Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast is about
mastering the best what other people have already figured out so you can apply their
insights to your life. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to
the podcast before public release, private episodes that only appear in your feed, hand edited transcripts,
including my personal highlights and more, you can join at fs.blog.com. Check out the show notes for
link. The final episode of the Knowledge Project in 2022 is a collection of some of the best insights
from the past year. We listened to all the conversations and picked out some key moments
that will help you make 2023 the best year yet. You're going to hear about evidence-based approaches
to happiness, getting things done, small things you can do to make life great, eliminating drama,
impulse control, making faster and better decisions, the core human nature that drives us all,
sleeping better, slowing down your aging process, and what really matters. Thank you for listening
and learning with us this past year. Together we're going to make 2023 even better.
Let's start this episode with Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale University and
a nationally recognized expert on happiness. Laurie appeared on episode 139 to discuss all the
factors that contribute to our happiness and why we spend so much time and energy pursuing it.
In this clip, she explains some of the evidence-based approaches to happiness she's encountered in
her research as well as some of the strategies to ensure your kid's happiness as well.
It's time to listen and learn.
Yeah, I mean, I think one awesome thing about the modern day is that I think we have all these
intuitions about what makes us happy. But with positive psychology and empirical psychology,
we can test these. We can take not-so-happy people and make them engage in social connection or do
nice things for others and measure whether happiness improves, happiness as measured by
self-report on how your positive emotions feel after doing that or your sense of satisfaction
with life and so on. When we do this, we find that things that make us happy are pretty straightforward.
We want to increase our social connection. We're happier when we do nice things for others.
We're happier when we are focused on our healthier habits, like things like improving our sleep and
getting more exercise. We can really see the effects of this stuff and often quite profound
effects. One of my favorite, most profound effects is the effect of taking a little time for gratitude,
the simple act of counting your blessings. There's evidence that in as little as two weeks,
the simple act of writing three to five things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper can
improve your well-being, like significantly improve your well-being. There's also evidence
that expressing gratitude to other people, like writing a detailed thank you note to someone
that you've always wanted to thank but never got a chance to. The act of doing that, at least in
Marty Seligman and others' data, can improve your well-being not just significantly immediately,
but can give you an improved well-being effect that lasts for over a month, which is crazy.
If there's this pill that you can take that will improve your well-being significantly for over a
month, you take one pill and months later you're feeling good, you'd be like, man, I'm going to do
that. The simple act of writing a thank you letter can do that. I think we need the evidence because
the evidence is sometimes shocking. Even for me that knows it, I'm like, I would not have predicted
that. But then when you see it, I think you can say, all right, I'll commit to that. I think this
is one of the powers of doing this class with my students is like, I show them the graphs. I'm like,
do you want to be here on the graph or here? If you want to be here, that's doing some thank
you letters. That's writing down things you're grateful for. I think when you see how much you
can really improve, I think that's what gets people to commit and actually make the behavioral changes
that take some work to really engage with this stuff. How much of that is really changing our
frame into our own life? It's not that we've actually changed anything. We're changing where we
place our attention. By doing that, we're giving ourselves more perspective in terms of the world.
I say this coming at this when I catch myself having a bad day and beating myself up. I always try
to remind myself that there are like 7 billion people in the world that would instantly change
all trade, all of their problems for all of my problems. That phrasing and just that way of
thinking about it tends to get me into a broader perspective and then gets me seeing things a lot
differently. Yeah, I think there's so much that we can change by changing our mindset,
by changing our attitude, by changing the things we attend to. You're talking about resetting your
reference points. Your reference point could be like, there's millions of other people that would
be so happy with this. Another change that's related to that is a technique that we know
from positive psychology, but it's also an ancient one. It's one that the ancient Stoics talked about
a lot, which is what's called negative visualization. The Stoics thought that you should start every day
visualizing just for a second that everything you thought was great in life is gone. They said,
you should wake up and be like, my spouse left me. I've lost my job. I'm lame in my legs. I'm
about to be ostracized. I don't have my community anymore. You do that for five minutes. You're
like, but that's not true. It didn't happen. It's a wonderful life and you run the movie really fast
in your head. The idea is just by feeling what it might feel like to have something negative happen,
it resets your reference point. It also stops your hedonic adaptation for a second where you're
like, oh my gosh, there are good things about having my spouse. One technique I use, which always
freaks out my audience, is when I'm giving a talk about hedonic adaptation and negative
visualization is I have people say, if you're a parent, imagine the last time you talk to your
kid, that's the last time you're ever going to talk to them. We don't have to figure out what
terrible things are going to happen, but they're gone. It's done. Instantly, you get this sense of
like the next time you see your kid, you're going to hug them a little bit closer. All it took was
like a two second negative visualization about what if they weren't here. We have the capacity to
really appreciate this stuff, but we need to bring our attention to what matters and why these things
are great in our lives. That takes a little bit of work, but it's really possible. We can have a
richer life and savor things a lot more by changing our reference points. Let's talk about kids for
a second. Can we adjust our kid's baseline level of happiness based on our own modeling of behavior
or is it all genetic? Is there a magic window where we can influence their happiness set point
sort of easier? Yeah. When you look at happiness and genetics, you kind of get two kinds of
messages. One is that there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable. Some of the variants
we see in the population about happy people and not so happy people, that variance is probably due
to somebody's genetic history. However, that doesn't mean that genetics is destiny. Even the
heritability of happiness is lower than you might expect. Estimates kind of vary, but it's probably
around 40%, 30%. It's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in
the world is like, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't. That's just simply not
the case. That means that there's a lot of room for the environment and epigenetic effects to
take hold. Usually when I mean environment, I mean you and your behavior of what you're doing
to promote your happiness. That's a story about happiness and genetics. I think as a parent,
as you think about conveying these things to kids, I think it's about kind of building in these right
strategies early on. I focused on college students. I wish my college students got a lot of these
techniques and learned about these evidence-based approaches much earlier. With my team here at
Yale, we're sort of trying to think about ways that we can get these strategies out to younger
and younger kids. I think there are lots of ways that parents can promote this stuff.
I think parents do a great job of worrying about whether kids are getting good grades and being
academically successful. I think we really need to think about conveying some of these
skills for boosting happiness over time too. Do you see any parenting techniques or approaches
that perhaps are well-intentioned but over time lead to discontent or unhappiness in children?
I think we've seen, especially just over the last 10 years, a lot of changes in how much parents
intervene and help their kids. There's been a lot of talk of obviously helicopter parenting and so on.
Now it's often said that we're in the domain of what's called lawnmower parents or steamroller
parents. It's not like you're swooping in to help your kid, which is the helicopter model. It's like
you're mowing the lawn or flattening the path completely. There's no bumps or little things
for kids to navigate doing that preemptively. I think it's incredibly well-intentioned. No one
wants your kids to go through anything hard. I think there's a real sense that the stakes are high.
You want your kid to learn, but there's also performance. You want your kids to learn and
to take their bumps, but you don't want them to do that on the SAT because that's going to really
matter for whether they get into college. I think more and more everything feels like the SAT.
There's no point where it is okay for them to screw up and learn. That's really problematic
because we know a couple of things about how kids learn. One is that you got to fail to learn.
In addition, you got to fail to develop anxiety that you can do. You got to fail in order not to
develop the anxiety that whatever task you're doing is going to be impossible for you. What I
worry about a lot is that parents who in this very well-intentioned way try to solve problems for
kids take away the opportunity that kids get from solving those problems themselves. That might not
seem bad, except that there's lots of evidence that that contributes to kids' beliefs about whether
they can solve those problems themselves. My colleague here at Yale, Julia Leonard, studies
the way that kids develop beliefs about their own competence. She does this in really little kids,
like so think toddlers. Her task works something like this. She brings a toddler in. She gives
them a tough puzzle to figure out. She either has parents try to help by giving some strategies of
like, hey, what color is this? A kind of teaching thing where you're not solving it for them and
you're not giving it like, hey, I'm going to give you a hint. You're just like, hey, let me just
and let you pay attention to the right stuff versus the thing that parents tend to do, which is,
here's how you do it. I'm just going to give you the solution or even worse. I get it as a person
who's like dealt frustrated with the kids before is like, let me just do that for you. You don't
know how to do it. It's really hard. Let me just do it. What she finds is that when you give kids a
very different puzzle later on, kids who've had that taking over condition where the parents give
the answer, give up much more quickly. If you find ways to survey them about what they believe,
they believe they probably don't have the ability to do that stuff. It makes sense. If a kid's like,
well, my mom's taking over for me, this must be really hard. This must be really scary. When my
mom's getting anxious about my grades, that must mean that the grades matter really a lot.
I think what parents don't realize is that that quick solution of like, I'm just going to take
care of it either out of their own anxiety or out of a real idea that this is helping.
It winds up ironically doing just the opposite. It winds up making kids feel like they themselves
are less efficient and less capable than they could be. It winds up contributing to a lot of
anxiety. In my experience as a college professor, I see this more and more among parents, more and
more parents checking in. My roommate's having a rooming conflict and I'm like, why are you talking
to me? You can give them some advice about handle it, but it's their rooming conflict or parents
calling professors about a student getting a bad grade. Again, I think it's well-intentioned. The
goal is to help, but ultimately it's not achieving the goal that parents think they're achieving.
Well, in a way, you're not practicing the resilience muscles that you'll need later in life and
you're not getting a chance to exercise them. Then when something happens and you're called upon to
use them, you just don't have them. Yeah. I think that's right. I think this is one of the reasons
we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, is that they've never had a chance
to mess up. They've never had a chance to do it on their own. When they finally have to do it, it
seems really scary and they really have these beliefs that they're not capable. The author and
former Stanford teen, Julia Lithgott-Hemes, has whole books about helicopter parenting and she
talks a lot about how today's teens are failure deprived. They haven't had a chance to fail and
this has these consequences, not just that when they finally do fail, it's really terrifying,
but even to try something where they might fail feels way scarier than it would have
if they'd had tinier failings along the way. What else comes to mind when you think about
parenting techniques that are well-intentioned, but you're seeing in college kids that backfire?
Yeah. I think another one is, I think a lot of parents are worried about their kids' well-being
and I think that that's good. Obviously, parents want parents to care about how their kids are
doing, but it tends to be, in my experience, very anxious parents that are worried about
their very anxious kids. When I meet the parents and I hear their anxieties about the kids' grades,
I'm like, well, no wonder your kids are anxious about grades because you're embodying all of these
kind of anxieties. I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of
emotional contagion, that we naturally catch other people's emotions. If you're embodying calm and
this is going to be fine and everything's okay, then kids are going to follow that. If you're
embodying anxiety and, oh my gosh, this is so important, kids are naturally going to catch that too.
I think that that's tricky to remember. I often get parents saying, oh, what can I do to make
my child feel happier? I'm like, well, have you focused on your own happiness? How are you doing?
It's like, well, no, no, no, I want to focus on them and it's like, you got to put your own oxygen
mask on first, not just because they're paying attention to the strategies you're using,
they're paying attention to your priorities. Those are implicitly getting transmitted,
but literally your own emotions are getting transmitted. And so I often say that if you're
really worried about your kid's happiness, do some work to focus on your own because if you're
feeling less anxious, if you're feeling in a better zone, if you're expressing gratitude,
all these things are going to naturally come to your kids more easily too.
That's Laurie Santos from Episode 139, The Pursuit of Happiness. You can check out the show notes
for a link to that episode. Next up, I want to revisit our interview with Alan Malali.
Ford was nearly bankrupt when Alan took over in 2006 and through his working together management
system and a culture of love by design, he turned them around. In this segment from Episode 151 of
the podcast, one of my favorite episodes of the year, Alan shares the specific aspects of those
principles and practices that created a culture of love by design. These are principles and practices
that create a culture of love by design, meaning that it's demonstrating your love for what you're
doing as an organization. It's also demonstrating your love and how you feel about all the participants
and their contribution. It's also by design. You're creating not only the principles and practices,
but also a reliable process and expected behaviors of all the participants as you work
together to deliver your compelling vision, whether it's that Boeing or Ford or a specific airplane
or a specific car. The first one, and these are written down. People have them on the car.
They carry around. They're in the offices. One of them, the first one is people first,
love them up. The reason is that these are talented people that are working on these programs.
I'll just use the 777 airplane as an example of a major program project in business.
Hundreds of thousands of people that are working on this airplane to design it all around the world.
They're talented. They're motivated. They believe in the vision of getting people together so they
can work together around the world. So appreciating them as a human being and appreciating their
talent and thanking them and including them. So every one of these things I'm going to share with you,
to your point, is a demonstration or an element of showing your love for all the participants.
So the second one is including everybody. So when you're designing their plane, we include
not only the airlines, but we include of course all the employees, all the suppliers,
all the certification agencies around the world, all the cities in which the airplane is going to be
used, and all the investors and all the bankers, all the people that are participating, they're
actually represented on the leadership team. So their voice and their thoughts and their suggestions
are included in the development of the strategy and the plan and the accomplishment of the objectives.
So include everybody. The next one is coming together around a compelling vision, a comprehensive
strategy, and a relentless implementation plan. So the power of that vision, as we all know,
is really, really important. Is it meaningful? Is it purpose? Is it going to serve not only the
stakeholder but the greater good? And you can imagine how that was at Boeing and at Ford, because
our whole life is dedicated to safe and efficient transportation, and having a comprehensive
strategy for the product, for the process for delivering it, for all of the people,
including the working together strategy, then a relentless implementation plan. And that's the
business plan review, which we'll talk about, which gets a lot of attention over the years,
where every week we meet with all of the stakeholders, and we go through an hour and a half, two hours,
we go through every element of the strategy for accomplishing our objectives. Also, the status
of that, we actually color code, all of the team members color code, their strategy plan on how it's
going, red or green, they have its own plan, yellow, they have an issue, but they have a solution,
and red, they have a new issue, but they're still working on the solution for it. And that next one
is having clear performance goals and one plan. Most companies have many plans, and most people are
trying to figure out what the plan is, as we all know. Facts and data, really important. We care
what you think, but we also want to know what other facts and data that you're looking at,
to draw your conclusions. Because as we go forward, especially on working on a yellow or red, we all
want to know those facts and data so that we together can turn the reds to yellows to greens.
I then move to the set some more demonstrations to let. So expect the unexpected, and expect to
deal with it. And so we're going to share the reality of our situation every week, so that
everybody knows what the opportunities are, but also what are the issues that we need to deal with,
and that everybody knows the plan, the product to process the people that work in the other plan.
They know what the status of it is, and also shame they know the areas that need special
attention. So think about what that respect for people means. When you share these things, I mean,
many people, many believers, if they have a red item, first of all, that embarrasses them, they think
they're not doing their job, as opposed to that red item is a gem. I clap when you have a red,
because you're not red, it's your item's red. Thanks for sharing that. Now we all can work
together to help you and us turn the reds yellows to green. And then the attitudes are really,
the attitudes, the beliefs and the values are really important. And what we really look at
are the behaviors, because that's what we can see. And so we have these expected behaviors
that we have zero tolerance for violating them. So a proposal and a plan, being positive, having
a find a way attitude, respecting each other, listening to each other, help each other,
appreciate each other, you can see various sophisticated words, very sophisticated.
But we can see this, and we can help each other in our personal development plans, always be moving
forward and growing in all of these behaviors the way we treat each other. Then emotional resilience,
this is a creative process, it's innovation, we're going to have issues along the way. And so we're
going to trust this process of working together and we're going to trust the process of turning
the reds to yellows green. And the last one that everybody absolutely loves is have fun and enjoy
the journey and each other. And as I mentioned, every day we'd wake up and every business
party we'd get together and we'd say, you know, thank you, how could I help? And then enjoy each
other and also enjoy the journey of creating these phenomenal products and services. Now there's one
corollary to that chain that's really important. And that is zero tolerance for violating this
process of working, the business plan review, the creating value roadmap, including everybody,
all stakeholders on the leadership team, zero tolerance for violating that operating process
and zero tolerance for violating these expected behaviors because we all can see each other,
we're together every week and you can imagine how seriously everybody takes the process and the
behaviors. That's Alan Mulally from episode 151, The Power of Working Together. Let's stay on the
subject of leadership for a minute with our next segment featuring Marshall Goldsmith,
one of the best executive coaches in the world. He's helped countless CEOs and leaders take
charge of their organization and help people become better all around him. Marshall appeared on
episode 142 and in this segment you'll hear him explain the three things that make a great life
and why most people miss them. Hint, there's no money, fame or success involved.
This is a different question than corporate success. If you look at life, my new book,
I talk a lot about that. And I talk about three things. What's it take to have a great life?
All right. And to me, great life is not measured by how much money you have or how much status you
have. What is it take to have a great life? First, I talk about three things I don't discuss in my
book and then three things I do. The ones I don't discuss are number one, it's health. You need to
have good health, but I'm not writing a book on health. Two, you need at least a kind of middle
class level of income and I'm not writing a book about that. And you need to have great
relationships that pick your love. And this book is only partially about that. Assuming you've got
that, you need three things. One, your aspirations. You have to have something. Why am I doing this?
Some reason for existence that's beyond just getting things done. You need a why. Two,
your ambitions. Those are the achievements that you have. And then number three is your day-to-day
activities. That's the life you're living every day. And to the degree these three things are aligned,
you're probably going to have a great life, which not as always as easy as it sounds. And
what happens is if you look at the history of the world, most people in the history of the world
were kind of stuck in the action phase, that day-to-day activity. We didn't have a lot of control
in our history. We kind of much did what we were told. We're born where we're supposed to be,
played our role in life, and we just lived from day to day. Not a bad thing. Just that's the way it was.
Some people are lost in the aspiration phase. They have lofty ideas and dreams. They don't
achieve much, but they think a lot about big things. The people I coach and most of people on this
podcast, if they're not careful, they overweigh ambition and achievement. They're lost in achievement.
And the one thing I really focus on in my new book is this. Never make your value as a human being
conditioned on the results of what you're trying to achieve. Never do that. It's a fool's game.
It is a fool's game for two reasons. One, you don't control the outcomes. There are million
variables impacting anything we're trying to do in life today. You don't control that. And number two,
what happens if you do achieve stuff? How much satisfaction is that giving in life anyway? A
week, a month, a year, not much. As soon as you achieve something, if that's all that matters,
guess what you're going to have to do? Achieve more and more and more and more and you never get there.
So it's really, this is counter to Western philosophy. We have been hammered that achievement
is good. About 98% of all self-help books tell you achieve more, delay gratification. Here's how
you can achieve more. On the assumption that once I achieve more, everything will be okay.
The great Western disease is it's all going to be defined when, followed by when. I get the
money status, BMW, condominium, everything's going to be okay after that. There's no when.
That's all nonsense. It's all going to be a great when. When is an old person waiting to die? That's
when. There's no when there. And one type of book always ends with, and they lived happily ever after.
That type of book is called a fairy tale. That's not the real world. That's not, that's a fairy tale.
In life, we're constantly reinventing ourselves. And the first thing I talk about is never place
your value as a human being on the results of what you're trying to achieve. I mentioned Albert
Burla who endorsed the book from Pfizer. I called Albert, how'd you do last year? Pretty good. You
know, came up with a vaccine, saved a billion or so lives. That's pretty good. And stocks and all-time
high and CEO of the year and book and all on and on. That's pretty good year. So what's your
problem in life? He said, I have a huge problem next year. Next year. If his value as a human
being is he has to do better than last year, pack it in. He will never do better than last year.
What happens to the Super Bowl champions? Disaster. Michael Phelps won 25 gold medals
more than anyone in history. What do you think about doing everyone his last medal? Killing
himself. Killing himself. If that's it, you're not going to win. You're not going to win.
So what I talk about in the book is it's great to try to achieve things but don't become fixated
on the outcomes. One of the most brilliant people I've ever met is called, his name's Safi Bacal.
Safi is a small business guy, started up 10 or 12 companies, made tens of millions of dollars.
He has a PhD in physics from Stanford, has an IQ probably equal to mine and yours combined.
Just a brilliant guy wrote a book called Loon Chas, he's consulted the presidents on and on and on.
So Safi is one of the people I spent time with over COVID during Zoom calls every weekend.
And he said he finally realized something. He's a scientist. He said he finally realized that
that he always thought happiness was a dependent variable based upon achievement,
that I will be happy after I achieve. And he said I finally realized happiness and achievement
are independent variables. You can achieve a lot and be happy. You can achieve a lot and be miserable.
You can achieve nothing and be happy. You can achieve nothing and be miserable. They're independent
variables. And when I talked to Safi, I told him how much you have to achieve. We need two
PhDs in Stanford. What, another hundred million bucks? Start up some more companies? Consult a
couple more presidents? What does it matter? On achievement, you're at 99.999 now. You think it's
going to matter? You get to a 99.999? It's not going to matter. You're just going to find something
else to do. And it was a great breakthrough for him because he realized you can be happy without
dependency upon the next achievement. Can we teach people this or does it have to be learned?
Yeah. And the way you do it is you love the process of what you're doing. You do your best.
It's connected to a higher purpose and you achieve what you achieve. You win, you win,
if you lose, you lose. I tell a story, the golfer in the beer can. So it's a golfer going to his
little country club. He's playing for the club championship, right? Last hole. Noisy people
in front of him drinking beer. Very annoying, but he concentrates. He hits a drive, almost perfect.
Somehow the ball goes over into it, into the rough, a terrible lie. What happened? He walks up to the
ball, a beer can. The idiots in front of him left a beer can on the fairway. He is so angry.
What does the golfer need to do? Forget about the drive. Forget about the beer can. Forget about
the idiots. Come up with a strategy, breathe, focus on the process, hit the shot in front of you.
Hit the shot in front of you. That's it. Let all that other stuff go. It's just a distraction.
Don't think about winning the tournament. That's a distraction. Don't think about the results.
Hit the shot. And the other thing is, forgive the other people for being who they are,
and forgive yourself for wishing they were somebody else. Let it go. Don't make yourself miserable,
because people in front of you are idiots.
That's Marshall Goldsmith from Episode 151, The Essentials of Leadership.
Next up, we go to another leadership coach, Diana Chapman, who appeared on Episode 130 to discuss how
we respond to challenges and how to eliminate drama in our lives so we can better become leaders,
partners, and parents. In this segment, Diana discusses the concepts of the 2-Me Leader and
the Buy Me Leader, and introduces us to the idea of the drama triangle, as well as the
difference between reacting and responding. We got this model from Gay and Katie Hendricks,
and I don't know where they got it from, but it's this idea that there is a line, and you're either
in this above-the-line mindset or this below-the-line mindset. And when you're above a line, you're
recognizing life is happening by me, and in particular, my own experience is happening by me.
So my emotional states, my physical states, my mental states are happening by me. The
circumstances out there are not ultimately the cause of my direct experience here. So it recognizes
that I have a lot of creativity here. I am the creator of the experience. Whereas when I'm in
leadership from 2-Me, it's more of those things out there are affecting me. It's happening to me.
So I don't get to have ultimate creative here. I'm now a victim to some of the circumstances
around me. And so therefore, from that mindset, I might say, Shane, you hurt my feelings.
You are the cause of my hurt feelings, which I hear a lot in the workplace. Or instead of,
hey, Shane, I want to let you know I hurt my own feelings. When you said these words,
I took them in and I hurt myself with them. It was happening by me. It didn't happen to me.
But most of us grew up like, Diana, go apologize to your sister. You hurt her feelings. And so we
got trained. We are responsible for each other. And now that doesn't mean, again, that I don't
make amends for, hey, I do want to acknowledge that I did this thing and likely that didn't
feel, likely didn't land very well over there. And so I can still take responsibility for my
impact in the world. But ultimately, everybody gets to have their 100% responsibility in their
own well-being when we're in this by me leadership model.
We're responsible for our own feelings. Something that you say to somebody else may
impact them in a way that you didn't intend. But you're not causing them any sort of injury.
Is that what I hear you saying? Yeah. What I'm saying is, if I say to you,
God, Shane, I think you'd have an orange mohawk on your head. I don't know why you're not wearing
an orange mohawk. You would look way better. Likely, that's not really going to impact you
because there's no belief in your own head that things you're wearing are going to impact you.
Your own head that thinks you ought to have an orange mohawk. But if I said something like,
you could be a more effective father. And I think maybe you should, if I said something,
I'm something that you believed into, you might hurt yourself with it because there's a little
velcro. And so some part of you is believing or agreeing with what I'm saying. And then you use
that to upset yourself. So the idea here is I get ultimate decision rights on whether I'm
going to upset myself or not. And you might create conditions that make it a little more
challenging. So if somebody starts yelling at me, I might need to get a little more present to not
upset myself. And that's where tools like meditation and other skills help people be able to build that
awareness so they can stay present in those scenes. I think that's sort of like a good segue into the
drama triangle and the role of being a victim and how we see ourselves. Can you talk to me a
little bit about the drama triangle, how you came across it, what it is, and how it limits us?
Okay, I just want you to know I'm like a huge fan of the drama triangle. It's the tool I use
every single day with myself and with my clients. So I learned this from Gay and Kathleen Hendricks
and it was originally created by a guy named Steven Cartman, a psychologist. And basically,
the theory is that we all have learned to do relationship, most in this role of victimhood,
and that there are three unique flavors of victimhood. And so the first one is the pure victim. And,
you know, Shane, it's so hard and the hours and my emails and oh my gosh, and the kids and COVID and
now the masks and oh my gosh, you know, there's just all this I'm at the effect of. And so victim
has this sense of disempowerment. It's got this it's taking less than 100% responsibility. It
often has a little bit of a whine to it. So then there's another role in the drama triangle and
that's the villain and the villain's job is to blame. Whose fault is it? So a lot of us have an
inner critic that blames ourselves. So gosh, I should have more health. I should be a more
effective partner or parent. I should be more successful or I shouldn't be, you know, blah,
blah, blah. Or you, Shane, it's because of you that we're not having a good time and I was fine
until you showed up. So you should or shouldn't be a certain way or them. I mean, we all know who
they are who are screwed up for the rest of us. And so this villain is constantly looking for
who's to blame. And then finally is the role of the hero. And the hero's job is to seek temporary
relief. And that really is the keyword is temporary. So I'm at the end of the day, I'm so burned out.
Where's the Netflix? Where's my Pinot Noir? Where's even going for a run or something that gives me
a little relief? And it works day after day, it works. But I never go address the core issue of,
like, wait a minute, what's going on that I'm living my life such that I come home at the end
of the day so burned out? You know, how am I, how is that happening? Can I address that so I don't
have to keep temporarily fixing it over and over again? We see this in friendships and in organizations
where people listen to each other's gossip. That's a great way actually to hear. Let me give you
some temporary relief by letting you vent. So I'm going to hear of you by listening. I'm going to
call it being a good friend. But we don't really solve your issue. We just make, you know, you
hang up and you go, oh, I feel better. That was great. Thanks a lot. But now you've got to go back
and we got to do it all over again. That's a way we can hero each other. Or we can hero them. Let's
put a philanthropy together and throw a bunch of money at a population and not really ask them to
take their 100% responsibility so that we'll take more. And then next year they come back and they
go, you know, we got all the same issues. Can you toss some more money at us? So heroine is the most
challenging, I think, in the drama triangle because the culture can really applaud heroes. And so our
identities go, hey, look, you know, people think I'm good for doing these things. It takes a lot of
awareness because in order to hero, you need victims. And then that means you are requiring
people to be disempowered so you can hero. And that's not such a, you know, that's how we're just
going to create more battles amongst us. Why is it called the drama triangle? My sense is because
in those three roles, what you get is drama. You know, you get recycling patterns where people
are reactive. And so that's a definition for drama is, you know, repeating patterns of reactivity.
I think that word reactive is really important because when we react, what we're not doing
often is reasoning. Right. We're not reasoning. We're not responding. We're in this kind of
compulsive, I got it, I have to. And so and a lot of it, again, I think is because we get to avoid
the discomfort that comes if we actually pause and become more aware and get and get present to
what's happening and to be honest about what's happening with each other. It's like, oh, I don't
want to do that. So let me just temporarily relieve everything over and over again. And what's interesting
to me also about each sort of point in this triangle is that from that perspective, we're just
always right, whether we're the victim, we're the villain, we're the hero, like the story that's going
on in our head is that we're, we're right. Yes. And exactly, we can create these biases that
actually can, we can avoid all the evidence to the contrary of our righteous perspectives. And the more
I'm in my own deep practice, I get that ego and identities need to feel right in order to secure
themselves. And if I were to let go of being right from that righteous point of view, which is like
a right that defends itself, what's underneath that is a lot more vulnerability, a lot more
of I don't know, a lot more fear. And if you're not comfortable with that, then the identity is
going to secure itself all back up again. And you're going to get back into I'm right that this is
the right way, and that's the wrong way. And I'm right to be more like this and not like this.
And everybody just we all get secured up again in these defense mechanisms to protect this deep,
deep vulnerability that comes under what if I don't know, what if people don't like to sit in,
I don't know. And they definitely don't like the fear of vulnerability, like even just opening
yourself up to somebody else and, you know, telling them you care about them or whatever it is,
because you're worried about this rejection, you're worried about all these things. Yeah,
that that threat to our approval, because gosh, we all want to be approved of it's so important.
And we want to, we all want to feel secure, you know, that I'm going to be part of something.
And I want it, we all want to have that control. But that all has to learn to be sourced inside
of ourselves. Because if I can't source all the approval I've ever wanted, I'm going to then be
out in the world trying to control my approval. And that's going to cause a decent amount of
suffering for me, and maybe for others too.
That's Diana Chapman from Episode 130, Trusting Your Instincts. Again, you can check out the
show notes for a link to that episode. Staying on the topic of reacting and responding, I was
thrilled to have leading neuroscientist in Stanford University School of Medicine Professor Dr. Andrew
Huberman on the show this year, in what turned out to be the most downloaded episode of 2022.
In this segment, you'll hear him discuss the importance of impulse control,
strategies to change her neural circuitry, and the idea of go versus no go functions.
I'm fascinated by this. You know, most of the disorder and dysfunction in the world
is caused by lack of impulse control. Right? I mean, just think about all the people that
tweet something stupid, and then lose their jobs. Or, you know, or we hear these cases like, wow,
like the person was on a zoom and they did something inappropriate, not by actually,
that's how they really have a heart. People have a lot of time suppressing their behavior,
and they lose things that they've invested tremendous amounts of resources in. Some of this
is relates to biological drives that primitive drives, you hear about people who have made
fortunes or have wonderful families, and then they go and have a one off affair with somebody,
and they lose a lot, right? They lose relationships, they lose reputation, just think, wow. So,
do we conclude that the forces of the hypothalamus that drive us towards certain types of behavior
are more powerful? Maybe, although maybe it's, we should look at it from the other side and just
say, well, maybe they were just actually far weaker in terms of impulse control across the board.
And maybe that's what made them effective because they were very action oriented. I have someone
in my life, I won't mention who they are, who likes to say about themselves, they're all tactics,
no strategy, and they're an extremely effective person. They can make more happen in 45 minutes
than anyone else I know, but they have no long term strategy. It's really, and it's gotten them into
some serious hot water. But in any case, so there's an area of our neural circuitry called the basal
ganglia. The basal ganglia are vitally important for controlling and integrating thought and action.
And they have two main circuits that are both regulated by dopamine, but they use different
receptors for dopamine to have different effects, in fact, opposite effects. Some of the circuitry in
this basal ganglia pathways are involved in what we call go functions, like pick up this thing or
lean into the work, it's go it's action oriented, and that includes thought. And then the other one
is no go. And there's a, it actually involves certain neurotransmitters, including dopamine to
suppress behavior. So what we learned as kids is actually a lot of no go type behavior, it's sit
still, don't interrupt. Okay, it's not just clear your plate from the table. It's not just be kind,
say thank you, those are go type behaviors, it's sit there, it's the two marshmallow task. And
beautiful work has a two marshmallow task, of course, being the study done at Stanford many
years ago and repeated many times, seems like I'm citing only Stanford studies, I realized there
are other universities, but a lot of great work was done there, where they give the kids an option to
have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows, if they wait, those videos are very cute and it's
fun to watch that the kids will sit there, they use all sorts of distractions, strategies, one of
the kids like starts getting close to the marshmallows, some can turn away, others sniff them.
And they've tracked these kids over time. And indeed, there are some data to support the fact
that kids that were able to defer gratification do better in life. It's not, the studies are not as
robust as we once thought, but adults have a lot of problem with the late gratification.
They're just not very good at it. And so one thing that I've done over the years to try and
reinforce these circuits in myself based on my understanding of how they work is every day I
try and have somewhere between 20 and 30 no goes and the no goes can be trivial, like I'm ready to
pick up my phone. No, and I force myself to not pick it up. And all I'm doing is trying to reinforce
that circuit because the thing to understand about neural circuitry is that it's generic, it doesn't,
it's not designed so that you have a strong no go response just to picking up your phone,
it actually carries over to multiple other things. And this is also true of the go circuitry. Maybe
this is the problem we're in, we heard years ago. And I think it's still a wonderful thing from was
Admiral Craven, you know, you get up to make your bed in the morning. Why? Well, I have a friend from
the SEAL teams, he's like, well, the, you know, the McCraven narrative was you do it so that at the
end of the day, even if you have a miserable day, your bed is made. I heard that I was like, well,
I like the idea. But frankly, seeing my bedmate at the end of the day doesn't do that much for me.
I actually think it's a much more powerful underlying mechanism and no disrespect to him,
great admiration for Craven, I love his work and what he's doing. But, but I think that at any
moment we can be back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass. That's the way I try and
visualize the waking portions of my life. Sleep, of course, allows you to toggle between these
states more easily. So get that sleep. But we're, you know, at any moment, we'll come like feeling
defeated, we're flat footed or forward center of mass, a forward center of mass takes energy, but
it also has its own momentum. So I think getting up and doing something without involving rumination
or consideration or thought just getting into action sets your whole nervous system into a mode of go.
And I think we then we drink caffeine, it's a go stimulus. Then we move towards the things that
are important to us. We're emailing, we're always doing go, go, go, go, go, even if you're scrolling
on your phone, it's go, scrolling Instagram or something. It's a go type function. We rarely
rehearse our no go functions. And no go functions are simply about suppressing behavior. So if you
have a meditative practice, there's a little bit of that, where you think, I don't want to do it,
but I'm gonna force myself to sit still, even though I want to get up, that's a no go. But
think about it, if you get better at meditating, you actually have less of an opportunity to get
into this no go mode, right, to trigger this circuitry. So what I try and do is introduce
20 or so no goes throughout the day that I deliberately impose on myself as I'm about to
get into reflexive action. And it could be delay a bite of food for a couple of minutes. I realize
it sounds almost like an eating disorder thing, but that's for people with eating disorders,
probably want to stay away from that one. But there are all sorts of ways that we can do this.
We find ways that we are short, short circuiting this process. And so I think we need to keep these
no go circuits trained up. I think nowadays there's so much opportunity and so much reward for go
that we don't train the no go pathways. One that I think works well for me is oftentimes if I'm
training in the gym, I'll have a set routine, and then I'll start changing it. I'll notice that I'll
have this impulse to, I'll give a dumb example, but just because I want to make it concrete,
you know, you're doing one exercise and suddenly you'll go to alternate limb. It's like, why did I
do that? I had a plan, right? I should stick to that plan. So the no go there is to not default
to something more spontaneous. It's to force into really enforce reg of it. And I think what happens
is is we become adults, there, there isn't anyone supervising us making us do these things quite as
much. And the phone has allowed for so much context switching and so much opportunity for go, go,
go, go, go that pretty soon you've got hours of your day that are gone that were not structured.
So I'm not talking about becoming neurotically attached to these no goes. What I'm talking about
is is keeping the the blade sharp on both sides, keeping the goes intact, getting up,
making your bed, getting into action, doing things, but also forcing myself to not check the phone,
to not check email, to stay in a groove of focus. And that's actually where there's the greatest
opportunity. I'm a big believer in 90 minute focused workouts. And of course, in that time,
attention drifts, and there's the temptation to get up, go use the bathroom, get up and get a cup
of coffee, get up and do anything but what I'm doing. But I try and just really create tunnel
vision. Even if I'll just sit there, this is miserable. I can't focus on this, but not allow
myself to go do something else. Unless there's a real urgent need. And this is actually the way
I trained myself to study in college. It was a little bit masochistic, but I used to sit down,
set a timer, I wouldn't let myself get up for any reason, for any reason whatsoever. And I think
I've lost some of that over the years. So I'm trying to build up that circuitry again. A good
friend of mine, Pat Dossett from the, you did nine years on the SEAL teams. And he's a big believer
in keeping these circuits tuned up. And he said, we always do certain challenge each year. The other
day he said to me, how about in 2022, we do the hour of pain. And I was like, Oh, no, turns out the
hour of pain is where you sit in a pretty uncomfortable position. And you have to remain
in that position for an hour. It's like, that sounds great. That sounds like a really great
low cost miserable way to build up these no go circuits, cold water, you could do for a little
bit longer, but eventually you're going to get hypothermic, right? He could burn yourself,
exercise, you could damage yourself, but one hour of pain. So I, I got to try this. So I think we're,
we're going to do it.
That's Dr. Andrew Huberman from episode 130, The Science of Small Changes. Check out the show
notes for a link to that complete episode. Next up, let's talk about decision making.
Speed, simplicity and empowerment are Reid Hoffman's three principles for decision making.
And in this next clip from episode 147 of the show, the founder of LinkedIn explains why each is
important for running an effective organization and how you can make decisions faster and better.
So one of the things, and I'll come, come to the, those three principles, but one of the things that
I find is useful as a understanding frame for everyone is that I think all companies are in
the process of becoming technology companies at different speeds because technology is changing
industries. And so there's the obviously, like what is usually referred to as technology companies
are technology companies that are like redefining the borders of software, reinventing new kinds
of technological hardware, et cetera. And then it kind of bleeds back in. But I think even like,
like manufacturing companies are becoming technology companies by sensors and, you know,
robotic lines and all the rest. And, and, and, you know, Hollywood, you know, is a technology
companies through CGI and streaming and, and distrusion. So it's like, it's the general thing.
Now, one of the things about technology is it picks up the clock. The technological clock
is accelerating decade by decade. And so the, the timeframes in which you need to operate and
need to make decision are accelerating. Part of that is like one of the things that when I,
when I kind of go through the entire world, there's basically two places that embody this
fighter pilot terminology called an OODA loop, observe, orient, decide act. It's how fast you
make these decisions through this kind of this framework, both as individuals in a society.
And it's Silicon Valley and China. And I think that's where all technology companies are in
the process of happening. And so then you begin to say whatever your particular
frameworks are, and you know, there's, there's, there's some very good frameworks and one
racy and daisy and so forth for distributing decisioning within the organization. And that's
part of the empowerment side. And then the speed and simplicity parts of its speed,
we've kind of already covered is kind of like one of the things that generally speaking,
making a decision faster is always better. Right. Like unless you have to evaluate the
decision a little bit sometimes that well, an extra X days or whatever, you know,
makes it 10% better is worth it on this decision for some particular reason.
But like, for example, one of the things I learned very early days in PayPal was
when I'm making decisions at startup speed, even confronted with very large decisions,
do you buy the company, you know, this company, do you, do you shut down this division and so
forth, you go, what would my decision right now, if I wasn't able to take any more time
in order to solve this decision? And you go, okay, well, my decision VX, then go, okay,
well, specifically what I learned or who would I talk to them, I change that decision. Because
if you don't actually end up with a good set of answers that you said, well, let's make the
decision now. Right. And then when you, when you think, well, maybe I could talk to so and so
or maybe I could get this information and say, well, what's the cost and time of getting that
information? Is it better to make the decision now? That's obviously all plays into speed.
And then in simplicity, one of the things that I've learned by, you know, kind of working at
these, you know, organizations that are either at scale or getting the scale is simple plans or all
that work simple plans or all that kind of, you know, simple things are the thing that can
can most easily spread without distortion within an organization. And so you want to have a certain
simplicity of, of kind of how you're doing it, even if you are, you know, kind of being
a little bit overly simple, that's the better side to err on for scale application. And anyway,
so that's, that's kind of a way of making it. And one of the things that I think is a general
thing for all every professional and then especially all leaders to really orient on is
how do you make decisions fast and well is one of the central things you're doing when you're
doing, you know, a wide variety of essentially, you know, kind of all maybe all jobs, certainly all
white collar jobs, certainly all white collar leadership jobs.
Can we dive into that a little bit more? Like how would you teach somebody to make decisions
fast and well or faster and sort of better at the same time?
So this couple of things. So one, like for example, one of the things that I value in, in people I
work with and hire is, is, is being explicit learners, which is you try to learn something in
a way that you can explain it to other people as a tool and as a principle. And so, you know, a
little bit of like when I was learning how to make decisions much faster at PayPal, I said,
all right, well, what I will do is I will get into the ritual of confronted with a major decision.
I will see if I can make that decision right now, because what I'm doing is a training my way away
from the discomfort of, oh, God, I haven't thought about everything. What if I'm wrong?
You know, how could I make this big decision so quickly away from that, but not in a way that you
say, well, the decision is made when you do it, but you're thinking about, you know,
concrete, it's about like, well, you know, who else would you talk to? What other information
or data could you get? What other things could bear on this decision? What other kinds of risk
analysis? So that's one ritual that helps you with that. And then, you know, obviously, you should
start by doing the trying it, not immediately going to, I'm going to be making that decision in,
you know, five seconds from when it happens. But then also part of what you begin to do is kind of
learn a set of questions. There's kind of, there's a whole bunch of different stuff around decision
making. So one is like, well, how much of this is a one-way door or a two-way door? Like, if you
make this decision, is it recoverable from? Because if it's catastrophic and expensive, then, okay,
well, maybe we should be a little more, have a higher degree of certainty, a higher degree of
likelihood and evidence in what we're doing. Questions around how much can you experiment
with decision? How much can you try it? Like, is there experimentation that can do it? It's like
the one-way two-way door, but it could be not quite getting through the door, but testing it yet.
Like, you know, is there a set of tools there that you learn to do these things? And then, of course,
you learn a bunch of stuff from decision-making science, which is trying not to have some cost
bias, you know, trying not to, you know, kind of be deluded by, you know, blind spots and so forth.
Like, there's most of decision science stuff kind of shows you how you make easy, like, maybe bad
failures, but you slip in the failures of decision mode when you don't even know it. And so, how do
you bring those kinds of things in? And so, you try to bring all of that in to essentially decision
making. It's like, it's the kind of thing that when you think about, you know, what should be
the advanced courses in high school, you know, because the natural kind of way that academia,
you know, which is kind of, you know, all starts with how do you train professors? What's graduate
school? How do you train people? Graduates? Undergraduate? How do you train people? Undergraduate?
High school? And you go, okay, but that's not the primary arc for most people. And so, like, for
example, when you say, well, should I have calculus two or not, right, as a way of prepping for this
path, the actual, you know, kind of question that you could actually get to that would be a really
good thing to have in all high schools is decision-making, right? Like, how do you think about
making decision-making a good way? Because, you know, obviously, we go through life-making decisions.
Should we date person X or Y or get married to them? Should we stay here? Should we move?
What job should we choose? What college should we choose? What thing should we major in?
And there's a whole set of things that go into that. All of those things go into decision-making
where being thoughtful and learning and iteratively to be better about it is really fundamental. So,
anyway, so that's, you know, that's, uh, I myself am a student of this stuff because of that
purview of how it applies to everything.
That's Reid Hoffman from Episode 147, Better Decisions, Fewer Mistakes. Check out the show
notes for a link. Staying on the subject of decision-making, next we hear from Indian
entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Kanal Shah, who shares the various lenses he uses when deciding
on whether to invest in a company. Shah also offers his thoughts on the nature of insight,
the differences between the American and Asian cultures, and the core human motivations that drive us all.
A lot of founders who pitch to me are usually well-prepared and make a presentation and come to
me and so I tell them that, hey, I don't understand English very well. Can you explain this to me in
Hindi? What does it do? Founders who really get what they're doing can switch language without a
problem because they really get it. And language doesn't change anything for them. Many people
who have just prepared their presentation and not really understand this very clearly,
they struggle with the language change and their pitch goes for a toss.
So hold on, one way to, I just want to add Peevak on this because one way that you can do this
without switching languages is switch level of the conversation. So often people prepare at one level
and it's like, oh, can you go deeper or can you go higher level and keep that in context,
which is sort of like the same idea. And I've seen that people who are really good, you change
language, you change medium, you tell them, I don't want to read your presentation, they'll
still be okay. Some people you tell them, I'm not going to look at your PPT and they'll be like,
how do I explain this to you? The other framework that has worked for me is,
I tell them, I don't understand anything what you're saying. Imagine I'm a user of this product
and I have to tell a friend over dinner to try this. What do I say? Only rule, I cannot use any
jargon because I don't speak to my friends in jargon. So tell me what do I say? And I tell them
to take 10 minutes break before telling me the answer. I would say 90% of founders fail at this
because they can't really distill it to that simple transmissible message
from a friend to friend. If you cannot distill your idea to a transmissible conversation at dinner,
it's not going to spread. And things that don't spread will have a huge
crack because nobody really understands what the hell are you doing? That's one framework that has
worked. The other one is asking them, what is the real motivation people will use it? A lot of times
the real motivation is different than what people say is the real motivation. For example,
buying expensive headphones. They are not really to make you hear better. You want to signal to the
world that you are affluent and you have good status and good taste. Most founders cannot distill
that that is the real reason people will buy it. They'll keep going to the functional utility and
not the emotional benefit of the product. And that's another framework I've seen that good founders
always know functional and the emotional benefit of their product or service.
Market sizing. Most founders cannot imagine how will they start from here and go on to build
a very large thing from here. They get stuck in, this is what I do, but they can't imagine how
will this become a large company ever. They just don't think they don't even think they don't even
they cancel their own idea. And I've seen the opposite type, which is I call it the Swiss knife
problem. They believe that they have to build a Swiss knife when the consumer only one is looking
for a knife because they love building. So a lot of them are usually with engineering background.
They love the builds. They write so much software that consumers are confused when they talk to them
because they don't have a foot in the door strategy that okay, let me sell a knife and then
eventually become a Swiss knife in their life. They start with the idea of Swiss knife and you're
like, hold on. I can't even process what you guys are doing. And Swiss knife becomes cool. Nobody
uses it. Like everybody seems to have a Swiss knife. It never being used. So I think that's
another pattern I've seen. I've never really thought about this from a human framework problem. But
another thing is that why would somebody pay for this? And it's surprising how most people do not
understand that nobody's gonna pay for that. Like, like, will your dad pay for this? Will your mom
pay for this? Will your CFO pay for this? Will your kid pay for this? Like, they are just off on that.
The last one is do they have an insight that is not obvious. But when you see them talk about you,
you're like, uh-huh, that makes sense. You will rarely meet successful people who are not insightful.
I believe the insight is the smallest unit of truth that is actionable. And therefore,
people who operate in the currency of insights tend to be generally more successful,
at least in business. Can you go deeper on that? The smallest unit of insight that's actionable?
Smallest unit of truth that is actionable. Truth. Truth that's actionable. Yeah, go deeper on that
for a second. If you go to ancient Hindu mythology and you study the Sanskrit scripts and Sanskrit
was a very condensed language, right? Because it was invented before paper was invented. So
knowledge was transmitted from human to human through memory. So they had to distill the wisdom
in the smallest unit possible that could be memorized and transmitted from human to human.
And the earliest scriptures were also tight. Like, you'll read Sanskrit yoga line and like,
in one line, they'll condense like really a lot of wisdom in it.
So I think the concept of boiling something to the core units of it, then you cannot divide it
further, becomes a powerful unit that is also the building blocks of what we call as first principles
that can help build businesses. And I think a lot of times,
it's a painful process. Seeking truth is painful.
Shane, you've been doing this for a while, like how many more blogs will it take to get close to
the truth? You will probably not find it. But the joy of seeking truth for the sake of it
is not natural. And therefore, a lot of people do not appreciate it enough. But
insights become this nice building block through which you can create great businesses, unlock
great success, because that is something that is not commonly available. Everybody seems to be
seeing some pattern, but you see something else. For example, I had this view that, oh,
India cares about status so much more than the Western society. Let me do a thought experiment.
I reached out to my friend who is to be a buyer of a top retail chain in India. I asked her to
check, can you check if the gross margin on all products sold for living room
is a lot more than the gross margin on all products sold for the bedroom? And nobody had
ever analyzed data like that in retail ever. Because it's like kitchen and so far and furniture
and all of that. Nobody thought living room and bedroom as two separate concepts. But I said,
can you please make somebody crunch it? And turns out the gross margin was three X more.
The reason is in a society, we care more about showing to others. So all the products which
are showing demonstrating status were put in the living room. Our bedrooms are terrible in India
because nobody comes to them. And therefore, it was not surprising that bed sheets were not
bought expensive in India. And bathroom products did not sell a lot. We don't have a lot of bath
tubs in India, because it's not about me. It's about showing social status to others who come to
my living room. And therefore, you apply that insight now. And I told this insight to a home
renovation company. I told them, don't keep saying home renovation, launch a product line
which is living room renovation. And today, 70, 80% of that revenue for them is living room renovation.
Because that's the insight. And that's the motivation button that you can press in people.
Well, I think in the Western world, it's about treating yourself. It's about you're worth it.
It's about we still have the status thing. Individualism versus collectivism, which is
how Asian societies are. And therefore, you don't deserve things to be special, but you have to
show it. And therefore, weddings are really big and very high gross margin. It's for others.
So let's go back to the, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I want to go into more
detail on, you mentioned some of the core human motivations that transcend culture.
The core human game is to constantly improve our social status so that we improve our mating success
or our success of our progeny. The easiest way to answer this question is that if we could really
create designer babies, would people spend most of their income on that or not? And let's not
go into ethical debate of is designer babies a good thing or not? If it was possible that you
can tweak their IQ, their looks, their health, their chances of terminal diseases to be lower and
all of that, or let me put it this way, let's say I could really invent a pill that can make you
younger or healthier, wouldn't you give me 50% of your net worth? And I think that's where the core
motivations are. Like what would you give half of your net worth for? Those are the core human
motivations and they don't change from society to society, they remain the same. They manifest
differently. For example, the Asian society is unlocked that education is everything, so they're
disproportionately optimized for that, but they don't, they save pennies. Like you said,
like your parents talked about traveling miles for saving cents, maybe they were also the parents
who would be okay to spend more on your education. And if you're told them I'm gonna cost, it's gonna
cost two X more, they would probably suffer and give you that money, but they would not buy an
extra shirt for themselves. Those are the interesting motivations. So in Asian societies, we treat our
kids like assets. So we are making investments on them because a lot of times we expect the kids to
take care of our family. So I don't know if you know about India is the largest market which sends
money back to India. Amongst all markets that does remittance, Indians remit the highest amount of
money back to their family then it comes to Mexico and others. And that's the sign that the kids were
raised as assets. You invested in them in hopes that when you make it back big, you will give it
back to the family and take care of us in our later life. So kids in these societies are treated like
assets versus oh you're on your own now. That is not in our culture because they will tell you that
I invested so much money in hopes that you will take care of me later on. So there's a whole societal
structure or social contract that exists in Asian societies of taking care of parents and
taking care of them even after you don't have any obligation to do that but people do it
till they die and really take care of them. Asians will not even flinch one bit to sometimes even
wipe out 50% or 100% of the network to take care of their parents. It's just hard to imagine concept
for many people in the West. That's Kanol Shah from Episode 141 Core Human Motivations. Check out
the show notes for a link to that complete episode. We spent quite a bit of time in 2022 talking about
health on the Knowledge Project especially how taking care of our mental and physical health
can help us as we get older. In this next segment you'll hear from renowned sleep scientist Matthew
Walker who discussed all the things related to sleep when he came on in February this year
including some things that negatively influence our sleep and unconventional sleep hygiene tips.
I think caffeine, alcohol and nicotine are going to be one category of things that will
probably guarantee a bad night of sleep. No nicotine too. Nicotine too. Nicotine is a stimulant
and it's a very clear disruptor of sleep. We've got some really solid data on that. That's
one thing that's probably not going to be so controversial in saying. I think the other thing
that I would very much suggest is getting your mental health straight. We came onto this when
we spoke about insomnia. If you are in a state of high anxiety or if you're in a state of stress
that is one thing that will just almost guarantee you would have to be very sleep deprived and have
a really high amount of sleep pressure to be able to fall asleep easily and stay asleep soundly
if you have a high degree of stress in your life and stress and anxiety. Those two things will
really guarantee a bad night of sleep. The other probably two things I would note
is making sure that you are sleeping at the right phase of the 24 hour clock phase. This brings us
onto something called chronotype. In other words, are you a morning type? Are you an evening type?
Or are you somewhere in between? You can do a test. It's very easy online. It's called the MEQ
test. It stands for morningness, eveningness, questioner, MEQ. It takes less than probably
like five minutes. If you Google it, it's free versions online. It will give you a score and
it will bucket you into being either a morning type, a morning log, a neutral, or an evening type,
or a night owl. It turns out there's actually in sleep science, we have five categories, extreme
morning type, morning type, a neutral, evening type, and extreme evening type. The reason everyone
has a 24 hour, what we call circadian rhythm, and no matter who you are, your circadian rhythm
is going to be 24 hours. My rhythm is 24 hours, Shane, your rhythm is 24 hours. That's set a
little bit by daylight because if you leave your body to its own devices, it's a little bit laggy.
It runs a little bit longer than 24 hours, it turns out. It's about 24 hours and I think 11
minutes for the average human adult we've calculated it as. But things like daylight and food and
timing and those different, will give, they act as a little set of fingers on a wristwatch. That's
kind of a little bit, you know, it's not quartz like, and it just pops the dial out and it resets
you to 24 hours. That's no different from one person to the next. We all have an unwavering
24 hour rhythm. What is different, however, across individuals is where the peak and the trough
of that circadian rhythm resides on the 24 hour clock face. That's the difference between your
circadian rhythm and your chronotype. So let me ask you the question, Shane, what time would you
sort of say that you would normally ideally like, not the time that you have to go to bed or have
to wake up, but ideally what time would you naturally like to go to bed and naturally wake up?
I try to go to bed between 10 and 10 30 every night and then I wake up usually between,
I don't know, 430 and probably six. Okay. And do you wake up at the afternoon?
I haven't used an alarm clock for since I had kids. Well, you're really quite a morning type
on that basis. Now, I'm in, I'm a neutral, I'm desperately vanilla, just like most of the things
of my sort of my nature in life. But so I'm usually a sort of 11 11 30 to sort of seven,
seven 30. And so what's nice is that you can see the two of us have slightly different chronotypes.
My natural urge to go to sleep is going to be an hour, an hour and a half later than yours. And my
natural urge to wake up is going to be an hour and a half to two hours later than yours. And I
make this point to come back to your question about what guarantees a bad night of sleep.
You can guarantee a bad night of sleep if you are mismatched in terms of your chronotype with your
bedtime. So some people will say to me, look, I get into bed and I just can't fall asleep. I'm
lying awake and it's, it's an hour, maybe even two hours before I drift off. And then I'll ask
them the question, you know, let's do a chronotype test. And, and again, this is not me being a
clinician. I'm just trying to sort of offer some help to them. And it turns out that they're an
evening type that naturally they would ideally like to be going to sleep around about 11 30
midnight and waking up 7 38am. But they're trying to get in bed because they have to be awake at
six a.m. in the morning for whatever they've got to do, get to work, or, you know, get to the gym,
or children, they're getting into bed at 10am. That's a biological mismatch of an hour and a
half to two hours. And so they think that they're suffering from sleep onset insomnia. When they
may not have sleep onset insomnia, instead, what they have is a mismatch between the innate
chronotype and the standard sleep bedtime schedule. And so that's another thing just to keep in mind
in terms of what can cause you problems with your sleep. The final thing I would say that can
guarantee a consistent pattern of bad sleep is spending too much time in bed. It's sound again
paradoxical, but it comes back to our bedtime restriction therapy. Don't spend if you're
struggling with sleep, and you're spending a lot of time in bed awake. That's a bad thing. And if
you're doing something even worse, which is now I'm lying, I'm going to bed and I'm staying in bed
for nine hours a night to try to compensate for the fact that I'm only really sleeping five hours
a night. I understand why you would naturally think that that's the solution. But in fact,
it's the very worst thing that you can do. So try to be mindful and not spend too much time in bed.
You know, a lot of the common sleeping tips are sort of out there, but there's got to be some
unconventional tips out there that help you optimize your sleep. There are, and I think, you
know, if there are people sort of trying to get the typical what we call the sleep hygiene tips,
they're out there and you can hear idiots like me espousing them on different YouTube places.
And those would be, you know, regularity, temperature, light, not staying in bed awake,
and then, you know, minding your alcohol and caffeine. I think unconventional tips, however,
maybe there's probably four, three or four or five of those. The first thing I would say, and this
sounds going to be going to sound unconventional, if you've had a bad night of sleep, here is my
following best advice. Do nothing. And what I mean by that is after a bad night of sleep, firstly,
don't try to sleep it off by waking up any later than is natural. Don't sort of say,
I'm going to then sleep in for an extra hour. The second thing is don't go to bed any earlier
than you would do. The third thing is do not nap during the day to compensate. And fourth,
don't start drinking more caffeine to try to get you out of that bad night of sleep. So let me
rewind the tape and go through those because me just barking rules at people isn't useful. I don't
think people respond to rules. People respond to reasons and not rules. So I'll try to explain
the reasons. Firstly, don't wake up any later. Don't try to sleep it off after a bad night. The
reason is because if you sleep in later into that following morning, when it comes time for you to
go to bed at your normal time and you get into bed, that your typical kind of Shane, you know,
1030 at night, you're not going to be as sleepy as you naturally would be. Why? Because you woke
up that much later. So you've been awake for less time. So you've built up less sleepiness. And so
you're almost guaranteeing a bad night of sleep the next night because you're going to be tossing
and turning to fall asleep. The second thing is don't go to bed any earlier for the same reason.
Don't say, well, I had a bad night of sleep last night. I'm going to try and make good. I'm going
to try and get into bed at 9 p.m. tonight rather than 1030. Well, you're a, you know, you're a
morning type, but you're not an extreme morning type. You're naturally going to be tired, even
if you've had a bad night of sleep at 10 to 1030 p.m. And by getting into bed at 9 p.m.,
with all goodwill and intention, you're setting yourself up for then just twiddling your thumbs,
lying wide awake for the first hour because you're mismatched with your current type. Naps
are a double-edged sword, but in this circumstance, they can be a bad thing. Because if you nap
during the day after a bad night of sleep, again, I understand why, but naps in the day
are a little bit like snacking before your main meal at night. They just take the edge
off your sleep appetite, off your sleep hunger, and you're not going to be as hungry for sleep
when it comes time for it at night. So try not to nap during the day. And then the caffeine,
the final one of those four things is sort of pretty obvious. It's just going to jack you up
and you're going to have too much caffeine in your system. The second thing is having a winddown
routine, which comes back to this idea of sleep being like a light switch and it's not like that.
I think as, since you are a father, you will probably know this with raising your children.
You kind of have a bedtime routine. And it's different for different kids, but when you've
figured out what works, you stick to it. You know, what you're doing is creating a winddown
routine. Why? Because kids can't just go from, you know, 60 down to zero within a short breaking
distance, which is you can't just go from lights on of wakefulness to lights off of sleep within
a minute or two. You build in a winddown routine. But somewhere between childhood and adulthood,
we abandon the notion that we need a winddown. Why don't adults need a winddown routine? Now,
it doesn't have to be, you know, your significant other coming in and reading you a bedtime story,
even though that's actually quite nice. And in fact, if you look at some of the meditation
companies like Calm, for example, and Headspace, they have bedtime stories read by some wonderful
characters like Stephen Fry. Why were they so popular? Why did they save those companies? It
certainly saved Calm and it gave them a, you know, I think almost a billion dollar valuation.
What saved them was sleep stories. And the reason is because we all need a winddown routine. And
being read to is part of a winddown that works for many people. Not only does it work, I mean,
it's probably how most of us grew up. Correct. That's how we experience going to bed. Yeah.
And it doesn't have to be reading, by the way, find something that works for you if it's,
you know, having a bath or a shower before bed. If it's meditation, I do usually try to meditate for
10 minutes before I get into bed. If it's light stretching, something that just helps you disconnect
and wind down is a really good piece of advice. I'm doing a deep dive on naps at some point. So
I've, I've idiotically released my own podcast with a wonderfully creative title. It's called
The Matt Walker podcast. And it's very different to your form of podcast, your far more elegant and
erudite, and you can interview people and explore. My podcast is rather inane in the sense that it's
a very, it's a short form podcast. It's usually somewhere between five to 10 minutes in length.
And it's a short form monologue from yours truly. And it's just a, you know, a little slice of sleep
goodness to kind of accompany your waking day. And there I'm going to take a deep dive into
explaining all of the science behind naps. But again, I would say that if you are struggling with
sleep at night, then the unconventional tip is not to nap during the day. Or if you're going to
nap during the day, make sure that you nap before one PM and keep those naps brief, maybe just 10
minutes or 15 minutes in duration and no more. I think the final two pieces of advice unconventional
would be don't count sheep. This it's a myth. And this that myth was exploded by another wonderful
sleep scientist here in my department, Dr. Allison Holler. And I'm going to take a quick
look at Dr. Allison Harvey and she did a great study. What she found was that not only did counting
sheep not make you fall asleep any faster, it actually made people take longer to fall asleep.
What she did find that was exceptional, that worked to help people fall asleep was taking
themselves on a mental journey. So think about a walk that you would take a hike that you like
to do or a walk on the beach or a bike ride. And just try and move through that with with your mind
and just take yourself on that mental journey. And it's all about once again, taking your mind
off itself. Because in this modern era, we are constantly on reception and rarely do we do reflection.
And reflection is so critical. And it's so powerful. And you've spoken a lot about the power of
reflection. However, I would say that the last time you want to start doing reflection is when
your head hits the pillow at night. Because then it's just you start to ruminate, you catastrophize
because there's something weird that happens to our thoughts in the darkness of night. Our thoughts
are not our own at night. They are darker, just like the absence of light around us. They the
bad things feel twice as bad. The frightening things feel twice as frightening. The anxious
things twice as anxious. It's just not a good time to be ruminating. And taking yourself on this
mental journey helps you not ruminate and catastrophize and blow things all out of proportion.
My one kryptonite in life that my one vice is I love racing motor cars. This is why our mutual
friend Peter and I were good friends for many reasons. But one is that we race cars together.
So I'll just put myself on one of my favorite tracks and I'll try and go around the track
and remember what gear I should be in what when I should be breaking my braking distance left foot
right foot bring. And you know, I can remember I'm and I'm halfway around the course and that's it.
I'm out like a light I'm done. So that's the second thing don't count sheep but take yourself on a
mental journey. The final silly tip and it sounds silly but it is actually effective.
If you're struggling with sleep, remove all clock faces from your bedroom. If you're waking up in
the middle of the night and you're staring at the clock and you look and you see it's 321 in the
morning. And then you toss and you turn then you look at the clock and now it's 438 in the morning.
So that's the second thing. Knowing what time of night it is is not your friend. It's not going to
change anything. It's only going to make matters worse. So if you need an alarm clock, that's fine
but make sure that you can't see clock faces in your bedroom. That's only going to to hurt and harm
you out during your night of bed sleep. That's Matthew Walker from episode 131, The Science of
Sleep. Next we turn to biologist and genetics expert David Sinclair, a man who has become a leading
expert on the aging process and who is out to prove he can live past 100 years old. In this
segment, David gives an overview of how the aging process occurs in the body and how controlled
fasting can help slow down that process. There's a growing consensus that what happens is we lose
information that we got in the womb. Now part of it was from genetics. We're carrying one copy
in every cell of our mother and father's chromosomes but we're also in fact largely
determined by what's called not the genome which is the DNA but the epigenome and the epigenome
are the control systems that tell the cell which genes to turn on and off and there's 20 something
thousand genes but they only use a few thousand to to specify how to be a nerve cell versus a
skin cell and this all gets laid down as we're embryos and eventually born and this epigenomic
information that tells cells how to behave we think breaks down over time and that results in
diseases tissue dysfunction so you know you start to look older you can't clear toxins you can't
think well your nerve cells don't work well you become less able to see at night eventually you
get diseases that kill you and that's really the major cause of suffering on this planet and what
we've done as a medical community is to look at the end stage of this process and we call these
things diseases and try to treat them with drugs and you know basically put in band-aids on the
problem forgetting what got us to that point in the first place which is aging itself which I
have proposed and is increasingly thought to be the case that it's disruption of that epigenetic
control system that tells the cells which genes turn on and off and that's sort of the information
loss and I think one of the analogies you've used before is like a DVD player and a DVD getting
scratched for those of us over 40 I guess yeah I didn't realize you're over 40 you look young
yourself so whatever you're doing keep doing that yeah so the DVD or the CD analogy works well to
older with older people but anyone who doesn't remember these were plastic discs with foil that
had little pits that represented zeros and ones and this is digital information and that digital
information in the cell is DNA and it's not zeros and ones it's ATCG chemicals and they're strung
out about six feet long of DNA in every cell and that's about the same amount of information that
you can fit on a DVD okay so our cells are a DVD but what aging is I've proposed is that it's like
scratches that disrupt the ability of the machine the laser beam to read the right songs at the right
time or the movie and you get a horrible cacophony of music and what we've discovered is that there
are ways to well we discovered one of the main causes of scratches that's broken chromosomes
which happens all the time in our bodies extreme cell damage also does that if we crush nodes
but we've also figured out and recently published that there's a way we think to polish those
scratches so that we can play that beautiful music of youth again let's talk a little bit about
sort of like reducing our biological age and I think we're all interested to some extent
some people more than others and living a long time but we all want that time to be full of vitality
and productivity and not just living longer for the sake of of living longer and I think that's
where the biological age versus your chronological age sort of becomes important one of the ways that
I've heard you talk about before is fasting and it's super interesting because fasting isn't new
I mean it used to be a necessity for us but now we're starting to learn about why it's helpful
can you talk a little bit about the benefits of fasting and how it relates to slowing down or
even reversing aging yeah well these systems that tell cells how to read the genes at the right time
this epigenome there are gene there are factors that control that and so a little very little bit
of biology here DNA isn't just floating around the cell it's actually looped into big loops that
tell genes to be switched on and genes that should be switched off are bundled up tightly
and we call this stuff chromatin and those those loops of genes that are on and bundles of genes
that are off are controlled in part by a set of genes called the sirtuins and those genes make
proteins that cause these loops and bundles particularly they create these bundles to keep
genes switched off because you don't want a liver liver gene or a skin gene coming on in the brain
but that's what happens with aging we find and so one way to make sure this process goes slower
is to turn on these sirtuins epigenetic regulators to use a more technical term
and there are seven of these epigenetic regulators the the things that prevent the scratchers
and we can turn them on with gene therapy in mice we do this and if you do it in the brain
of a mouse they'll live longer do it in the body they can live longer but we can't genetically
modify ourselves so what we can we've also found is that these genes get turned on by adversity
adversity or at least perceived adversity if our body thinks we're going to run out of food or
we need to run away from a saber-toothed tiger or we're chasing a mastodon then our body says oh
you know times might be tough don't put all our energy and resources into growing bigger muscles
in fact put that some of that energy into surviving hunkering down and defending the body against
toxins against damage and that we know leads to longer life it slows down this clock of epigenetic
changes which we can measure and we also know that the ways to mimic adversity include skipping meals
eating less protein in general being hot and cold and then the big one is eating the right types of
food that we all know a healthy Mediterranean type diet and there are actually chemicals within those
foods of a Mediterranean diet in olive oil and red wine that we found in my lab to activate these
sirtuins and probably also slow down the clock but they certainly improve health and then the last
thing chain that I think is really important is what I'm working on is not about keeping people
older at the end of life and alive for longer it's the opposite we're keeping animals and
increasingly we're showing with people that you can keep them younger for longer so that when you're
80 you can actually be 60 is there there's so many different directions I want to go on here but
is there a point where fasting becomes I mean there is a point unhelpful right like if you don't eat
you will die eventually is it sort of like you skip one meal is good do you skip two meals is great
you skip six and you're back to good again or is there sort of like some sort of limit that we
should think about in terms of maximizing the benefit if we are going to pass yeah well there's
some real key points to here one is we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation that would
not be beneficial and in fact when you know 10 000 years ago or more people were not living a long
time from fasting because they were not getting enough nutrition but in our world now we can
have any not energy drinks but drinks that contain enough nutrients we can make sure that we're not
deficient we can measure things with blood tests and we can make sure that we're not deficient but
the optimal the second point is that the optimum is different for everybody in part because we have
different tolerances for not eating but also because we have different microbiomes with
different genders we just are genetically different and we know from studies in mice that you can take
regular lab mice and mix up their like breed them in a way that you get a little bit of diversity
in these lab mice and give them caloric restrictions so you don't feed them more than I think it was
40 percent what they would normally eat and some mice breeds strains we call them lived a lot longer
or some of them died earlier so you then but practically what should you do well it seems to be
a rule that if you fast at least 14 hours you'll have a lot of health benefits better metabolic
stability lower blood sugar levels better cholesterol these kind of things kick in
um a popular one is the um what 16 8 go for 16 hours so you skip one meal a day and have a late
lunch or an early lunch depending on which one you're skipping and that uses the period of sleep
as a fasting state and then what I do is I skip breakfast and often I skip lunch skip lunch as
well and so I'm getting actually more like 20 hours of fasting on a good day I will say that
today I had a little bit of avocado for breakfast because I had to get up really early so I'm not
perfect and I don't think anyone should strive to be perfect but you do what you can now there are
other people that do uh a week long fast now now that's the other extreme I wouldn't go further than
a week actually given what I know but once you've gone more than three days there's a special type
of recycling of proteins it's very beneficial called autophagy or autophagy and that takes
about three days now I've never done that myself I'm pretty wimpy when it comes to uh to these
kind of things I'm a hedonist by nature and very lazy but I think that if you can go three days
or four days that would be occasionally not it not of course not every week but you could do that
every few weeks and if you do a week long fast um you want to do that maybe four times a year
and those are the the rough guidelines if we fast for two meals and then on the third meal
we eat as many calories as we would have eaten during the rest of the day normally are we still
getting benefits of fasting yes yes yes yes we are that's the great news that so take me for
example I have big dinners um because I'm making up for the lack of food during the day and so I'm
not losing weight once you've hit a set point and you've got your your body weight and during COVID I
dropped from 150 pounds to 132 I'm now steady at that 132 feeling great eating tons of food that I
always wanted but it's packed into an hour or two of feeding now how do we know that works well we
know from blood tests in humans that it it looks like it's beneficial you get the kind of changes
that are seen in younger people things like I mentioned blood glucose and then there's hormone
levels and stress levels which I've been measuring in myself for a decade so I can tell you for me
it works but the the other thing that's important is that from animal studies that have been done
over the last 100 years in mice and rats and dogs it's very clear that it's not just what you eat
it's when you eat and there's a very famous study that was done by a colleague of mine Rafael de
Cabo at the NIH in Bethesda and he made three different types of diets for mice one that had a
lot of protein the other had carbs the other had fat and he thought he would find the
optimal diet for the mice turns out it didn't make any difference what mattered was when he gave the
food and if he gave it to them just within this short hour long window every day they lived dramatically
longer 30% longer that's David Sinclair from episode 136 reversing the aging process again
check out the show notes for a link to that episode I want to end this best of 2022 episode with some
final thoughts from Sarah Jones Simmer who appeared on episode 135 the foundation of trust Simmer is
the CEO of the weight care company found but she previously served in various executive roles with
Bumble the online dating company as you'll hear in the last segment of this episode it was during
that time while Bumble was proceeding through an IPO process that Simmer was forced to endure a
life-changing health diagnosis that ultimately taught her of the gratitude and what really
matters in life so in May of 2020 I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer I didn't have a
family history I had no reason to suspect that I would have it and so it was very blind siding
and this was shortly after Bumble had been acquired by Blackstone I was loving and thriving working
with the private equity team restructuring the business working through the 100-day plan
it was terrifying and Whitney was one of the first people that I told and she was an unbelievable
support through that process but but one of the things I felt like I realized pretty quickly is
that I didn't have the same degree of emotional bandwidth as I might have before I again specifically
remember being getting a biopsy and like awaiting the results and then going through my inbox on my
phone and like I couldn't even process some of the things that were coming up and like this person's
title and like when were these performance reviews and one like I just didn't have the brain space
I needed to focus my emotional bandwidth on myself my family and so I had a conversation with Whithin
and we constructed this narrower deeper role as chief strategy officer that would enable me to go
from a team of like 150 to 45 and it would take on transformative strategic projects across the
business and the first one would be the IPO which may sound kind of intuitive to want to take on
something like that during a cancer journey but I mean first of all I felt like I had to work I did
not want to be a full-time patient I love work I get so much joy from it if that was also taken
away from me in addition to what surgery was going to take away what chemo is going to take away
I did not want to lose my ability to lean in intellectually and build something that we were
continue to be so proud of at Bumble so I knew I wanted to do that and and strangely was enough
planning in the IPO process like we could make it work I made it work around chemo sessions and
surgeries and I was so lucky to have this incredible team mostly led by women across city
golden sacks blackstone even our internal team that was supportive of things like you know putting
my major surgeries on the calendar and working deadlines around that and so it was really
empowering to not be relegated to patient status and to be able to lean into that process and then
by the way when I did get to a point where because radiation was daily and I just needed more time
I felt truly empowered to to take a leave and I know that not everyone gets to be in that situation
and I certainly do wish that level of agency for more folks facing something like this but I think
the chance to really lean into something that meant so much to me professionally while I was
struggling with something in terms of illness it just felt really powerful I think I needed that
and there's even another layer to this which is that during this process you you got a brain
aneurysm yes I I never tell this part of the story because I feel like it sounds like so crazy
but in a strange way cancer may have saved my life so I as a result of how advanced the cancer
wasn't they found that they did a bunch of additional scans to check my bones lungs liver the places that
this typically metastasizes and the kind of cancer I have often metastasizes to the brain
so they checked my brain and came back and said well we've got good news and bad news goodness
is there's there's no tumor the bad news is you have an unruptured aneurysm that's effectively a
ticking time bomb and on the one hand it's actually great that we now know about that the
likelihood that that would have ruptured it's fairly high right and so I've subsequently had it stented
but part of the reason that I've had nine surgeries on a cancer journey is that
due to them we're related to my brain and making sure that we could address the aneurysm
that's a crazy story I'm so glad you you're okay through all this I'm curious like I have to like
I have a lot of empathy for for how that would have felt to get this news and go through that
process and work with these people and then my mind just jumps to like how did it change you
how did it change you professionally how did it change you personally what do you do differently
now as a result of this how do you live life differently yeah I think the quick answer to
your first question is like I do feel like I got an up close and personal view of the healthcare
system the the good bad and otherwise but I'm incredibly grateful to the team of providers
that I had the privilege of working with here in Austin at FD Anderson at you know UT Neurosciences
and so just unbelievably grateful for that it does change you I hate that it takes something
like this to give us that level of perspective but that genuinely is the silver lining for me
I just think there's a level of gratitude that I have for like the the simple things and an
understanding and clarity of purpose you know on the one hand it's freeing because like my daughter
and I talk a little bit about big deals and little deals you know we'll have like little deals like
being late for school right which like before might have given me so much anxiety and and now I'm
like well the big deal was surviving a year and a half of cancer treatment it a lot of these other
things it helps us to put them into perspective but I think for me it was super clarifying
professionally as well as I said before I love work I really do think part of what brings me joy
and energy in my existence is is the outpouring of things that I can build into the teams that I get
to be a part of and the amazing products that we make that change the world and I I think some
people will go through a health experience like this and for them like that may change the way
they think about work and they may deep prioritize it for me it made me be crystal clear about what
it was in work that I truly cherished and enjoyed and in my case that meant the answer was going back
and building again and then going back to that like infrastructure development phase really getting
to build and scale a team wanting to make that better myself as CEO I had this moment in our
treatment journey where the doctor was worried about metastasis and she said look worst case I
can get you five years and there's something very special about that five-year time frame you know
if you had 30 days you would change everything and on the other end of the spectrum all of us
live right now like we've got infinity in front of us but what if you have five years what would
you do differently you do a lot more changing on the margin and the reality is we should all be
thinking that way every day you know what are the things that I would drop if I actually only had
five years what would I be so disappointed that I didn't do if I only had five years and the good
news in my case is you know we all think I have more than five years now I'm doing well with
treatment there's amazing drugs for the kind of cancer I have and I'm doing well with them
so I don't have to have that five-year time frame in a literal sense but I do try to think about it
in a figurative sense and the other the other related point I would make there is like that
it gives me permission I think to prioritize things that I might not have before so one of the
rhythms that I've tried to develop for myself especially because I now work in a remote first
context is like how do I give myself permission to lean into work when I want to and then permission
to lean out when I also want to and I do this exercise in the evenings where I try to ask myself
what am I blocking what am I advancing how did I make people feel and when I can answer those
questions just even knowing the answers will give me permission to then move into a different phase
of my day right and go spend time with my kids or exercise or landscape whatever the case may be
but that clarity of sort of giving myself permission and guardrails to prioritize all of the things
that bring me joy and like I by no means have it all about it's no one does it's a lie but it gives
me permission to reflect and I think I do just spend much more time on reflection and thinking about
how I feel how I made other people feel and ensuring that that's a priority for me
that's a beautiful answer and your journey is incredible and inspiring thank you so much for
taking the time to talk with me today thank you I really had so much fun I appreciate you taking
the time thank you and if you would wish me back well listeners would wish me back date time and I
will be there right there with you thank you so much for your time today my pleasure yeah thanks
so much for having me on the show well thanks so much for having me on I'm always happy to sit down
and have a podcast have a conversation at any point thank you for this opportunity I'm really
grateful thank you so much the questions you asked were really spot on and I thought our
conversations can be very useful for a lot of people thanks again you're really about something
really important there's so many people that are really working to serve and so the fact that you're
capturing that for people I think is absolutely fantastic so I'd just like to thank you for
for your service too let's imagine a few people have a little better life listening to our conversation
thank you for having me and and like I said I'll maintain that I'm extremely envious
of what you do because this feels like how life should be lived
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