 Taipei was first described in the 1950s, here in San Francisco, cardiologists, Meyer Friedman, Friedman and Rosenin, and here was their original formulation. Time pressured, hostile, impatient, low self-esteem, joyless striving, okay, like 80% of us. And what these guys reported was, if this is what you're like, you are more at risk for heart disease. Cardiologists hated these guys. You're some 1950s Ozzie and Harriet cardiologists, and all you're thinking about is heart valves, and here's these guys instead saying, no, you got to sit down, you're patient and talk with Christ, who wants to talk to their patients and say, okay, so you're in the supermarket and you've picked the line that's going the slowest, you go out of your mind, that has something to do with heart disease. Huge resistance in the field, and it took decades to become absolutely clear from all the meta-analyses, type A is for real big time. If you have a type A profile, you are more at risk for, you are more at risk than if you smoke, than if you have elevated cholesterol levels, than if you are overweight. In terms of heart disease, it's a huge risk factor. And one of the things that's emerged in this field in recent years is a recognition of one of the key components of the type A profile, something that is now referred to as toxic hostility. And this is this attributional style, where anything that happens in the world around you is proof that they're out to get you, they're out to get you preferentially, and the only way to protect yourself is having the knives out 24-7. This is, you know, you pick the wrong line in the supermarket and you want to kill the son of a bitch, get behind the cash register, come on, come on, I have a one o'clock appointment, no, don't ask her how she is today, come on, come on, come on. If this is what you're doing, if this is what you're doing, instead of checking out the Elvis sightings in the National Inquirer, your blood pressure is going to go up. And if this is what you're doing, every time somebody could have held the elevator door open for you, but didn't, you are going to cumulatively damage this system. And in lots of ways, the central question in this field now is insofar as you have this toxic hostility, what's worse for your heart expressing the hostility or keeping it repressed inside? What's clear is expressing it is worse for everybody else's blood vessels there, but what is the cost of repressing strong physiological sort of emotions? Okay, so that's stress and heart disease. Actually, one might wonder how is it that these guys ever figured out about type A personality? How did they discover this? And I got to hear this story some years ago from the horse's mouth himself. Meyer Friedman, cardiology first described it, died a few years ago in his 90s and was seeing patients up until the end. And as he used to say, I'm still type A, but I'm a type A tortoise now. And here was the story he would tell about the discovery of type A personality. Okay, 1950s, he and his partner had this cardiology practice, San Francisco, everything was fine. There was this one weird problem they were having, which was they were spending a fortune having to reupholster the arm chairs in the waiting room. What is this about? Who knows? It's just part of the overhead. Every month the upholsterer comes in, a chair or two to fix. One month, the upholsterer is on vacation, replacement upholsterer comes in, takes one look at the chairs and discovers type A personality says, what is wrong with your patients? Nobody wears our chairs this way. And this is what it looked like. What you see is the front two inches of the seat, the front two inches of the armrest are torn to shreds, like beavers are in their dwarf beavers all night going on there. What is this? This is what a type A individual looks like when they are not just literally figuratively but literally clawing at the arms of their chair there. This is them squishing and moving around. This is what an individual with a type A profile looks like when they are sitting in their cardiologists office waiting for getting a result. This is exactly what it looks like. So what is supposed to happen at that point of science is working correctly? Like freedmen should grab them like, good God, man, what you have discovered or like midnight conferences between upholsterers and cardiologists or teams, teams of idealistic young upholsterers sweeping across America and coming back with the news that no, you don't find chairs like these in podiatrist's offices. That's what should have happened. What actually happens, here's where Dr. Friedman starts looking all sheepish. He says, I told my nurse, get this man out of my face. I'm this important doctor. He's wasting my time giving him his damn check. He was too type A to listen to the guy. And it was years before he collaborated with a psychologist and out popped this profile and he said, oh my God, the upholsterer was right to this day. Nobody knows who that guy was. Let's see. It's early afternoon. I am willing to bet there in some bar and the marina or something right now, there's some 95 year old retired upholsterer who's just drinking away there and you get him started and he's going to go on and on about how he discovered type A personality. Absolutely true. So one, one of those dark moments in the history of science.