stories about where people have had to stand outside the hospital window while somebody passes away on the inside. And that was heartbreaking before I heard you say that. But the thought of how we basically are regulating each other, each other's neurochemistry, is even more terrifying. And it also speaks to why one of the most profound tortures that you can put on a human is just radical isolation.

B (46:20)

That's true. Unless they're a meditator. There's a difference between isolation and solitude. You know Vivek Murthy, who's just been appointed the head of the. Just been appointed by Biden, the head of his Covid task force, he was a surgeon general under Obama. He wrote a book on loneliness. And loneliness, as you say, is horrible. Being isolated, not being able to connect with people, it ups your likelihood of severe illness, depression, anxiety, terrible. However, if you're a meditator, you think, oh, what a great chance for a retreat. And that's called solitude.

A (46:58)

So what have they figured out? Like, are they just learning to regulate their own physiology?

B (47:04)

Well, it might just feel good. It's a way of putting yourself in a positive state or at least engaging in a meaningful pursuit. And this is really important because it has to do with one's sense of purpose or meaning. Nietzsche said, if you have a wide live, you can endure almost any how I heard that I read that line in a book by Viktor Frankl who survived four years in Nazi concentration camps. He said that was his motto because he realized that having a larger sense of purpose made it easier for him to endure the actual tortures that he went through. And I think that that's. That if we have a sense of meaning and if you're involved, say okay, you're all alone, but you're a heavy duty meditator. Well, that's great because I can pursue this meaningful work, which is meditation, I'll do a retreat. And I've heard this from friends of mine who are serious meditators, that the lockdown is a double edged sword. On the one hand they can't see their family or friends. On the other hand, it's a great opportunity for retreat because no one's going to bug you. And you know the classic recipe for place to go on retreat is a place of solitude where you don't have to deal with everyday life.

A (48:26)

So here's a question for you. Do you think that meditators would get the same benefit from meditation during isolation, specifically so as a, as a way to substitute for the fact that they're now alone if they didn't see it as being Purposeful. So they were doing the actual. They were focusing, they were breathing, they were bringing their attention back, but they had no sense that they were doing this for a grander purpose. It was just. I was given this instruction manual and I have to do it, and that's that. Would they still get the benefit, or is it the framing that this is a purpose for me to give myself to?

B (49:02)

So there's no data I know of that looks at these two conditions, which it's a nice experiment you just outline. However, I have a hunch that the larger frame of meaning makes a difference. Absolutely. And I think it does in every part of our life. For example, at work, if you can find a purpose. For example, I just gave a talk by zoom to a group of physicians who are frontline of COVID and we were talking about purpose and meaning. You know, they're putting their lives at risk helping people. Their income is suffering, but they're doing it anyway, and they're worried about their families bringing it home. On the other hand, the medical mission has such meaning and gives them such purpose that they do it anyway. And I think if it didn't have that meaning or purpose, it was just a matter of, you know, let's weigh the risk and the money they give up. But there's this underlying sense of, you know, what I'm doing matters that makes them keep going.

A (50:11)

So Man's Search for Meaning, the Viktor Frankl book you were talking about before, when, first of all, it's on my list of, like, the absolute must reads that people have got to read this book. But that really drove home for me. So, you know, one thing I get asked a lot about is successful. How do you become successful, all that. And when I look back on my own life, it becomes very clear to me that the punchline of life isn't success, money, fame, it's none of that. It's neurochemistry. And the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself and getting to a point where you have what I'll call fulfillment. Because it's not as transient as happiness. A bowl of ice cream makes me happy, but it's very transient. And if I repeat it too much, then it stops being, you know, something that feeds me. But when you focus on meaning and purpose, doing something that matters, and oftentimes doing something that matters that is difficult even increases its sense of importance in you and gives you sort of this outsized impact that, to me is so fascinating. I don't know, do you think about things from an evolutionary lens. Because I'd be really curious why the hell meaning and purpose is so fundamental to the well being of the human psyche.

B (51:29)

I'm not sure I can connect evolution to meaning and purpose. I know that our beliefs about what we do are extremely powerful. And presumably anything that's powerful must have had some payoff in evolution. Let me just parenthetically mention I wrote the introduction to a new book by Viktor Frankl called yes to Life.

A (51:52)

How do we have a new book by Viktor Frankl?

B (51:54)

How can there be? He gave three lectures six months after he left the camp that would have been rediscovered. Wow. Just translated. And I had the honor of writing the introduction.

A (52:08)

So give me a little bit about what that book was and then tell me what you wrote in the introduction, Victor Frank. I'm literally hanging on every word. Viktor Frankl is who you want to talk about. A hero.

B (52:18)

Yeah. So Viktor Frankl. The very title of the book gives me the chills. Think about it. Yes to Life In Spite of Everything. What he had just gone through. His pregnant wife died in the camps. His parents, his brother. I mean, it was traumatic, terrible. Plus he was tortured and, you know, forced labor, horrible. However, he had a deeper sense of meaning and purpose which got him through. And in the book, in the introduction, I talk about a few things, one of which is why meaning matters so much. And you know, he dedicated his life to helping people find a sense of meaning. But the yes to Life In Spite of Everything was. Was actually a line from a theme song that was written for a concentration camp. And the prisoners were forced to sing the camp song at the end of an exhausting day of labor. Some of them sang it into the line, yes to Life In Spite of Everything, sarcastically, because of course, they're in a situation that was hell. And I talked to a woman I know whose parents were survivors of one of those camps, and she said that every Saturday they get together with other survivors and have a party. That was the yes to life in spite of everything in the positive sense, in the camps. No, no. After they got out, when she was a kid. No, no, you couldn't have a party in a camp.

A (53:57)

Yeah, yeah.

B (53:58)

But afterward, because they felt that life was so precious that they had survived. And so the Frankl book I recommend, I recommend both of those books and they cover some of the same territory and also different territory.

A (54:17)

What was your intro about? What was sort of the thrust?

B (54:21)

Oh, well, I had several things. One of the things I wrote about was propaganda disinformation. Very timely. Now the way the Nazis got to power was through telling lies, beating them over and over till they became truths in people's minds. And I recommended an outfit called the News Literacy Project, which helps people, particularly students, be smart consumers of information. Like ask, you know, who's saying this? Why are they saying that? Do they want me to believe something? Do they have other sources they cite? You know, is this based on something I can trust or is it not? Anyway, I felt that that was really important, so I just picked up themes from Frankl's book.

A (55:07)

One thing that I found just eye opening in Frankl's book is he talks about that day where they're liberated. And he recounts how there were people leaving the camps that said, before nightfall, I will have blood on my hands. Meaning, like, I'm going right now to kill somebody that was involved in, you know, having locked us up. And he just saw that as such a tragedy that they were walking away with the wrong frame. He certainly understood it, obviously, but he was like, you're basically locking yourself up again. And you tell an extraordinary story in emotional intelligence about heaven and hell. And if I remember right, it was a samurai tell that story. I think that it's really enlightening.

B (55:54)

So the samurai goes to a monk, and he says he wants a teaching on, you know, Buddhism, Dharma. He says, would you give me. Explain to me the difference between heaven and hell. And the monk looks at him, says, I wouldn't waste my time with you. You're so sick, stupid. And that. That the samurai gets, you know, has amygdala hijack like that, starts to draw his sword, and the monk says very calmly, that's hell. And then the samurai puts his sword back as he calms down, and the monk says, that's heaven. Yeah, it's in our mind.

A (56:32)

Yeah, I love that idea. And this is totally tangential, but something I find really powerful. I don't know how familiar you are with Jordan Peterson, but he has an interpretation of the Bible verse that the meek shall inherit the earth. And he said he really struggled with that concept for a long time. Why would. Because we normally would translate meek as weak. And he said he just really struggled. Why would the weak, who will be trampled upon by the strong, over and over and over, why would they ever inherit the earth? And he said, if you go back. And I forget which language, but. But if you go back into the ancient version of the language from which that word was taken, meek could be interpreted to mean the person with the sword who keeps it sheathed and that you are capable of great violence, but you keep it in control. And it's the people who are capable of the violence but have the emotional control to stay calm that ultimately win. In fact, there's another story in your book that's so perfect to that.

B (57:30)

This. The.

A (57:32)

The Japanese subway story about the guy that comes on drunk and the aikido guy that goes to step in. I. I'd love to hear that as well.

B (57:40)

So I. I had this friend, late friend now Terry Dobson, who's one of the first people to bring aikido to the west. Terry had been a marine. He's like a tough guy. Used to be his favorite thing to, you know, favorite activity was he'd go to a bar and get really drunk and get in a fight. That was a good time for Derek. And then he found himself studying with aikido master who said in essentially what you're saying, Tom, you have to keep your sword sheathed. Learn how to take down anyone, anytime, and don't do it. Then you win. So Terry's on the subway in Tokyo. Very crowded. They're very packed. And he sees this big, strong, dirty, tough drunk guy at one end of the subway. And he's kind of stumbling down the car and people parting ways. And Terry says, okay, well, this is justified. I'm going to take this guy out. So he gets ready. It's like high noon on the subway car. There's Terry at one end and the drunk at the other. And as the drunk is stumbling toward Terry, this whole old Japanese guy in a traditional kimono pipes up and says to the drunk, hey, how you doing? What you been doing? And the drunk looks at him, says, what do you care? And the old guy just keeps going. He says, hey, come on. Sit down next to me. Tell me about your life. And the drunk slumps down in the seat and says, oh, well, you know, I don't got no job. I don't got no wife. I don't got no house. I feel terrible. Terrible. And the old guy starts patting him. And then Terry realizes he doesn't have anything to do. The trouble's over. And that was a story about keeping your sword seized. Tom, I have a question for you, and it's about purpose. I've seen some research that suggests that the old style, like brand me, it's all about me. And my success is actually only held by a very small majority of people. And that there's a different brand of success which has to do with finding a larger meaning. And I'm curious about how you got into what you are doing now, because from one point of view, it's very successful. But from another point of view, I see you as helping many, many people. I wonder what's been your motivation? Could you tell me about your path?

A (60:09)

Yeah. So I chased money really hard for a very long time. In my early 20s, from the time I was a little kid, I knew that I wanted to be rich, and I just went after it. And I woke up every day valuing myself for my ability to suffer in pursuit of my goal, which was money. And I did that for almost a decade. And finally, my wife pulled me aside and was like, you're so unhappy. It's now damaging the marriage. And I would drive into work, and it was like a cloud had rolled in. I just. Everything about my life was misery. And the only thing that kept me going was an obsession with getting rich and the sense that I could endure more pain than the next person. And there was something in my wife saying that because my highest value is my marriage. So when she said that I was damaging the marriage, it just forced me to reflect on everything. So I realized at that point that I was worth more. I was worth about $2 million at the time, and I was worth more than I'd ever been worth in my entire life. And I was also more than happy than I'd ever been in my entire life. And so I have this moment of. You've got to be kidding. I am living the cliche of money can't buy happiness. I'm like, if there is ever something that people have repeated over and over and over, it is that money cannot buy happiness. So why did I have to, like, walk into this trap? Now? That's a very complicated answer. I'll shorthand it to, money actually is very powerful, and so people will pursue it forever. Okay, cool. So I could understand why money not only had allure to me, but that it would remain alluring not only to me, but to other people, but that there was a punchline that was bigger than that. And at the time, the way I conceived of it was I wanted to feel alive. So going back to that gamma state that you were talking about, I got that gamma state from writing. And when you. You even refer to it in the book as the moment where you. You just realized how to solve a difficult problem, that half second of just pure joy. And I was like, I want to live there. And I would get that. Literally, I have the chills again. I would get that sometimes writing so. And I had originally started pursuing money because I Wanted to build a studio. None of that really matters. But so I realized, okay, I wouldn't have said Gamma State. I wouldn't have known that, quite honestly, until I read your book. But I wanted that moment of feeling alive. So I decided I'm going to stop chasing money and that I'm never going to chase money again. And I'm going to chase that feeling now. Irony of ironies. I then found a company with my partners that we said, okay, we're not going to pursue money anymore. This is going to be about adding value to people. Now, we're not dumb by this point, we're quite business savvy. But we're like, we're going to leverage the business savvy to construct something that allows us not to focus on money, but to focus on lifting other people up. Like making a product that people want, that it makes their life better. And I start tapping into meaning and purpose. And so I'm reading about the brain voraciously by this point for like 10 or more years. So I'm beginning to understand some of the basics of psychology and like neurochemistry. And, you know, I haven't read Viktor Frankl yet at this point, but I'm sort of beginning to understand that there are different brain states and things you can lean on. So I'm like, okay, meaning and purpose. I'd read a book called Drive by Daniel Pinker, I think, and he talks about how meaning and purpose are two of these five fundamental drivers. And so I'm like, okay, that's really interesting. I'm going to lean heavily on that. And that company ends up being a billion dollar company and ends up changing my life. I mean, just like you can't even imagine all from pursuing meaning and purpose and not from pursuing money. But in that process, I had about 3,000 employees and 1,000 of them grew up in the inner cities, which you also talk about in your book. You're beginning to understand why I resonate so much with you. And I realized, as you have seen from the data, that growing up in the inner cities is devastating psychologically. And that more than anything, this is a psychological problem, like the toll that it takes on somebody's psychology. And so I'm like, okay, I've had all this sort of worldly success that I've wanted. I have long ago learned that it's not about the money anyway, that this is about meaning and purpose. Because I have been wealthy and just emotionally bankrupt and I never want to go back there. So can I teach this? And so My obsession becomes I had to do certain things to my mind to get primed for success. And I wasn't the person voted most likely to succeed. Again, you talk about this when you talk about EQ and iq. So my iq, I would say, is pretty average. But I did the work to come to understand myself, which then gave me the ability to understand other people. And that has paid dividends in all the ways that you outline in your book and being able to be a good leader and all of that. So how much of this can I package and teach? And so that was the birth of this show, was me trying to create something for my employees because I was like, look, I'm gonna bring up. Because you become sort of like the father figure in a company, and people are going to ignore their boss the way they ignore their father. And so I was like, they need to hear this from other people. So I said, watch. I will bring on. I mean, at this point, hundreds of people, and they're all going to circle around very similar ideas because they're just our universal principles to success. There is universal things to think. Meditation works as close to universally as you're going to find. And so it's no accident that the number of people that I bring on talk about these very similar concepts. And so, like you with wanting to bring meditation is. There's meaning and purpose in it for you. It's a kind thing to do. It makes you feel good about yourself. That's why I do what I do this. It really is teachable. It really does change people's lives. And it really impacts my neurochemistry through the avenues of meaning and significance and purpose.

B (65:59)

That's really fascinating, Tom. Thanks for that.

A (66:01)

Yeah, for sure.

B (66:02)

There are a couple of things. One is I'm very intrigued by your fascination with brain chemistry. And the other is that I wonder if people looking at you and your life arc and trajectory might confabulate meaning and purpose with financial success. Because there are many people who are very satisfied because their life is meaningful and purposeful, who are financially successful. You're successful by other criteria. So those are just two questions I'm asking.

A (66:40)

Well, on the second one, the worry that I have, I would be a little surprised that people confabulated my message with money and meaning and purpose, because I go out of my way to make it very clear, like, how many billionaires have to commit suicide before you realize money is not going to solve those problems? It is possible, though. But that's part of why I don't sell lifestyle so you won't see me, you know, doing drone shots of my house or you know, sitting in front of a Ferrari. I don't even own Ferraris, I couldn't give a shit. But like that whole thing I don't get into even though it actually be great for business. Now on the. The thing that I do worry about is that people will. Because I'm all about being hardcore. I'm all about working really hard. And I get so turned on by people that talk about working hard, working long hours. That is my aphrodisiac. I love being around people who are like that. I love doing it. But there's one caveat in that, which is the thing that I'm chasing that I go after every day gives me that gamma feeling and so it makes me feel alive. So I'm working on the weekends because I'm getting, I mean look, I may only get three or four of them throughout the day, but I'm getting those moments of like the pure joy of having solved a problem that I care about with a skill set that I've worked really hard to obtain. And I think that the thing that I'm creating helps other people. So it's like this perfect neurochemical cocktail. And I don't have kids. So for me leaning into the work is joyful. It creates something I care about and it's in a realm where I'm doing things I would do whether I got paid for them or not. So I do. And I try to tell people, look, be careful who you take advice from. Me included. If what you want is a stress free life, I'm not your guy. If you want to be the greatest parent ever, I'm not your guy. These are not the things that I know how to do, nor are they the things that I'm pursuing. And so I do actually worry about that because some people will. Many people would hate the life that I live. And so they need to be very careful not to try to follow in my footsteps.

B (68:51)

So you get a high from working hard is what you're saying?

A (68:54)

I very much get a high. Now the complexities of that in terms of value system and beliefs which you mentioned earlier, I have handcrafted those things on purpose to exaggerate the high that I get.

B (69:09)

Do you feel you have enough time for your private life? Non workload.

A (69:13)

You know, it's interesting. So I have so melded them. My wife and I founded the company together. So for the last, in fact the last two companies, she was a part of the founding team of Quest. And now we are legitimate co founders of Impact Theory. So we work side by side and that is really fun. We have complementary skill sets. I do worry sometimes though that God forbid something happened to my wife. We've been together now for 20 years. I definitely do not fear divorce, but I really fear her dying or, you know, something happening because I don't spend a lot of time investing in friendships. So that, that's one where I'm like, oh, is this the right play? So I try to have enough of a foot in that world that I'm not like completely isolated beyond my wife. But that is like, if I were to say your lifestyle has one weakness, it's that I make so much time for my wife and so much time for my passions. That doesn't leave a lot for traditional friendship maintenance.

B (70:18)

And do you miss it?

A (70:20)

Not usually. Which is why it's like one of those where intellectually I know, man, if something happened to her, I would. That would not be a pleasant place to be be because even though I'm introverted, so I have. I like a meditator who just does not have a problem being alone. I do not have a problem being alone, but I, I'm not a, you know, industrial strength meditator, so I know a problem would come for me.

B (70:44)

Well, I don't know if you remember the part of emotional intelligence where I talk about long term marriages.

A (70:51)

I do for the audience.

B (70:53)

Each mate becomes part of the biology, the way in which you handle your inner feelings and physiology of each other. And so a divorce or a death of a mate, as you say, is devastating because you're literally losing part of yourself too, in addition to your attachment to the person. So I can totally understand what you're saying. And I also think, Tom, that what you have found and what you have crafted for yourself, I suspect is unique to you. That I don't think one size fits all that. Other people and people who love your podcast, which is great, which is helpful, may have other ways of finding the perfect set. For some people it will be friendships, you know, or some purpose that doesn't bring a lot of money. And for others, they'll want to be you, essentially.

A (71:58)

Yeah, there's definitely no question that one size does not fit all. Do you think about, like, how people can find for them what's going to be the right answer? Because I find so many people are living by the law of accident. Their parents made a comment when they, when they were a kid and that steered them in one direction. A girlfriend broke up with them and made a comment and that solidified them down a path. Or they've got golden handcuffs. The job just pays so well. How do you help people with that?

B (72:26)

Yeah, I think it's an interaction of life's accidents which put us on one path or another. Or switch can't control that. And self awareness, which as I said is a pivotal part of emotional intelligence because you're so awareness at a deeper level helps you find your inner rudder, your own sense of what matters to.

A (72:52)

Me, which is meaning, how do you do that?

B (72:56)

I think you do it by assessing choices you've made or making. I'll tell you.

A (73:04)

Are you looking for things that lead you to certain emotional states?

B (73:09)

Some people may be doing that. But you know, the paradox of purpose is that you can endure unpleasant emotional situations because it has meaning for you. So you may not be chasing highs, you may be chasing a deeper satisfaction or a deeper contentment. So this friend of mine, I grew up in the central valley of California and he grew up on a ranch in the next town and he almost flunked out of high school. He went to a community college. He took a film course and found that he loved film. And he got into a film school and he made a student film that caught the eye of a director who gave him a job as a production assistant. You know where I'm going because you've read the book. But this director was so impressed by him that he talked to studio into backing a film based on a script this guy had written and letting him direct it. And everybody thought it would do terribly. But he did very, very well. He made a lot of money from that film. But the studio had the last cut. This is traditional in Hollywood. They paid for it, they're going to edit it the way they wanted. He hated the way they edited. And he decided, you know, I'm a creative artist, I'm never going to let a studio do this again. So he went off on his own, founded his own company and made another movie based on a script he'd written. Almost failed because he ran out of money, got a last minute loan. But you've probably seen the movie because I'm talking about stuff, Star Wars. So George Lucas is a guy who knew what mattered to him. He made a decision accident that turned out to be hugely successful financially. But that wasn't why he made it. He made it because he felt his creative integrity was at stake. So this is the interaction between purpose and success in a conventional sense of you may get it.

A (75:21)

What do you know? Lucas he is. So first of all, that story is so good. Like, every filmmaker is, if they're paying attention, is in love with that story and obviously how well it worked out for him. I had the. A. Very weird. So I went to USC film school, and while I was there. Yeah, so while I was there, Lucas obviously, is one of their biggest, if not the biggest, donors. And so he was there one time, and I just saw a bunch of people standing outside the editing room, and there was this big, big guy, just like a real big physical presence, and he's chomping on a cigar, and he's telling this great story. And so I just stop and I'm listening. And as he's telling the story, I'm like, he's talking about Star Wars. And then I'm like, but I've never seen this guy before in my life. And I know who George Lucas is. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting. And then I look to my side. I'm not joking. Seven feet from me, George Lucas is standing very quietly up against the post. And this guy, you know, the big sort of gregarious. I don't even remember who he was. He had. I don't know if he was one of Lucas's producers or if he worked at Lucasfilm. I don't know. But it was so interesting to see Lucas letting somebody else shine. You talk about great leaders getting the best out of other people, you know, letting this guy shine, letting him fill the room. And Lucas just sort of, you know, sitting back very quietly, smiling as this guy told the story. I always found that so fascinating because, you know, obviously Lucas is, I mean, famous, and you want to talk about in a film school that bears his name. It was literally, if I remember right, called the Lucas CNTV school. And it was like, here he is, just so quiet, so chill. Doesn't need the spotlight, just really content. That left a big impression on me in terms of not always needing to be the center of attention, which at that point in my life, was pretty important to me, and now is, despite the fact that I have a YouTube show, is actually not something that I think a lot about. That was pretty powerful. How did you get to know him?

B (77:31)

As I said, we're both from the Central Valley. My high school used to play his high school. And we met some years later through one of his girlfriends at the time and had dinner, and we just hit it off because we came from the same village, essentially, and we're both refugees from the same horrible. It's like the empty Part of California.

A (77:54)

Modesto. Modesto adjacent.

B (77:56)

Right. What's that?

A (77:58)

Around Modesto.

B (78:00)

He grew up in Modesto. I grew up in Stockton. I was at the New York Times when I met him. And he was George Lucas by then, but he was George Lucas by accident. He was always kind of unassuming, you know, it didn't matter to him that people recognized him or didn't, you know, or gathered around to hear what he said. He'd rather let the guy chomp me a cigar be the center of attention.

A (78:23)

One thing that I find interesting is so obviously his early films, which you alluded to, were very avant garde. Thx 1138 is, I will say, his student film, which I watched, made me want to give up because it was so good. I was absolutely startled that that was a student's film. THX 1138, the feature film, I was a little less enamored by, and it obviously did not do well at the box office. If I remember right. It basically bankrupt Zoetrope, which was Francis Ford Coppola's company. Who was the guy that, you know, really took a shine to him and sort of brought him into the professional world. But he had to make a choice. Do I want to keep being this avant garde sort of indie filmmaker that I always thought I would be, or do I, you know, tell more conventional stories? But he had this one story really wanted to tell, which was American Graffiti, which, you know, oftentimes people don't realize that's what set him up to get the kind of ownership in Star wars that he had, because it crushed. It did over 100 million, if I'm not mistaken. American Graffiti back in the day, which was, you know, just astronomical.

B (79:30)

One of the innovations in American Graffiti was the soundtrack. I don't know if you're a film student, you may have noticed, but everything has a song to it. Every scene, which. Which had never happened in a film before. But there was something about that that just showed his creativity. But there was something about that that people loved, and that gave him the cushion to risk his own money, which people in Hollywood said is insane. You don't risk your own money on a film. You get investors. He didn't do it. Yeah. Turned out okay. I think it turned out okay. He was lucky.

A (80:05)

What's interesting about American Graffiti, in George Lucas's own words, he said that was an ode to a trend that he saw going away. And he wanted to make this swan song to kids having sex in cars. And I thought, wow, that's so interesting the way that, like, the world does move on because by the time I came around that was, I mean, certainly not anything that I did or any of my friends that I knew did. It had, you know, sort of become passe. And now when I think about trends as they intersect with like what you're doing and how much technology is changing kids and social media and you talk in the book about, you know, what's the sort of impact that this is having on people's brains? Do you fear at all where we're headed because of our sort of shortening attention span? Is that a myth or is it actually going to have some negative consequences?

B (80:58)

I would say it's not just attention span and it's open question whether it really is shortening, but it's the development of the emotion social circuitry itself. Well, it's exacerbated now because kids aren't even in school. Nobody knows what the consequence will be for today's kids of having to be home alone for a year or more because of the virus and to not even go to school, but to have it at a distance. And my grandkids are in school, but it's online. And this is on the one hand getting them used even more used to a digital and technological world. And on the other hand, we don't even know what the consequence will be for the developing brains. And it's going to be different for a 5 year old and a 10 year old and a 15 year old because brains develop different parts at different rates. I actually see it as an argument for being sure kids get social and emotional learning because I suspect they're being deprived systematically of the kinds of interactions kids in evolution and in your childhood and mine had with other kids and with people, their families and teachers and so on that help their brains develop, I would say, well for social interaction and for managing themselves. So I feel that this means we have to be even better at giving kids access to this kind of thing. Let me tell you mentioned inner city kids. One of the things that social emotional learning does is it really can help level the plan playing field in this way. I've been mentioning cognitive control, which is the ability to manage your disruptive emotions. Lots of people get in trouble, particularly in inner cities, because they're too impulsive, they don't manage their emotions well or their impulsivity. There was a study done in New Zealand that showed if you have high cognitive control between 4 and 8 in your 30s, you have better health than more financial success. And if you develop cognitive control between 4 and 8, you get the same benefits. And this is the kicker. Cognitive control is a stronger predictor of your adult life than your childhood IQ or the wealth of the family you grew up in. That's the great leveler. So I feel if we give kids a complete skill set, going to be doing them a great service for the rest of their life.

A (83:40)

One of the skills, because getting to like real sort of measurable or tangible skill set is one of my obsessions. In the book you talk about, I forget what you call it, but you've got the kid who's about to play soccer and the sort of bully kid comes up to, you think you're going to play soccer. 1. If you could tell that story and put a name to that technique because. Because it was such a powerful example of a kid who learned something, deployed it, and you can sort of extrapolate that to his future life and get why this is so powerful.

B (84:11)

So, Tom, put yourself in a middle school in the inner city of New Haven, which is a bomb down. There's no jobs in New Haven for people that used to. There used to be 20 or 30,000 factory workers in New Haven. Now there are none. The local heroes are the drug dealers on the corner because they're successful. And it's a middle school. And as you say, the scene is there's this one kid who's really kind of overweight and definitely not athletic, and two kids behind him that are what we call jocks, very athletic. The two jocks are making fun of this kid and one of them says very sarcastically, oh, so you think you're going to play soccer? And the. A kid, overweight kid, turns around, takes a deep breath. This could easily lead to a fight. So it's like he's steady, not getting himself ready, takes a deep breath, and he says to that kid, yeah, I'm gonna play soccer, but I'm not nearly as good as you are. What I'm good at is art. Show me anything, I'll draw it really well. Someday I hope to be as good as you are at soccer and at that. The first kid who's just putting him down, comes over, puts his arm around him, says, oh, come on, I'll show you a thing or two. So the technique is a put up. When someone puts you down, you say something positive about yourself, something positive about the other person, changes the chemistry of the moment. And he learned this in social, emotional learning. They call it social development in that school system. So, you know, kids love these classes because it's about their life. You know, how I can handle my own upsets and how I can get along with other kids. This is what kids care about, you know, themselves and other kids. So it's a real win win.

A (85:57)

Do you know what's the psychology? Why are kids so ruthless? Is it like innate jockeying for position? Like in my adult life, I would never say something like, oh, so you think you're going to do XYZ thing that I'm good at? Like that seems so insane to me. And we certainly teach kids. Hopefully most adults know not to do things like that. But kids are not for play. Like they will just thrash people.

B (86:24)

So Tom, think about it. I think we socialize kids into that.

A (86:27)

Attitude, into the bullying or to not bullying.

B (86:31)

Well, it's an extension of something that we do which is an unintended consequence, I believe. You know, you don't have kids, but remember when you're a kid, you come home from school and the parent asked the kid, how'd you do on the test? What if the parent instead said, who was kind to you? Today it's a completely different frame of mind about what matters at school. But we in our culture, and by the way, our culture is an outlier ours in Australia, among world cultures in rampant individualism, we want our kids to be better than other kids. And a kid who's developing prefrontal control over the amygdala and for boys particularly, it doesn't take place till the 20s. Adolescence, it's just not there. So whatever their impulse is, they express it. And so you end up with bullies. Of course there's individual differences. Some kids have it earlier and they can manage themselves better. We could teach cognitive control. It's a very teachable skill. The brain wants to learn it, but we don't.

A (87:43)

Is empathy teachable?

B (87:46)

It's all teachable. Of course, empathy is teachable.

A (87:48)

How do you teach empathy?

B (87:50)

So the thing about empathy is that almost never in life do we get feedback. For example, you may have a hunch how someone feels. You don't ever, you don't say, do you feel angry or do you feel happy or do you feel sad? But if you do that, then you get, then the part of the brain that empathizes gets information. There is an amazing 45 minute instruction in reading emotions from facial expression. Paul Ekman. Paul Ekman is one of the world's experts on the facial expression of emotion. Paul Ekman has a website and in 45 minutes you can learn to detect what he calls micro expressions, which are fleeting parts of an emotional expression that tell Us how someone really feels, not how they want us to think they feel. And beating micro expressions is a form of empathy. It's part of empathy. It can be taught. Yeah.

A (88:50)

That's interesting, because when I think about, even when I was a kid, kid, the thought of bullying somebody, no way. Like, I was just too aware of how much that sucked. Now, there were other things I was completely oblivious to. Like I had no sense of how I was coming across to other people, but that one, being able to project myself into somebody else's shoes, that one I could do. Now that makes me think about sort of what traits are predictive of success. And one thing you mentioned earlier briefly, and you talk about the book, and I took a note because I was like, how is this true? That optimism is highly correlated with success? How? Like what? What's the stat? How correlated with success is it and why?

B (89:39)

Okay, well, let me talk about optimism, the drive to achieve and emotional management, because I think you need all of them for success. And then remind me to talk about what's wrong with them if that's all you got. And it has to do with empathy. So when I was in graduate school, I had a professor named David McClellan who studied entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs. And he realized that they had several competencies, he called them, that you didn't find in unsuccessful entrepreneurs. One of them was that they loved performance feedback. They wanted a metric for how they're doing so they could improve. They had a learning curve for how they acting. Another was that they took risks that looked foolish to other people, but they felt were smart. And they felt it was smart because they had done their homework. They knew they had some sense that this can work. And other people who hadn't gathered information didn't think so. So the drive to achieve, which is sometimes these days called grit, meaning you keep your eye on the goal. One of the interesting things you talk about, the high you get. It turns out if someone has a goal in mind and pictures in their mind how they're going to feel when they achieve that goal, it activates circuitry in the left prefrontal cortex that makes you feel good. So if you can keep that in mind, it doesn't matter what obstacles you have, you're just going to keep going. It's going to feel good when you get there, one way or another. And then there's the optimism, which is positive outlook, which is the sense that I can do better. These days it's called growth mindset. This positive outlook means that even if I have a setback, even If I fail, fail, it's okay, because I know I can get better at it. And of course, these days in Silicon Valley, having a failure is a market of future success, because it's assumed you're going to learn from that and do better next time. And then all of that is based on being able to manage yourself well and being able to keep going despite what happens, to recover from being upset. And then the deficit is something we've talked about. If you only care about your own success, you may end up very successful, but very unhappy. And you've told the story about that. If you can think about how you can help other people, empathy or compassion, then you may find a deeper sense of meaning that will give you a trajectory in life that may give you a deeper satisfaction, which is not momentary happiness, but is more lasting.

A (92:27)

Yeah, getting people focused on the right things is. Man, it's really sort of top of the list when I step back and I. So going back to people that grew up in the inner city and I think about, okay, I've got some very brief window of time where I can try to instill in them the thing that's going to allow them to go on a beach. Successful one is optimism. Or I have always used the words growth mindset. So getting them to adopt a growth mindset, to believe that they can get better through practice. It's what I call the only belief that matters, because your actions are going to line up with your beliefs. And if you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and that you're never going to be able to get better, and life is just about making the most of what you have. Every time you realize you're not as good as you thought you were, your world is sort of shrinking, shrinking, shrinking. And that's certainly what happened to me in my early 20s was the darkest period of my life because I had a fixed mindset. And every time I failed at something, I was like, oh, my God, I'm not as good as I thought I was. I'm not as good as I thought I was. Not as good, not as good. And so my world just kept getting smaller. I kept putting myself in smaller rooms with, you know, less talented people. And that was sort of leading me nowhere fast. And the big breakout moment was brain plasticity. And I read about it. This was back when it was still highly contested. And I was like, look, I'm just going to choose to believe that this is real, because when I think about it being real, I feel optimistic, I feel hopeful, I feel light. That sense of pressure that's crushing me down goes away. And so let me just try to live in that moment. And then because I chose to believe that if I practice something I would get better at it, I actually started getting better, better. Now this is where life gets tricky and why, when you bring up that individualism, I'm like, I'm actually team individual now within a context of understanding, fulfillment. And that fulfillment requires just innate. It is innate in us as a social species to want to help the group. So you need to plug in, but wanting to get good yourself. And I think that there's also an innate drive driver there for us to want to translate our potential into actual skill set. And by doing that, now you've got people that are actually capable in the real world. You get them moving up dominance, or that's a terrible way to say it, of competence hierarchies so that they're able to move up and be better. And if they're also helping those around them. And being the kind of leader that you described, it gets very interesting. So I'm always trying to get people on that track of like, look, you just have to recognize one thing, skills matter. So skills mean you can do something other people can't do. And if that thing that you can do that other people can't do is something society values and it matters in terms of meaning and purpose, that's going to be amazing. And then you can translate potential into actual skills by working at it. So now it's like if you just give them, if they buy into that idea, then doors begin to open. Now, it takes time. It's not something that you're going to do. You're not going to be able to translate potential into skills overnight. But you get on this path that is very self reinforcing.

B (95:42)

Tom, let me give you a framework for that, please. Comes from Howard Gardner. Have you talked to him? I have not. He's at Harvard School of Education. Anyway, Howard and I went to graduate school at the same time too. Howard talks about aligning what you're great at, your excellence with, what you love doing, what engages you with your ethical sense, what matters to you. He says if you align those three things, you have what he calls good work. And the question is, how much of my day is spent in what I could call good work? What could I do to enhance it? What could I do to make it all of what I do? And you know, when I hear your career trajectory, it sounds like you've done that. You know, this has been a Guiding principle. But I offer it to you because you impact a lot of people, and I agree with you. It's so important to understand that you can get better and if you do the work of improvement. But that's not all there is to it. It's also, what do you love doing? What will satisfy you, and why do you do it? The Dalai Lama put it in a different way. I heard a mask group conference at MIT on systems. He said, whenever you face a decision, ask yourself three questions. Who benefits? Is it just you or a group? Just your group or everyone? Is it only for now or for the future? Because that opens up a whole other way of thinking about the consequence, the impact. I mean, talk about impact theory. That's a theory of impact.

A (97:24)

Talk to me about loving kindness. When you talk about that. That's sort of what that makes me think, that that sense of expansion and how it makes you feel.

B (97:34)

So loving kindness, which is empathy and compassion, essentially can be nurtured. We know this. There's work at the Max Planck Institute that shows that if you do a practice which is basically a circle of caring, you think about the people who've helped you along in your life, people who you're grateful for, and if they're still alive, you wish them silently, that you hope that they'll be happy and healthy, have a fulfilled life and thrive. And then you wish that for yourself silently. Then the people you love, and then people you know, people you work with or whoever, your neighbors, and then to everyone, everywhere. It turns out if you do that, it creates a stronger connectivity in the brain. You like. Neuroscience, I know, creates a stronger connectivity in the part of the brain which has that concern, empathic concern, the third kind of empathy. So that is kind of an exercise in loving kindness. And the good thing about loving kindness is it means that you cultivate an attitude that primes the likelihood that you'll actually help someone, that you'll actually care, that you'll manifest that what you. Or what you do.

A (98:56)

Yeah, that it's the neuroscience around that and how. One thing I found in my life that is. It was really sort of startling when I first discovered it. It's one of the secrets to my marriage, is how quickly you can actually shift your own neurochemistry, that you can be angry, you can be upset, and maybe you're even angry and upset over something that has justification. Like that person really has done you wrong in a way that everybody would look at and say, yes, they were wrong. And I just found that investing in being angry and Being right and doubling down on the fact that I've been wronged just didn't make me feel the way that I wanted to feel. And it certainly didn't do anything wonderful to my wife or to the marriage. And so finding a way to what I will sort of cheesily refer to as filling my heart with love. When I fill my heart with love, and I feel it, and it can be by laughing out loud. It can be just by thinking of a time where my wife did something, something so kind for me. As you get better, at least it has been my experience that I just sort of know how to put myself in that space, which I've never stopped to sort of think about what exactly I'm doing in those more vague moments. But I can move myself to that place where I feel like my heart is full of love. And I'm like, even if this doesn't do anything for my wife, in this case, I feel so much better. Like, I would rather be here for my own sake. But, you know, you talked about emotions being contagious. It also then feels better for my wife.

B (100:30)

So that brings to mind a lot of things. One is that there's a saying, Tibetan saying, the first person who benefits from compassion is the one who feels it. You're the beneficiary. Why should you let your mind be controlled by hell, by anger? You know, and actually, the Dalai Lama talks about the difference between destructive anger and constructive anger. Destructive anger is when it harms you or someone else. Constructive anger is when you see an injustice or, you know, something that you really do want to change, and you keep your focus and you keep the energy and you keep the persistence. You let go of the hatred, the disgust, whatever the strong negative emotion is, and you keep going to fix things. Also, you mentioned how quickly you recover. This is called resilience. The actual technical definition of resilience in a lab is how long it takes someone to shift from being upset. You can see it in the brain, you can measure physiology to getting back to what we call baseline or column. And people who are very good at recovery have three times more activation in circuitry in the left prefrontal cortex than people who are going to be worrying about it or thinking about it or seething about it a week later or in the middle of the night.

A (101:55)

What does the left prefrontal cortex do?

B (101:58)

So the left prefrontal cortex inhibits the amygdala, that surge of the hijack. The right prefrontal cortex gets taken over by the amygdala. Hijack so the left prefrontal cortex does a lot of things. It's the part of the brain that activates when we think about where we're going and how good it will feel. It says no to amygdala hijacks. It's the key to recovering quickly. It can be trained and strengthened in kids. I'll tell you how I was in an inner city in Spain, Spanish Harlem. Seven year olds in the class every day they have an exercise they call belly buddies. They get their favorite stuffed animal, they lie down on a rug, they put the animal on their belly and they watch it rise on the in breath, fall in the up earth, rise. If their mind wanders off, they bring it back. Basically it's mindfulness for seven year olds. But the data shows that this kind of exercise strengthens the circuitry in the brain that lets you recover from being upset. And why not teach the kids from the get go? You know, why do you have to wait till you're 30 something?

A (103:08)

No question. Let me ask you, when we think about emotional intelligence, is there, you talk about the book, some sex differences and while for sure there is massive amounts of overlap, is there any meaningful differences between how men and women grapple with emotional intelligence?

B (103:29)

Well, you know, on every test of emotional intelligence there are many. Now women on average score better than men on average, largely because women are socialized to think about, become experts in relationship and men are not. You know, you talk to boys about things and how they work and you talk to girls about relationships and how you feel and that continues through life. And women talk to each other about relationships. Men tend not to do it so much. So there's a natural.

A (104:01)

Is it just the socialization or is the socialization an echo of something physiological?

B (104:08)

Well, it may be from evolutionary. There may be an evolutionary advantage to having that arrangement. I think it's also cultural. In Thailand, for example, it's not that way. But in Thailand, men grow up being about as sensitive and empathic as women, I'm told. I don't know for sure, but I think it's both an interaction between some genetic or evolutionary determination and culture. But this is really important. If you look at differences between genders, you're talking about two largely overlapping bell curves. Not to get too nerdy, but the differences are at the extremes and what it means is that any guy might be as empathic or attuned to relationships as any woman. Men tend to be better at self confidence and at managing upsetting emotions, but any woman can be as good as any guy at that. That's what it means. You're talking average and very interesting. If you look at top performers, this is a study done in a business setting. The gender differences fall away. The highly effective leaders, if they're men, are as attuned to relationships as women. And the highly effective leaders who are women are as good at managing their emotions or as confident as men. So. So I think that one thing people learn as they go up the ladder is how to have a fuller set of emotional intelligence abilities.

A (105:45)

I think that sums up pretty well the very powerful work that you've done. Not just in the book Emotional Intelligence, which I cannot recommend enough, but the major swath of your body of work. Where can people connect with you? What's the best way to learn more from you?

B (106:02)

Well, you can reach me through my website. I recommend the 25th anniversary edition of Emotional Intelligence has an updated intro by me. It will be out in December 2020 and available thereafter. And I have a newsletter on LinkedIn which is free to anyone who wants to subscribe. My latest thinking. And then. Yeah, danielgoleman1word.info is my website. Just shoot me an email at. Contact danielgoleman.info and Tom, it's a real pleasure talking to you.

A (106:41)

Thank you, man. I feel the same. Your books are amazing. They've really shaped the way that I think about emotional intelligence and meditation and its impact. And I just, I can't recommend you or your work work enough. So thank you for continuing to do it, man. It was awesome to have you on the show. If you've got something in the future, let me know. I am all about having you back on. This was a lot of fun.

B (107:03)

Awesome. Oh, by the way, I'm starting a podcast. I'm starting a podcast.

A (107:08)

As you should.

B (107:09)

I forgot. It's called first person plural and I think it's gonna explain the title.

A (107:15)

Why first person plural.

B (107:16)

That's we. First person plural is we. It's about us. And it's about my interests, emotional intelligence and beyond. So those are all ways to connect with me. And it's been wonderful connecting with you. Thanks so much.

A (107:30)

Thank you guys. Be sure to check out the new podcast. Definitely read the books. They are amazing. And speaking of amazing things, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Most healthy habits are hard. Meal prep takes hours. Gym routines get derailed all the time. Complicated supplement regimens fall apart, often within weeks. But AG1 Next Gen is different. AG1 NextGen delivers what your body actually needs 75 plus vitamins and minerals, 5 clinically studied probiotic strains plus prebiotics and superfoods. It replaces your multivitamin, probiotics and more in one simple daily drink. AG1 Next Gen comes in three new flavors, Tropical Citrus and Berry. All plant based flavoring with 0 added sugar, 0 artificial sweeteners, 0 erythritol. Every flavor maintains NSF certification for sport, so you know you're getting the strictest quality standards. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1 and if you use my link to, you'll also get a free bottle of AG D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and five of the upgraded travel packs with your first order. Click the link in the show notes or just head to drinkag1.comimpact to get started again. That's drinkag1.com impact.