Fan Favorite: Daniel Goleman on Expanding Your Mind With Emotional Intelligence

On this episode of Conversations with Tom, psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Goleman, Ph. D, joins Tom Bilyeu to discuss such matters and more as they explore why it’s critical you become self-aware of your emotional intelligence and begin to develop it, all while pursuing your purpose and meaning in life. They discuss what emotional intelligence and emotional IQ is, how you can develop and strengthen it at any age, the power of practicing meditation regularly, how purpose and meaning is critical to leading a successful life, the common traits of successful leaders, why you need to have empathy, optimism, love and kindness, and so much more. ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 2-7-21 SHOW NOTES: Emotional Intelligence | Daniel breaks down what being emotionally intelligent looks like. [0:27] Training | Daniel reveals what training emotional intelligence looks like. [3:36] Adulthood | Daniel reveals what you may need to unlearn as an adult. [11:09] Breathing | Daniel reveals the powerful and positive impact of breathing exercises. [21:35] Importance | Daniel reveals why it matters that the western world adopts mediation. [29:13] Social Brain | Daniel breaks down what your social brain is. [35:21] Meaning | Daniel reveals why meaning, purpose, and beliefs are so important to us. [44:09] Ruthless | Daniel reveals why so many kids can have moments of ruthlessness. [1:19:55] Empathy | Daniel shares how empathy is teachable. [1:21:42] CHECK OUT OUR AMAZING SPONSORS: Range Rover: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out. iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACT when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu Tax Network: Stop looking over your shoulder and put your IRS troubles behind you. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://tnusa.com/impact Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Found Banking: Try Found for FREE at https://FOUND. COM/IMPACT https://found.com/IMPACT American Alternative Assets: If you're ready to explore gold as part of your investment strategy, call 1-888-615-8047 or go to https://TomGetsGold.com https://tomgetsgold.com ITU: Ready to breakthrough your biggest business bottleneck? Apply to work with me 1:1 - https://impacttheory.co/SCALE ********************************************************************** Do you need my help? STARTING a business: Join me inside ZERO TO FOUNDER here https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=6762613-Scaling%20YT%20%26%20PC%20Ads&utm_source=IT_PC&utm_content=ztf_it_pc_ad SCALING a business: Click here to see if you qualify https://tombilyeu.com/scale?utm_campaign=6762613-Scaling%20YT%20%26%20PC%20Ads&utm_source=mindset_PC&utm_content=bdceo_mindset_pc_ad Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT atwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about the moment your side hustle becomes a real business. Now, I see way too many founders stay stuck running their business like it's a hobby, and then they wonder why nothing ever feels real. It doesn't feel real because it's not. I've helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real businesses through Impact Theory University, and the first step in the path to building a legit business is registering it. And Taylor Brands will help you do just that in a few clicks. An LLC, a limited liability company, is an official business structure. It's inexpensive to form and very simple to maintain. It's how you open a business bank account. It's how customers know they're dealing with a real company. And Taylor Brands doesn't stop at the filing.

• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement.

• 1:10Tom Bilyeu?

  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 to... 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.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tom. Pleasure to be here.

• 1:35Tom Bilyeu?

  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, 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 emotional intelligence is, and I think focusing on the four parts would be a good place to start.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  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 marshal your good feelings, your positive feelings, 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.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  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

• 3:25Speaker 01

  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, you don't need that technical skill, you need people skills.

• 3:40Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. Do you want me to start over?

• 3:53Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so here's the good news. It's learned and learnable. It doesn't matter where you are now. You can get better and there's a methodology for that. And also, this is why I'm a big proponent of teaching this to kids in school. Because there's a developmental window. The brain, its emotional, social circuits don't become anatomically mature till the mid twenties. 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.

• 4:44Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 5:01Speaker 01

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

• 5:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Go into some details. Like one thing, so when I think about self-awareness,

• 5:18Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 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 a feeling circle. This happens in a lot of schools where kids say how they feel right now and why.

• 5:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Why is it called a feeling circle? You're there just because they're sitting the kids in the circle?

• 5:53Speaker 01

  They 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 to five and six-year-olds. Uh, here's, I, 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 snowsuit on. And he has a tantrum, no way. I'm not going to put on my snowsuit. He's pounding the floor and yelling, no, no, no. Then all of a sudden, he stands up, goes to his room, comes back with his snowsuit on and starts to go out. And his mom says, hey, what just happened?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  He says, oh, uh, my guard dog got upset, so I had my wise owl talk to it. So what is that? That is neuroscience for a five-year-old. It's taught in these courses. He's talking about his prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive center. That's the wise owl. The amygdala and the nerve, the emotional circuitry in 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, uh, with his prefrontal cortex. And that is one of the circuits you want to strengthen, uh, 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.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  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 react. 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 a hijack.

• 8:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Are you familiar with Lisa? Do you know Lisa Feldman Barrett by any chance and her work?

• 8:08Speaker 01

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

• 8:12Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:22Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:38Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  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 uh, interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the emotional centers.

• 9:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Can you go into that a bit?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the emotional centers uh have as a trigger the amygdala. The amygdala is constantly scanning our world, our reality as we go through it to see is there a threat. And this, of course, in evolution was no doubt highly important for survival. Russell in the bushes, run away, it's gonna 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 equal and make it do what it thinks it needs to to survive.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  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 and I'm gonna be, you know, I'm gonna slug this guy. The amygdala thinks like a child.

• 10:14Tom Bilyeu?

  I think you've referred to that as symbolic threat?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  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 gonna do something, you're gonna smile and change the subject. So emotional intelligence is the smooth integration of the emotional centers and the prefrontal, the thinking part of the brain, executive part of the brain.

• 10:56Tom Bilyeu?

  So, all right, so that takes us into the beginnings of self-awareness. Do, when you're talking to kids about that connection in the body. Luxury brands are not charging you more for better cashmere. You're paying for the storefront, the ad budget, the name on the tag, but Quince cuts all of that out. They work directly with ethical factories, they skip the middlemen and sell 100% Mongolian cashmere starting at just 60 bucks. 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Now, I gave one of these as a gift last year. It was a big hit and gifting is really the test of a brand. You might tolerate a lot of stuff in your own closet that you would never give to somebody else.

• 11:39Tom Bilyeu?

  I've got their joggers and a couple of their tees as well, and I can tell you their whole line is high quality. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now also available in Canada and the UK. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, make sure you tell them that it was on Impact Theory. That's the best way to support the show. I'll call you back. That's the most expensive sentence in business. You mean it when you say it, but by the time you remember, they've already found somebody else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q U O.

• 12:21Tom Bilyeu?

  The business phone that's built so you never miss a call or a customer. QUO. Writes up your calls for you and one click turns any of them into a task with a name and a due date. The follow up actually happens instead of living in your head. When you can't pick up at all, Quo's agent does. It answers questions, gets the details and texts them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and you can jump right in. It's also an official connector in Claude and ChatGPT. Ask who called while you were out and it's handled. Quo is the number one rated business phone on G2. It's trusted by over 90,000 businesses.

• 12:59Tom Bilyeu?

  When money is on the line, always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months at quo.com/impact. That's Q U O dot com slash impact. Do you go into that, like teaching them how to sort of assess like, ooh, 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?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have to say there's more than 100 different curricula in social emotional learning, which is what this is called. And so they all do it differently. But generally, what you want to do is to help the child learn that when my stomach feels this way, or, you know, when I start to get a little jittery, it's an early sign of maybe a hijack coming, whatever language you use. And these programs use different language. But you want children to be able to recognize what's going on in them so that they can take control. It's a way of giving them actually more agency, more ability to manage their own life. And you can do

• 14:11Speaker 01

  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 olds, because they can comprehend at higher and higher levels.

• 14:26Tom Bilyeu?

  So what about for people as they get older, you know, somebody that's watching this now, they're 35, whatever, they're 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. But you talked about people might have to unlearn some of that. What does that process

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Sure. 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.

• 15:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Are those universal?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Pardon me?

• 15:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Are those universal?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  The window of opportunity?

• 15:22Tom Bilyeu?

  The signs, the early warning signs.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  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 a direction you don't want to go, what can I do that's different? Well, one thing that we find in neuroscience, it tells us, this work from UCLA, if you can name the feeling, I'm getting angry, it already shifts energy from the circuitry for anger to the verbal cortex, which is naming the anger. So that starts, that starts to weaken the path. Then, ideally, you want to have something else you can do.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:28Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:46Tom Bilyeu?

  And you started this off with mindfulness. When, when did you start meditating? I assume you meditate.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I started a long time ago when I was in college.

• 16:54Tom Bilyeu?

  And what, what got you into that?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  I was really uptight and anxious, and it relaxed me.

• 16:59Tom Bilyeu?

  But how'd you even find that? Like, I'm guessing this is, are we talking, what, the seventies?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Uh, it was a lo, it was a long time ago. And it was, however, I was at Berkeley at the time, it was very easy to find in the Bay Area. It was probably very hard to find in Middle America. It was probably only in certain, you know, urban centers, university towns at that time. Now it's everywhere. You know, businesses are teaching mindfulness.

• 17:25Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 17:37Speaker 01

  The psychology of the day paid no attention to meditation. It paid no attention to altered states or altered traits. And in fact, I found that out because I went on to graduate school in clinical psychology and spent two years in India. When I came back to Harvard, to my program, which was very psychoanalytic at the time, and said, I wanted, I met a lot of people in India who seemed really cooled out, and they all seemed to be meditators. And I think there's something, there's a there there. And I liked 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.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  So it took, it was a little bit of a risk back in those days to be so interested in meditation.

• 18:26Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Behavioral science, generally.

• 18:35Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Oh, no. When I was 13, my sister gave me a book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. This planted a seed. It was about Zen Satori. And I thought, whoa.

• 18:59Tom Bilyeu?

  What's Satori?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Satori is a momentary enlightenment experience. Like, aha, I got it. You may not keep it, but you got it then. So you can remember that. It's like a psychedelic chip. Oh, I got it. And then the chemical leaves your body and you lose it. But at least you had it for a while. So anyway, that was inspiring. I got very interested in eastern schools of thought, all of which said, there's this other way of being which transcends, you know, ordinary life. I was very intrigued by that. And I thought I would try meditation. And as I said, my immediate motivation was I was

• 19:40Speaker 01

  pretty anxious. And I found it actually worked for me, cooled me out. And now-

• 19:47Tom Bilyeu?

  What kind of meditation were you doing in the beginning? Was it, um, did you learn to breathe from your diaphragm?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  No, no, it was TM.

• 19:53Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I've since again forgotten. TM is where you repeat a word or a sound over and over to sort of calm the mind?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  It's a mantra. And at the time, I paid a lot of money for that mantra.

• 20:10Tom Bilyeu?

  I've heard of that.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:26Tom Bilyeu?

  How old were you when you went to India?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Uh, it must have been twenty-three, twenty-four.

• 20:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you encounter meditation, I'm guessing, sort of late teens, early twenties. 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?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  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, uh, shows that no matter what meditation you're gonna 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, have a certain stance toward your experience, that's mindfulness. And if your mind wanders off, as it's gonna

• 21:29Speaker 01

  do, and you notice it wandered, bring it back. That's like a rep in a gym with a weight. Every time you lift the weight, the muscle gets out much stronger. And in meditation, every time you bring your mind back, you're training your neurocircuitry to pay attention. So those are the two big main effects of any kind of meditation. By the way, I don't advocate any brand. I really believe that the best meditation is the one you'll do, whatever one it is. And I don't care because

• 22:00Tom Bilyeu?

  Because the key is just the focus or?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  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 it helps with our life. We're going to yell less at the kids, whatever it is. And

• 22:21Tom Bilyeu?

  Why would that be true? So as a meditator, I get it. Experientially, I am. Yes, it changed my life. Ah, what would you call it? I call it just breathe. So I took it from box breathing as a method, but I found that the four equal parts of the breath were they left me actually almost short of breath. So what I do is I just sit super comfortably and I breathe each 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 to natural sounds.

• 23:06Tom Bilyeu?

  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 in my life. And so I was like, yo, I have got to figure something out.

• 23:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Came across a Navy SEAL because I always thought that meditation was too sort of soft. And I my life journey was about toughening up. And so anyway, I had a shoot it for a long time. And this guy finally was like, Tom, stop being a dumbass. You got to try this. And so I did literally with that first diaphragmatic breath, I could feel myself shifting into the parasympathetic nervous System and I was like, oh my God, how did I not do this for so many years? This is absolutely insane. And now I'm 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.

• 24:31Tom Bilyeu?

  But it's also, and you wrote about this in the books, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how they do this. How some meditators and you reference specifically one Swami, I forget his name. But that can control his autonomic nervous system, which of course is the big draw of people like Wim Hof. And that has been transformational for me.

• 24:51Speaker 01

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

• 25:36Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 25:38Speaker 01

  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 muscle, 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.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And there are people who meditate like a thousand to 10,000 hours lifetime. And they get better benefits. There's dose response relationship. And then there are the yogis. These are like industrial strength meditators. They devote their whole life to it. And my co-author Richie Davidson, who by the way, I've known since graduate school at Harvard. He too was interested in meditation. He was told that would be a career ending move. However, he's now got a lab at University of Wisconsin, which has 100 people. It wasn't career ending.

• 26:47Tom Bilyeu?

  It's so big now.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very big. But the interesting thing was he flew these yogis over one by one. Put them in brain scans and so on. It turned out at the upper level, like the Olympic level of this. Brains are different. Physiology is different. One of the things, as I mentioned in the book, which I really am struck by. If you or I have great insight, aha, I got it. Our EEG wave shows a high intensity gamma for about a half second. Or if you imagine biting into a peach and the sound and the taste and the, you know, all of that. All at once, you get the same gamma.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  These yogis had that gamma all the time in the resting EEG. Which suggests that they are in what we call an altered trait of consciousness. So it's, it's great to begin and we all will get benefits. But if you keep going, it seems to get better and better. So at my age, at my point of life, I'm feeling like, hey, I better get going. You know, I'm taking this seriously. I'm paying, I'm putting a lot more time into it.

• 27:59Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Actually, I was really

• 28:16Tom Bilyeu?

  You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in. An intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive.

• 28:59Tom Bilyeu?

  My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact and you can be up and running in minutes.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  He 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.

• 29:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:36Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 29:39Speaker 01

  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, very fast.

• 29:49Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 30:08Speaker 01

  No, and he's also sticking off to the bathroom to smoke cigarettes. I mean, the guy was like, not what he made out. I actually, I got a telegram from someone in India who knew him before he came to America, who said, "Don't have anything to do with that guy. He abandoned his wife and two kids. 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 on who's a real, who's the real McCoy and who's a phony. So a lot of.

• 30:41Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 30:55Speaker 01

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

• 31:00Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 31:05Speaker 01

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

• 31:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Ah, stop the heart seems a bit dicey, but in terms of consciously slow it down or consciously raise it.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  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 in 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 were very interested. But it, 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

• 32:01Speaker 01

  systems as systems of psychology. And because it seemed to me that there were psychological systems, ways of working with the mind that it, that were millennia old, that were completely unknown in the West. And, you know, I thought, well, okay, I'll bring some of these back. And also, they're practical. They have an application. And the application was mainly through meditation, not solely. And I was very interested in bringing meditation to the West in a sound way, not through selling some brand of meditation, but in getting good research done on it.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  And, you know, I had two friends from those days that had stayed in that track. One is Richard Davidson, who really is leading the neuroscience research on this. The other's a guy named John Kabat-Zinn, who has introduced mindfulness-based stress reduction. He was like the father of mindfulness in America. And he, his kind, his approach was developed in a medical setting to help patients who medicine could no longer help, just helped them lead, have a better quality of life. And now it's spread in all sectors. But one of the reasons it's spread is because there's very good research behind it. And I'm still

• 33:23Speaker 01

  a believer for the West, it's important. Our belief system, to a great extent, hinges on the credibility of science.

• 33:30Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 33:43Speaker 01

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

• 34:10Tom Bilyeu?

  I was gonna say, like, to me, the things that you're into, from focus to altered traits, meditation, emotional intelligence, all feel like you need them all if you're going to pull this off. You talk in the book Emotional Intelligence, you talk a lot about, one of the studies I find just beyond intriguing, looking at couples and why they divorce and the four horsemen, you know, this notion that if there's contempt in the relationship, like, you're really gonna be in trouble. And then the idea of being able to give people the tools to unwind that stuff, and how much of that is gonna start with what we've talked about already, the awareness, being mindful, recognizing body emotions, translating that

• 34:53Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 35:31Speaker 01

  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 that 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 master's in any subject. And that is what's called a threshold competence. Everybody needs it to get in the game.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  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 this. People like them more. People are more loyal to the organization. They want to help other people out. There's a host of kind of a halo effect from that that highly emotionally intelligent leader. And it makes an organization, you know, you see it in profit and growth. So, you know, hard metrics.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Soft skills have hard consequence. And so, think about it. What, what? I don't know if you work for many different people. But I ask people around the world, what are the qualities of the boss you love the most? And what are the qualities of the boss you hated the most? And invariably, wherever I am, it's emotional intelligence that characterizes the boss we love.

• 37:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Do they say that? Or do they have different words that they use to describe?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I asked them, I asked them, just give me one characteristic of the boss you love. And then one of the boss you hate. And then I list it. And 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.

• 37:52Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Oh, psychological safety is critical for a relationship.

• 38:07Tom Bilyeu?

  But what is it?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  So if you, okay, there's three kinds of empathy, Tom. One is cognitive empathy, you know how people think, you know the language they use, you can be a good communicator. The second is emotional empathy, this has to do with the social brain, which we should come back to. But brains create 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 are these is based in a different part of the brain. Empathic concern is based in a parent's love for a child, it's the mammalian caretaking circuitry.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  And it means, it's not just that I know how you think and know how you feel, I can manipulate you with that. But I actually care about you, I want what's good for you. That creates psychological safety. So if you can actually feel that, if you can communicate it to people. And you do it verbally, non-verbally, you might have a one-on-one conversation with a 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.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Then you become the kind of boss people really like, because you care about them.

• 39:40Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 40:21Speaker 01

  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. The social brain was, actually it's a fairly new discovery. Social neuroscience is a new field. And it emerged as the neuroscientists stopped just looking at one brain and one body and one person. Started looking at two brains and two bodies while people interact. And they discovered, well, 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?

• 41:00Tom Bilyeu?

  I am, yeah, but please say, say something about it so that the audience knows.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  You know, there's a story, I don't know if it's neuromythology or true, but mirror neurons were discovered in a lab in Italy when they're looking not at two brains, but one cell in a monkey that only activated when the monkey raised its arm. And one day, the monkey's standing stock still, and that neuron is firing. Nobody knows what's going on. And then they realized, hot day in Italy, lab assistant went out for a gelato. He's standing in front of the monkey, and every time he lifts the gelato to take a lick, the monkey's neuron for the same movement activates. That was the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons pepper our brain, and they tell us instantly what the person in front

• 41:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Leader is put in a very positive mood, I feel really good.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:46Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 42:50Speaker 01

  I'll tell you, I'll tell you the study that says this, because it makes it. So there's, so women are getting their brains scanned one by one. And they're told they're going to get a shock, an electric shock in about 30 seconds. And their amygdala, which we know is the brain's radar for threat, goes nuts. And they go into the anxious state, firefly. If someone holds their hand, then they calm down a little bit. If their husband holds their hand, they go completely quiet. The amygdala goes quiet, goes calm. What this means is that the people we love and the people who love us are connected to us, connected to us silently biologically.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  You go to a hospital on the day when you could go to a hospital and visit a loved one, and you're just there with them. Your presence is important biologically. And it may not be evident to us, but it's, it's clear that this happens. So, you know, the most powerful person in the group has a lot of influence that we just don't know about, or we don't notice.

• 43:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Man, that's, when I think about, while we're recording this, we're still in the middle of COVID and people not being able to be there when their loved ones are struggling profoundly or even passing away. I've heard horror stories about where people have had to stand outside the hospital window while somebody 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.

• 44:37Speaker 01

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

• 45:15Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Well, it might just feel good. It's a way of putting yourself in a positive state, or at least engaging in a meaningful pursuit. And this is really important, because it has to do with one's sense of purpose or meaning. Nietzsche said, if you have a why to live, you can endure almost anyhow. 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.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  And I, I think that that's, that if we have a sense of meaning, and if you're involved, say, okay, you're all alone, but you're a heavy-duty meditator? Well, that's great, because I can pursue this meaningful work, which is meditation. There's, I'll do a retreat. And I've heard this from friends of mine, who are serious meditators, that the lockdown is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they can't see their family or friends. On the other hand, it's a great opportunity for a retreat, because no one's going to bug you. And you know, the classic recipe for a place to go on retreat is a place of solitude, where you don't have to deal with everyday life.

• 46:44Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  So, so there's no data I know of that looks at these two conditions, which is a nice experiment you just outlined. 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, if you can find a purpose, for example, I, I just gave a, a talk by Zoom to a group of physicians who are frontline of COVID. And we were talking about purpose and meaning. You know, they're putting their lives at risk, helping people. Their income is suffering, but they're doing it anyway. And they're, they're worried about their families, bringing it home.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:28Tom Bilyeu?

  So Man's Search for Meaning, the Viktor Frankl book you were talking about before, when, first of all, it's on my list of like the absolute must reads that people have got to read this book. But that really drove home for me. So, you know, one thing I get asked a lot about is success. How do you become successful, all that? And when I look back on my own life, it becomes very clear to me that the punchline of life isn't success, money, fame, it's none of that. It's neurochemistry. And the only thing that matters is how you feel about yourself when you're by yourself. And getting to a point where you have what I'll call fulfillment, because it's not, it's not as transient as happiness.

• 49:11Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 49:33Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  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 Viktor Frankl called Yes to Life.

• 50:10Tom Bilyeu?

  How do we have a new book by Viktor Frankl?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  How can there be? He gave three lectures, six months after he left the camp, that had been rediscovered.

• 50:20Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  It was just translated. And I had the honor of writing the introduction.

• 50:25Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Viktor Frankl.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  The very title of the book gives me the chills. Think about it, "Yes to Life in Spite of Everything." What he had just gone through. His pregnant wife died in the camps. His parents, his brother. I mean, it was traumatic, terrible. And plus, he was tortured. And, you know, forced labor, horrible. However, he had a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, which got him through. And in the book, in the introduction, I talk about a few things, one of which is why meaning matters so much. And, you know, he dedicated his life to helping people find a sense of meaning.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  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'd get together with other survivors and have a party. That was the "Yes to Life in Spite of Everything" in the positive sense.

• 52:07Tom Bilyeu?

  What, they were in the camps?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  No, no, after they got out.

• 52:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, I was gonna say, wha-

• 52:12Speaker 01

  No, no, you couldn't have a party in a camp.

• 52:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 01

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

• 52:35Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I had several things. One of the things I wrote about was propaganda, disinformation, very timely now. The way the Nazis got to power was through telling lies, repeating 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? You know, is this based on something I can trust, or is it not?

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Anyway, I felt that that was really important. So I just picked up themes from Frankl's book.

• 53:25Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 54:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Tell that story. I think that it's really enlightening.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  So the samurai goes to a monk, and he says, he wants a teaching on Buddhism, Dharma. He says, "Would you give me, explain to me the difference between heaven and hell?" And the monk looks at him and says, "I wouldn't waste my time with you. You're so stupid." And that the samurai gets, you know, has a megal 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."

• 54:48Speaker 01

  It's in our minds.

• 54:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that idea, and this is totally tangential, but something I find really powerful. I don't know how familiar you are with Jordan Peterson, but he has an interpretation of the Bible verse that the meek shall inherit the earth. And he said he really struggled with that concept for a long time. Why would, because we normally would translate meek as weak. And he said he just really struggled. Why would the weak, who will be trampled upon by the strong over and over and over, why would they ever inherit the earth? And he said, if you go back, and I forget which language, but if you go back into the ancient version of the language from which that word was taken, meek could be interpreted to mean the person with the sword who keeps it sheathed.

• 55:32Tom Bilyeu?

  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. 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.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  So 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 was like a tough guy. It used to be his favorite thing to, you know, favorite activity was he'd go to a bar and get really drunk and get in a fight. That was a good time for Terry. And then he found himself studying with a Saito master who said, essentially what you're saying, Tom, you have to keep your sword sheathed. Learn how to take down anyone anytime and don't do it. Then you win. So Terry's on the subway in Tokyo, very crowded, very really packed.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  And he sees this big, strong, dirty, tough drunk guy at one end of the subway. And he's kind of stumbling down the car and people parting ways. And Terry says, okay, well, this is justified. I'm going to take this guy out. So he gets ready. You know, it's like high noon on the subway car. There's Terry at one end and the drunk at the other. And as the drunk is stumbling toward Terry, this old Japanese guy in a traditional kimono pipes up and says to the drunk, hey, how you doing? What you been doing? And the drunk looks at him and says,

• 57:17Speaker 01

  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 the story about keeping your sword sheathed. Tom, I have a question for you.

• 57:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And it's about purpose. I've seen some research that suggests that the old style, like brand me, it's all about me and my success, is actually only held by a very small majority of people. And that there's a different brand of success, which has to do with finding a larger meaning. And I'm curious about how you got into what you are doing now, because from one point of view, it's very successful, but from another point of view, I see you as helping many, many people. I wonder what's been your motivation? Could you tell me about your path?

• 58:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so I chased money really hard for a very long time in my early twenties. From the time I was a little kid, I knew that I wanted to be rich. And I just went after it. And I woke up every day valuing myself for my ability to suffer in pursuit of my goal, which was money. And I did that for almost a decade. And finally, my wife pulled me aside and was like, you're so unhappy, it's now damaging the marriage. And I would drive into work, and it was like a cloud had rolled in, I just, everything about my life was misery, and the only thing that kept me going was an obsession with getting rich, and the sense that I could endure more pain than the next person. And there was something in my wife saying that, that, because my highest value is my marriage.

• 59:12Tom Bilyeu?

  So when she said that I was damaging the marriage, it just forced me to reflect on everything. So I realized at that point that I was worth more, I was worth about $2 million at the time. And I was worth more than I'd ever been worth in my entire life, and I was also more 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 can't buy happiness. I'm like, if there is ever something that people have repeated over and over and over. It is that money cannot buy happiness. So why did I have to like walk into this trap? Now that's a very complicated answer. I'll shorthand it to money actually is very powerful and so people will pursue it forever.

• 59:50Tom Bilyeu?

  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 refer to it in the book as the moment where you you just realized how to solve a difficult problem. That half second of just pure joy. And I was like, I want to live there. And I would get that up, 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.

• 1:00:34Tom Bilyeu?

  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 going to stop chasing money and that I'm never going to chase money again, and I'm going to chase that feeling. Now, irony of ironies, I then found a company with my partners. That we said, okay, we're not going to pursue money anymore. This is going to be about adding value to people. Now, we're not dumb. By this point, we're quite business savvy, but we're like, we're going to leverage the business savvy. To construct something that allows us not to focus on money, but to focus on lifting other people up, like making a product that people want, that it makes our life better.

• 1:01:15Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Yeah. 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.

• 1:01:57Tom Bilyeu?

  All from pursuing meaning and purpose and not from pursuing money. But in that process, I had I had about three thousand 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?

• 1:02:42Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Uh, 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. So I was like, look, I'm gonna bring up, because you become sort of like the father figure in a company.

• 1:03:26Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna circle around very similar ideas, because there just are universal principles to success. There is universal things to think. Work 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.

• 1:04:08Tom Bilyeu?

  It really does change people's lives and it really impacts my neurochemistry. Through the avenues of meaning and significance and purpose.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  There is a couple of things. One is I'm very intrigued by. Your fascination with brain chemistry.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  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. Successful by other criteria. So those are just two, two questions I'm asking you.

• 1:04:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, on the, on the second one. The worry that I have, I would be a little surprised that people confabulated. My message with money and meaning and purpose because I go out of my way to make it very clear like how many billionaires have to commit suicide before you realize. Money is not going to solve those problems. It is possible though, though, but that's part of why I don't sell lifestyle. So you won't see me. You know, doing drone shots of my house or, you know, sitting in front of a Ferrari. I don't even own Ferraris. I couldn't give a shit, but like. That whole thing I don't get into, even though it'd 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.

• 1:05:43Tom Bilyeu?

  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 skillset 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.

• 1:06:26Tom Bilyeu?

  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, 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.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:07:12Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Do you feel you have enough time for your private life? Non-work life?

• 1:07:31Tom Bilyeu?

  You know, it's interesting. So I have so melded them. My wife and I founded the company together. So for the last, in fact, the last two companies, she was a part of the founding team of Quest and now we are legitimate co-founders of Impact Theory. So we work side by side and that is really fun. We have complementary skill sets. I do worry sometimes, though, that God forbid something happened to my wife.

• 1:07:56Tom Bilyeu?

  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's one where I'm like, ooh, is this the right play? So I try to have enough of a foot in that world that I'm not like completely isolated beyond my wife. But that is like, if I were to say, "Your lifestyle has one weakness, it's that I make so much time for my wife and so much time for my passions, that doesn't leave a lot for traditional friendship maintenance."

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  And do you miss it?

• 1:08:38Tom Bilyeu?

  Not usually, which is why it's like one of those where intellectually, I know, man, if something happened to her, I would, that would not be a pleasant place to be 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.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if you remember the part of Emotional Intelligence where I talk about long-term marriages?

• 1:09:09Tom Bilyeu?

  I do, but for the audience.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  And how each mate becomes part of the biology, the, uh, 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.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  I suspect it's unique to you that I don't think one size fits all. That other people and people who love your podcast, which is great and which is helpful, may have other ways of finding the perfect set. For some people, it will be friendships, you know, or some purpose that doesn't bring a lot of money. And for others, they'll want to be you, essentially.

• 1:10:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, there's definitely no question that one size does not fit all. Do you, 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. 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. How do you help people with that?

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's an interaction of life's accidents, which put us on one path or another, or switch, can't control that, and self-awareness, which as I said, is 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.

• 1:11:11Tom Bilyeu?

  How, how do you do that?

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you do it by assessing choices you've made or are making.

• 1:11:21Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  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 he grew up on a ranch in the next town. And he almost flunked out of high school. He went to a community college. He took a film course and found that he loved film. And. He got into a film school.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  He made a student film that caught the eye of a director who gave him a job as a production assistant. You know where I'm going because you've read the book. But this director was so impressed by him that he talked the 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 the studio had the last cut. This is traditional in Hollywood. They paid for it. They're gonna edit it the way they wanted. He hated the way they edited. And he decided, you know, I'm a creative artist. I'm never gonna let a studio do this again.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  So he went off on his own, founded his own company, and made another movie based on a script he'd written. Almost failed because he ran out of money, got a last minute loan. But you've probably seen the movie because I'm talking about Star Wars. So George Lucas is a guy who knew what mattered to him. He made a decision, accident, that turned out to be hugely successful financially, but that wasn't why he made it. He made it because he felt his creative integrity was at stake. So this is the interaction between purpose and success in a conventional sense of the word.

• 1:13:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you know Lucas?

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:13:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you know Lucas? He is, so first of all, that story is so good. Like every filmmaker is, if they're paying attention, is in love with that story. And obviously how well it worked out for him. I had a very weird, so I went to USC Film School. And while I was there, yeah, so while I was there, Lucas obviously is one of their biggest, if not the biggest donors. And so he was there one time. And I just saw a bunch of people standing outside the editing room. And there was this big, big guy, just like a real big physical presence. And he's chomping on a cigar and he's telling this great story. And so I just stop and I'm listening.

• 1:14:22Tom Bilyeu?

  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 looked 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 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.

• 1:15:03Tom Bilyeu?

  And Lucas just sort of, you know, sitting back very quietly, smiling as this guy told the story. I always found that so fascinating because, you know, obviously Lucas is, I mean, famous. And you want to talk about in a film school that bears his name. It was literally, if I remember right, called the Lucas CNTV School. And it was like, here he is, just so quiet, so chill, doesn't need the spotlight, just really content. That left a big impression on me in terms of not always needing to be the center of attention, which at that point in my life was pretty important to me. And now is despite the fact that I have a YouTube show, is actually not something that I think a lot about. That was pretty powerful. How'd you get to know him?

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  The empty part of California.

• 1:16:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Modesto or Modesto adjacent, right?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 1:16:15Tom Bilyeu?

  Around Modesto?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:41Tom Bilyeu?

  One thing that I find interesting is, so obviously his early films, which you alluded to, were very avant garde. THX 1138 is, I will say, his student film, which I watched, made me want to give up because it was so good. I was absolutely startled that that was a student's film. THX 1138, the feature film, I was a little less enamored by, and it obviously did not do well at the box office. And if I remember right, it basically bankrupted Zoetrope, which was Francis Ford Coppola's company, who was the guy that, you know, really took a shine to him and sort of brought him into the professional world.

• 1:17:18Tom Bilyeu?

  But he had to make a choice. Do I want to keep being this avant garde sort of indie filmmaker that I always thought I would be? Or do I, you know, tell more conventional stories? But he had this one story he really wanted to tell, which was American Graffiti.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:17:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Which, you know, oftentimes people don't realize, that's what set him up to get the kind of ownership in Star Wars that he had. Because it crushed it. Did over a hundred million, if I'm not mistaken. American Graffiti, back in the day, which was, you know, just astronomical.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  And I think it turned out okay. He was lucky.

• 1:18:23Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 1:19:06Tom Bilyeu?

  fear at all where we're headed because of our sort of shortening attention span? Is that a myth? Or is it actually gonna have some negative consequences?

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  I would say it's not just attention span, and it's open question whether it really is shortening. But it's the development of the emotional social circuitry itself. Well, it's exacerbated now because kids aren't even in school. Nobody knows what the consequence will be for today's kids of having to be home alone for a year or more because of the virus. And to not even go to school, but to have it at a distance. And my grandkids are, you know, in school, but it's online. And this is, on the one hand, getting them

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  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, and a 10-year-old, and a 15-year-old, because brains develop different parts at different rates. I actually see it as an argument for being sure kids get social and emotional learning. Because I suspect they're being deprived systematically of the kinds of interactions the kids in evolution, and in your childhood and mine, had with other kids, and with people, their families, and teachers, and so on, that helped

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  their brains develop, I would say, well, for social interaction, and for managing themselves. So I feel that...

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  This means we have to be even better at giving kids access to this kind of thing. Let me tell you, 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've been mentioning cognitive control, which is the ability to manage your disruptive emotions. Lots of people get in trouble, particularly in inner cities, because they're too impulsive. They don't manage their emotions well, or their impulsivity. There was a study done in New Zealand that showed if you have high cognitive control between four and eight, in your 30s, you have better health and more financial success.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:57Tom Bilyeu?

  One of the skills, because getting to like a real sort of measurable or tangible skill set is one of my obsessions. In the book you talk about, I forget what you call it, but you've got the kid who's about to play soccer and the sort of bully kid comes up to him, "Oh, you think you're going to play soccer?" 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 to his future life and get why this is so powerful.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  So Tom, put yourself in a middle school in the inner city of New Haven, which is a bombed, there's no jobs in New Haven for people that used to, there used to be 20,000 or 30,000 factory workers in New Haven, now there are none. The local heroes are the drug dealers on the corner, because they're successful. And it's a middle school, and as you say, the scene is there's this one kid who's really kind of overweight and definitely not athletic, and two kids behind him that are what we call jocks, very athletic. And the two jocks are making fun of this kid, and one of them says, very sarcastically, "Oh, so you think you're going to play soccer?"

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  A kid, overweight kid, turns around, takes a deep breath. This could easily lead to a fight. So it's like he's 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 and 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.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  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 real win-win.

• 1:24:15Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:46Tom Bilyeu?

  Into the bullying or to not bullying?

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Well, it's an extension of something that we do, which is an unintended consequence, I believe. You know, you don't have kids, but remember, when you're a kid, you come home from school and the parent asks the kid, "How'd you do on the test?" What if the parent instead said, "Who was kind to you today?" It's a completely different frame of mind about what matters at school. But we, in our culture, and by the way, our culture is an outlier, ours in Australia, among world cultures, in rampant individualism. We want our kids to be better than other kids.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  And a kid who's developing prefrontal control over the amygdala, and for boys particularly, it doesn't take place till the twenties, adolescence. It's just not there. So whatever their impulse is, they express it. And so you end up with bullies. Of course, there's individual differences. Some kids have it earlier, and they can manage themselves better. We could teach cognitive control. It's a very teachable skill. The brain wants to learn it, but we don't.

• 1:26:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Is empathy teachable?

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

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

• 1:26:06Tom Bilyeu?

  How do you teach empathy?

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  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 a part of the brain that empathizes gets information. There's an amazing forty-five-minute instruction in reading emotions from facial expression by Paul Ekman. Paul Ekman is one of the world's experts on the facial expression of emotion. Paul Ekman has a website, and in forty-five minutes, you can learn to detect what he calls "micro-expressions",

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  which are fleeting parts of an emotional expression that tell us how someone really feels, not how they want us to think they feel. And beating micro-expressions is a form of empathy. It's part of empathy. It can be taught.

• 1:27:07Tom Bilyeu?

  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. Um, 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?

• 1:27:51Tom Bilyeu?

  How like what what's the stat? How correlated with success is it? And why?

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  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 the 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 uh, competencies, he called them, that you didn't find in unsuccessful entrepreneurs. One of them was that they loved performance feedback. They wanted a metric for how they're doing so they could improve. They they had a learning curve for how they're acting.

• 1:28:42Speaker 01

  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. Uh, and other people who hadn't gathered any information didn't think so. So the drive to achieve, which is sometimes these days called grit, uh, 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.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  You're just gonna keep going. You know, it's gonna feel good when you get there, one way or another. And then there's the optimism, which is positive outlook, which is the sense that I can do better. It's, these days, it's all called, it's called growth mindset. This 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 is based on being able to manage yourself well. And being able to keep going despite what happens, to recover from being upset.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  But is more lasting.

• 1:30:45Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna allow them to go on to 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. Uh, because your actions are gonna line up with your beliefs. And if you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits and that you're never gonna be able to get better.

• 1:31:29Tom Bilyeu?

  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 twenties was the darkest period of my life because I had a fixed mindset. And every time I failed at something, I was like, oh, my God, I'm not as good as I thought I was. I'm not as good as I thought I was, not as good, not as good. And so my world just kept getting smaller. I kept putting myself in smaller rooms with, you know, less talented people. And that was sort of leading me nowhere fast. And the big breakout moment was brain plasticity. And I read about it. This was back when it was still highly contested. And I was like, look, I'm just gonna choose to believe that this is real. Because when I think about it being real, I feel optimistic. I feel hopeful, I feel light.

• 1:32:14Tom Bilyeu?

  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 practiced 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.

• 1:32:58Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna be amazing. And then you can translate potential into actual skills

• 1:33:39Tom Bilyeu?

  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 gonna do. You're not gonna be able to translate potential into skills overnight. But you get on this path that is very self reinforcing.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  Tom, let me give you a framework for that.

• 1:34:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Please.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  Comes from Howard Gardner. Have you talked to him?

• 1:34:06Tom Bilyeu?

  I have not.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  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

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  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 him ask 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?

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:35:42Tom Bilyeu?

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

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  So loving kindness, which is empathy and compassion essentially, can be nurtured. We know this, there's work at the Max Planck Institute that shows that if you do a a practice which is basically a circle of caring, you think about the people who've helped you along in your life, people who you're grateful for, 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, then to people you love, and then to people you know, people you work with, or whoever, your neighbors, and then to everyone everywhere.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  It turns out if you do that, it creates a stronger connectivity in the brain, you like neuroscience, I know, creates a stronger connectivity in the part of the brain which has that concern, empathic concern, the third kind of empathy. So that is a kind of an exercise in loving kindness. And the good thing about loving kindness is it means that you cultivate an attitude that primes the likelihood that you'll actually help someone, that you'll actually care, that you'll manifest that in how you, what you say or what you do.

• 1:37:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, that, it's the neuroscience around that and how, one thing I've 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 in being angry and in 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.

• 1:37:56Tom Bilyeu?

  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 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.

• 1:38:15Tom Bilyeu?

  As you get better, at least it has been my experience, that I just sort of know how to put myself in that space, which I've never stopped to sort of think about what exactly I'm doing in those more vague moments. But I can move myself to that place where I feel like my heart is full of love. And I'm like, even if this doesn't do anything for my wife in this case, I feel so much better. Like, I would rather be here for my own sake. But, you know, you talked about emotions being contagious. It also then feels better for my wife.

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  So that brings to mind a lot of things. One is that there's a saying, Tibetan saying, the first person who benefits from compassion is the one who feels it. You're the beneficiary. Why should you let your mind be controlled by hell, by anger? You know, and actually, the Dalai Lama talks about the difference between destructive anger and constructive anger. Destructive anger is when it harms you or someone else. Constructive anger is when you see an injustice or, you know, something that you really do want to change. And you keep your focus and you keep the energy and you keep the persistence, you let go of the hatred.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  The disgust, whatever the strong negative emotion is. And you keep going to fix things. Also, you've 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 thirty times more activation in circuitry in the left prefrontal cortex than people who are going to be worrying about it or thinking about it or seething about it a week later or in the middle of the night.

• 1:40:12Tom Bilyeu?

  What does the left prefrontal cortex do?

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  So the left prefrontal cortex inhibits the amygdala, that surge of hijack. The right prefrontal cortex gets taken over by the amygdala hijack. So the left prefrontal cortex does a lot of things. It's the part of the brain that activates when we think about where we're going and how good it will feel. It says no to amygdala hijacks. It's the key to recovering quickly. It can be trained and strengthened in kids. I'll tell you how. I was in an inner city in Spanish Harlem. Seven-year-olds in a class. Every day they have an exercise they call belly buddies.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  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 on the out-breath, rise on the in-breath. 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 thirty-something?

• 1:41:26Tom Bilyeu?

  No question. Let me ask you, when we think about emotional intelligence, is there, you talk about in 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?

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:18Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think that's just the, the socialization? Or is the socialization an echo of something physiological?

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  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 let me continue.

• 1:42:37Tom Bilyeu?

  How is it in Thailand? Oh, please.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  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 attuned to relationships as any woman. Men tend to be better at a self-confidence and at managing upsetting emotions, but any

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  woman can be as good as any guy at 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 a business setting, the gender differences fall away. The highly effective leaders, if they're men, are as attuned to relationships as, 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.

• 1:44:03Tom Bilyeu?

  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?

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  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, danielgolemanone word dot info is my website. Just shoot me an email at contact danielgoleman dot info. And Tom, it's a real pleasure talking to you.

• 1:44:59Tom Bilyeu?

  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. It was awesome to have you on the show. If you've got something in the future, let me know. I am all about having you back on. This was a lot of fun.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:45:26Tom Bilyeu?

  As you should.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  I forgot. It's called First Person Plural. And I think it's gonna launch-

• 1:45:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Explain the title. Why First Person Plural?

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:45:47Tom Bilyeu?

  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.

• 1:46:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient-dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements, and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make.

• 1:46:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.com/impact to claim this offer.