 Welcome to the show, Charles. It's great to have you back. Thanks for having me. I'm really psyched to be here. Yeah, we've really enjoyed your podcast and researching for the show. And last time we talked about building habits and breaking bad habits. And we're halfway through 2020. Obviously, a lot of time to create some new habits and break some bad habits. And what have you worked on so far? A lot of time. So let's see, just a month ago, I moved from Brooklyn, where I'd lived for the last 16 years to Santa Cruz, California, because my wife got a new job. And so that's obviously moving during a pandemic. It has its own challenges to begin with. We had to sort of move the entire podcast operation. So I had to set up a new studio. But on the other hand, being here and just being in a pandemic, it kind of gives us this like wonderful opportunity to create new habits, because all our old cues and rewards are suddenly gone. And so it's like a blank slate in a lot of ways for building new behaviors. Yeah, we've talked to a lot of our clients who not having a commute, have reoriented their morning routine, their evening routine. I just wanted to add to that as well. When this all came down, how long it was going to last was a bit nebulous for everybody. But we all sort of had an innate feeling that this was going to be more of a marathon than a sprint. And with that comes the psychological experiment that none of us had asked for of being in isolation, not having having our routines taken from us. And for myself and my own sanity, I realized that building any more new routines and figuring out a way to keep my old habits was going to be beneficial for all of this. And my friends and the people who I've seen around me who thought this was just going to be Netflix, binging for a couple of weeks and back to work, they're having major problems. Absolutely. And this totally ties, I think you're exactly right. And this ties into like what we know about psychology, right? Like we need routines. I mean, in many ways, routines are kind of when we say like what our life is, what we're really talking about is we're talking about these routines that we do almost thoughtlessly. And when those routines suddenly get torn away from us because, you know, all of a sudden you're not going to work and you get to sit in your pajamas all day long. Or when we kind of like give ourselves mental permission that we're like, Oh, now we get to play hooky from our routines. It can feel okay at first. But after a while, your brain craves structure. And so what happens is that structure emerges whether we want it to or not. Now it might be a structure that we choose, right? Like, Oh, I wake up every morning, I go for a run, like a means that the rest of the day feels pretty good. Or it might be a structure that just emerges on its own, which is like, I turn on Netflix, Netflix, I put on Twitter and then like suddenly seven hours has gone. And I can't remember exactly what happened except I was very angry during periods of that. And so what's really important is during these periods when everything suddenly up for grabs is to see like this is actually kind of an opportunity. But it's only an opportunity if I take advantage of it. Otherwise, it's something that can like actually undermine. And you brought up a good point around psychological cues and wearing your pajamas because many of us don't realize that it actually influences us mentally to stay in our sleepwear when we're working from home. We don't realize the psychological impact that those cues are having on us. Totally. Or even just changing rooms. So we did on my on my podcast how to we did an episode about how to work from home, like the right way. And we brought in someone who's an actual like workplace design expert. And we were asking him for advice. Like, what is the what is the thing that we need to know? And he said, Well, the most important thing is when in your normal day, you have certain behaviors that are associated with certain places. Like, not only do you move to go to work usually, but oftentimes when you're at work, you move inside your workplace for different types of activities. You go to a meeting room to have a conversation with someone else. You sit at your desk in order to email, you walk outside in order to get a coffee. And those places are such strong cues that we're not even aware of them. Now, all of a sudden, if you're trapped inside your house, we're in this instinct to start saying like, Well, I guess like, I guess the couch is where I'm going to like watch TV. And I'm going to like fall asleep. And I'm going to like do work. And I'm going to drink a coffee here. That's a terrible idea. Like what this expert told us was trying to linear even if you're in a small apartment, trying to linear different parts of the house for different kinds of activities because just moving into that area of the house will make it easier to start. I completely agree. And I stumbled into that. I should have listened to the podcast and saved myself some hours of lost productivity. But it has been so key to have a designated space to do what I need to do to work and a designated space to relax. And I know I'm fortunate here in LA, New York City, some of our clients tougher to arrange it when your bedroom is your living room and everything else. But those cues are so key. Oh, I was just going to say, you know, we did this other episode that I think ties exactly into this. It was called how to stop procrastinating. And we had Dan Ariely. So the way that our show how to works is that someone calls in with a problem and we get an expert to solve their problems. And Dan Ariely that the behavioral economist was our expert. And one of the things he said, because I think the procrastination has been a real issue for people alongside being at home, right? How do I know when to start when to stop? Is he said the key for procrastination is very often two things. Number one, find small bites, right? Like during the pandemic, you are not going to write a novel. But today you could write a paragraph. And so like just focus on like just writing a paragraph. But number two, recognize that there used to be a bunch of novelty during our workday that's gone now. And those were mini brief rewards. You need to program those back in. So sitting on your couch for like 90 minutes working, that actually is much less healthy than sitting on your couch for 20 minutes. And then getting up, taking a walk around the house, getting a cup of coffee, letting yourself spend five minutes on Facebook in another room. If you build these little rewards that used to happen naturally work when someone would just stop by your desk, if you build them into your day now, it's going to make it easier for you to get things done and not to burn out. Now, in researching about your podcast, we discovered you actually learned how to survive a pandemic in September of 2019. Yeah. Yeah. So how prepared were you for this year? Okay, so let me just say material wise, super duper prepared, right? I had like, I had like all the like the talking points ready. I had like, you know, a couple gallons of water, lots of power bars. Emotionally, dude, it's just it's been rough, right? I don't know if you guys have kids, but like, particularly when you have children at home, and I think exactly Johnny, what you were saying before, the fact that it just seems to kind of, we don't know when the end is the fact that it like, at one point we were like, okay, this is going to be a tough couple of months. And now we're like, I guess it's a tough half a year. And now with school starting, some parents are like, it's a tough maybe the rest of my life. I have no idea. That's what makes it so hard. And, and I don't know that there's a way to emotionally prepare for that. Well, on top of that, when our government in the rest of the world seems to be playing it as they go along as well with no one to have a clear cut cut plan of this is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to get through and we're going to need buy in from everybody. We don't have any of that. And everyone is just winging it the best that they can. And we're going to find out which experiment worked. But that is not helping our emotional state as we work through this at all. In fact, it's contributing to making it worse. I think you're exactly right. And I think one of the things that like it's important to recognize now, and we've heard this in a couple of episodes on the podcast, is people saying, you know, it is totally normal to feel anxiety right now. Most of us actually feel anxiety just in normal life, right? Like during periods of the week. And most often that anxiety actually comes from uncertainty. It does not come from my mom's sick. It does not come from, you know, I'm not doing well at my job. It comes from my mom's sick. And I don't know what's going to happen next. I don't know if she's going to get better or worse. Or I don't feel like I'm doing well at my job. And I don't know what my boss thinks about that. That uncertainty is what creates anxiety. And even if you just have certainty, even if someone just tells you bad news, we tend to be less anxious once we know. And so the question is, not can you try and solve the problems in your life? Because the truth of the matter is, we're not going to know when the pandemic ends. We're not going to know how things go next. But can you identify places in your life where you are feeling anxiety because of uncertainty where you can resolve that uncertainty? So what am I going to do tomorrow morning first thing? That is an uncertainty you can absolutely resolve, right? I don't know if this pandemic, if this quarantine is going to go on for another six months. But what am I going to do next month when the kids go back to school to make sure that we don't all go nuts? That is an uncertainty that you can resolve. And so when we think of anxiety as not I need to solve a problem, but I need to find just find some certainty, whether it's a good uncertainty or a bad one, I think it really helps us deal with that mental stress. I think another big part for many of us is the mile markers that we have throughout our life to look forward to trips, events, graduations, weddings, and all of those being put on pause. We've lost that sense of timing. And without actually taking some time to carve it out again, and it's something that me and my fiance have done of actually saying, you know what, we're going to look forward to hike this weekend. And that's going to be our trip to help us mentally get through it because it is a long sludge. Absolutely. You know, it's funny that you mentioned this because like I would say over the last 10 years, the thing that like helps me day to day is I look at my calendar and I'm like, oh, like, like I always get together with my friends in Makatawa, Michigan, and in July. And I see that on the calendar. And you know, or the New Year's Eve, we, you know, New Year's we go to like surfing together. And of course, those have been erased from my calendar, right? Because everyone just kind of canceled everything. And so I actually emailed my friends and I was like, look, like, I think there's a way to responsibly do this. Let's just make plans. Like the plans might be as simple as like, we are going to like two families are going to get a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And we're both going to quarantine for 14 days ahead of time. But let's just have something on the calendar just to make it easier to go week to week. In fact, I think a lot of, you know, everyone's been doing sort of like social zoom calls, right? And social zoom calls like particularly like some of them are good, but some of them aren't. And particularly the big group ones are like kind of frustrating. But I think there is something really healthy from just having an on your calendar to say like, Oh, on Sunday morning, I'm talking to 110 of my closest friends. It's probably not going to be a great conversation. But it gives me something to anchor to to look forward to. And I think that's really important. I know many of us started out with a lot of momentum because it was like, you know, hey, I'll get together on a zoom. And what's happened is this awkwardness of, well, not much has changed in the last week. I know we have a weekly social zoom, but I'm doing the same thing. And unfortunately, I'm sheltering in place like I was last week. So we don't have those life events to chat about either the gossip, all that fun stuff. When you check in with your friends, it's a lot of the same over and over and over again. Yeah, I totally agree. But so I actually have a tip on this, which is sort of two things that both of these actually come from episodes of the podcast. There was one about the how to work from home episode. One of the things that the expert said is like, you just, you basically need a conductor on a zoom call, right? You can't assume that a zoom call is like normal conversation where it just goes well, you need someone who's going to be brave enough to say like, I'm going to be an air traffic controller. But number two, and this came from a conversation we did with someone about ironically how to lose 155 pounds happily. And we had this woman on who had just lost a ton of weight and we paired her with the expert Brittany from Brittany runs a marathon who they sort of made her life into a movie about losing all this weight. And both of them had this issue, which is that after they had lost a lot of weight, they expected to be happy and they weren't. And so the question is, how do you find happiness after you've done this incredible thing like lost 155 pounds? And what we found was that like part of it was connection, right? It's hard to connect with people because you bump into someone you haven't seen for a while and all they want to do is talk about the fact that you've lost all this weight, but you've had that conversation 40 or 50 times. And so the key is how do you get to something deeper? And what, what the expert, what Brittany said that I thought was really smart was have some question in your back pocket that the other person is going to be happy to answer, but has not thought of. And like, I realized I kind of do this, we probably all do this. One of the things I find myself doing at like, you know, like conferences I go to is asking someone, what's the most interesting thing you learned in the last week? And when you ask someone that it kind of gives them permission, it's a little bit of a weird question, but it gives someone permission to be a little weird and interesting themselves and tell you something genuine. And so I think it's almost worth like thinking to ourselves, the way that we would like pregame for cocktails is that we would look at our life and be like, Oh, I got to tell Jim or I got to tell Judy that story. We don't have stories anymore, but we do have the ability to generate questions. And I think those questions make all the difference now. I think for a lot of us, if you had that view of this is going to last for a few weeks, and I'll just sleep my way through it or binge on some Netflix. Well, that you spent that reactively, you didn't expect you didn't spend that time proactively, even if you just set out to build a couple new habits, you would have learned so much and gotten so much more from each day that you would have a lot of things to talk about. And your days would be marked because there was engagement, you tussled with life. However, if you're just watching junk, I call it junk food entertainment, which mainstream TV music, it's just passive time wasters. We've know the storylines. We've seen them a hundred times. It's just empty calories. And you're not going to mark your days. You're not going to learn anything if you're consuming empty calories. It's about getting engaged. I think that's exactly right. And I think part of the way to test this for yourself, because I think, for instance, people can spend two hours on Twitter and it doesn't feel like it's empty calories, but it is. Because even though you're reading about Trump and you're reading about the world and news and X and Y and Z, it's not anything that you're actually engaging with. It doesn't feel like work. And so one of the things that I've tried to do is for each week to try and choose one thing outside of my actual work that is like a pastime that feels a little bit like work. So if I'm going to read a book, I want to read a book that's a little bit challenging. And then after I read it, try and figure out what is this person trying to say as if I'm getting ready for a book club? Or even just watching TV, I found that there's a difference between sitting down and watching TV because it's entertaining noise and being on Twitter at the same time versus watching a TV show and being like, what choices would I have made differently? If I was making this TV show, how would I have crafted it differently? What I think is good and what I think is bad about the TV show? And then I think when you're talking to your friends and you're like, Hey, did you guys see that new show? And there's a show that I love called El Candidito, which is on Netflix right now. It's about this Mexican show about like drug cartels, politics. Like I find that like when my friends have seen it and we're talking about it, the conversation is so much more robust because I'm like, Hey, did you notice in that one scene they did this and that didn't really make that much sense to me? And like, like, even when we went back and we rewatched Lost and even watching Lost was more fun because I was like, I watched it with my kids and I was like, Oh, this is why they're hooked. And this is where they get bored. It's just it's that critical thought. It's so easy to you're exactly right to lose it in a vacuum. So we need to stick it back in. That's what makes us interesting. I think that's the investigative journalist in you talking. I know for us, we binged on survivor with a new lens and obviously in this climate, a lot of relevant details there. Now you bring up a really good point and you invite experts on your show. And right now there is a, I would say a dearth of real experts. There are a lot of people with blue checkmarks. There are a lot of people right now espousing conspiracy theories and stuff that doesn't actually help you learn, grow, become that self actualized person. One, how do you go about finding and identifying the experts to trust in this information age where we're living on Twitter and it's very difficult? And then two, when you're actually working with the expert in the show, how do you get them to actually make the knowledge applicable? Because I think that's also so important because when we talk to experts, sometimes they're talking 10,000 feet and at a level that we as mortals can't really understand. So I mentioned before how our show works and I think this is actually a key to it is that we always have two people on the show with us. There's a caller and it's literally just a listener who's sent in a problem and says like, I'm having trouble procrastinating or one woman wrote in, she was 38 years old and had never been kissed. And she was like, how do I solve this? Right? And so we bring them on the show and then we have an expert and the expert we look for is someone whom we believe is actually an expert and we actually interview them ahead of time to make sure they are. And so either they have some credential and credentials are kind of out of favor right now in like this White House administration. But like, if you get a PhD in something, you're usually like no more than the average show about it. Or they went through something themselves, right? They went through some experience where they can just say like, I've been through this, we actually had one episode where this woman, her son came out as non-binary or her child came out as non-binary. And she was really struggling with it. And so we paired her with this mom, whose own child had come out as non-binary. And it actually started like a support group for parents to help them just understand this. And so we try and look for people who have had experiences. And you're exactly right. It is very easy for an expert to give like pie in the sky advice. And like you're like, I don't know how to use that. But when they're talking to someone who is struggling, who like literally is just a listener who wrote in and Sue says like, I need advice because I don't know what to do tomorrow to go meet a guy and I'm 38. And how do I tell them that I've never had a kiss or that my child said this to me and my husband won't stop using their gender name. It's pretty hard to give theoretical advice. Like at that moment, you as an expert are usually pushed to say like, here's what you should do. And the most amazing thing is our listener usually does it. Like at the end of every episode, we have some follow-up where they call, we just finished taping one today where it's about how to ask for a raise, how to demand more at work. And this dude who was like a total milk toast, he like sent in his like follow-up and he was like, yeah, I asked for a raise. I got a raise, a promotion, and I've got a whole new team. Like basically like they doubled my salary. And we were like, I guess it works. But I think that's the key is that make it real to make it embedded in a story. Right. And I feel in today's day and age, many of us are not truly seeking advice. A lot of it is just to vent and to relate less than it is to give advice. And how do you pick up on the signals of someone just emotionally venting? Obviously, if we're talking a lot about uncertainty and the stress that goes along with it and truly someone who wants to take the advice and heat it. I think for both the person who's asking advice and for the advice giver, I think the key is to try and ask these ambiguous questions. So I'm a reporter at the New Yorker magazine, and I'll tell you what my interview style is like when I'm when I'm writing a story, which is that I call someone up and I say to them, look, you're an expert on this. I actually don't know what questions to ask you. I'm going to ask you some questions, but like, if there are more interesting questions I ought to be asking you, tell me what they are. Because my whole goal is like to get them to do the thinking for me. Like I want them to tell me the insight I haven't even realized is out there yet. And the only way I can do that is to ask these kind of frustrating questions. And the best interviews do not feel like good interviews. Like they feel like super frustrating halfway through because you don't know what they're talking about and they don't know what you're asking them. And you're both struggling to like try and get to someplace to make a connection. Those are the best interviews because they end up saying things that not only surprise me as the interviewer, but that surprise themselves. All of a sudden they're like, oh, you know, I never thought about it that way, but this is what I really need. And I think that's true in life. Like, again, this need for certainty, this need for like, to remove the anxiety of social interactions. We oftentimes ask questions that we kind of know what the answer is to, right? Like, how are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. You know, are you still unhappy at work? Yes, I'm still unhappy at work. Like, we know the answers. The really interesting questions is like, we're in a pandemic, there's a chance, small chance, chance that we all might die tomorrow. What do you really wish you could do if you were going to die tomorrow? Like, that's a pretty interesting question. Honestly, I don't know the answer to it. I don't even know how I would answer that question. That makes for a pretty good conversation and pretty good advice giving. Yeah, it certainly breaks the mold in that it's not a common question that people get, so they don't have a prepared answer, right? We're breaking out of that pattern that we're in. And let's be honest, many of us have actually had that thought cross our mind in the last six months of what are we excited to do when we're out of this or what do we wish we could have done before this? Exactly. Like, that's a great question. Like, you know, if the vaccine was here tomorrow, like, what's what, how is your life going to be different because of this pandemic? How are you going to behave differently? Like, we've all been thinking about on some level, but just to have someone ask us it sort of forces it all to the surface. I think for a lot of us in in this age that we're dealing with with information, everyone feels that they're being put in in gotcha moment situations as well. And I'm sure you deal with this as an investigative journalist by asking some of the questions that you just proposed. That allows the person to relax and realize, oh, my voice is actually going to be heard. And my views are going to actually be heard here. And I can be open enough to discuss them without being measured in every word. And because I think for a lot of us, we know if we're so worried about being stuck in a gotcha moment, we're going to end up putting ourselves in one because we have been so worried about just expressing ourselves. I think that's exactly right. And a huge part of like asking those questions is to let people kind of experiment with their answers. Often times when I'm talking to folks, I'll say, look, I'm about to say something that I only believe 40%, but I want to kind of say it to see how much I actually believe it. And I think in science they call this a confidence interval. I'm about to make a statement that I have a confidence interval of 15% for. But what's important is that in your right, this is a rough time. You say something on Twitter and all of a sudden you're canceled. And first of all, I think that is terrible. It's something that I think all of us should work against. You've been maneuvering quite well there, Charles. But the other part of it is that I also think that forums like Twitter are not great places for conversations. I think that part of this is we should recognize that there was this promise made to us that the internet expands the conversation and it really doesn't. Like conversations are things that happen between people. It can happen in emails, but it usually doesn't happen on a platform. And so, and I think my kids recognize that, right? They don't say things on Twitter that they would only say to their friends. But I also think I'm going to make this other pitch, which is when we see people say things where they're clearly experimenting with an idea, I think it's okay to encourage that and say like, hey, you just said X. I want you to know I'm going to read it as you trying to figure out an idea rather than you saying something definitive. And like let's figure out that idea together because part of your idea might be wrong. Part of your idea might be offensive in ways that you didn't even understand. And it's interesting to hear that, but not like you're a bad person because you said something that wasn't where you didn't have a confidence interval of 100. Well, I think a big problem is that in media, social media especially, it is built for speed, not accuracy. And in this rush to fill that void, to be the first one to have a take, the first one to make a point, the first one to interject in the conversation, we are setting ourselves up to be on shaky ground and have a very high confidence interval. If we're moving at the speed of light and reacting to the bits of information we're getting. And a lot of these big issues that we're seeing come up in the cancel culture right now, they're so much more nuanced. They take hours of conversation, long form conversation to really understand and unpack. And of course, we could cherry pick evidence and data, as you know, to build the narrative that suits whatever belief we're trying to push to the forefront. What I would love to know in your experience now of doing the show and learning how to, what's the meta of learning these skills? Have you noticed patterns when it comes to one, if you know nothing about the topic? And then the other challenge I know a lot of us have is, we kind of know something about the topic, but we might not know the right things. So like when I think about my golf game, like my uncle and my dad taught me some things, but they're not professionals. And that information is not actually really valid to me learning and picking up that skill. So I think you're exactly right. And I think that's exactly the right way to ask this question. Because I think there's these two big insights that I've had from doing the show for a year now. The first is that some of the best advice is very obvious advice when you say it. But when you just get a little bit under the surface, it gets a lot more interesting and a lot more complicated. Right. So one of the things that like asking open-ended questions, what we were just talking about, there are so many situations, how to ask for a raise, how to help a friend who's going through grief, how to, you know, even how to like go out on dates, how to date, everyone says ask open-ended questions. So that seems like a pat almost like a boring answer, except that when you get a little bit deeper, like what makes a question open-ended? Like what questions work best? If I ask someone, what did you learn in the last week versus if we're all going to die tomorrow? What do you wish that you could do today? Those are both open-ended, but they're very different, right? They lead to different emotional places. And that's kind of interesting is that if you take Pat advice, if you take obvious advice and just dig under it, you find something meaningful. But then to the point you just raised about golf, the other thing that I've learned is there is a lot of advice that the expert knows that none of us do. And that just comes from literally studying something really hard, like what used to be called sort of deliberate practice, right? Taking a question and iterating it again and again and again. And so when it comes to trying to solve a problem, sometimes in addition to listening to old wives advice or instead of expression, the Pat advice that surrounds us, the things get written on pieces of wood and putting on walls, we should also go to an expert and say, tell me the complicated thing, like tell me the thing that no one else knows, because it leads to advice like Dan Ariely saying, if you want to have a productive day, you need to plan mindless breaks into your day, which is not Pat advice, but which is key to helping us avoid procrastination. And your open-ended question example is exactly the nuance that we try to discuss on the show around the context of the emotion that you're evoking in the person you're talking to. There's a time and a place with friends you trust to get vulnerable on the negative emotions. When we're meeting new people, we want to talk about the exciting emotions and what they're looking forward to, not all of the baggage and drudgery and depression evoking emotions that are in those loaded open-ended questions. I think that's exactly right. So one of my favorite examples of this is talking about money. I went to business school. I'm a business reporter. I actually love talking about money because I think it's just interesting how people think about money, the emotions around money. Ultimately, money is a question of our values, how we allocate scarce resources. But for there's a lot of people who, like, if you bring up money, it's definitely going to turn them off. And so there's understanding that. If you start a conversation about time, like, if you only had a thousand hours in a week, how would you spend them? That's an interesting conversation for a lot of people. And then if you say, if you only had $1,000 in a week, how would you spend it? It's a way into that conversation. And the difference between those two answers is actually kind of interesting. Like how we think about time versus money is a fascinating topic. But you're exactly right. We have to think about the context in which we're entering that conversation because otherwise they're just like, why does this jerk keep on talking about money? It's so shallow. When it comes to learning new things, we've also discovered that it takes the right mindset. It's not just about skill set. And in doing the show, what have you learned about the mindset piece to learning these skills and actually implementing the advice that you get? You know, a huge part of that is the more empathy you can generate, the more successful you're going to be. So we had one episode that just came out a couple of weeks ago called How to Survive a Shark Attack. And it's like a fantastic, I love this episode. So it's this guy who a couple of years ago, he was paddle boarding, was 24 years old, paddle boarding in Hawaii. And he got attacked by a shark and the shark took off his leg and messed up his hand. And like he tells the story of this like, you listen to the story and it's so compelling. He like narrates getting attacked by a shark. He thought he was going to die. And then, and what's interesting is the expert we had on as someone who's an expert in PTSD, because even after this guy physically recovered, and he can walk with the prosthesis now, he's basically physically back to, to, you know, close to 100%. For the next year, he was dealing with rage and he was dealing with depression, all the physiological aspects of this attack. And he said that the thing that made the difference for him, and the expert said that he finds this again and again, is he sat down and he wrote thank you letters to everyone who had helped save him, right to the people who'd flown the helicopter, to the people who'd just seen him get attacked on the beach. He wrote them thank you letters. Now, this is a little paradoxical because you, like, if something terrible happened to him, and he was thanking people for like being around while something terrible happened. But he said it made him feel so much better that like this act of gratitude. And the reason why I think is because, A, it put him in control of the narrative and put him in control of the tragedy. Like it's not something that happened to him. It's something that he is taking control of and he is thanking people for helping him. But second of all, it's just because the more that we show empathy to others, the more we can show empathy to ourselves, we practice empathy, we learn how to do it. And the truth of the matter is that anyone can change any habit, right? We know that amazing changes. There is someone in the United States of America today who has smoked for 30 years and they will smoke their last cigarette today and will never smoke again. There's someone else who will start a diet and they will lose 100 pounds. That's happening, that's happening every single day, every single 12 hours in America. People can change, but the way you change is that you have to have empathy for yourself to do that. And you can't, it's not like a switch you can flip, it's a skill like learning to read. You got to practice and we practice it by having empathy for others. So powerful. Now we love asking all of our guests what their X factor is. So what is a mindset that unlocked a skill set for you that makes you unique and successful? I think that for me, so when I was a kid at one point, my parents like became foster parents for these two kids. And these were kids that we knew and they were really troubled. And I was like in high school, I think at the time. And before they came in, me and my siblings, we just like were dreading this because like they were both young kids, they were super hyperactive. We were like, oh my God, they're going to be in our rooms, they're going to be in our stuff. And so we weren't looking forward to this. And then they were going to share a bathroom with me. And so one day I went in and I was like, look, I don't want them taking all my towels and putting them on the ground. I'm going to put in lower level towel bars so they have a place to put their towels. And as soon as I did that, I felt better about it. I was like, you know what, we can do this. Like we can help these kids. This is a good thing that we're doing. I can totally handle this. And it worked. Like taking control, just asserting some agency makes things better. It's known as an internal locus of control and psychology. And so I try and find opportunities to do that, and it always makes me feel better. So powerful. And what is your favorite episode to date? What was the most surprising episode for you before you leave? I will say we did one called how to rob a bank, in which someone teaches me how to rob a bank. And then I go and try and rob a bank. That was a pretty good one. I like that one. All right. Where can our audience find the show and more about robbing banks and shark attacks and all this fun stuff? Absolutely. So if you go on to any podcast, by the way, you shouldn't rob a bank. Just an FYI. If you go on to any platform and you just type in my name Charles Doohigg or how to with Charles Doohigg, or you Google how to with Charles Doohigg, you'll find it. Awesome. Thank you for the time. Always a pleasure. Thanks, guys. Absolutely. Take care.