Psychologist Daniel Goleman Reveals How to Strengthen Your Emotional IQ | Conversations with Tom

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am joined today by daniel goldman who wrote an extraordinary book that i am very excited he's written a whole host of books in fact that i'm excited to talk about but emotional intelligence being one of the ones that we'll probably spend a lot of time on today and why it may be more important than iq daniel welcome to the show thank you tom pleasure to be here dude this topic is something that i think a lot about as somebody who grew up not thinking of themselves as being particularly iq smart um this was one of those first things that gave me some hope that there might be something that you know i'm that i could find my own sort of path to success and talk us through sort of just like a real brief introduction to what uh emotional intelligence is and and i think focusing on the four parts um would be a good place to start so emotional intelligence is just a different way of being smart as you pointed out it's being intelligent about emotions so there are four parts self-awareness knowing what you're feeling why you feel it how it affects what you do managing yourself using that awareness to keep your disruptive emotions in check and marshall your good feelings your positive your energy and then tuning into other people empathy knowing how they feel and then putting that all together to have effective relationships so those are the four parts self-awareness self-management empathy and social skill and frankly there are a lot of very high iq people who are not very good in this domain and also i've got lots of different kinds of data that show that as you go on in life and in your personal life and even in an organization as you go up the ladder emotional intelligence skills matter far more for success than your cognitive abilities for example take even in a tech industry think about this you may be a software engineer working with other software engineers that's there's no emotional intelligence there particularly your programming but let's say you become head of a team or head of a division or a vice president or c-level executive now you're managing people you're not writing code you're handling people who write code so you don't need to you don't need that technical skill you need people skills so when we actually daniel um one thing really fast your mic is uh bumping on your shirt or something so if we can that would be very simple of the solution okay awesome yeah do you want to start over no no no we're absolutely fine um so when i think about emotional intelligence or even iq i the question i always want to know is how malleable is this stuff you know is this something that we can get better at or is it a trait that's locked in yeah so here's the good news it's learned and learnable but it doesn't matter where you are now you can get better and there's a methodology for that and also this is why i'm a big proponent of teaching this to kids in school because there's a developmental window the brain its emotional social circuits don't become anatomically mature till the mid-20s so there's a chance to get it right in the first place it's not too late in adulthood but you may have to unlearn some habits and then relearn new ones so it's a little harder what are some of the things that you because i know that you've actually worked really hard to get this turned into curriculum in schools i assume you focus k through 12. what does training emotional intelligence look like like what are the muscles that we have to strengthen well first of all the best programs cover the whole range self-awareness self-management empathy getting along with other kids go into some details like one thing so when i think about self-awareness um i i think about it in terms of trying to not only recognize that you're feeling something but then put an interpretation to that feeling is that how you approach it in the curriculum that you teach and if so how do you walk kids through that yeah so uh i don't teach the curriculum but i'm a proponent of the curriculum and for example with a little kid you might start every day with the feeling circle this happens in a lot of schools where kids say how they feel right now and why is it called a feeling circle you're they're just because they're sitting in the kids sit in a circle sit in a circle and the teacher has them go around and say well how do you feel why do you feel that way it's just that but that is the beginning of self-awareness and you might do it five and six-year-olds here's let me tell you a story five-year-old kid who's in one of these classes it's a snowy day i don't know where you live tom but you have to imagine a snowy day and the kid says i want to go out and play mom and mom says fine but you have to put your snow suit on and he has a tantrum no way i'm not going to put on my snowsuit he's pounding the floor and yelling no no no then all of a sudden he stands up goes to his room comes back with his snow suit on and starts to go out his mom says hey what just happened he says oh my guard dog got upset so i had my wise al talk to it so what is that that is neuroscience for a five-year-old it's taught in these courses he's talking about his prefrontal cortex the brain's executive center that's the wise owl the amygdala and the the the emotional circuitry and the midbrain that get you so upset that's his guard dog and he has learned how to manage his emotions his disruptive emotions his anger or whatever with his prefrontal cortex and that is one of the circuits you want to strengthen as a child ages it's technically it's called cognitive control it's the ability to see and realize oh i'm getting upset oh that's anger i'm upset because of this and talk yourself through it or or find a way to calm down physiologically and change your state before you respond before you wreck we get in trouble in life today in our private life and at work when we have what you have to call an amygdala hijack where all of a sudden that radar for threat thinks oh my gosh there's an emergency and it takes over the prefrontal cortex and we are really pissed off or really scared and we maybe send an email or say something to someone or do something that we regret later that's the hallmark of the hijack and are you familiar with um lisa do you know lisa feldman barrett by any chance in her work i know who she is but i don't know her work that well i think you guys would be in very close to lockstep you guys cover a lot of the same ground she so when you were talking about the guard dog and the wise owl right um there's a concept that she talks about where part of as people begin to develop an awareness of their body it's having a concept that you can put that into and i've heard you both talk about this idea of the brain is sort of always trying to predict trying to guess at why i feel this way and put it into a box right and by it seems like part of what you're doing is giving kids more boxes or giving them names ways to conceptualize this stuff that helps them is that part of the strategy that's part of cognitive control and she and i are both working from the original underlying neuroscience of joseph ledoux at new york university she's at northeastern i think or at boston but at any rate he's done the foundational work on this very important interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the emotional centers can you get into that a bit yeah so the emotional centers uh have as a trigger the amygdala the amiga is constantly scanning our world our reality as we go through it to see is there a threat and this of course an evolution was no doubt highly important for survival russell in the bushes run away it's going to eat me if i don't you have to have a very quick response the problem is that in civilization today we have the same biological response and the same wiring of the central nervous system where this one part of the brain can declare an emergency and take over the thinking brain the prefrontal cortex and the importance and make it do what it thinks we need to to survive and very very often that just doesn't work in modern day life because it might be oh i'm being treated unfairly and then uh you know the amygdala says oh how unfair i'm gonna be you know i'm gonna slug this guy the amygdala thinks like a child i think i've referred to that as symbolic threat it's a symbolic threat not a not a physical threat yeah so i'm being treated unfair not being listened to someone's taking credit for my work these are all symbolic threats the biological response is very powerful and if you're lucky the impulse to slug the guy goes to your brain and information from other parts of the brain can come in like oh that's your boss so you're not going to slug him you're going to do something you're going to smile and change the subject so emotional intelligence is the smooth integration of the emotional centers and the prefrontal uh the thinking part of the brain executive part of the brain so all right so that takes us into the beginnings of self-awareness do when you're talking to kids um about that connection in the body um do you go into that like teaching them how to sort of assess like oh i'm getting flushed or i'm feeling anxious or you know do you give them sort of the signs of the guard dog to look out for yeah so i have to say there's more than 100 different curricula and social emotional learning which is what this called and so they all do it differently but generally what you want to do is to help the child learn that when my stomach feels this way or you know when i start to get a little jittery it's an early sign of maybe a hijack coming whatever language you use and these programs use different language but you want children to be able to recognize what's going on in them so that they can take control it's a way of giving them actually more agency more ability to manage their own life and uh you can do that in different ways at different levels of maturity so you might do it one way for the five-year-old the guard dog and the wise owl you might do it very differently for 10 year olds or 15 year old because they can comprehend at higher and higher levels so what about for people as they get older you know somebody that's watching this now they're 35 whatever their long past that sort of age where the brain is has baked itself in there is hope for them for sure brain plasticity obviously continues until the day you die um but you talked about people might have to unlearn some of that what does that process look like well let's say you have you're quick to anger but you wish you didn't yell at your kids so much or your wife so much or whoever so much so the first step in changing that habit is mindfulness paying attention to what's going on in you and starting as with the kids starting to recognize the early warning signs that you're about to lose it because then you can intervene you have a window of opportunity pardon me are those universal the window the signs the early warning signs oh i think they vary from person to person depending on what the habit is you want to change and then the once you recognize oh i'm heading down that path which is the direction you don't want to go what can i do that's different well one thing that we find in neurosciences tells us this work from ucla if you can name the feeling of getting angry it already shifts energy from the circuitry for anger to the verbal cortex which is naming the anger so that starts that starts to weaken the path then ideally you want to have something else you can do take a deep breath count to ten pause however you're going to do it think about what's effective in the situation and then respond that's that's what i was calling cognitive control and the best programs for kids teach cognitive control and it's never too late to increase your cognitive control so that's basically interested in how adults really beef this up so you've written pretty extensively in fact this even before i knew you were the one behind the book emotional intelligence i came across the notion of altered traits and meditation and how impactful that can be sure um and you started this off with mindfulness one when did you start meditating and i assumed i started a long time ago when i was in college and what what got you into that i was really uptight and anxious and it relaxed me but how'd you even find that like i'm guessing this is are we talking about the 70s uh it was a lot it was a long time ago however i was at berkeley at the time was very easy to find in the bay area it was probably very hard to find in middle america uh it was probably only in certain you know urban centers university towns at that time now it's everywhere you know businesses are teaching mindfulness as as such an early adopter though i'm really curious so it did it just seemed self-evident to you that this could be useful were you already studying psychology and so it seemed like anything that attached your physiology could be interesting the psychology of the day paid no attention to meditation i paid no attention to altered states or altered traits and in fact i found that out because i i went on to graduate school in clinical psychology and spent two years in india when i came back to harvard to my program which was very psychoanalytic at the time and said i wanted i met a lot of people in india who seemed really cooled out and they all seem to be meditators and i think there's something there's a there there and i like to do my research my dissertation research on it and they thought that was the stupidest idea they'd ever heard that was the kind of reception so that was the atmosphere at the time so it took it was a little bit of a risk back in those days to be so interested in meditation but it's even weirder so what what did you study in undergrad uh behavioral science generally okay so you're at berkeley you're studying behavioral science you yourself are feeling sort of stressed out you come across a monk one day like how does how what was your first introduction oh no um when i was 13 my sister gave me a book called zen flesh zen bones this planted a seed it was about zen satori i thought what's the story satori is a momentary enlightenment experience like aha i got it you may not keep it but you got it then so you can remember that it's like a psychedelic chip oh i got it and then the chemical that leaves your body and you lose it but at least you had it for a while so anyway that was inspiring i got very interested in eastern schools of thought all of which said there's this other way of being which transcends you know ordinary life i was very intrigued by that and i thought i would try meditation and as i said my immediate motivation was i was pretty anxious and i found it actually worked for me cooled me out and now what kind of meditation were you doing in the beginning was it um did you learn to breathe from your diaphragm no no it's tm okay i don't you know i hear about tm all the time and i actually think i asked somebody about this talk about a momentary enlightenment yeah i've since again forgotten tm is where you repeat a word or a sound over and over to sort of calm down and at the time i paid a lot of money for that mantra and then when i went to india i found my mantra listed among other mantras in the appendix of a book that was published in calcutta i thought oh man but then once i was in india i started i had an opportunity to learn mindfulness how old were you when you went to india i must have been 23 24. okay so you encounter meditation i'm guessing sort of late teens early 20s you're doing tm you're repeating a phrase that you've paid a fair amount of money for but you're finding that it lowers your anxiety oh yeah it works every kind of meditation seems to do that so the book you mentioned altered traits which reviews uh the meditation research in good journals shows that no matter what meditation you're going to do if you do it regularly it does two things it calms you it makes you less triggered less often and when you're triggered you're not triggered so intensely and you recover more quickly that's the calm and it also focuses you it's meditation is a direct training for the mind in paying attention because every every meditation says you do this thing repeat the mantra i have a certain stance toward your experience that's mindfulness and if your mind wanders off as it's going to do and you notice it wandered bring it back that's like a rep in the gym with the weight every time you lift the weight the muscle gets that much stronger and in meditation every time you bring your mind back you're training your neural circuitry to pay attention so those are the two big main effects of any kind of meditation by the way i don't advocate any brand i i really believe that the best meditation is the one you'll do whatever one it is and i don't care because because the key is just the focus or well you know there's different levels of benefit and i would say for most of us just getting calmer and staying more focused means we're going to make better decisions taking information better it helps with our life we're going to yell less at the kids whatever it is and why would that be true so as a meditator i get it experience yes it changed my life ah what would you call it i call it just breathe so um i took it from box breathing as a method but i found that the four equal parts of the breath were they left me actually almost short of breath so what i do is i just sit super comfortably and i breathe each each part of the cycle to maximize the pleasure so i inhale only as long as inhaling feels good i hold on the inhale only as long as it feels good i exhale in a way that feels good and i hold the exhale as long as it feels good and as long as i like you said i'm bringing my mind back to just focusing on my breathing or a big thing for me is i listen to natural sounds so it might be waves crashing or it might be a thunderstorm or rain but that like when i'm aware of the sounds then like i have the chills right now just thinking about it when i'm aware of the sounds and i'm not sort of zoned off but i'm actually there with that sound and i'm just focused on my breathing i get super calm and for me the hook was diaphragm breathing that it literally in a single breath it changed my life forever i was in a period where one my diet was such a mess that i was i was just drinking so many artificial drinks and was creating anxiety plus i was in a very anxiety provoking period of my life and so i was like yo i have got to figure something out came across a navy seal because i always thought that meditation was too sort of soft and i in my life journey was about toughening up and so anyway i'd shoot it for a long time and this guy finally was like tom stop being a dumb ass you got to try this and so i did literally with that first diaphragmatic breath i could feel myself shifting into the parasympathetic nervous system and i was like oh my god how did i not do this for so many years this is absolutely insane and now i'm i'm a devotee to breath work meditation cold exposure like anything that i can do to i think like you're saying largely stay focused increase that the ability to bring myself back to focus but it's also and you wrote about this in the books and i'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how they do this how some meditators and you reference specifically one swami i forget his name but that can control his autonomic nervous system which of course is a big draw of people like um wim hof and that has been transformational for me well i have a lot of things to tell you tom what is this i'm just uh i'm writing a book now with spent llama and i just finished a chapter on exactly the kind of controlled breathing you're doing that 444 which the navy seals used to calm down and it has the research shows it has a very strong impact physiologically just as you said it shifts you from the sympathetic nervous system the fight-or-flight the anxiety mode to calm to the parasympathetic or relaxation response whatever you want and it does it very powerfully if you stick with it and if you do it regularly you can do it once it might happen and you'll stay there for a second or two if you do it dave do you do it daily i do yeah not seven days a week but five pretty pretty regularly yeah so if you do that it's like working out in the gym you get better and better at it and your musc your brain and body get better at getting into that state however you added something which i want to point out which was attention control you're also working with your attention in that every time your mind wanders off you notice i hope or you try to notice and bring it back that's a good beginning now as as i pointed out in the book altered traits there's many levels to meditative accomplishment and they're people who meditate like uh a thousand to ten thousand hours lifetime and they get better benefits there's dose response relationship and then there are the yogis these are like industrial strength meditators they devote their whole life to it and my co-author richie davidson who by the way i've known since graduate school at harvard he too was interested in meditation he was told well that would be a career-ending move however he's now got a lab at university of wisconsin which has a hundred people he's wasn't currently it's so big now yeah it's very big but the interesting thing was he flew these yogis over one by one put him in brain scans and so and it turned out at the upper level like the olympic level of this brains are different physiology is different one of the things as i mentioned the book which i really am struck by if you or i have great insight aha i got it our eeg wave shows a high intensity gamma for about a half second or if you imagine biting into a peach and the sound and the taste and you know all of that all at once you get a same gamma these yogis had that gamma all the time in the resting eeg which suggests that they are in what we call an altar trait of consciousness so it's it's great to begin and we all will get benefits but if you keep going it seems to get better and better so at my age and my point of life i'm feeling like hey i better get going you know i'm taking this seriously i'm paying i'm putting a lot more time into it that's interesting well tell me about india so you go to india in your sort of early midish 20s were you just still at too driven a period in your life to say i'm going to set this aside and become the industrial strength yogi uh actually i was really interested in hanging out with people who were accomplished yogis llamas and swamis by the way the swami x that you mentioned he could control his autonomic nervous system but he didn't know what he was doing he was a little bit of a phony actually really oh yeah oh i've heard this guy mention so many times tell me more well when he said he was going to increase his heart rate he slowed it when he said he was going to slow it he actually went into tachycardia which is very dangerous very funny i remember you saying that in the book but um i didn't catch that you were saying that this was basically bs now what i heard is that he could he he would claim to stop his heart but he was more i think this way talking about tachycardia he was speeding it up so much that it you basically couldn't differentiate between beats no but he's also sneaking off to the bathroom to smoke cigarettes i mean the guy was like not what he made up i i actually i got a telegram from someone in india who knew him before he came to america who said don't have anything to do with that guy he he abandoned his wife and two kids he used to be the manager of a shoe factory so this guy was a you know this was the problem americans are so naive we had no discrimination uh on who's a real who's the real mccoy and who's a phony so a lot of but do you find it interesting that he could adjust his heart rate even if it was in the wrong like let's say he couldn't tell which way he was doing it the fact that he could change it is unique even if it you know is a genetic fluke or something well uh i would be more impressed if he knew what he was doing now are there people now that that can do it on purpose um i've never met any you mean stopped their heart ah stop the heart seems a bit dicey but in terms of consciously slow it down or consciously raise it probably i wouldn't be surprised but you know the research interest has moved on from that that was very naive we're like oh wow there's a guy who has some autonomic control this was the day of biofeedback you know when you know you we thought you needed a signal to slow your heart rate or speed it up and this guy said he could do it without that so we're very interested but you know now we're more interested in what happens in the brain partly we're interested because now we have the technology that lets us look we didn't have it then we only had external measures so i go to india and what i was interested in was actually studying eastern systems as systems of psychology and because it seemed to me that uh there were psychological systems ways of working with the mind that had that were millennia old they're completely unknown in the west and you know i thought well okay i'll bring some of these back and also they're practical they have an application and the application was mainly through meditation not solely and i i was very interested in bringing meditation to the west in a sound way not through selling some brand of meditation but in getting good research done on it and you know i had two friends from those days that have stayed in that track one is richard davidson who really is leading the neuroscience research on this there is a guy named john kabat-zinn who has introduced mindfulness-based stress reduction he was like the father of mindfulness in america uh he his kind his approach was developed in a medical setting to help patients who medicine could no longer help just help them have a better quality of life and now it's spread and all sectors but one of the reasons it spread is because there's very good research behind it and i i'm still a believer for the west it's important our belief system to a great extent hinges on the credibility of science why do you think this matters like why why does it matter to you so much to bring um meditation here into the west i think having read your book i know the punchline but i'm curious to hear well i think meditation is a kind of mind training and emotional management that people people can benefit from immensely so i think it's actually it's a kind thing to bring it to to the west um i think that's my motivation and also it's interesting you know emotional intelligence kind of does the same thing i was going to say like to me the things that you're into from focus to um altered traits meditation um emotional intelligence all feel like you you need them all if you're going to pull this off you talk in the book emotional intelligence you talk a lot about um one of the studies i i find just beyond intriguing um looking at couples and why they divorce and the four horsemen you know this notion that if there's contempt in the relationship like you're really going to be in trouble and then the idea of being able to give people the tools to unwind that stuff um and how much of that is going to start with what we've talked about already the the awareness being mindful recognizing body emotions translating that into a concept that you can sort of hold on to um you even talk in the book about taking a break like if you feel like whoa we're escalating we're we're moving towards an emotional hijack here um to take a break so you can settle down um where this really starts to get interesting to me is is how it plays out in leadership and how when you look at people that perform just at the top top top of their game it's no longer about iq because they all have high iq what what are those elements how do we begin to get good at that interpersonal stuff the notion of the social brain like talk to me about that okay so the research you're talking about the four horsemen of the apocalypse comes from john gottman who studies couples and he found that if a couple is having a fight basically those are two amygdala hijacks think about it it's helpful to separate for at least 20 minutes so you can calm down then come back now let's look at you know the workplace everybody who's at a certain level of management has to have had an iq about a standard deviation above the norm it's about 115. it's what it takes to get an mba or a masters in any subject and that is what's called the threshold competence everybody needs it to get in the game what's more interesting are the distinguishing competencies once you're in the game what makes one person so successful while someone else is not so successful and it turns out emotional intelligence makes the difference how you manage yourself and how you relate to others and the most successful executives the most successful leaders get top performance out of people and there's lots of research that shows us people like them more people are more loyal to the organization they want to help other people out there's a host of kind of a halo effect from that that highly emotionally intelligent leader and it makes an organizat you know you see it in profit and growth so you know hard metrics soft skills have hard consequence and so uh think about it what what i don't know if you've worked for many different people but i asked people around the world what are the qualities of the boss you love the most and what are the qualities of the boss you hated the most and invariably wherever i am it's emotional intelligence that characterizes the boss with love did i say that or do they have different words that they used to descend no no no i asked them i asked them just give me one uh characteristic of the boss you love right and then one of the boss you hate and then i list it and all lo and behold the list describes emotional intelligence these are people that you trust these are people that give you psychological safety these are people who are honest you know on and on and on and then psychological safety as somebody who wants to be a good boss i really want to know what these are so psychological safety is oh psychological safety is critical for a relationship but what if you okay there's three kinds of empathy top one is cognitive empathy you know how people think you know the language they use you can be a good communicator the second is uh emotional empathy this has to do with the social brain which we should come back to but brains create a invisible instantaneous unconscious brain-to-brain link and emotions pass back and forth so you know what the other person's feeling because you feel it too and then the third kind of empathy is empathic concern this these of these is based in different part of the brain empathic concern is based in a parent's love for a child it's the mammalian caretaking circuitry and it means it's not just that i know how you think and know how you feel i can manipulate you with that but i actually care about you i i want what's good for you that creates psychological safety so if you can actually feel that if you can communicate it to people and you do it verbally non-verbally you might have a one-on-one conversation with the person who works for you not about their job but about the person just getting to know them what do they want from life from you know from their career from this job how can you help them that creates a real sense for that person of being known and cared about and seen by you the boss and i and that is invaluable then you become the kind of boss people really like because you care about them i want to go back to the social brain um which was one of the most interesting concepts from your book and it's something that i've seen other people sort of touch on um i forget the the name of like the person who's basically a little more dominant or higher in the dominance hierarchy or whatever but like if you put women together in uh they live together let's say that they're um periods their menstrual cycles will sync up but it will cue off of the woman who's considered to have the most high social standing how many different things happen like that so women's periods um posture facial expressions like what are what are the things that oh yeah it's very powerful so let me tell you a little bit about the social brain then i'll talk about the most powerful person in the group uh the social brain was actually it's a fairly new discovery social neuroscience is a new field and it it it emerged as the neuroscientists stopped just looking at one brain and one body and one person started looking at two brains and two bodies while people interact and they discovered lo and behold there's all this circuitry in the forebrain the front part of the brain which is designed to link in to the brain of the other person one of the famous discoveries was mirror neurons are you familiar with that concept mirror neurons i am yeah but please say say something about it so that the audience knows you know the there's a story i don't know if it's neuromythology or true but neuro mirror neurons were discovered in a lab in italy when they're looking not at two brains but one cell in a monkey that only activated when the monkey raised its arm and one day the monkey's standing stuck still and that neuron is firing nobody knows what's going on and then they realize hot day in italy lab assistant went out for gelato he's standing in front of the monkey and every time he lifts the gelato to take a lick the monkey's neuron for the same movement activates that was discovery of mirror neurons pepper our brain and they tell us instantly what the person in front of us is feeling doing intending and it's a back channel for emotions to pass and there are many other circuits now discovered in the social brain but what it means is that we are biological actors in the people close to us and if you're powerful if you're the most powerful person in the group it's human nature to pay most attention to and put most importance on what the most powerful person in the group says or does so for example at yale school of management they did a series of studies where the leader of a team is put in a bad mood and people on the team catch that mood performance goes down leader is put in a very positive mood i feel really good people on the team catch that mood performance goes up so it has real consequence even though it's invisible and we're biological actors in other people's physiology what do you mean by that say that another way i'll tell you i'll tell you the study that says this because it makes it vividly so there's so women are getting their brains scanned one by one and they're told they're going to get a shock and electric shock in about 30 seconds and their amygdala which we know is the brain's radar threat goes nuts and they they go into the anxious state firefly if someone holds their hand then they calm down a little bit if their husband holds their hand they go completely quiet the amygdala goes quiet goes calm what this means is that the people we love and the people who love us are connect to us connected to us silently biologically you go to a hospital in the day when you could go to a hospital and visit a loved one and you're just there with them your presence is important biologically and it may not be evident to us but it's it's clear that this happens so uh you know the most powerful person in the group has a lot of influence that we just don't know about we don't notice man that's uh when i think about while we're recording this we're still in the middle of covid and um people not being able to be there when their loved ones are struggling profoundly or even passing away i've heard horror stories about where people have had to stand outside the hospital window while somebody passed away on the inside and that was heartbreaking before i heard you say that but the thought of how we basically are regulating each other's neurochemistry is even more terrifying and it also speaks to why one of the most profound tortures that you can put on a human is just radical isolation that's true unless they're a meditator there's a difference between isolation uh you know vivek murty who's uh just been appointed the head of the just been appointed by biden ahead of his covert task force he was a surgeon general under uh obama he wrote a book on loneliness and loneliness as you say is horrible uh being isolated not being able to connect with people it ups your the likelihood of severe illness depression anxiety terrible however if you're a meditator you think oh what a great chance for a retreat and that's called solitude because what have they figured out like are they just learning to regulate their own physiology well it it might just feel good it's a way of putting yourself in a positive state or at least engaging in a meaningful pursuit and this is really important because it has to do with one's sense of purpose or meaning nietzsche said if you have a why to live you can endure almost any how i heard that i read that line in a book by viktor frankl who survived four years in nazi concentration camps he said that was his motto because he realized that having a larger sense of purpose made it easier for him to endure the actual tortures that he went through and i i think that that's uh that if we have a sense of meaning and if you're involved say okay you're all alone but you're a heavy-duty meditator well that's great because i can pursue this meaningful work which is meditation there's i'll do a retreat and i've heard this from friends of mine who are uh serious meditators that the lockdown is as a double-edged sword on the one hand they can't see their family or friends on the other hand it's a great opportunity for a retreat because no one's going to bug you and you know the classic recipe for place to go on retreat is a place of solitude where you don't have to deal with everyday life so here's a question for you do you think that meditators would get the same benefit from meditation during isolation specifically so as a as a way to substitute for the fact that they're now alone if they didn't see it as being purposeful so they were doing the act they were focusing they were breathing they were you know bringing their attention back but they had no sense that they were doing this for a grander purpose it was just i was given this instruction manual and i have to do it and that's that would they still get the benefit or is it the framing that this is a purpose for me to give myself to so so there's no data i know of that looks at these two conditions which it's a nice experiment you just outline however i i have a hunch that the larger frame of meaning makes a difference absolutely and i think it does in every part of our life for example at work uh if you can find a purpose for example i i just gave a talk by zoom to a group of physicians or front line of covet and we were talking about purpose and meaning you know they're putting their lives at risk helping people their income is suffering but they're doing it anyway and they're they're worried about their families bringing it home on the other hand the medical mission has such meaning and gives them such purpose that they do it anyway and i think if it didn't have that meaning or purpose it was just a matter of you know let's weigh the risk and the money they'd give up but there's this underlying sense of you know what i'm doing matters that makes them keep going so man search for meaning the victor frankel book you were talking about before when first of all it's on my list of like the absolute must-reads that people have got to read this book but that really drove home for me so you know one thing i get asked a lot about is success how do you become successful all that and when i look back on my own life um i it becomes very clear to me that the punch line of life isn't success money fame it's none of that it's neurochemistry and the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself and getting to a point where you have what i'll call fulfillment because it's not it's not as transient as happiness a bowl of ice cream makes me happy but it's very transient and if i repeat it too much then it stops being you know something that feeds me but when you focus on meaning and purpose doing something that matters and oftentimes doing something that matters that is difficult even increases its sense of importance in you and gives you sort of this outsized impact um that to me is so fascinating i don't know do you think about things from an evolutionary lens because i'd be really curious why the hell meaning and purpose is so fundamental to the well-being of the human psyche i'm not sure i can connect evolution to meaning and purpose i know that you know our beliefs about what we do are extremely powerful and presumably anything that's powerful must have had some payoff in evolution let me just parenthetically mention i wrote the introduction to a new book by victor franco called yes to life by victor frankl how can it be he gave three lectures six months after he left the camp that uh would have been rediscovered wow it just translated and i had the honor of writing the introduction so give me a little bit about what that book was and then tell me what you wrote in the introduction i'm literally hanging on every word victor frankel is is who i want to talk about a hero yeah so victor frankel the very title of the book gives me the chills think about it yes to life in spite of everything what he had just gone through his what his pregnant wife died in the camps his parents his brother i mean he it was dramatic terrible plus he was tortured and you know forced labor horrible he had a deeper sense of meaning and purpose which got up through and um in the book i in the introduction i talk about a few things one of which is why meaning matters so much and you know he dedicated his life to helping people find a sense of meaning but the yes to life in spite of everything was actually a line from a theme song that was written for a concentration camp and the prisoners were forced to sing the camp song at the end of an exhausting day of labor some of them sang it into the line yes to life in spite of everything sarcastically because of course they're in a situation that was hell and i talked to a woman i know whose parents were survivors of one of those camps and she said that every saturday they get together with other survivors and have a party that was the yes to life in spite of everything in the positive sense and that was in the camps no no after they got out she was going to say no no you couldn't have a party in a camp yeah yeah but afterward because they felt that life was so precious that they had survived and uh the so the franco book i i recommend i recommend both of those books and they cover some of the same territory and also different territory what was your intro about what was sort of the thrust oh well i had several things one of the things i wrote about was propaganda disinformation very timely now the the way the nazis got to power was through telling lies beating them over and over until they became truths in people's minds and i recommended an outfit called the news literacy project which helps people particularly students be smart consumers of information like ask you know who's saying this why are they saying that do they want me to believe something do they have other sources they cite uh you know is this based on something i can trust or is it not anyway i felt that that was really important so i just picked up themes from frankel's book one thing that i found just eye-opening in frankel's book is he talks about that day where they're liberated and he recounts how there were people leaving the camps that said before nightfall i will have blood on my hands meaning like i'm going right now to kill somebody that was involved in you know having locked us up and and he just saw that as such a tragedy that they were walking away with the wrong frame he certainly understood it obviously um but he was like you're basically locking yourself up again and you tell an extraordinary story in emotional intelligence about heaven and hell um and if i remember right it was a samurai tell that story i think that it it's really enlightening so the samurai goes to a monk and he says uh he he wants a teaching on you know buddhism dharma he says uh would you give me uh explain to me the difference between heaven and hell and the monk looks at him says i wouldn't waste my time with you you're so stupid and that that the samurai gets you you know just has a middle hijack like that starts to draw his sword and the monk says very calmly that's hell and then the samurai puts his sword back as he calms down and the monk says that's heaven it's in our mind yeah i love that idea and this is totally tangential but something i find really powerful i don't know how familiar you are with jordan peterson but he has an interpretation of the bible verse that the meek shall inherit the earth and he said he really struggled with that concept for a long time why would because we normally would translate meek as um weak and he said he just really struggled why would the weak who will be trampled upon by the strong over and over and over why would they ever inherit the earth and he said if you go back and i forget which language but if you go back into the the ancient version of the language from which that word was taken meat could be interpreted to mean the person with the sword who keeps it sheathed and that you are capable of great violence but you keep it in control and it's the people who are capable of the violence but have the emotional control to stay calm that ultimately win in fact there's another story in your book that's so perfect to this um the the japanese subway story about the guy that comes on drunk and the aikido guy that goes to step in i'd love to hear that as well so i i had this friend late friend now terry dobson who's one of the first people to bring aikido to the west terry had been a marine he's like a tough guy used to be his favorite uh thing to you know a favorite activity was he'd go to a bar and get really drunk and get in a fight that was a good time for derek and then he found himself studying with this aikido master who said in essentially what you're saying tom you have to keep your sword seized learn how to take down anyone any time and don't do it then you win so terry's on the subway in tokyo very crowded they're very really packed and he sees this big strong dirty tough drunk guy at one end of the subway and he's kind of stumbling down the car and people parting ways and uh terry says okay well this is justified i'm going to take this guy out so it gets ready you know it's like high noon on the subway car there's terry at one end of the drunk at the other and as the drunk is stumbling toward terry this all japanese guy in a traditional kimono pipes up and says to the trunk hey how are you doing what you've been doing and the drunk looks at him says what do you care and the old guy just keeps going he says hey come on sit down next to me tell me about your life and the drunk slumps down in the seat and says oh well you know i don't got no job i don't got no wife i don't got no house i feel terrible and the old guy starts patting him and then terry realizes he doesn't have anything to do the trouble's over and that was a story about keeping your sword seized tom i have a question for you yes and it's about purpose i i've seen some research that suggests that the old style like brand me it's all about me and my success is actually only held by a very small majority of people and that there's a different brand of success which has to do with finding a larger meaning and i'm curious about how you got into what you are doing now because from one point of view it's very successful but from another point of view i i see you as helping many many people i wonder what what's been your motivation could you tell me about your path yeah so i chased money really hard for a very long time in my early 20s from the time i was a little kid i knew that i wanted to be rich and um i just went after it and i woke up every day valuing myself for my ability to suffer in pursuit of my goal which was money and i did that for almost a decade and finally my wife pulled me aside and was like you're so unhappy it's now damaging the marriage and i would drive into work and it was like a cloud had rolled in i just everything about my life was misery and the only thing that kept me going was an obsession with getting rich and the sense that i could endure more pain than the next person and there was something in my wife saying that that because my highest value is my marriage so when she said that i was damaging the marriage it just forced me to reflect on everything so i realized at that point that i was worth more i was worth about two million dollars at the time and i was worth more than i'd ever been worth in my entire life and i was also more unhappy than i'd ever been in my entire life and so i have this moment of you've got to be kidding i am living the cliche of money camp by happiness i'm like if there is ever something that people have repeated over and over and over it is that money cannot buy happiness so why did i have to like walk into this trap now that's a very complicated answer i'll shorthand it to money actually is very powerful and so people will pursue it forever okay cool so i could understand why money not only had a lure to me but that it would remain alluring not only to me but to other people but that there was a punchline that was bigger than that and at the time the way i conceived of it was i wanted to feel alive so going back to that gamma state that you were talking about i got that gamma state from writing and when you you even referred to it in the book as the moment where you you just realized how to solve a difficult problem that half second of just pure joy and i was like i want to live there and i would get that literally have the chills again i would get that sometimes writing so and i had originally started pursuing money because i wanted to build a studio none of that really matters but so i realized okay i wouldn't have said gamma state i wouldn't have known that quite honestly until i read your book but i wanted that moment of feeling alive so i decide that i'm gonna stop chasing money and that i'm never gonna chase money again and i'm gonna chase that feeling now irony of ironies i then found a company with my partners that we said okay we're not going to pursue money anymore this is going to be about adding value to people now we're not dumb by this point we're quite business savvy but we're like we're gonna leverage the business savvy to construct something that allows us not to focus on money but to focus on lifting other people up like making a product that people want that it makes our life better and i start tapping into meaning and purpose and so i'm reading about the brain voraciously by this point for like 10 or more years so i'm beginning to understand some of the basics of psychology and like neurochemistry and you know i haven't read viktor frankl yet at this point but i'm sort of beginning to understand that there are different brain states and things you can lean on so i'm like okay meaning and purpose i'd read a book called drive by daniel pinker i think and he talks about how meaning and purpose are two of these five fundamental drivers and so i'm like okay that's really interesting i'm gonna lean heavily on that and that company ends up being a billion dollar company and ends up changing my life i mean just like you can't even imagine all from pursuing meaning and purpose and not from pursuing money but in that process i had about 3 000 employees and a thousand of them grew up in the inner cities which you also talk about in your book you're beginning to understand why i resonate so much with you and i realized as you have seen from the data that growing up in the inner cities is devastating psychologically and that more than anything this is a psychological problem like the toll that it takes on somebody's psychology and so i'm like okay i've had all this sort of worldly success that i've wanted i i have long ago learned that it's not about the money anyway that this is about meaning and purpose because i have been wealthy and just emotionally bankrupt and i never want to go back there so can i teach this and so my obsession becomes i had to do certain things to my mind to get primed for success and i wasn't the person voted most likely to succeed again you talk about this when you talk about eq and iq so my iq i would say is pretty average but i did the work to come to understand myself which then gave me the ability to understand other people and that has paid dividends in all the ways that you outline in your book and being able to be a good leader and all of that so how much of this can i package and teach and so that was the birth of this show was me trying to create something for my employees because i was like look i'm going to bring because you become sort of like the father figure in a company and people are going to ignore their boss the way they ignore their father and so i was like they need to hear this from other people so i said watch i will bring on i mean at this point hundreds of people and they're all going to circle around very similar ideas because they're just our universal principles to success there is universal things to think meditation works as close to universally as you're going to find and so it's no accident that the number of people that i bring on talk about these very similar concepts and so like you with wanting to bring meditation is there's meaning and purpose in it for you it's a kind thing to do it makes you feel good about yourself that's why i do what i do this it really is teachable it really does change people's lives and it really impacts my neurochemistry through the avenues of meaning and significance and purpose that's really fascinating tom thanks for that that's coming for sure there are a couple of things one is i'm very intrigued by your fascination with brain chemistry uh and the other is that i wonder if people looking at you and your life arc and trajectory might confabulate meaning and purpose with financial success because there are many people who are very satisfied because their life is meaningful and purposeful who aren't financially successful they're successful by other criteria so those are just two two questions i'm asking you well on the on the second one um the worry that i have i would be a little surprised that people um confabulated my message with um money and meaning and purpose because i go out of my way to make it very clear like how many billionaires have to commit suicide before you realize money is not going to solve those problems it is possible though though but that's part of why i don't sell lifestyle so you won't see me um you know doing drone shots of my house or you know sitting in front of a ferrari i don't even own for ours i couldn't give a but like that whole thing i don't get into even though it actually be great for business now on the the thing that i do worry about is that people will because i'm all about being hardcore i'm all about working really hard and i get so turned on by people that talk about working hard working long hours that is my aphrodisiac i love being around people who are like that i love doing it but there's one caveat in that which is the the thing that i'm chasing that i go after every day gives me that gamma feeling and so it makes me feel alive so i'm working on the weekends because i'm getting i mean look i may only get three or four of them throughout the day but i'm getting those moments of like the pure joy of having solved a problem that i care about with a skill set that i've worked really hard to obtain and i think that the thing that i'm creating helps other people so it's like this perfect neurochemical cocktail and i don't have kids so for me leaning into the work is joyful it creates something i care about and it's in a realm where i'm doing things i would do whether i got paid for them or not so i do and i try to tell people look be careful who you take advice from me included if what you want is a stress-free life i'm not your guy if you want to be the greatest parent ever i'm not your guy these are not the things that i know how to do nor are they the things that i'm pursuing and so i do actually worry about that because some people will many people would hate the life that i live and so they need to be very careful not to try to follow in my footsteps so you you get a high from working hard is what you're saying i very much get a high now the complexities of that in terms of value system and beliefs which you mentioned earlier i have hand crafted those things on purpose to exaggerate the high that i get do you feel you have enough time for your private life non-work life you know it's interesting so i have so melded them my wife and i founded the company together so for the last in fact the last two companies she was a part of the founding team of quest and and now we are legitimate co-founders of impact theory um so we work side by side um and that is really fun we have complementary skill sets i do worry sometimes though that god forbid something happened to my wife uh we've been together now for 20 years i definitely do not fear divorce but i really fear her dying or you know something happening because i don't spend a lot of time investing in friendships so that that's one where i'm like oh is this the right play so i try to have enough of a foot in that world that i'm not like completely isolated beyond my wife um but that is like if i were to say your lifestyle has one weakness it's that i make so much time for my wife and so much time for my passions that doesn't leave a lot for traditional friendship maintenance and do you miss it not usually which is why it's like one of those were intellectually i know man if something happened to her i would that would not be a pleasant place to be because even though i'm introverted so i have i like a meditator who just does not have a problem being alone i do not have a problem being alone but i i'm not a you know industrial strength meditator so i know a problem would come for me well i don't know if you remember the part of emotional intelligence where i talk about long-term marriages and how for the audience each mate becomes part of the biology the the way in which you handle your inner feelings and physiology of each other and so a divorce or a death of a mate as you say is devastating because you're losing you're literally losing part of yourself too in addition to your attachment to the person so i can totally understand what you're saying and i also think tom that what you have found and what you have crafted for yourself i i suspect is unique to you that i i don't think one size fits all that other people and people who love your podcast which is great which is helpful may have other ways of finding the perfect set for some people it will be friendships you know or or some purpose that doesn't bring a lot of money and for others they'll want to be you essentially yeah there's definitely no question that one size does not fit all do do you think about like how people can find for them what's going to be the right answer because i find so many people are living by the law of accident their parents made a comment when they were a kid and that steered them in one direction a girlfriend broke up with them and made a comment and that you know solidified them down a path or they've got golden handcuffs the job just pays so well um how do you help people with that yeah i think it's an interaction of life's accidents which put us in on one path or another or switch can't control that and self-awareness which as i said is pivotal part of emotional intelligence because your self-awareness at a deeper level helps you find your inner rudder your your own sense of what matters to me which is meaning how do you do that yeah i think you do it by assessing choices you've made or are making um i'll tell you looking for things that lead you to certain emotional states some people may be doing that but you know the the paradox of purpose is that you can endure unpleasant emotional situations because it has meaning for you so it may not you may not be chasing highs you may be chasing a deeper satisfaction or a deeper contentment so this friend of mine i grew up in the central valley of california and uh he grew up on a ranch in the next town and he almost flunked out of high school he went to a community college he found he took a film course and found that he loved film and he got into a film school he made a student film that caught the eye of a director who gave him a job as a production assistant you know where i'm going because you've read the book but uh this director was so impressed by him that he talked a studio into backing a film based on a script this guy had written and letting him direct it and everybody thought he'd do terribly but he did very very well he made a lot of money from that film but he the studio had the last cut this is traditional in hollywood they paid for it they're going to edit it the way they want it he hated the way they had it and he decided you know i'm a creative artist i'm never going to let a studio do this again so he went off on his own founded his own company and made another movie based on a script he'd written almost uh failed because he ran out of money caught a last minute loan but you've probably seen the movie because i'm talking about star wars so george lucas is a guy who knew what mattered to him he made a decision accident that turned out to be hugely successful financially but that wasn't why he made it he made it because he felt his creative integrity was at stake so this is the interaction between purpose and success in a in a conventional sense of the world you may get it what do you know lucas he is so first of all that story is so good like every filmmaker is uh if they're paying attention is in love with that story um and obviously how well it worked out for him i had the a very weird expo i went to usc film school and while i was there yeah so while i was there lucas obviously is one of their biggest if not the biggest um uh donors and so he was there one time and i just saw a bunch of people standing outside the the editing room and there was this big big guy just like a real big physical presence he's chomping on a cigar and he's telling this great story and so i just stop and i'm listening and as he's telling the story i'm like he's talking about star wars and then i'm like but i've never seen this guy before in my life and i know who george lucas is and i'm like huh that's interesting and then i look to my side i'm not joking seven feet from me george lucas is standing very quietly up against the post and this guy you know the big sort of gregarious i don't even remember who he was he he i don't know if he was one of lucas's producers or if he worked at lucasfilm i don't know but um it was so interesting to see lucas letting somebody else shine you talk about great leaders getting the best out of other people you know letting this guy shine letting him fill the room um and lucas just sort of you know sitting back very quietly smiling as this guy told the story i always found that so fascinating because you know obviously lucas is i mean famous and you want to talk about in a film school that bears his name it was literally if i remember right called the lucas uh cntv school and it was like here he is just so quiet so chill doesn't need the spotlight just really content that left a big impression on me in terms of not always needing to be the center of attention which at that point in my life was pretty important to me and now is despite the fact that i have a youtube show is actually not something that i think a lot about um that was pretty powerful how did you get to know him as i said we're both from the central valley my high school used to play his high school and we met some years later through uh one of his girlfriends at the time and had dinner and we just hit it off because we came from the same village essentially and we're both refugees from the same horrible it's like the empty part of california and uh around modesto he grew up in modesto i grew up in stockton i was at the new york times when i met him and he was george lucas by then but he was george lucas by accident he was always kind of uh unassuming you know it didn't matter to him that people recognized him or didn't you know or gathered around here but he said he'd rather let the guy chomping his cigar be the center of attention one thing that i find interesting is so obviously his early films which you alluded to were very avant-garde thx 1138 is i will say his student film which i watched made me want to give up because it was so good i was absolutely startled that that was a student's film um thx 1138 the feature film i was a little less enamored by and it obviously did not do well at the box often if i remember right it basically bankrupt zoetrope which was francis ford coppola's company who was the guy that you know really took a shine to him and and sort of brought him into the the professional world um but he had to make a choice do i want to keep being this avant-garde sort of indie filmmaker that i always thought it would be or do i you know tell more conventional stories but he had this one story he really wanted to tell which is american graffiti which you know oftentimes people don't realize that's what set him up to to get the kind of ownership in star wars that he had because it crushed it did over a hundred million if i'm not mistaken american graffiti back in the day um which was you know just astronomical one of the innovations in american graffiti was the soundtrack i don't know if you're a film student you may have noticed but everything has a song to it every scene uh which which had never happened in the film before but there was something about that that just showed his creativity but there's something uh about that that people loved and that gave him the cushion to risk his own money which people in hollywood said is insane you don't risk your own money on a film you get investors he didn't do it yeah i think he it turned out okay yeah he was lucky what's interesting about american graffiti in george lucas's own words he said that was an ode to a trend that he saw going away and he wanted to make this swan song to kids having sex in cars and i thought wow that's so interesting the way that like the world does move on because by the time i came around that was i mean certainly not anything that i did or any of my friends that i knew did um it had you know sort of become passe and now when i think about trends as they intersect with like what you're doing and how much technology is changing kids and social media and you talk in the book about you know what's the sort of impact that this is having on people's brains um do you fear at all where we're headed because of our sort of shortening attention span is that a myth or is it actually going to have some negative consequences i would say it's not just attention span and it's open question whether it really is shortening uh but it's the development of the emotional social circuitry itself uh particularly exacerbated now because kids aren't even in school nobody knows what the consequence will be for today's kids of having just be home alone for a year or more because of the virus and to not even go to school but to have it at a distance and my grandkids are you know in school but it's online and this is on the one hand uh getting them used even more used to a digital and technological world and on the other hand we don't even know what the consequence will be for the developing brains and it's going to be different for a five-year-old than a 10 year old and a 15 year old because brains develop different parts of different rates i actually see it as an argument for being sure kids get social and emotional learning because i suspect they're being deprived systematically of the kinds of interactions the kids in evolution and in your childhood and mind had with other kids and with people their families and teachers and so on that helped their brains develop i would say well for social interaction and for managing themselves so i i feel uh that this means we have to be even better at giving kids access to this kind of thing let me tell you mentioned inner city kids one of the things that social emotional learning does is it really can help level the playing field in this way i i've been mentioning cognitive control which is the ability to manage your disruptive emotions lots of people get in trouble particularly in inner cities because they're too impulsive they don't manage their emotions well or their impulsivity if there was a study done in new zealand that showed if you have high cognitive control between four and eight in your 30s you have better health and more financial success and if you develop cognitive control between four and eight you get the same benefits and this is the kicker cognitive control is a stronger predictor of your adult life than your childhood iq or the wealth of the family you grew up in that's the great leveler so i feel if we give kids a complete skill set we're going to be doing them a great service for the rest of their life one of the skills because getting to like real sort of measurable or tangible skill set is one of my obsessions in the book you talk about i forget what you call it but you've got the kid who's about to play soccer and the sort of bully kid comes up tonight yeah you think you're gonna play soccer um one if you could tell that story and put a name to that technique because it was such a powerful example of a kid who learned something deployed it and you can sort of extrapolate that into his future life and guess why this is so powerful so tom put yourself in a middle school in the inner city of new haven which is a bomb down there's no jobs in not even for people that used to there used to be 20 or 30 000 factory workers and maybe now they're none the local heroes are the drug dealers on the corner because they're successful and it's a middle school and as you say the scene is there's this one kid who's really kind of overweight and definitely not athletic and two kids behind him that are what we call jocks very athletic the two jocks are making fun of this kid and one of them says very sarcastically oh so you think you're gonna play soccer and the a kid overweight kid turns around takes a deep breath this could easily lead to a fight so it's like he's steady not getting himself ready takes a deep breath and he says to that kid yeah i'm gonna play soccer but i'm not nearly as good as you are what i'm good at is art show me anything i'll draw it really well someday i hope to be as good as you are at soccer and at that the first kid who's just putting him down comes over puts his arm around him says oh come on i'll show you a thing or two so the technique is a put up when someone puts you down you say something positive about yourself something positive about the other person changes the chemistry of the moment and he learned this in social emotional learning they call it social development in that school system so you know kids love these classes because it's about their life you know how i can handle my own upsets and how i can get along with other kids this is what kids care about is you know themselves and other kids so it's a a real win-win do you know what's the psychology why are kids so ruthless is it like innate jockeying for position like in my adult life i would never say something like oh so you think you're gonna do xyz thing that i'm good at like that seems so insane to me and we certainly teach kids hopefully most adults know not to do things like that but kids are not for play like they will just thrash people so tom think about it i think we socialize kids into that attitude uh into the bullying or to not bullying well it's it's an extension of something that we do which it's an unintended consequence i believe you know your k you don't have kids but remember when you're a kid you come home from school and the parent asked the kid how did you do on the test what if the parent instead said who was kind to you today it's a completely different frame of mind about what matters at school but we in our culture and by the way our culture was an outlier ours in australia among world cultures in rampant individualism we want our kids to be better than other kids and a kid who's developing prefrontal control over the amygdala and it for boys particularly it doesn't take place till the 20s adolescents no it's just not there so whatever their impulse is they express it and so you end up with bullies of course there's individual differences some kids have it earlier they command themselves better we could teach cognitive control it's a very teachable skill the brain wants to learn it but we don't empathy teachable it's all teachable of course empathy how how do you teach empathy so the thing about empathy is that almost never in life do we get feedback for example you may have a hunch how someone feels you don't ever test it out you don't say uh do you feel angry or do you feel happy or do you feel sad but if you do that then you get then the part of the brain that empathizes gets information there's an amazing 45-minute instruction in reading emotions from facial expression of paul ekman pollickman is one of the world's expert on the facial expression of emotion paul ekman has a website and in 45 minutes you can learn to detect what he calls micro expressions which are fleeting parts of an emotional expression that tell us how someone really feels not how they want us to think they feel and beating micro expressions uh is is a form of empathy it's part of empathy it can be taught yeah that that's interesting because you know when i think about even when i was a kid the the thought of bullying somebody no way like i was just too aware of how much that sucked now there were other things i was completely oblivious to like i had no sense of how i was coming across other people um but that one being able to project myself into somebody else's shoes that one i could do now that makes me think about sort of what traits are predictive of success and one thing you mentioned earlier briefly um and you talk about the book and i took a note because i was like how is this true that optimism is highly correlated with success how like what what's the stat how correlated with success is it and why okay well let me talk about optimism the drive to achieve and emotional management because i think you need all of them for success and then remind me to talk about what's wrong with them if that's all you got and it has to do with empathy so that uh when i was in graduate school i had a professor named david mcclellan who studied entrepreneurs successful entrepreneurs and he realized that they had several competencies he called that you didn't find in unsuccessful entrepreneurs one of them was that they loved performance feedback they wanted a metric for how they're doing so they could improve they had a learning curve for how they're acting another was that they took risks that looked foolish to other people but they felt were smart and they felt it was smart because they had done their homework they knew they had some sense that this can work and other people who hadn't gathered at information didn't think so so the drive to achieve which is sometimes these days called grit meaning you keep your eye on the goal one of the interesting things you talk about the high you get it turns out if someone has a goal in mind and pictures in their mind how they're going to feel when they achieve that goal it activates circuitry in the left prefrontal cortex that makes you feel good so if you can keep that in mind it doesn't matter what obstacles you have you're just going to keep going because you know it's going to feel good when you get there one way or another and then there's uh the optimism which is positive outlook which is the sense that i can do better it's these days all called it's called growth mindset uh there's a positive outlook means that even if i have a setback even if i fail it's okay because i know i can get better at it and of course these days in silicon valley having a failure is a market of future success because it's assumed you're gonna learn from that and do better next time and then all of that uh is based on being able to manage yourself well and being able to keep going despite what happens to recover from being upset and then the deficit is something we've talked about if you only care about your own success you may end up very successful but very unhappy and you've told the story about that if you can think about how you can help other people empathy or compassion then you may find a deeper sense of meaning that will give you a trajectory in life that may give you a deeper satisfaction which is not momentary happiness but it's more lasting yeah getting people focused on the right things is um man it's it's really sort of top of the list when i step back and i i so going back to people that grew up in the inner city and i think about okay i've got you know some very brief window of time where i can try to instill in them the thing that's going to allow them to go on and be successful one is optimism or i have always used the words growth mindset so getting them to adopt a growth mindset to believe that they can get better you know through practice it's what i call the only belief that matters because your actions are going to line up with your beliefs and if you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and that you're never going to be able to get better and life is just about making the most of what you have every time you realize you're not as good as you thought you were your world is sort of shrinking shrinking shrinking and that's certainly what happened to me in my early 20s was the darkest period of my life because i had a fixed mindset and every time i failed at something i was like oh my god i'm not as good as i thought it was i'm not as good as i thought i was not as good not as good and so my world just kept getting smaller i kept putting myself in smaller rooms with you know less talented people and that was sort of leading me nowhere fast and the big breakout moment was brain plasticity and i read about it this was back when it was still highly contested and i was like look i'm just going to choose to believe that this is real because when i think about it being real i feel optimistic i feel hopeful i feel light that sense of pressure that's crushing me down goes away and so let me just try to live in that moment and then because i chose to believe that if i practice something i would get better at it i actually started getting better now this is this is where life gets tricky and why when you bring up that individualism i'm like i'm actually team individual now within a context of understanding fulfillment and that fulfillment requires just innate it is innate in us as a social species to want to help the group so you need to plug in but wanting to get good yourself and i think that there's also an innate driver there for us to want to translate our potential into actual skill set and by doing that now you've got people that are actually capable in the real world you get the moving up dominance or that's a terrible way to say it of competence hierarchies so that they're able to move up and be better and if they're also helping those around them and being the kind of leader that you described it gets very interesting so i'm always trying to get people on that track of like look you just have to recognize one thing skills matter so skills mean you can do something other people can't do and if that thing that you can do that other people can't do is something society values and it you know matters in terms of meaning and purpose that's going to be amazing and then you can translate potential into actual skills by working at it so now it's like if you just give them if if they buy into that idea then doors begin to open now it takes time it's not something that you're going to do you're not going to be able to translate potential into skills overnight but you get on this path that is very self-reinforcing tom let me give you a framework for that please comes from howard gardner have you talked to him he's at harvard school of education anyway howard and i went to graduate school at the same time too howard talks about aligning what you're great at your excellence with what you love doing what engages you with your ethical sense what matters to you he says if you align those three things you have what he calls good work and the question is how much of my day is spent in what i could call good work what could i do to enhance it what could i do to make it all of what i do and i you know when i hear your career trajectory it sounds like you've done that that you know this has been a guiding principle but i offer it to you because you impact a lot of people and i agree with you it's so important to understand that you can get better and if you do the work of improvement but that's not all there is to it it's also what do you love doing what will satisfy you and why do you do it the dalai lama put it in a different way i heard a mask group conference at mit on systems he said whenever you face a decision ask yourself three questions who benefits is it just you or a group just your group or everyone is it only for now or for the future because that opens up a whole other way of thinking about the consequence the impact i mean talk about impact theory that's the theory of impact talk to me about loving kindness um when you talk about that that's sort of what that makes me think that that sense of expansion and how it makes you feel so loving kindness which is empathy and compassion essentially i can be nurtured we know this there's work at the max planck institute that shows that if you do a practice which is basically a circle of caring you uh think about the people and who've helped you along in your life people who you're grateful for and if they're still alive you wish them silently that you know you hope that they'll be happy and healthy have a fulfilled life and thrive and then you wish that for yourself silently than the people you love and then people you know people you work with or whoever your neighbors and then to everyone everywhere it turns out if you do that it creates a stronger connectivity in the brain you like neuroscience i know it creates a stronger connectivity uh in the part of the brain which has that concern empathic concern the third kind of empathy so that is a kind of an exercise in loving kindness and the the good thing about loving kindness is it means that you cultivate an attitude that primes the likelihood that you'll actually help someone that you'll actually care that you'll manifest that how you what you say or what you do yeah that it's the neuroscience around that and how one thing i found in my life that is it was really sort of startling when i first discovered it it's one of the secrets to my marriage is how quickly you can actually shift your own neurochemistry that you can be angry you can be upset and and maybe you're even angry and upset over something that has justification like some that person really has done you wrong in a way that everybody would look at and say yes they were wrong and i just found that investing and being angry and being right and you know doubling down on the fact that i've been wronged just didn't make me feel the way that i wanted to feel and it certainly didn't do anything wonderful to my wife or to the marriage and so finding a way to to what i will sort of cheesily refer to as filling my heart with love when i fill my heart with love and i feel it and it can be by laughing out loud it can be just by thinking of a time where my wife did something so kind for me um as you get better at least it has been my experience that i just sort of know how to put myself in that space which i've never stopped to sort of think about what exactly i'm doing in those more vague moments but um i can move myself to uh that place where i feel like my heart is full of love and i'm like even if this doesn't do anything for my wife in this case i feel so much better like i would rather be here from my own sake but you know you talked about emotions being contagious it also then feels better for my wife so that brings to mind a lot of things one is that there's a saying uh tibetan saying the first person who benefits from compassion is the one who feels it you're the beneficiary why should you let your mind be controlled by hell by anger you know and actually the dialogue talks about the difference between destructive anger and constructive anger destructive anger is when it harms you or someone else constructive anger is when you see an injustice or you know something that you really do want to change and you keep your focus and you keep the energy and you keep the persistence you let go of the hatred the disgust whatever the strong negative emotion is and you keep going to to fix things also you mentioned how quickly you recover this is called resilience the actual technical definition of resilience in a lab is how long it takes someone to shift from being upset you can see it in the brain you can measure physiology to getting back to what we call baseline or calm and people who are very good at recovery have 30 times more activation in circuitry in the left prefrontal cortex than people who are going to be worrying about it or thinking about it receiving about it a week later or in the middle of the night they don't have the left prefrontal cortex too so the left prefrontal cortex inhibits the amygdala that that surge of the hijack the right prefrontal cortex get take gets taken over by the amygdala hijack so the left prefrontal cortex does a lot of things it's the part of the brain that activates when we think about where we're going and how good it will feel it says no to amygdala hijacks it's the key to recovering quickly it can be trained and strengthened in kids i'll tell you how i was in an inner city in spanish harlem seven-year-olds in the class every day they have an exercise they call belly buddies they get their favorite stuffed animal they lie down on a rug they put the animal on their belly and they watch it rise on the in-breath fall in the out that's rising if their mind wanders off they bring it back basically it's mindfulness for seven-year-olds but the data shows that this kind of exercise strengthens the circuitry in the brain that lets you recover from being upset and why not teach the kids from the get-go you know why do you have to wait till you're 30 something but you have no question let me ask you when we think about emotional intelligence is there um you talk about the book some sex differences and while for sure there is massive amounts of overlap is there any meaningful differences between how men and women grapple with emotional intelligence well you know on every test of emotional intelligence there are many now women on average score better than men on average largely because women are socialized to think about and become experts in a relationship and men are not you know you talk to boys about things and how they work and you talk to girls about relationships and how you feel and that continues through life and women talk to each other about relationships and tend not to do it so much so that's just the the socialization or is the socialization an echo of something physiological well it may be from evolutionary there may be an evolutionary advantage to having that arrangement uh i think it's also cultural in thailand for example it's not that way but how does it continue in thailand uh men grow up being about as sensitive and empathic as women i'm told i don't know for sure but i think it's both an interaction between some genetic or evolutionary determination and cultural but this is really important it if you look at differences between genders you're talking about two largely overlapping bell curves not to get too nerdy but the differences are at the extremes and what it means is that any guy might be as empathic or return to relationships as any woman men tend to be better at self-confidence and managing upsetting emotions but any woman can be as good as any guy if that that's what it means you're talking averages and very interesting if you look at top performers this is a study done in the business setting the gender differences fall away the highly effective leaders if they've been are as attuned to relationships as women and the highly effective leaders who are women are as good at managing their emotions or as confident as men so i think that one thing people learn as they go up the ladder is how to have a fuller set of emotional intelligence abilities i think that sums up pretty well the very powerful work that you've done not just in the book emotional intelligence which i cannot recommend enough but the major swath of your body of work where can people connect with you what's the best way to learn more from you well you can reach me through my website i recommend the 25th anniversary edition of emotional intelligence has an updated intro by me it will be out in december 2020 and available thereafter and i have a newsletter on linkedin which is free to anyone who wants to subscribe my latest thinking and then yeah the daniel goldman one word dot info is my website just shoot me an email at contact daniel gomez and phil and tom it's a real pleasure talking to you thank you man i feel the same your books are amazing they've really shaped the way that i think about emotional intelligence and meditation and its impact and i just i can't recommend you or your work enough so thank you for continuing to do it man i was awesome to have it on the show if you've got something in the future let me know um i am all about having you back on this was a lot of fun awesome oh by the way i'm starting a podcast i'm starting a podcast as you should i forgot it's called first person plural uh and i think it's exciting title why first person plural that's we first person plural is we it's about us and it's about my interests emotional intelligence and beyond so those are all ways to connect with me and it's been wonderful connecting with you thanks so much thank you guys be sure to check out the new podcast definitely read the books they are amazing and speaking of amazing things if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care you