 I know when a lot of us think about purpose, we often default to spirituality for our answers. So Johnny and I were both really fascinated around your delve into the science behind purpose. We'd love to hear a little bit of the backstory of how this book came together for you. Yeah. So this book, I wrote this basically out of because of an existential crisis I had when I was a medical student. I was studying, I went to medical swim Baltimore at Johns Hopkins and for whatever reason at this time in my life, I was really troubled with the implications of science and particularly the theory of evolution that seemed to be, from my perception at least in conflict with the sense that I had, that most of us had that life has value and meaning and purpose. And I laugh about it now. I remember a particular quote from a professor many, many decades ago in the mid 20th century who wrote, in the inevitable march of evolution, life is of profound unimportance, a mere eddy in the primeval slime. And that just kind of, you know, it's like, oh, nothing matters, you know, terrible. Is this really what biology and science more broadly implies about human nature and our existence? Well, I know in my studying of evolution and undergrad, a lot of it. It was centered around the randomness. And I think for many who look at and think about evolution, it does feel random, purposeless, and up to chance. And you argue that actually there's a lot of science behind the fact that it's not as random as many of us think. What is going on in evolution that would point us in the direction that maybe there is a higher order? That's a great point because that was something that was kind of like, you know, are we really just, you know, tens of thousands of intricate molecular accidents that somehow came together? And there's lots of good data and arguments these days that that's not necessarily the case. A lot of this work, probably more than any other person, this is the work of a biologist named Simon Conway Morris. He is at the University of Cambridge and he has noticed patterns throughout nature that many creatures develop the same things independently over and over and over and over again. So maybe just take a couple examples. So birds, bats and butterflies, they all have wings and the capacity for flight. But biologists tell us that through the long course of evolution, you know, their most common recent ancestor did not have flight or wings. And so they each independently developed this, this ability, you know, as another example, when you look at a shark and you look at a dolphin, they look really, really similar. And, you know, someone who doesn't have any knowledge of biology would think, oh, they probably, you know, they're very closely related. Well, that's not the case. A dolphin is a mammal. It has a skeleton, a bone, a shark is a fish. It has a skeleton of cartilage and, you know, dolphin. They think that the ancestors of daltons were land dwelling and somehow migrated back into the water, but they each kind of have this body shape that is, you know, extremely similar. You know, another example is eyes. You know, we all have, we have eyes and the estimate from biologists that eyes have evolved independently about 40 different times. So, you know, you get the sense that there is a pattern here and it's not just kind of one thing after another, but that there are these principles, these higher-order principles that are constraining evolution to go in certain ways and not others. And with that conclusion, so looking at it as not random, how do we draw that back to human purpose? Because I think, for many of us, it feels currently that science is almost pitted against religion and for some, science has become a bit of a religion. And I'm curious how you now taking this view and evolving yourself around the viewpoint of evolution, how you can take that and bring it to me and Johnny sitting here and finding our own purpose. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one part of the equation. Okay. There were two major things about evolution that bothered me. One was the randomness piece. And I'll totally, you know, to be intellectually honest, just that, just saying it's not random doesn't necessarily cut it to save it. By the way, this, you know, Richard Dawkins, who's probably our generation's most outspoken atheist would agree with this. And in fact, he kind of proved this point when he asked one of his colleagues, he said, can you think of anything that has evolved only once and his friend can only think of a handful of times? So, what I'm saying so far is not in any way go against, you know, what is pretty much mainstream thinking in evolutionary biology. But that doesn't, again, prove, okay, you know, we have some purpose. It could just be, you know, the cold in a different universe that has laws. So to kind of continue a search for, is there actually an overarching purpose and meaning to our existence, we got to turn into human nature. And this relates to another part of what I thought, at least before I really delved into the details. This was another part of evolution that was kind of like, this doesn't seem right to me. And it had to do with what it implies about human nature. Charles Darwin published his most influential book, The Origin of Species in 1859. A couple years later, another biologist coined this phrase, survival of the fittest. Probably everyone's heard of it. And biologists don't tend to use that term too much today, but it is somewhat instructive. And it also kind of gets to this sense that a lot of people who don't have much training or understand this, that they think, okay, evolution implies that we're selfish, that we're, you know, aggressive and greedy and so forth. And if that's true, that's kind of a pretty depressing view of human nature and a bitter pill to swallow. Going back to Richard Dawkins, sorry, not to pick on him too much, but, you know, probably his most famous book is called The Selfish Gene. And most of the book is not necessarily about selfish behavior, but it's an interesting title. But in the first pages of that book, he says something to the effect that, look, if you're trying to build a good society, one in which people interact and cooperate, you're not going to get any help from biology because we are born selfish, okay? It turns out that it's more complicated than that. And I think anyone who observes human nature recognizes, well, people aren't just selfish. They also have a capacity to interact in ways that are really altruistic, you know, selfless. And nature seems to have shaped us in ways in which we have both capacities. We have a deep capacity for selfishness, but also altruism. And, you know, this seems to be a cruel kind of twist of fate. And this is one of the reasons that life is such a struggle. Because in a very real way, we are kind of pulled in different directions. So if we look at other animals, where does altruism come into play? I think a lot of us view other animals as entirely selfish and survival of the fittest, but humans seem to have been evolving in a direction where altruism is actually rewarded as we're in tight-knit, close communities and our populations continue to grow. Particularly, you see this in families, but also there's a whole group of animals that are sometimes called youth social. These are things like ants and bees. They behave in incredibly cooperative ways. You know, we kind of rival them with our level of cooperation. So I wouldn't say it's just humans, because there's lots of examples from the natural world where, you know, creatures interact in ways that are altruistic. It's not totally unique to humans. You're kind of, you're putting your finger on this debate that has gone on about are we just advanced animals or are we different? You know, I think it's a bit of a false dichotomy because, yes, we are different in our abilities and in degrees, but if you differ so much in a degree, it's a totally different thing. Right? I think it's a little bit of a silly debate to take because clearly we're very different than animals. You know, no other animal can make cell phones or send a creature to the moon or perform heart surgery, but you know, there are a lot of shared characteristics that we have. So hopefully I've answered your question a little bit. Yeah, I am interested to know how you view the duality of those two forces. And there's a few examples of this in the book that you give, not just altruism and selfishness, but certainly, if we think about some of our family or friends or colleagues, we can definitely identify the selfish and we can definitely identify the altruistic. So how do we split the difference and what might be going on there in terms of our decision making? Yeah, well, what I think is I think that we all have capacities of each within us and that there are certain frameworks that are going to help us to bring out one versus the other. There's a psychologist, Jonathan Haidt. You may have heard of him. He writes a lot. He's got a wonderful metaphor that I think is really instructive to this. So he has this metaphor that he calls of the rider and the elephant. OK, and that's how he describes human nature that, you know, we do have control, but we're kind of like the deliberate part of our decision making process, like this person who's riding an elephant. And as long as the elephant doesn't, you know, have a desire of his own, we can tell the elephant which way to go. But if the elephant really wants to do something, we're kind of powerless to pull it back and rein it in the other way. So I think this is a really good metaphor for human nature because there are certain contexts in which that altruism is more likely to flourish and in other contexts in which, you know, jealousy or selfishness or or something else tends to tends to predominate. And so identifying those contexts, I think, is a really important kind of social goal and goal of social science. So free will is a highly debated topic. But, you know, at the same time, it's kind of it's kind of at the root of what we see is human beings, you know, intrinsically, the way we view each other, we see each other as free and autonomous beings. And there's something about it that is just seems to be fundamental. A lot of philosophers and scientists have wrestled with this issue for a long time. There was a scientist, fairly well-known scientist, Robert Spolsky, who came out with a book in the fall of 2023, basically saying that, yeah, you know, free will is just an illusion, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I take this head on and I think there's good data to suggest that he is not quite right. I agree with him that there are lots of things that factor into the decisions that we make. But that doesn't mean that things are 100 percent determined beforehand, that this conversation that we're having right now is not inevitable. And it was not somehow pre-written or pre-ordained into the big bang. So happy to dig in to kind of what what evidence suggests that. The religious aspect of free will is certainly not determined either. Even within Christianity, there are those sects that believe that you're just going to live out God's plan. And then there are those in certain sects of Christianity that are like, no, you do have free choice and free will and your actions are going to determine your result. So, even in a religious aspect, it's certainly not. Correct. Correct. And I think what you're referring to probably dates back to John Calvin and this notion that, you know, whatever happens is God will and how can God be all powerful if we also have free choice and that sort of thing. So I, you know, this book, as you've noted, there's a there's a deep kind of religious implication to it. I mostly kind of shy away from delving into theology, but just like, you know, trying to appeal to the sense that most most people have that life has value and meaning and so forth and that they're, you know, there is some sort of higher, higher purpose or higher power. What the science says, my interpretation of science are two things. And when you talk about free will, inevitably you have to come up to a kind of boring but necessary task of defining your terms. Because when we talk about free will, some people mean one thing, some people mean another thing. For me, at least it's kind of built into the term itself that the free part that there are some actions that are not deterministically tied to the past. And there's come some wiggle room in the cause and effect relationship that is so important to, you know, how we often view the world. The other part is that the will part is that we can with our thoughts control our behaviors and our actions. And I think there's, there's, there's good, good scientific evidence that both of those propositions hold that behavior, even at, even in relatively simple organisms, for instance, in one experiment, biologists have a leech and they, and the leech can respond in one of two different ways to a stimulus. It can either swim or it can crawl. And they'll, you know, they'll set up the experiment to where the conditions are exactly the same, but they can't predict is the leech going to swim or crawl. They'll do it, you know, it's kind of a probabilistic thing. And they'll say, well, you know, 60% in time, it'll do one thing, 40% will do another. They'll do experiments with other organisms, like a worm or a cockroach, something like that. And there seems to be this unpredictability about it that no matter what, if you, if you control the conditions exactly the same way, even with the same organism, it will behave in different ways. And so, you know, as you get to humans, it becomes more and more complex. But my logic is that, look, if these simple organisms behave in ways that are fundamentally indeterministic, do we really think that humans are going to be fully deterministic? And I think that's kind of a relatively straightforward conclusion that we're not deterministic. I think we have to look at it in a species aspect as well. I mean, time plays a role. I mean, when we look at it at an individual level, that is certainly different from a group level, and then from a group level to a civilizational level. And so who's to say, like what aspects of free will are we going to measure? You're going to get different answers from an individual level to a group or civilizational level. So that makes it incredibly difficult because if you're going to argue one, I'm like, okay, well, let me argue on the individual level and show you why that doesn't work here. So again, that brings the disconnect and all the confusion of, okay, well, then we have to set and define what we're going to discuss and what that means. So we're not going to be able to agree on anything. You're right. The behavioral tendencies can emerge at different levels. So if you're talking about the way one organism behaves versus like a family or even a group or social, larger social group of organisms, there may be different patterns and principles that apply. So it's a very complex concept. It's a fascinating one. So looking back at this human nature and its role in purpose, there are a couple other examples that you give in the book of this duality. So we talked a little bit about selfishness and altruism, but one that comes up a lot. And certainly, Johnny and I talk a little bit about dating in particular is this idea of monogamy and promiscuity. And we're seeing now a rise in secularism. We're seeing along with that a rise in polyamory and some alternatives to monogamy. And I'm curious how you view that duality when it comes to love and lust in humans and how that might actually unlock purpose in us. Getting right to the heart of it. It's a dicey subject. It's obviously a subject of great interest to a lot of people. But there is this, even to that level, the way that we approach using biological terms, reproduction and mating and so forth, there's a sort of dichotomy. When you think about potential sexual partners, again, just to try to stick to maybe sterile biological language, most people, they have some desire and it's greater, it's more pronounced in men for reasons we can get into through through evolution or psychology, but have a desire for a variety, a diversity of partners. But there's also this expectation that we want commitment. And when you look at the data, there's this dichotomy and you can't really, from a societal level, you can't really satisfy both simultaneously. And every person has to try to make that decision as to which way are they going to go. And as you've noted, the topic of polyamory seems to be lots of different places in the news and the media. There are good reasons from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology that this is going to be a tricky road to go down. I think this is not a way that we want to go as a society for the benefit, primarily of women, because this can lead to a lot of violence. A big factor in domestic violence is sexual jealousy. And there's this kind of inextricable link between promiscuity and sexual jealousy that people might have experienced with this. When you learn of the infidelity on the part of your spouse, especially for men, there is this almost reflexive jealousy that arises and this in many ways can be, in some instances, can even be lethal and lead to violence. So it's a very tricky relationship that I think we just want to think about really critically as this discussion goes on about how relationships are formed and so forth. So, Sam, with that point and the trajectory that we're heading now culturally, where do you see that going? I don't know, but here's what I predict will happen. If it becomes more and more prevalent, right now it tends to be not exclusive, but a lot of times these cultural trends happen among the most educated, among the quote-unquote elites, and then it might trickle down. And people with more, say, impulse control and so forth may be able to make it work at some level, but as this trickles down to people with less education, maybe less ability to control their impulses and so forth, I think there is going to be more domestic violence. I think there's going to be more gender inequality. If we're trying to move forward in gender inequality, I think this is going to be a bit of a step backwards. I think there's going to be maybe an expectation. If it becomes more and more predominant, more prevalent, there's going to be an expectation on the part of men, more than women, that, hey, let's have an open relationship. I think that's going to be it's going to be tricky. A key point you make in the book is that if we look across cultures, this pattern of monogamy is clear. So I know all of us are bringing cultural context to this conversation, and that cultural context could be religious influence based on the way we are raised, the communities we're a part of, you mentioned another culture, the elites, but I just want to point out that what is clear in the science is this pattern of monogamy in humans is prevalent across all cultures. Religion builds morality upon monogamy and the nuclear family in a lot of different instances of different religions completely. So there is a signal that is present in human nature that science is measuring across all of these cultures that leads to this conclusion of monogamy. I think it's one of our great social achievements as a human race. Biologists tell us that our closest relatives, biologically, are chimpanzees. And chimpanzees have basically they have sex indiscriminately. And so sometimes people point to that and say, well, we're just kind of like more advanced chimpanzees. One of the things that we often don't recognize how good we have it as human beings, do either of you have just to guess if we applied our notion of say domestic violence chimpanzees, do you have any estimate or guess at what proportion of female chimpanzees at some point in their lives experience what we would frame as domestic violence? Nearly 100. Yeah, 100%. And I would say that those are linked. And a lot of times violence is used by males to control reproduction and reproductive access and so forth. And again, I totally agree with you, AJ, that we do have a deep capacity for monogamy and what you know, anthropologists would call long term pair bonding. We also have a capacity to not to kind of disregard that. I think it doesn't take long to look around the tabloids and see examples where people are behaving in other ways. It's obviously a sensitive issue. I think it's going to be good for society. It's going to be good for children. It's going to be good for women if we can continue on this road toward monogamy. It's not easy, especially with some of the cultural changes that have happened in the last decades, at least in the West. But I think it's a fight worth continuing. In a sense, it requires us to overcome a deep kind of propensity within human nature. To bring it home and to get back to this idea of what actually is the purpose of existence, to me it seems that look, the way that nature has shaped us leaves us pulled in these different directions. We have these differing capacities within us. When you combine this, again, my conclusion is that on some level, we have this ability to choose free will. To me, it seems like life is a test that we have to kind of choose between these competing impulses within us and it seems at least on some level that life is a test. We've had on Dr. Robert Waldinger to talk about the Harvard Adult Developmental Study, and I know that's a key chapter in the book. I'd love to segue into how does this look from purpose from a personal level, but then also what is this good for society level that is linked, obviously, into human nature because it's clear through all of this that we have thrived as humans in civilizations. It's not been on our own, completely isolated, and it's not been in small tribes trying to fight off woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. We've been able to survive and strengthen in forming civilizations, and a lot of this meaning and purpose is tied to the human nature around creating these civilizations. Yeah, and also at a fundamental level are immediate social groups. When you ask people what is most meaningful about life in these large series that, say, the Pew Foundation does, and you give them a blank answer, so it's not necessarily multiple choice, they just can write whatever they want. Most people list in some form their personal relationships. I think that is revealing. As you've noted, a lot of people will just say, well, should I just work as hard as I can, give as much money as I can? There are some kind of cognitive illusions that nature has in a sneaky way built within us because we're not good at one of the psychological principles that is really interesting is this notion of affective forecasting. That is the ability to predict how we're going to feel in a given situation. What that means, by extension, is that we're not great at predicting what's going to make us happy. Let me qualify it a little bit because we're mostly good at predicting whether a situation is going to help us to feel positive or negative emotions, but the intensity and the duration of those emotions were not great at. So this was driven home by an influential study in the 1970s with the provocative title of lottery winners and accident victims, where researchers, they went and they assessed these two very different groups of people, ones that had suffered terrible accidents that left them quadriplegic or paraplegic, and the other group, those who had won the lottery. This wasn't immediately after the event of interest, but some time. And so if I ask you, would you rather win the lottery or suffer an accident? You say, well, of course, I'm going to win the lottery because my happiness is going to be better. But in terms of the ability of these two different groups of people to enjoy everyday things, there wasn't really any difference. And that is because of a related principle called hedonic adaptation. This notion that for a lot of things, after a period of time, our happiness set point goes back to where it was. And that's certainly the case with things like money, getting a promotion, that sort of thing, is yeah, they make us feel better for a period, but then we kind of settle back in. In a way, there's a good part about this because it also means that we can adjust in the other way, and that if we go through some adversity that we can adapt and prove resilient and adjust to difficult circumstances. So it's not all bad, but there is a kind of a maddening aspect that depicts us almost as like hamsters running on this happiness treadmill. But the key exception is relationships. And again, for good and for bad, a positive, warm, intimate relationship can really increase our happiness set point, whereas a toxic one, you don't really adapt to that. Toxic relationships kind of have this enduring negative impact on well-being. No, it's a great point. And I think the inverse is also something that's fascinating to me. So we had Daniel Pink on the show to talk about regret. And many of us end-of-life situations feel intense regret on the singular pursuit of achievement that often leads us to grow distant from those relationships in our life, friends, family, loved ones. And even upon achieving that, that regret dampens us later in life when we recognize the value in those relationships. So it's happening on both ends. It's impacting our happiness, but it's also that pursuit of achievement is impacting our regret later. Yeah. Well, it's also showing up in all the studies that we're seeing. We've talked about it on this show for a long time now, which is the loneliness epidemic. And there are multiple reasons why we were going down that path and and we need to correct that. And due to that, we have a sicker society. We have a mentally unclear society as well. And all these things are contributing to our culture. So what I'd love to unpack for our audience is the overlap of relationships and purpose. Because I think a lot of us, when we hear purpose, it does draw out individual viewpoints of, again, achievement, success, things that I need to do. It's something that we even sought to find that purpose. And in actuality, a big argument in the book is that purpose is found through relationships and through these social ties and connections. And then that has a great impact on society as a whole. There's certainly an aspect of human nature that there can be a purpose in attaining individual recognition or status. And there is a measure of kind of satisfaction that can come from that. But it tends to be dwarfed by this sense of purpose and meaning that comes from, I am part of a larger group. I am contributing to a cause that is greater than myself. And that's all about social cohesion and how we relate to each other. And that my impact is not just about me, but it's about kind of the greater social good. So this just, again, it goes back to relationships. One thing that I think is somewhat unique about the argument I'm trying to make is where that comes from in a kind of biological evolutionary history. And a lot of it comes from, if we want to go down this path, if we don't, that's fine. But the way that our families are formed and the way that our offspring are so helpless when they are born. Yeah, I would love to unpack that. And I know we've touched on attachment theory on this show in the past with other guests, but I thought it was really unique to bring it into the conversation of purpose. Because I think it's a popular trending idea on social media. And a lot of people are aware of attachment. But I had never thought of it in the greater value of purpose. Yeah, I think they're related. So just to give a little context, in the early 1900s in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, there was this sense that relationships were just a means to an end. The baby loved the mom because the mom gave the baby milk. The husband loved the wife because the wife gave him sex. They have the various sort of kind of transactional nature to it. One of my kind of academic heroes is this guy named John Bulby, who was a psychiatrist, a British psychiatrist, and who really kind of gave rise to this attachment theory. And he worked with, he worked not only people who studied humans, but people who studied animals. And he recognized, you know, even in animals, relationships were not just a means to an end that animals would engage in behaviors to strengthen relationships just for the purposes of strengthening relationships. And the way that he characterized this is the root of this comes from the parent-child attachment, right? When our, and our offspring are probably the most extreme example of this is that they are extremely helpless when they are born. So everything a human baby does, you know, cry, coo, smile, is meant to draw the parent to the child. And that, you know, Bulby reason was adaptive. And you know, it had to be like that because the infant was so helpless. You know, those who study infant development sometimes refer to the first, say, three to six months of life as the fourth trimester, because our babies are born half-baked. And so, you know, conversely, the parent had to develop this deep kind of love and attachment towards the child. It's not just a one-way street here. You know, certainly the child looks out for, you know, the parent's watchful care, but the parent, you know, anyone who's been a parent, you're looking at your three-year-old making sure they're not running in the street, that sort of thing. There's this, there's this kind of like, they're a small attachment of you. And there's a, there's kind of an evolutionary link to that, right? That some becomes somewhat obvious that that strongest form of attachment and love and altruism so forth comes from the way that, you know, the way that nature-shaped our, our family relationships. Something I think is really interesting about that is that it's kind of inevitably linked with, with the challenge that it is, right? If you ask a parent, you know, what is the most challenging thing you've done, nine times out of ten, they'll say, raise my kid. If you say, okay, what's the most rewarding thing you've done? They'll say nine times out of ten, raise my kid, right? And you can't, you can't kind of get away from those. Let me, let me just, if it's all right, dry this point home with this, a kind of kooky thought experiment. Imagine what our social lives would be like if we were, say, seahorses, okay? So seahorses are different and they have male pregnancy, which would probably automatically lead to some very different parental leave policies. But also the ways they're different is that they have like 2,000 babies at once. Part of that that's different is that they don't have any investment in their kids once they're born. It's kind of like, okay, they leave the male womb and goodbye, good luck, you know, hope you don't get eaten. Please make me proud. You know, no human being knows exactly what it's like to be a seahorse, but it's a good bet that they don't really care, have the same deep love and concern for their, their children, their offspring that the human parents do. And so kind of at this confluence of, of psychology and evolution, you know, this, this, there can't be this deep love without compelling sacrifice. It's almost like a, a cosmic near spiritual truth. Does that make sense? Yeah, there's another aspect to that as well. And Sam, perhaps you could cite the study. I, we've talked about it on the show, but there is a certain level of happiness that we're all able to achieve. And that's going to go up and down as things change and we get older and there's going to be those hurdles. But those who do have children have much higher ends of happiness due to having that relationship, but their overall quality of life isn't as high and happiness as the person without the child. And I laugh about this because of course, when I was younger, I never thought about having children. And now that I'm, I'm older and there's certain aspects of that that I, I do wish that I would get to experience and perhaps I will, but you know, but that, that shows exactly of that attachment and what that delivers in us and our quality of life. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of studies about this. And I think this is where it's kind of really important to try to parse out our terms, right? We use these things like happiness, well-being, you know, good emotion, right? So parenting is not, like if you think of happiness as like reading a book on the beach, that's not parenting. Yeah. I have five children that are 14 and under, you know, so I, you know, it's, it's a busy life. It's, but you know, when you use terms like rewarding, that, you know, that seems to kind of really get to this, this matter more. There's a great book. It was written by a woman named Jennifer Sr. 2014 or so. And I really liked the title. It said, all joy and no fun, the paradox of modern parenting. And, and the only qualm I have with that is the word modern because as I've kind of laid out here, it's always been a challenge. It's kind of like evolutionarily written into our natures that raising children is going to take a lot of sacrifice and effort. Those rewards of joy are that much greater. And why that people without children are never going to be able to experience. And I know from my friends who have recently had children that it does give a lot of purpose and meaning to their life and often leads to men investing more energy into providing into their career and also influencing this great society. And I know there's some great science around in particular dads and children. And I love for you to unpack extending beyond the good life what the great society actually means with all of this purpose. I think as you guys have pointed out as episodes that I listened to and prepped for talking with you today, there's this sometimes illusion we have that I can be happy all the time or I can have positive emotion all the time. And that's just not how reality is, right? And so, you know, sometimes in our efforts to avoid a negative emotion, we will maybe avoid a, you know, a longer term greater payoff emotionally. And I think, you know, that you see that a little bit, right? The fertility rate has fallen quite a bit. And now is hovering around, I would say 1.7, 1.8 children per woman. And that's lower than if you ask women, how many children would you like to have? It's almost like a full child more than it actually is. So, for lots of complicated reasons, we, you know, families have been having fewer children, women have been having fewer children in the West. And I think that's kind of related to this. So, I am trying to draw back to, you know, biology and evolution, right? When you think of like, is there anything more evolutionary evolutionarily motivating than providing for your offspring? And as you mentioned, AJ, that you have friends who have children and it kind of makes them view work in a different way. It's not just about me now. It's like, okay, I got to take care of my kids, right? And so, when I go to work, it's imbued with a deeper sense of purpose than it was when it was just like, I'm trying to, you know, be carefree and a bachelor and so forth. So, I think those principles are related. What I'd love to hear from you, looking back at the research and everything you did and putting together this book, what would your advice be for Sam sitting there in med school being leveled in evolution class around this concept of purpose? Because it's something that we hear a lot in our clients and especially our younger clients who are fresh out of college and looking to find that purpose and often hearing advice on shows like ours that you need purpose to find meaning in life and to ultimately create the good life for yourself. But that concept of actually finding it for yourself is challenging. And many in our audience would love a map. So, what is your advice to Sam sitting in that med school class? Well, there's a tendency among some in our western culture now, especially those who are really driven to sequence these major life milestones, right? I'm going to get through, in my case, you know, it was medical school and then, you know, us doctors, we go to school like forever. And so, after med school, there's residency and there's a tendency to try to sequence those things and say, you know, I am, you know, after I'm done with all my medical training, after I'm stable financially, then I can focus on relationships, maybe a family, that sort of thing. It's tricky to say this is a, you know, this is an approach that's going to work for everyone. But I think sometimes it's, it's better if you don't sequence them. If you, you know, if you look at, okay, let's let me focus. I don't have to focus exclusively on work or school right now. Let me also have time in the evenings where I can try to develop longstanding personal relationships. I mean, hopefully, you know, with a romantic partner, I know dating these days is a tricky thing. I was fortunate to get married right before I started medical school. So, some scholars who study marriage will refer to this as, you know, a capstone marriage. That's when you kind of go through the career and then you have a capstone marriage or a cornerstone, meaning that you get married a little bit earlier. I'm not going to be so presumptuous to say, you know, this is when people should be married, that sort of thing. But you don't need to put it off. And in some ways, I think it's better to think about it earlier and not to, not to sequence these, these events in our, in our lives. Certainly, if you wait to form deep personal relationships too long, you know, other opportunities might, might pass by for you to, to do this thing. That's what I wish I would have known when I was younger. And, and, and just to kind of, you got to remind yourself, look, it's the relationships. And you know, I'm by, by standards of Yale professors, I'm fairly religious. And I feel like that's one of the reasons that I, I go to religious services on a regular basis to remind me, look, it's the relationship dummy. It's not your career. I mean, that's important, but you need to have a balance and a focus for this, right? And biology, there's a word for imbalance. It's cancer, right? When one cell, you know, becomes so dominant in the organism, it, it can overtake and, and starve the other tissues and parts of the body. So you don't want work to become a cancer. I mean, our brains finish growing and developing late 20s, 27, I believe is, is awesome ages. And part of that in getting married early is that those pathways, and there's a lot of imprinting left to do, and there's pathways that are being built. And if you're building those with your significant other, and then having a family together, those pathways and are, are that much stronger. And the imprinting is that much stronger. And not to say that you can't build that relationship after 27, but, but your, your brain is fully developed. And we see it just in making friends as you get older is more difficult. In fact, we help our clients do that because it is difficult. And there's a reason why it is better. There's lots of reasons for a lot of people that it's going to be better to get married early to have children early for those specific biological reasons. Yeah. Yeah. And this religious principle of investing in your community, I think is another very important part of this finding purpose. And I know we see it in a lot of our clients, this lone wolf mindset that if I just self achieve and I reach ranks and degrees and status personally, then I can put that down and I can start to invest in relationships when in actuality, it's investing in your community that creates those relationships that helps you elucidate that purpose for yourself. And much of this purpose is tied to being in service of others, which is why most modern religious philosophies that is a cornerstone of it is the community building aspect because it is so closely linked to purpose. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with everything you just said. So I'd love to hear what in this research of this book was most surprising for you, especially because I feel you did such a great job of looking closely at the science but having this religious grounding. And I know as I started the show with, many in our audience might feel that they're almost at odds that you're picking one side or the other. But in actuality, there is a lot of overlap in the science that you researched in this book and brought forward. I feel like what was most surprising for me was the strength of the research that links marriage with well-being and happiness. That was just something that blew me away. And part of it was because it was the opposite of what I was reading in the newspaper or the prevailing sentiment from cultural and opinion leaders that if you want to be happy, you need to be carefree and maximize your freedom. And that is certainly not what the data say. Probably the two most, the two modifiable factors that most impact mental health, well-being, happiness all together are marriage and actually religious participation. And a lot of that has to do with relationships. And it's Facebook and social media, there can be blessings from them, but there's a lack of depth in relationships that are formed in social media context that things like marriage and community groups, religious participation, the depth of those relationships is really much more gratifying than any sort of Facebook friendship that you come across. A lot of people has probably been said, social media is a little bit like the junk food form of relationships. There's this aspect to it that tastes good, but it has essentially no lasting nutritional value. And part of that is because I think in part these things weren't around when our ancestors were evolving. They're an imitation for social interaction that our ancient brains were accustomed to and essentially evolved for. I have to remind people that this is an experiment. We don't know what the results are of all this technology. It's been very difficult to talk about some of these things and certainly a very difficult book to write in today's climate with all of this because it does make things difficult. And a lot of the paths that this technology has put us on has been very anti-human or even anti-relationship at certain points. And that's difficult. We have to understand that and navigate that. I mean, just for instance, there was a class action lawsuit dropped on dating apps last week due to them misleading the public. But we're now 10 years into those marketing campaigns and we're seeing the results of how those marketing campaigns to get rid of the stigma of online dating and what they replaced it with has resulted in. And we have to be able to fix that if we're going to be a healthy society. I think one of the ways that we can approach this and certainly there are benefits. I don't want to say I'm anti-technology, that sort of thing. My extended family, my wife's extended family, we live across the US. We'll have a Zoom call once a month and the cousins can talk to each other. That's a great benefit in that way. But one of the things I think we need to think about is we need to constantly be asking ourselves how is this similar or how is this different to how humans interacted, you know, anciently. And in the ways that we can make it more like that, I think it's going to make it better. So one of the things that is pretty intuitive is that there's a lot of toxicity that exists on the internet. A lot of this has to do with anonymity. If you have a username that has no link to your personal identity, then there's really no way that there's going to be any consequences for you saying all sorts of toxic stuff. People say things to each other on the internet that they would never say to each other in person. And that's because our subconsciousness kind of dehumanizes each other when we don't see each other's faces and so forth that we subconsciously forget that behind this chat is an actual person. And so if we can, can we make a policy where whatever social media platform is, you have to have a picture and it has to be prominent and it has to be linked to who you actually are. That would, it's not going to solve all the problems, but in a subtle way is going to decrease that toxicity that sometimes happens. Yeah, I think our view on it is technology should be additive to your life. It should be additive to your community. It should be additive to your relationships. The fear that we have and there's a recent article in Atlantic about this loneliness epidemic is it's substituting the third place, the religious gathering, the entertainment that we also gained from those weekly sermons and from our pastor and our religious leaders has now been completely substituted in our life by the screen. And that screen is readily available 24 seven, whereas we only had that opportunity on Saturdays or Sundays to get together with our community in a safe space to build and foster relationships be entertained by our religious leaders and then come away with that village that helps support us in child rearing. And as we become more and more isolated in our career, moving away from our friends and family, and that screen is ever present, that technology acting as a substitute as we're seeing has a cascade of negative impacts on our lives. And it does bring us further away when substituting from finding our purpose. Yeah, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. So with this book, I'd love for audience to find out more about you and where they can purchase this book as it comes out a little bit later next month. Sounds great. You can visit my personal website, SamuelT Wilkinson.com. You can also look me up on the Yale webpage. The book is available wherever books are generally sold. Thank you for joining us, Sam. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Sam. Thanks very much for having me.