Episode 337: Jeff Karp: Breaking Patterns, Achieving Enhanced Mental Performance, & Creativity In a Distracted World

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits and Hustle, Gresham.

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All right, you guys, I'm excited about this podcast because we have Jeff Karp.

And I kind of joked around with you, Jeff, because he's basically like a walking brain.

He is an MIT professor, a Harvard professor.

He's founded 12 companies.

His newest book is called Lit.

And he says that he cracked the code on making you guys or anybody become limitless in their potential.

And basically, I want to hear all about it.

And he he is here for the day, not with me only, but to talk about his book.

So, Jeff, thank you for being on the podcast.

Hey, it's so great to be here.

Thank you.

No, you really, like, you know, what I really loved about when I was reading about you and why I wanted you to be on the podcast more than anything else was because you speak my language, even though you're a huge academic, which I always say that I'm actually not.

My thing is being bold, not being smart.

But we kind of like came to the same place in different ways.

We kind of like say the same things, but from two different places.

However, when I read into your background, you basically have a similar background to me as like a young kid.

Your teacher said that you were lazy, you didn't think you were a good student,

you thought you were stupid, you didn't think you would amount to much.

And then lo and behold, like you've won a million awards and accolades and like, and now you are a professor at all these esteemed colleges and have created like your, well, you can tell us, but like your background or

what you've accomplished, given where people thought you were going to end up is so remarkable.

And I just love your story.

And so that is why I wanted to actually have this conversation and speak to you because it's amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

No, you're welcome.

Okay, you have a PhD, became a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, a member of the National Academy of Inventors, and a distinguished chair at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he co-founded 12 companies, amassed over 100 patents, and had received 50 awards.

And like, it goes on and on and on.

I want to, that's why, like, you're,

how did you become, how did you go from somebody who felt like you were not capable, that you wouldn't amount to much to becoming the success that you have.

are obviously today.

Let's start with that.

Okay, sure.

Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right.

I never really considered myself to be smart.

I think, you know, if I go back to the second grade, I was struggling with ADHD, undiagnosed ADHD and learning differences.

Nobody knew it.

I didn't know it.

My parents didn't know it.

My teachers certainly didn't know it.

And my mom tried flashcards and

phonics and everything.

Nothing worked.

I was, you know, sat at the back of the class just like feeling angry and frustrated, demoralized through elementary school.

My teachers would call me lazy, you know, and they would say that you wouldn't amount to much.

And, you know, I was, I was labeled a troublemaker.

I'd end up in the principal's office quite often.

I got to know the principal pretty well.

And

but what happened at the end of the second grade, my teacher held a conference with my parents and voiced how he wanted to hold me back and repeat the second grade.

And my parents negotiated for me to spend the summer with tutors.

And so all my friends went on vacation.

And I went in one day and the tutor asked me a question that literally changed my life and that really began this, this whole process for me, which is she read a passage and asked some questions.

I gave answers.

And then she paused and said, how did you think about that?

And that

question, no one had ever asked that.

to me before.

And that question, all of a sudden, it was like I tapped into awareness in that moment.

It was like I stepped into some light, a light bulb moment.

And it wasn't instantaneous, any sort of changes that occurred, but it kind of gave me this, you know, it like unlocked something within so that as I was moving forward, I started to realize that I could think before I said things, that I could observe other people and sort of do pattern recognition to get an idea of how are other people behaving and sort of like, you know, what's going on inside my mind and my body.

And what that did is it sort of led to a whole cascade of things in my life.

For example, you know, here's this super super distracted kid.

And what I started to realize is anytime I asked a question, my attention would hyper-focus for a few moments on what the response would be.

And then I could feel that like imprinting in my mind, and I would be able to recall it later.

And so I discovered that asking questions was a tool for me to cope, to learn.

That like, as I'm sitting in class, I just can't, even if I go to lectures today, it's hard for me to pay attention for too long.

My mind's just wandering across, you know, they'll say one thing, you know, I'll connect it to something else I know.

And now I'm thinking about that.

And then I come back and it's really easy to get into this sort of cycle of shaming myself as well.

But I feel, so I've been developing all these tools and strategies throughout my life to be able to compensate for all of the things that I feel are holding me back.

And that, and I think now as I look back, I think what I was doing at the time, it was the first time in my life where I was really consciously tapping into my own neuroplasticity, my sort of conscious rewiring of my brain.

I love that.

So you have to teach yourself how to be like what I say, like resourceful and figure things out.

Like I always say that sometimes like mediocrity is a strength because when you aren't good at things, it forces you to learn and navigate better than if it were great at everything.

Right.

So you kind of figured out early on how to overcompensate for these like things that you felt that you were less great at, right?

Exactly.

yeah, yeah.

I mean, even like the challenges, the struggles, the failures, like there were so many like spectacular failures along the way.

I mean, I could almost every year I can give you one or more, but because I had this awareness, I realized that every time I encountered a challenge or a failure, just you know, as an example, there'd be this sort of heightened emotion that I'd feel very frustrated, very angry.

I'd notice it would dissipate within two or three days after I got a good night's sleep or two.

And then there would be almost like this after the rain moment where these insights would emerge.

I'd be able to sort of piece things together.

And so I started to realize like, okay, if I can take big risks and fail, you know, flat on my face, then I'm going to create these moments where I can see things I wasn't able to see before and sort of connect patterns and identify.

And that's one of the things we do in my lab is we often will, you know, embrace constructive failure.

Like we'll actually seek out and try to fail, but in a way that can help us figure figure out what's really important.

What do we need to focus on?

How do we make something our North Star?

So, what would you say

while you were growing up and learning this about yourself?

What became your superpowers or what became the things that you became hyper good at?

You said it being aware, having awareness was one of them.

What were the other things?

So, I think, well, the ability to ask questions, I became really good at asking questions.

And

did you become, I don't mean to interrupt you, but I want to be clear on this.

Was it that you were naturally curious that you started asking questions or you just picked up in the pattern that that's how you learn better?

So you would just ask, you would rapid fire questions?

What would be

the approach?

So I feel like.

In school, I always felt like it was going against my curiosity.

Now, I don't know if I felt it like, I would say it exactly like that as a child, but I think looking back, it felt like that.

Like it felt like school was trying to crush my just wandering mind and just sort of imagination.

And I just felt like it was sort of putting education into like a cube, you know?

And so.

And I had all, you know, there was like a ravine by one of the house that I grew up in, like before I moved to the country actually in the third grade.

But I just remember just my mind flowing and being just, you know, I just couldn't understand

why school was the way it was because it felt, it just felt like it was closing in on me.

And I felt like claustrophobic, you know, to some degree.

But the questions, I realized as a survival tool, I had to ask, I can't learn unless I ask questions.

So the teacher would go through a lesson.

If I don't ask questions during or stay after it to ask questions, then I'm going to miss everything.

I'm not going to get it.

And so I literally literally developed this strategy where, like, all through high school, I would spend like time after class and I'd go in on weekends and meet with teachers all the time to like go over my essays and try to just ask questions and learn.

And so, I just realized that learning, and eventually, in

college, I stopped going to classes because it was just too much anxiety and it just seemed unproductive to me.

And so, what I ended up doing actually in college was I found this kind of hack where if I could get the answer sheets for things, I would study the answers first and then I would try to figure out what the question was.

So I'd kind of do everything backwards.

And then when I sort of was looking through the answer and I was like, okay, I don't really understand what the question was, then I would look at the question.

So I'd like motivate myself to figure out the match between the question and the answer.

by sort of stimulating my mind.

You know what, Seth, that's a great hack.

I also think it's interesting that some of the most like,

truly like brilliant people that I've met in my life were always bad in school, or they always had this like hurdle to overcome.

And they went on to do extraordinary things, like kind of what you're talking about.

The interesting thing about you is that you became an academic in an academic world that didn't suit you.

which is really like a dichotomy, right?

Like you hated the way the school system works, works, education system works, but then you became a professor at the most esteemed schools in that system.

Yeah, I never really thought about it that way, but I think one of the kind of, let's say, decisions that I made kind of along the way and insights that I gained about career paths.

Actually, there was this moment that actually happened when I, so I did my, my undergrad and then I went to grad school.

Where did you go to undergrad?

I went to McGill in chemical engineering.

Wait a second.

How did I miss that?

I'm Canadian.

My family was in Montreal.

My sister went to McGill.

You're telling me that you went to McGill.

Yeah.

Where did you grow up?

So I grew up in Peterborough.

Right.

That's why I liked you also because you're a Canadian.

How did I forget this?

Yes.

Yeah.

Us Canadians, like, you know, I was at an

I was at an event actually just a few days ago in Boston.

And after the event, it was like all the Canadians in the room were somehow together, even though we didn't know we were Canadian until, yeah.

That's right.

You know what?

I forgot about that missing link when I wanted you on the podcast.

Okay.

So you, Miguel, and then for, where did you go for grad school?

So I went to, and then grad school, I did University of Toronto.

Okay.

Good.

And then, uh, and then I went to MIT for almost three years for my postdoc.

And I was coming out of my postdoc and I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do.

And I was sort of like looking at some jobs.

There was some startups I was talking to.

And I was thinking academia and I wasn't sure.

And then at the startup, I said, okay, well, what would I be doing if I get this job?

And they said, Well, you know, you'd be, um, you'd have a team of a few people to start, and you'd be focused on.

And as soon as they said the word focus, I didn't even listen to what else happened.

I was like, This is not for me.

It was like this, again, this other, this light, another light bulb moment where it was like, I can't focus.

I need to, just because I realized through my life that I'm curious about so many different things.

And I started to realize and see what was possible because during, and I feel like that to me is so so important to to life is that we can only sort of aspire to do what we know is possible.

And so I did my postdoc with Professor Bob Langer, who is co-founder of Moderna and like 50, 60 other companies.

And, you know, they call him the Edison of medicine.

And he,

I think, truly shows people what's possible in terms of having great relationships with students and mentoring really effectively in terms of spinning out startups from academia and maximizing success in terms of just being gracious and showing gratitude and appreciation.

I mean, he, so, so to me, it was like being in his lab and many other situations in life, you know, kind of like this, but maybe just more extreme, I felt like what I perceived as possible just expanded, like unbelievable boundaries were pushed out by being in his lab.

And then that's where I sort of got this sense of like, I want to focus on translation.

I want to focus on not just publishing papers, but on taking academic discoveries and turning them into products that can help patients.

Well, okay, but I'm still on the fact that if you can't focus, and by the way, don't you hate the question when people say, well, you have to focus to be successful at anything.

Because that's another one of my things, right?

Like, that's why so much of what you say resonates with me because everything you say, I'm like, I agree.

I saw, that's me, that's me.

Because it's hard for me to just do one thing.

I'm not, my brain will not not allow that type of like myopic behavior.

So I do like a hundred things.

But they say like to be successful, really successful, very successful, you have to be doing one thing and do it really well.

And not, you know, because you, you know, it's, you, you, if you disperse your time to too many things, nothing is ever going to be successful.

But it sounds like you've kind of done the same type of approach.

Again, if you can't have a, if you're not able to focus, how are you able to be an academic writing papers, doing these clinical trials like that to me requires like a brain piece that that brain power is so necessary in that way like it's not like you're like like one of these entrepreneurs that's kind of exceptionally impulsive and just like kind of flies by the seat of your pants because you do have that act you're an academic so the two is confused i'm confused by talking to you yeah you know what i mean yeah no i actually have so many thoughts to to share i'll try and see if I can bring them out in a cohesive way.

Okay, try.

Okay, okay.

So one thing I would say is that I realized, so with ADHD, you know, people with ADHD generally can hyper-focus on things that they're really

interested in.

And I believe it's even a step further.

I think that people with ADHD, at least, you know, if I kind of generalize my experience to everyone with ADHD, is not only hyper-focus, but get into the flow state.

So, which I really think is like hyper-focus is a pulse of flow.

Flow is just more extended, you know, period of time.

And so what I discovered is that in some ways, procrastination is a key to getting into the flow state for me.

So I am able to get, and because I work in so many different areas and so many things I'm really curious about, I can get into the flow state on demand because I always have so many things like with deadlines and I have so many things that I'm doing that I'm really excited about.

So I think to me, that's just one, one.

So, you know, we hear a lot of negative things about procrastination, but I feel like there,

that it actually has a place.

And I've used it as, you know, it's not in the book, but I've used it as a tool, you know, a lot to get things done and get into the flow statement.

That's a very interesting take because again, I could not agree with you more.

Yeah, like I think that, so generally, I would say, okay, so to me, there's kind of like two categories of things.

And again, I'm like, my mind is kind of ADHDing all over the place.

So the things that I really like doing and I'm like super curious about, I have this interesting, I would say, relationship with it where sometimes like I know I like doing it and I will procrastinate because I like doing it.

And I want to do the things that I'm not as excited to do first, right?

So sometimes I do that.

And then sometimes I just, I do the opposite.

Like I'm kind of always like like kind of, you know, bouncing around like that.

But I think, I think that I just see procrastination as a way to build up the force of attention, you know, like it creates this, it like pressurizes the system.

And I feel it can be used in a very positive way.

And I mean, that, that's just like, you know, one, one thing I wanted to say about that.

The other thing is just kind of going back to attention in general, because I agree, like, you know, our culture, our digital age with information, stimuli coming at us from all all directions, it like atomizes our attention, you know, and, and, and, and so we need tools, we need strategies to focus our attention.

And something that happened to me as I was going into the third grade, moved out to the country, you know, struggling, I get off the bus every day because, you know, I'm out in the country and the driveway, our driveway is that like a thousand feet long.

So it's, it's, uh, and there's a bridge and there's, you know, nature.

I can talk, talk a lot about it.

But I get off the bus, I'm like literally exhausted.

I couldn't talk after I got home because because I was just exhausted every day about trying to make sense of the world and what's happening.

And so I'm kind of walking along the driveway and all of a sudden I see something.

And, you know, because the driveway is carved through a forest.

And so I look and I kind of get closer.

I can't really make out what it is.

I get a bit closer.

And then I'm like, holy shit, it's a bat.

And I'd never seen a bat before.

And I would get off the bus and be like ruminating about all sorts of, you know, negative things that had happened during the day.

And that interaction, I felt like all my thoughts were squeezed out of my brain at that point.

I was laser focused on the bat.

It was like my brain was being pinched.

And I started to think later on that day or the next day, I was like, wait a moment, this is really incredible what happened because I had this awareness from the second grade with this tutor.

And I started to think, okay, maybe I can use this in my life.

I can, I don't, you know, I can focus my attention with questions, but maybe there's ways I can pinch my brain.

I can squeeze out the other thoughts and start to focus on things intentionally.

So to use my intention to focus my attention.

And so I started to experiment with that and started to bring that to various areas of my life and started to realize that if I intentionally try to focus my attention, that I can actually do it for short bursts of time.

And that as I started to do it more and more, I got better and better.

Now it was slow, but I did experience this kind of incremental process.

And I think any of us can improve our attention.

And there's all kinds of tools to do that.

Like, I'll just give you one example, one recently that I've been playing with, and I'll give you another example of something else that I use all the time.

So there's this app, and I'm sure there's lots of apps.

So if I mention one, I'm not really like, you know, saying this was always the only one.

So Flora, there's this app, Flora, and there's this tree.

My sister's a child psychologist and she recommended it to me because she recommends it to our patients.

And there's this little tree.

And what you do is you hit this, I haven't figured out the whole app, but you hit the start button.

And then if you are distracted and you use your phone, then the tree dies.

So you set like 25 minutes and you hit start.

And just the act of actually engaging that way and sort of framing it, framing it in

this sort of sense, I'm able to work for 25 minutes without being distracted.

Like it just becomes much easier to do because it's like this accountability.

There's this other, you know, sort of element of the treat.

The other thing I've been experimenting with is what I will do is, I'll just hit on my phone the timer, like the stopwatch, right?

And I hit start and I just say to myself, okay, how long can you go without being distracted?

And I'll just see how long I can go.

And then when I get to, you know, kind of reaching for something to just distract me, I kind of like, okay, no, no, no, I want to try to go a little bit more.

So that's like another, like simple, simple hacks.

And then the other thing that I do is I call, I actually have a name for it called the distraction disruptor.

So I write the word distraction on a piece of paper beside me.

And anytime I feel the pull of a distraction, like go on social media or whatever it is, or if I catch myself in a distraction, I put a check mark.

And it's kind of like a little like interception of the distraction.

It's a way to just sort of say to my brain, hey, hey, you know, like stop that or

hey, cut that out or, hey, notice what you're doing now.

And I find that distractions dissipate more with that.

And then the other thing is, is that I notice that there's certain patterns of my life where I become more distractible because now I have check marks on this page.

And so I know, you know, if I don't get enough sleep or if I'm on like a sugar high or if I've had carbs and I'm crashing or caffeine high or caffeine crash, like all these things can make me more distractible.

Those are amazing, actually.

And by the way, unique because What I have to say is I'm always struggling when I have people on this show and I ask them for actionable ways people can better themselves, right?

Like optimize whatever it is.

And so often people say the same shit over and over again, right?

Like meditation, whatever it is.

I don't want to hear that.

I want to hear new things that are like actually things that people can try that aren't that like usual.

You just gave them to me.

Those are all really good because for me, especially, and I think a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, I feel are very ADD and we're very distractible.

And especially now with like Instagram and social media, it is virtually impossible.

I know for myself, like my time efficiency has become much less because there's, there's like always a shiny ball to look at.

I am going to try those.

I have a question about that Flora app, actually.

You're saying with that Flora app, you have to.

If you are not doing, explain that Flora app part to me again.

Sure.

So

on your phone, so you open the app and then, I mean, there's a bunch of features I haven't played with yet, but you just hit this, like it's set to 25 minutes to start and you hit the start button.

And if you go on your phone and go to Instagram, then the plant can die.

So, so it kind of like, and then if you, so I did that, let's say like I was on the plane yesterday, I had it open and I just sort of went and then it was like your plant's dead.

And I was just like, oh, like, okay.

And then, but then that registers in my mind.

Totally, I get it.

So next time, like, I feel like.

Hold on, wait.

My question is,

so what do you do then?

Like, let's say you have to do something, you keep the app open, you're not allowed to go into other screens on the app.

I think that's how it works.

Yeah, or if you go there for too long, so you know, sometimes I even just use it on my computer.

So, like, if I, or that's pretty much how I use it, I have my computer open, I have my phone, you know, in some sort of like charger, whatever thing, and I have the Flora app open.

So, I'm not necessarily going on my phone, but I'm conscious that the app is open and I'm like engaging it in this way to reduce, like, I have this intention that I want to reduce my distraction.

Right.

Because you even the fact that you know that that's happening, like that that tree can die or whatever gives you enough consciousness to not to not do it, to keep on doing the task at hand.

Yeah, yeah.

I love that.

Exactly.

Okay, give me more stuff.

Okay, I'll give you more stuff.

Okay, so

another thing that I realized with, you know, because I've had this relationship with technology that has been quite toxic, you know, and, you know, I think fairly extreme.

Like I kind of got to the point where I'd be watching Netflix and walking my dogs at the same time.

Yeah.

And

yeah, I mean, it just seemed normal to me.

Oh my God, Jeff, I love you.

You're so amazing.

You have no idea.

It's like, I don't know, maybe that's a narcissistic thing to say right now, but I feel you're like so similar to me.

It's hilarious.

I think it's so funny.

Go ahead.

I just think it's hilarious.

I would convince myself that it was okay because I would watch, I'd have the dogs out for an hour because I'd watch a full show and I'd be like, okay, look, they got their exercise, right?

And I'd be trying to like, and I would, and that's the thing, like, I feel like I, I, I feel like I can, I started to realize that I can validate anything that I'm doing.

Like I can convince myself that that's the right thing or a good thing to do.

And for me, so, you know, this book that I wrote, Lyd, it's all about intercepting patterns and trying to, trying to develop awareness of the patterns that we have in our lives because I think that there's these things things that we start doing and then we tell ourselves that it's normal or it's the right thing to do or maybe others are telling us it's the right thing to do and then we just do we just sort of like you know turn the switch so we're now no longer aware of what we're doing or you just justify I think you get really good at justifying your behavior and if you're functional still right it's easy to kind of keep on going doing those things.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

And then and then, you know, like I might convince myself that, oh, this is my, my way of relaxing for the evening, you know, to walk around the neighborhood with Netflix, with the dogs, like this kind of, you know, like there's all kinds of ways I can justify it to myself.

Oh, the dogs are getting exercise.

I'm getting more relaxed.

I'm shifting my mind away from all these things.

I'm moving, you know, I'm moving, I'm getting at my exercise.

And so what I realized with technology is that if I say something I figured out is I can't just say put it away.

It doesn't work for me.

Like I can't just tell myself, oh, leave it here, leave it there.

That doesn't work.

But I found something that does work for me is is if I set the intention to be open to the cues, right?

So I feel like there's a lot of cues that we get from our minds.

Our bodies are very intelligent, constantly giving us cues.

Our interactions with other people, we're getting cues.

And, you know, I found that I want to be, and there's this backstory to how I landed on this, but again, this other kind of like, you know, something that blew up in my life, but I realized that I want to be open to the cues.

I want to, that, that, for example, when I'm, let's say, going to the bathroom, right?

And I take my phone in and it's just like, you know, like in the olden days, you had magazines, right?

And this little thing that I always felt like it was kind of gross that you're like touching magazines that other people touch.

So maybe like with your own phone, it might be better.

Yeah.

But I just, you know, I found myself doing that all the time.

And then I was just like, okay, but.

what happens if I don't?

And what are the cues that I get?

And I start to, okay, so it's a little bit uncomfortable at first, but then I start to realize that there's these thoughts that are going through my mind.

Like, where's my mind gravitating for?

Like to, and it's almost like, you know, I have practiced some forms of meditation.

I really like transcendental meditation, which I use from time to time, not consistently, but I do find that there is a purpose for it.

In fact, if we just go there for one second, what I do sometimes with transcendental meditation, if I notice I'm being distracted, then I do the mantra of the single word for like 10 seconds.

And then I say, do I still feel the gravitational pull for the distraction?

And most of the time I don't.

So it's again, like a tool to intercept

this like pull.

So if you can sort of be aware that like, oh yeah, I want to go check Instagram and or I want to go to YouTube or like, you know, whatever it is.

And then you're like, okay, but there's something I'm doing now.

I feel the pull.

I'm about to go there.

I'm just going to do TM for 10 seconds.

And what do you do?

You just say the same word over and over again.

You say the same word over and over again.

You know,

anything you pick?

Well, they, what happens is you go to the ceremony and they give you a word and you're not supposed to tell other people what the word is.

And then you say the word out loud and then you start saying it in your head.

And then so I've practiced that as well as a tool to reduce my distractibility.

Clearly in this conversation, my mind's going all over and I'm not practicing any of these tools.

Clearly.

But

the thing about the cues to me is so important.

And if it's okay to just go here just for a moment, when COVID hit, this was really a critical time in my life because

I had been focused my entire life.

So I got identified as having ADHD and learning differences in the seventh grade.

Why do you keep on saying learning differences?

I've never heard that word before.

People said learn, I was learning disability back when I was, you know, but then people are like, you can't say that.

So now you can't, now the word is T C woke.

Okay, now you got to say learning differences.

Learning differences.

Yeah, yeah.

And I asked my mom, she said that they said it was a communications disability.

So it's kind of like I had trouble transferring, let's say someone said something to me and I think about it and then putting it on paper.

Like I couldn't,

like I couldn't go from one form to another.

I couldn't look at the blackboard and maybe I would understand some things, but then I couldn't write it down.

Like I couldn't write it in a notebook or like there were, it just, I, I, I, um, like a lot of the time I feel like I have ideas and things to say in my mind, but I just can't get it out.

Like I can't, I can't formulate it.

I can't figure out how to communicate it to other people, which is very, very frustrating.

But it, so it's more of a communication disability, the disability or whatever, the learning pro.

Yeah.

What did you call it?

The learning difference.

Difference, excuse me.

Was the ability to communicate it.

It wasn't that you couldn't comprehend it.

You just couldn't communicate it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And part of it, I think, what I've kind of come to realize now is that when I'm asked a question, let's say in school, I think of a lot of possibilities for the answer.

And so I can't figure out which is the one that the teacher wants.

Right.

And so I can't, that's why I need more time to figure it out.

And then, like, when my children ask me to help them, what they hate, they will never ask me to help them with their homework because it's the same thing.

Like, I see the question and I'm like, well, they could mean this and they could mean that and they could mean that.

And I'm not really sure which one it is.

So like we have to like, we have to do this method of trying to figure out what the question is asking.

And they're just like, no, no, no, there's one method.

That's the teacher with the one that's like, mom, where are you?

Yeah.

So, so that just doesn't work.

But okay, so I spent like majority of my life trying to improve efficiencies and maximize productivity because time was a big issue for me.

It took me a long time to do everything.

One teacher actually put like blinders on my desk in front of all the other kids and put a stop, like a timer.

I mean, that just made me more stressed.

And so what happened was when I get to COVID, so one of the tools is called flip the switch.

And it's about noticing your inner desire for possibility is the first step.

And when COVID hit, and I started to, you know, we had this unintentional pause, everything came to a shocking, you know, sort of stillness.

And I

had, you know, I started reflecting on all these things because I, this was the extreme time, like when I was doing the Netflix, like walking the dogs and all these things in my like back-to-back meetings and just filling my day and going to bed late, waking up early and just doing as, you know, going crazy all over the place.

And I realized, holy shit, I'm like.

I was going to birthday parties and I was trying to network with other parents at the birth, my children's birthday parties.

I would be going to soccer matches and practices and just be trying to get in my 10,000 steps and walking around the field, you know, constantly not engaging with anybody.

I'd be on vacation and be sitting in the beach chair, like just working, you know, or like I was like at the bar even and, you know, my family was right there.

And I, like, my wife and I, our relationship had deteriorated.

My son, all of a sudden, he was a teenager.

And, you know, he's like, I look up, he's like the quarterback of the high school football team.

And he's like, you know, there was points in time where he would come to me and say, hey, can we throw the ball?

Like when he was younger.

And I'd be like, five five more minutes, five more minutes.

And then an hour would pass.

And then he just stopped coming to me.

And so all of this, when COVID hit, it all kind of came crashing down.

And the book that I was writing was actually focused on productivity until COVID hit.

And then when COVID hit, I had this like massive realization that I had my priorities.

Like, you know, so the second step of flip the switch after noticing your inner desire for possibility, because I was noticing it like beyond anything I've noticed before.

And the second step is to take stock of what's working, what's holding you back.

And I realized I was like, oh my God, I've spent my whole life developing all these efficiencies and productivity and I have all these tools to use to maximize that.

But what was holding me back was that I wasn't prioritizing what was most meaningful and important to me, which was my relationships with my family.

And so the next step is to consider other ways of thinking, other possibilities.

And it was literally right in front of me.

My wife was exploring spiritual questions and she had teachers, like spiritual teachers that she was engaging.

And I said, Jessica, can you please introduce me to all of your spiritual teachers, all the people that you've worked with?

She did that.

I started to meet with them.

I started to experiment with different forms of meditation, like transcendental meditation.

And I started to observe, I started to observe like my impulsivity.

I started to observe like when I had like some sort of a stimuli, how I would just chase it right away, you know, like an email.

Like when, when, when I started my lab, I had this policy in my mind.

I just made it up that like anytime someone sent me a research paper, a student to review, I would get it back to them the same day.

So I would stay up as late as I needed to stay up and I'd spend like an hour or more per page.

Like it would take me a long time to really, because I'm, you know, was just wanted to be very thorough.

And here I am, this young professor.

And, and, um, you know, if I didn't sort of bring in my own funding within two or three years, then I would be kicked out.

And so, anyhow, I just started to develop this awareness of my impulsivity and just how I would chase things really quickly.

I started to be able to truly hold space for my family and be able to listen to them.

And one of the ways that I noticed that was to me, this is, this is like a really important tool for me is let's say I'm talking to one of my children.

And they're saying, they're talking and then an idea comes in my head that may, you know, and I add it to the conversation.

I notice that the energy shifts from them to me.

And that now all of a sudden they had the floor, they were expressing themselves, and now the conversation is about me.

And so I started to recognize that.

And I was like, oh my God, like I need to think about when I come into conversations, I need to think about like the energy of the conversation.

If the energy is like with them, I have to do what I can to support and keep the energy with them versus like shift it to me.

Like I just found myself pulling energy away from them.

In what way?

Well, in the way of like, you know, they might say something and then I would just be like, oh yeah, in my work, like, oh, I did something, like, you know, I just, I, I, you just shifted it towards you.

I shifted it towards me.

I shifted it towards me.

And I just noticed that there were certain things I would say that would change the, like they were ready to say more.

And then all of a sudden, they like what they were going to say.

I could see then they stopped talking because now I have intercepted.

Right.

Yeah.

I totally know what you mean.

And so I started to recognize that.

I wouldn't have recognized that had COVID not happened and I would have gone through this process.

And that's where, sort of noticing the cues, I started noticing that there were these cues, that there were these sort of like, almost like my values, my morals, like it's almost like they started to like, to come out of the pores in my body, you know, like I started to sense like, okay, here's what really like it, like, like the things that I need to tune into to make decisions that are going to be fully aligned aligned with me.

So, you changed the entire premise of your book from being a productivity book to being a book about, because to me, what isn't the book about unleashing someone's potential?

It is, it is, yeah.

And I think a big book.

It's called Lit, by the way.

And by the way, I don't have, I actually have a PDF of it.

I don't have the right to the full book.

Oh, we'll get it to you.

It's coming out.

We're going to have the pre-release copies in the next couple of weeks.

So, yeah, good.

We can get it to you.

And what does Lit even stand for, by the way?

Life ignition tools.

So basically, it's tools to live your best life, basically, or be the most what life.

Well, I'll give you, I'll give you an example of how I see it, right?

And just a very specific example, but we can go broad as well.

So the flow state is something that I think a lot of people can relate to.

You know, most people have been in it at one point or another or multiple times, and you can feel very productive, you know, when you are in it.

You're in the zone.

And so I like to think of lit as

as all the good things that flow is with really wrapped around a core purpose so almost thinking of it as like flow 2.0 in the sense of because with flow you could be working on something that's not aligned with your values you could be working on something that is you know it's just focused on productivity but it's not focused on purpose it's not something aligned with your intentions if you really step back and press pause in your life and try to figure out like where do you really want to place your efforts and where do you really want to like you know what do you want to do that that's going to be most meaningful to you and and and for your life and your relationships and okay so if your book was supposed to be a book of productivity which you know now it's not lit is about tools to help ignite your best life let's say right like it's life ignition tools right yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so what is the book about then if it's not about productivity and it's about living your best life and optimizing and unleashing your potential yeah yeah well the book does does have a productivity component, but the productivity is aligned with core purpose.

So it's like aligning productivity with being deliberate, with being intentional, with.

Because what it sounds like to me is that when COVID hit, and you know, you were very much about efficiency and productivity.

Like when you were saying at the soccer games, you're trying to get your 10,000 miles in, because my brain works like that too.

I'm like, oh my God, I'm sitting still when I can be walking around and doing this at the same time.

Like, I think that is a part of our mind anyway, like my, my neuroplasticity or my chemistry is I hate that feeling of inefficiency.

It drives me crazy.

But you're saying when COVID hit, you kind of re kind of re

or changed or reframed or tweaked your neuroplasticity by doing these other behaviors.

Yeah.

Like these,

your wife, your wife had all these spiritual people that you sort of talk to.

Do you feel like with that experience now that you're not, you're not so concerned with efficiency as much?

You're not as, I don't know what the word is, like

concerned about productivity and time.

So I would say that I'm very aware of the

you've harnessed it, maybe?

Yeah, like I'm aware of the culture I exist within.

I'm aware of what needs to be done to make an academic discovery and what needs to be done to bring that to patients.

No, no, no.

But what I mean is, okay, your wife had these teachers.

What kind of teachers were these spiritual teachers?

One was obviously a TM meditation teacher.

So, yeah, so there was one.

Or sorry, Transcendental, or is that what you call it?

TM?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Actually, the TM one was one that

I sought out after I had spoken to her spiritual teachers.

Okay.

And they were, you know, people who like could engage in the Akashic records.

Have you ever done that?

Actually, funnily enough, someone reached out to me because they wanted to do that on me yeah i never did it though okay was it did you it's just interesting i just you know i have this clearly like scientific mind and very logical side of things yeah but i'm also extraordinarily curious about everything and so i feel like i'm open to other ways of knowing other ways of being other things that don't seem logical to to be possible because actually in the world of science like everybody says it's not possible until someone shows that it's possible.

And so, something that was once impossible becomes possible.

And to me, when I think about that,

how many things exist today that we say are impossible that will be possible tomorrow or next month?

So, of all those spiritual teachers, which teacher or what was the one thing that you didn't like really believe in or really kind of lean into that you realize was exceptionally helpful for your type of brain and my type of brain and other people's brains who may not be interested in those things.

I think it was simply the ability

to observe my thoughts without acting.

The ability, so it was almost going to copy that though.

So, what kind of teacher was it?

What kind of teacher?

I think that it was a combination of these teachers.

I mean, I'm trying to think.

There was, um, there was this extraordinary woman in Toronto that both my wife and I spoke to, um, Victoria, who we met many times.

In fact, she was so amazing that during COVID, I set up like like three or four sessions with my lab.

So she came in and did Zoom sessions with the entire lab and walked us through these visualizations.

What does she do?

What's her, what kind of teacher was she, though?

Like, what does she do?

I can send you her website so you can check it out.

But I like, there's a whole list of things that she's like accredited for, but I don't remember the question.

No, no, I know.

I'm sure she's got a credit.

I'm trying to understand.

Like, is she meditation?

Is she a Reiki healer?

She has teachers.

I think she does Reiki.

I think she does spiritual healing.

Like, what is her like spiritual is like saying,

I don't know.

It could be anything under the sun, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, that's just one of these things that I don't.

Like, I kind of engage her and was felt like a really sort of powerful experience, but like, I've forgotten all the stuff.

All the things.

By the way, do you now live in Boston, though?

Live in Boston.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, sorry.

Go ahead.

Okay, so what we're talking about.

The book.

Okay.

So Lit is a series of 12 simple holistic tools that can help us tap into this wellspring of energy that we all have.

And it's holistic because I've recognized that we need tools that work together.

And I'll just give you a few examples.

So the book is really focused on intercepting routine patterns, right?

So just this sense of like our life is filled with patterns, everything in our life, like from the moment we wake up to the time we go to bed, you know, how fast we eat, what types of things we eat, the clothes we buy, how fast we brush our teeth, you know, the whole process of getting ready in the morning, the route we take to work, you know, the tone of voice we use with other people.

It's just like, it's everything, right?

And so we have so many patterns that serve us, but we have

for me, many patterns, even more that don't serve me, you know, that are just kind of locked in.

So lit is really all about how do we have tools to intercept those patterns?

Because that's how we keep growing and that's how we keep learning and that's how we keep moving more and more towards intentionality with, like, you know, deep living a life of deep purpose and meaning and connection, and you know, all these wonderful things.

And so, if we're going to do that, we need tools that can help flood our brains with positive neurotransmitters, right?

So, that's where like get hooked on movement comes in.

We need to constantly be moving because that provides us with this good feeling and it can help us break these patterns.

And we need tools to tap into our motivation, which is to

identify the cues that move us to act, that we all have these cues.

Like, for example, when I move my laboratory from Cambridge to the Longwood Medical Area in Boston, and now we're in the hospital, and I see patients all the time, that's like a motivator to like keep going and to be more persistent because we see the people that we're treating are like right there, you know, like what Brian Stevenson says, who's a social justice activist, who says, be proximate, stay proximate.

You want to stay proximate to the things that really move you.

And then there's, you know, we need tools to help us to connect with nature and deepen that connection because we need to, you know, in this modern day society, we're constantly stressed.

Someone that I interviewed, Linda Stone, coined this term, a screen apnea.

Anytime we sort of receive a certain email or see a heading, we hold our breath, you know?

And so it's stressing us out, just the interactions that we have with the digital world.

We need a way to switch from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system to calm ourselves down.

Just going out into nature does that.

It gives us this sense of well-being.

Sometimes we go out into nature and we feel the sense of boredom, but that just shows us how far we are from attuning to the rhythms of life, like how far away we've moved.

And we need.

How?

Tell us.

Tell me.

So it happens because, I mean, this has happened to me sometimes where, you know, in the past, I've gone out into nature and I just sort of I'm like, okay, like it's what's not happening.

Like, you know, I'm like, why am I not feeling calmer?

Like, I'm looking around.

And then when I sort of step back and look at it, it's like, okay, well, what was I doing before that?

What's the rest of my week been?

And it's like, oh, back-to-back meetings, all sorts of deadlines, you know, bouncing around all over the place.

And now I'm going to nature for like 20 minutes and saying, like, you know, just can you reverse all that?

Like in that moment.

And it doesn't happen that way.

How does it happen?

So one of the ways that I have found, actually, there's a couple of ways I want to love to discuss.

So one of the things that I do is when I'm walking the dogs, right?

And there's a lot actually with the dogs now.

When I'm walking the dogs.

You're not watching Netflix.

I'm not watching Netflix anymore because, okay, so I want to be open to my intention when I walk the dogs is to connect with them.

That is my intention.

I want to connect with them.

Okay.

So what I notice is we have two dogs, Ginger and Ryder.

Ginger looks back at me every like, I don't know, 15, 20 seconds, just to see if I'm paying attention to her.

And when we make eye contact, there's a little burst of energy I notice in her.

Ryder will look at me more infrequently, like every couple of minutes, whatever.

But when we connect our eyes, he like, it's like, I can see the energy transfer, you know, occur.

So that to me is sort of like building on this connection.

Then the other thing I do is I'll walk around the neighborhood and I cycle through my senses.

So I'll say, okay, sight.

Like I want to focus on my senses, right?

Because I think that our, we, we've kind of been this culture, the society we live in, it desensitizes our senses.

Like it sort of dulls them.

And I want to try to reawaken them.

And so when I walk around the neighborhood, I'll say sight and I'll just look at like the bark of the trees and the texture or I'll look at the leaves or I'll look up at like the canopy or, you know, or just, you know, the tops of the trees, whatever it is, wherever, wherever I'm at.

And then I'll, I'll say, okay, um, like hearing and I'll listen and I'll listen for the birds and I'll just focus my attention entirely just just for like 10, 20 seconds or something like that, just on the sounds, the rustling of the weed leaves, touch.

I feel like the wind all of a sudden I can feel it.

Didn't feel it before, but now it's, oh, now it's there, you know, and I feel my feet walking.

I sort of slow down when I do this.

I consciously am slowing down my walking.

So it's kind of like doing one thing at a time.

And I feel like this is deepening my connection as well with nature because I'm starting to gain more of an appreciation.

Now, there's another tool that I use every day, three times a day, that actually I discovered in the summer.

I was at a dinner at my friend Bridge's house and he had his food.

And he said, Okay, he goes, I'm going to show you this new gratitude ritual that I'm doing.

He put his hands like kind of beside the food a little bit over and he said, Okay, I'm going to think of what each ingredient tastes like before I eat.

So he's, you know, we just pause and we each look at each ingredient, like, you know, whatever it is.

And then he said, Okay, and now I'm going to think about all the energy from the sun that went and drove photosynthesis and all the microbes in the soil and all the farmers who touched this and the people who transported it.

We're going to think of all the people who prepared this.

And then he said, and now this food is gonna become us.

And for me, I was just like, this seemed right.

Like there just something clicked for me.

And ever since he did that, every single meal, I've been doing that.

And I feel that, and to me, this is just, you know, lit because when we bring our awareness to something like that, it comes alive for us, right?

Like anything we bring our awareness to, it sort of comes out of this static 2D and it becomes 3D and living and evolving.

And so all of a sudden I start doing this and I start to realize like it starts changing for me.

And so I start to think to myself like, oh, you know, like, well, like, how did this, all of these things come about?

And I start reading about, you know, oxygen in the air.

And actually over half of the oxygen that we breathe in the air comes from the phytoplankton in the ocean.

So now I'm thinking like, okay, like there's things that we're eating that are reliant on the phytoplankton in the ocean to make oxygen.

We're certainly reliant on it, right?

So I start to think about the interconnectedness of everything.

And I start to think to myself, like, okay, the molecules that are in here, right, have existed forever.

And what else have they been in, right?

Like I start thinking about that.

I understand, but most people aren't going to be like that, right?

Yeah.

So how can they,

not to cut you off, but like,

how does the average person

who wants to integrate these tools into their life, how do they start if they don't think in that type of way?

If they want to be much more intentional

while also being

productive, give me a few tools of how they can, like, how they can start or what are the main, some of the good, few of the tools that are easy to apply.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure, for sure.

Okay, as I look for more questions for you.

Okay, okay.

So one of the tools is press pause.

And that tool is really the sense that, you know, we have, we fill our days with these back-to-back meetings.

We're constantly on the go and, you know, feel overwhelmed.

And we might say to ourselves, okay, I don't have time to do anything else, right?

But what I've realized is that we actually need to press pause in order for our brains to fully catch up with what we're doing.

And for our brains to be able to, you know, to turn mind into matter, we actually need pauses.

So one of the people that I interviewed for the book, Molly Gerbrien, is a neuroscientist and a violinist.

And so she studies this.

And what she found is that if you have one hour to practice a skill, for example, it's much better to break it up and practice for 15 minutes and then take a five minute break and then keep doing that because we need time for our brains to develop these new synapses and to sort of like you know reconnect or or to bolster connections and she also found that there's something called the startle effect which is when you are learning something and then you pause for like five minutes and then you go back to it you've forgotten some of the things and so your brain gets startled but then that focuses your attention and then you more easily imprint the next piece of information in your working memory and then it goes into your longer-term memory so so sort of the pauses are a really important tool for us.

to build into our day, to process experiences and knowledge to kind of fit things.

Because if we kind of think of it as like a dot, there's dots all over the place.

We want to connect the dots so we can connect information together and make sense of things.

And if we're just filling our day with all the things that we typically do, then we're not really giving the time to connect things.

We're not really taking the information and and placing them in ways that we can then build on and use in the most productive, sort of valuable ways.

And so this idea of pressing pause, and there's a lot of ways that we can start to press pause.

So one example, and by the way, a lot of these tools, you just have to change one thing.

Like you just have to make a small change somewhere and it can create a domino effect for other things.

So some people might, for example, start to press pause.

They might be able to build in a little bit of time in between their meetings meetings and just sort of sit with it and just sort of like process.

Like, I find after I have a meeting, if I can, even like 15 minutes to just sit there, and if I'm not even doing emails, I'm just maybe I go outside for a walk and I just sort of like let things like these thoughts start, there's information in my mind that starts to come to the surface that I then connect.

I'm like, oh, I just met this person and oh, yeah, there was a person I met like three years ago, and we need to get them together, right?

Like that doesn't happen if you do these back to back to back breaks.

You need to have breaks in between to even process what even happened.

Yes, exactly.

So, so, and then for some people, like, there may be one tool at this moment that is not going to be the tool that's best for them to like the on-ramp for them, but there might be another tool that'll give them an on-ramp.

Like, that could be pinch your brain.

Like, so, for example, it could be, you know, sitting here and you're just like overwhelmed things and then you're like, wait a moment.

What if I think about what's the most important thing that I'm doing today?

Like, what if you just sit sit there and focus your attention on intention?

Like basically say to yourself, what is really the highest value thing?

What's the thing that's the most meaningful to me today?

Right.

And am I doing that right now?

Or do I want to reprioritize what I'm working on?

Like there's this Nobel Prize winner that I interviewed, Phil Sharp.

And, you know, he talked about how at periods in his day, he'll just pause and think about, okay, what's the most important question in this field of biology that could completely change everything?

You know, like he's pausing and thinking, just giving, and maybe nothing comes to him that day.

But by doing that, like things start to, you know, things start to percolate and sort of, you know, mix in and things can come out of it.

Another one of the tools that I think is, is, is, is, I mean, all the tools are really simple to practice and to embrace and engage.

Implement.

And yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know, it's interesting, like

how you got to this place is being the way you are right and now you need to like reverse engineer to get to the next place of your life right like i feel like that's kind of like was it the fact that like it was really hard for you to be you like doing these behavior patterns to get you to where you needed to go but to continue with those behavior patterns it's exhausting in a way right yeah yeah there certainly is you know sometimes i feel like it's like i don't know if you remember the movie terminator and like at one point there's like four like there's like they're having he's having some sort of conversation or something and he this screen comes up and there's four things he could say and he picks the one thing to say yeah yeah there's that yeah I remember that like I feel like that all the time like I'm not quite sure and so I'm not quite sure what to say and so I've spent my life like trying to figure out the patterns of what to say and what people's responses will be and then I've kind of tried to rewire my brain so that I can, you know, fit in and that I can have conversations and that I can process information in various ways.

Like I really have kind of felt like a lot in my life, like my brain is almost like this, like kind of like a robot in certain ways.

And that I'm like, I've had to program it consciously

to fit into social circles, to know what to say, what not to say.

Like I feel like in early my life, I said a lot of things what are not to say, which I probably would have been like, I don't know, maybe jailed for if I said those things today.

But like, you know, like, I feel like it was all experimental.

Like my whole life was very experimental.

And I'm still experimenting with all kinds of things.

And that's just part of the process as well.

And actually, just one other thing just to add to this is that, you know, just speaking of the tools, like if somebody is sort of like, oh my God, I'm just exhausted in my day.

And, you know, like, I feel like people are waking up to this sense that there's something more.

There's something wrong with society.

There's something wrong with our lives.

There's like, there's a lot that's right, but there's like things that are wrong that are just sort of like, ah, we're not going in the right direction.

And that's why it's, I feel it's more important than ever that we find ways to be aware of our patterns and intercept them.

And it can be as small as like just changing the hand that you brush your teeth with, like, for example.

And these may sound like ridiculous, but these are just, and you don't have to do that per se, but like things like that, like just make tiny little changes.

tiny change can give you the energy for a bigger change and a bigger change and a bigger change.

Like there's so many things that I do to intercept my day.

One of the things is when I'm walking, I realize if I put my head down, I ruminate more.

So, if I walk, if I keep my head up, I find I have less rumination.

I'm more like looking up at the trees.

I'm more like observant of the birds.

I'm more observant of things.

But, like, I always, anytime that I'm like ruminating, my head is like down.

And so, you catch yourself in that moment, right?

And then you look up again.

I look up again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Purposely look up.

This is great because it's like you've taught yourself how to be so conscious of your behavior where you can like catch it in its moment to pivot and change.

So if you're in a bad mood or if you are being too self-absorbed or if you are being too this or that, you can literally stop it in its tracks and take it to another direction is what it sounds like.

That you've mastered that ability.

Yeah, I wouldn't say mastered per se, but I would say that maybe like mastered the awareness.

Yeah.

And so like I, and my wife and I now, we have this relationship where like if I say something that I know is like, I don't know, inappropriate or just something that bothers her, for example, or I trigger her, like she knows that I know that I just did it and I'm feeling bad about it, you know?

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I want to know with Mr.

Efficiency and Productivity, what is your daily habits go every day?

What time to wake up until you go to sleep?

Okay.

First thing I will say is that I do have daily rituals, but I rather frequently disrupt my rituals because I'm of the mindset that not any ritual is going to be purposeful forever.

And that there's, I'm very excited to try things.

And so I, for myself, I'm kind of against the idea of doing one thing and saying I'm going to do it for my whole life, which then makes it okay for me to not do a ritual for a few days to have a break, because then I start to develop awareness of the importance of that ritual in my life, which then motivates me to go back to it if I feel it's important or to find something else.

Holy hell.

Okay, just tell me what your rituals are now.

Okay, go ahead.

So, one of the things that I find really important in the morning is waiting an hour and a half half to two hours to have breakfast from the time that I wake up.

Wow.

So I wake up around 6.30 or so, and then I have breakfast somewhere around maybe like 8.39, sometimes even 9.30.

And why I like that so much is because it builds up my gratitude for having breakfast.

I find I used to be someone who just woke up all the time and ate right away.

And I found that by sort of prolonging that time, I have a much greater appreciation.

I'm hungry for the breakfast when I eat it.

Whereas if I just wake up and eat, I'm not that hungry.

I mean, sometimes I am, but not always.

And so I really want that hunger to kind of build up to a level where I'm really going to feel appreciation for eating.

So that's one of the rituals that I have consistently been doing.

I really find it important at this point in my life.

Another ritual is I do breath work.

And so I do breath work, rhythmic breathing.

One of the things I do is called psychedelic breath work and so i and i find with breath work to really make it work i need to focus all of my attention on it i can't just be breathing and thinking about other things i need to be doing very deep diaphragmatic breathing where i'm

and i'm like feeling my whole diaphragm you know go down and out like i can feel it every time and when i do that so i do that um usually at twice in the day.

When I wake up, I'll do this as part of this routine before I have my breakfast.

Usually what I'll do is I'll

wake up, I make my breakfast, I have a conversation with my wife.

We just chat about, you know, whatever.

And I'm just kind of making my breakfast.

What do you eat for breakfast?

Kids come down.

I just realized recently that it's like incredible for my brain what I'm eating.

Like it just, I was like, oh my God, yeah.

It's like, but I, cause I just kind of did it because it, you know, just, it just, you know, mixing things.

And I like this and that.

So oats.

So I eat a good amount of oats, just dry oats.

And then I put on it, I put walnuts, I put baru nuts, right?

Barucas, yep.

I put blueberries, I put hemp seeds, and sometimes macadamia nuts or pumpkin seeds.

And then I'll put like almond milk or some type of nut milk on it.

Okay.

And so that's the energy.

Are you a vegan?

I'm not a vegan.

I'm kind of moving away from meat.

I rarely eat red meat, very, very rarely, almost never.

I'm kind of cutting down on chicken and

I'm kind of gravitating towards more like the pescatarian, you know, and then maybe I'll gravitate towards vegan.

I'm, I'm sort of, I see that as being,

I like that progression.

And then another part of it, so then I take the dogs out for a walk and I like to walk them in the woods if I can.

Not every day I'm able to do that, but I do.

One of the things I also do is I like to walk backwards at night while I'm walking the dogs so I can see their faces.

Not the whole walk, but like for part of it, I'll actually do that because it just I feel it just changes the perspective, it changes things.

And just another way to interact with them.

And then I at nighttime as well, what I'll do is I'll do rhythmic breathing when I'm out with the dogs, sort of as a preparation before I go to bed.

So I'll walk them around the neighborhood for about like 15 minutes and I'm doing like deep rhythmic breathing as I'm walking with them.

So when I get back home, I have this very deep sense of calm and relaxation, which I think helps me fall asleep.

Do you do any kind of exercise beyond that?

I do, I get about 12,000 steps a day is kind of my average for the last, you know, five years or something like that.

And then I bike in the summer.

I did it about 5,000 miles on my bike this past summer.

Wow.

Just,

I mean, people who bike seriously were like, oh my God, that's nothing.

But

I was being polite.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's good.

It's good.

Yeah, yeah.

But like for someone who hadn't biked that much before, like this past summer, I just started biking and it was one of these things where I just lowered the activate.

I think of things in terms of activation energy, anything new that I'm doing, I think of it as like how much energy is required to do something.

And then I think, okay, how can I lower the energy?

So for biking, it was like, how could I start biking?

It was like, okay, I hang my helmet on my bike.

That lowers the activation energy.

I put air on the tires.

I wash it the next day.

That lowered it.

Put it somewhere I'm going to see every day.

That lowers it big time.

And now I only need like 10 minutes to go around the neighborhood.

And so that's what I did.

I like that.

That's a good, that's, those are good.

Those are good.

Are you in therapy?

I've done therapy many different times, not currently right now, but only because you keep on using

these very therapy words like triggered.

And it's like, I feel like your wife has like brought you to therapy a few times to like, to like learn, because you're saying very specific words that are very therapy sounding, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I've actually, I've suggested to times that for us to go go to therapy and we've we've done it together um where i've you know kind of initiated just because i feel you know and and and relationships i feel it's it's like especially when you've been with someone for a long time like my wife and i have been together we got together in um the year 2000s when we started dating and you know we know each other really well and we certainly know how to kind of push each other's buttons well yeah and you know i think that it's a pattern again it's a pattern of pushing buttons right and so being able to intercept that pattern pattern, being able to have awareness of when I'm pushing the buttons, then I can later on, I can say, like, hey, Jess, you know, like before I feel bad, like I actually was put trying to push your buttons or you know, like I can kind of, and I, I now gotten to the point where it's much easier for me to do that.

Like it wasn't very easy to do that before.

Like there was an incident in the car the other day where I went into the car, I had my computer with me, my son was in the car, and my wife was sort of saying something and I was kind of working and then I said something.

And my son was like, you know, he kind of like raised his voice with me.

And I was like, oh my God, look at what I'm doing.

Like here I am like multitasking.

I'm doing work and like with my family.

And I like shut it and, you know, I paused, I just reflected.

And then I said, you know, I'm really sorry.

Like that's not, even though like I felt like, you know, my ego was kind of, you know, like it wasn't easy to say that.

And I feel that's one of the things about neuroplasticity and wiring is that if you kind of just bring yourself to say it as hard as it is, it's a little bit easier the next time.

And it's a little bit easier the next time.

And it may never get to be like crazy easy, but you do feel that resistance start to go away.

And that's what I feel tapping into neuroplasticity is all about.

You know, it's so interesting too, that like, it's like when, you know, when you're fearful of something, when you just expose yourself to that fear a little bit every time, you get less and less fearful of it.

It's the same kind of thing, right?

Like the more you do something, the less it affects you and bothers you and you get better at it.

It's like anything you practice, you get better and better at, right?

Yeah.

All right.

How old are your kids, by the way?

So our daughter is 15 and our son is 18.

Oh, you have two kids.

Yeah.

Oh, so he's already, they're already like older, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so is she an academic as well or no?

So my wife is a Pilates instructor.

She runs a studio in Brookline.

Oh, okay.

Different.

And we haven't even talked about the lab yet, which I find interesting.

Like, well, how you even started a lab?

How much money have you raised to date?

For the companies, like over 600 million.

So far?

Okay.

And you have 12 now or more?

It's actually 13 now.

Excuse me.

Is this number 13?

And have any of these companies, by the way, have you exited any of these companies?

Three companies were acquired and one IPO'd on the NASDAQ.

Which ones are they?

And why don't I know them?

So one of the companies is called Bullseye Therapeutics.

We developed a needle that can stop in between the layers of the eye to deliver gene therapy to the back of the eye.

So it's like if you have a balloon inside of a balloon and you inject water in between, it goes all the way around, right?

Did you kind of pick, like if you have a balloon and then there's a bullseye, what's the other one?

Yeah.

Sorry, okay.

That's why I'm next.

And then I um, and then one is a, we developed a, um, a delivery approach for drugs

so that you could, let's say, like take a pill and someone who may have like inflammatory bowel disease, the pill would open up and you'd have these little gel fibers and they would attach to the ulcers and then selectively release the drug at the site of the ulcer.

So it's like kind of targeting inflamed tissue.

That got acquired, yeah, by who?

Pure tech health.

And then I started a company in the

cannabinoid space called Molecular Infusions, and that was acquired by Parallel, which is in cannabis or cannabis?

Like, yeah, in the cannabis space.

And then um I co-founded a company all these companies have co-founded and and I co-founded a company in the regenerative medicine space to to um

to take small molecules um and um which are standard drugs to activate stem cells and progenitor cells in the body to restore function so one of the approaches that um

we went after is to functionally restore hearing um so people who have hearing loss um I heard about this one.

Yeah, it's called frequency therapeutics.

Well, you did a TED talk 10 years ago about this one, I think, right?

That you mentioned it in there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mentioned it.

Yeah, you're right.

I remember.

I'm telling you, I remember.

So what would be, what was your biggest exit so far?

Well, the frequency therapeutics company IPO'd on the NASDAQ and the value went up to, I think it was like 1.8 billion at one point.

And where is it at like now?

Where is it?

So they did a merger with another company, Corobio.

So that technology, actually, what happened was, so we did five clinical trials and a number of patients, their hearing improved, but we couldn't get enough of a signal to get it, the drug to keep going through clinical trials.

So we brought it back into my laboratory.

And now we're in the process of using a variety of techniques, including artificial intelligence, to identify new targets that we could combine with that therapy to then potentially go back into trials.

Okay, how did you start a lab in the first place?

That was like another question I have.

And like, do you only, do you only do biotech and stuff within like healthcare like this?

And what do you, what do you teach it?

What kind of professor are you?

Okay.

Yeah.

These are like major questions.

Yeah.

So I started my lab in July of 2007.

It's based at the Brigham Women's Hospital.

And where is that?

So that's in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston.

So there's a bunch of hospitals that are together.

The Children's Hospital is there.

Dana Farber's there.

The Beth Israel is there.

It's really like energetic spot, you know, for healthcare research and treatment.

And so I started my lab there.

My faculty position goes through Harvard Medical School.

So that's where my academic appointment is.

And then I have appointments at MIT through the Health Sciences and Technology Program, the Broad Institute, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

So multiple affiliations.

But my lab, when I started my lab, actually, I was focused on this one technology to try to engineer stem cells so we could infuse them into the bloodstream and target where they go in the body.

So the idea is like by knowing the zip codes of blood vessels in different tissues, we could program the cells to slow down and stop in those tissues.

And we actually demonstrated, like we had data showing we could do it.

What's your PhD in though?

It's in chemical engineering.

Oh, yeah.

That's so crazy.

Like biomedical and chemical engineering.

That's David's also, right?

David Edwards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, I think what happened was, I think, I think the story is that he's a mathematician.

and then he i think that's where his like yeah doctorate was i think and then he joined bob langer's lab and bob bob presented to him a problem which was aerosol drug delivery how do you get drugs into the deep lung yes right and he did all of the work to figure out the most aerodynamic particle possible and then someone in the lab figured out how to make it and then they created a company which i think then led to the formation of alchemies which is a big company now yeah exactly you know more than i do okay so then this lab.

So then when you say you can, how easy or hard is it to start a lab?

Can anyone, like not anyone, but like, let's say I have a PhD in chemical engineering, like what makes you credible to start a lab?

Are you, is it, is, is starting a lab about raising money than to do experiments and research on a particular company?

Is that basically what it is?

Yeah, it's a great question.

No one's ever asked me the question like this before, but so

there you go.

So I welcome to Habits and Hustle.

There we go.

So to start a lab, so usually you have to have a certain amount of research experience already so that you know how to run experiments and

such.

And to get a faculty position, often, you know, there's a search that happens and maybe a couple hundred people will apply for every position.

It's often in high demand to get a position.

And they look for people who have a really demonstrated record of already training to do research.

So, doing work in a PhD, publishing papers, helping to maybe securing fellowships or writing grants.

So, one of the big things about being a professor is you have to be able to secure your own funding.

And there's two positions: one is a traditional academic department position where you just have to secure your summer salary and you're teaching two or three courses a year, and the rest

the college pays for.

And then there's a position in the hospital, which is where I'm at, the Brigham Women's Hospital, Hospital, where I don't technically have to teach any specific course.

I have, but 100%

of my salary comes from the grants that I secure.

So it's higher risk.

Like if I don't bring in research dollars to my lab, then I can't pay myself like my salary.

Right.

So it's like, but at the same time, there's more freedoms because you know, you're not teaching as much and you just, there's, there's, there's more freedom being, so I'm based in the hospital.

okay and um and in my laboratory there's a few things I've done to maximize potential for translation and to be entrepreneurial so one is I minimize overlap of expertise of people in the lab right which is very different from a traditional lab where everyone has the same expertise so my lab we've had chemical engineers mechanical engineers electrical engineers biologists immunologists we've had a cardiovascular surgeon we've had a gastrointestinal surgeon we've had a dentist in the lab constantly changing and so the way I think about it is, let's say we have like people around a table and we're brainstorming.

Everyone can bring a unique perspective.

Everyone has unique knowledge and unique skills and they feel validated because no one else can bring that.

So it really brings out the best and the most of everybody, you know?

And so that's one of the elements that I found is really important.

Another is empowerment.

So I'm always looking for ways to empower people so that they can spread their wings.

And because I feel like it's very easy for someone, let's say like me to hold people back and to sort of put them in boxes and just say like, so for example, one of the things Bob Langer, one of the pieces of advice that he gave me and many other people is he said, you never want to limit anybody, right?

It's like that simple.

But what that means is that if somebody wants to do an extracurricular, like, yeah, go ahead.

You know, whatever's going to bring joy to your life, whatever is going, it's the holistic way of living.

Right.

And so he sounds amazing, this Bob Langer.

He's incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, there's so many pieces of advice that he gives like that.

And so to me, it's always about how, so when people join my lab, I commit to being a mentor for life.

And I tell people, like, you can reach out to me at any time in your entire career.

And, you know, I'm do whatever I can to be helpful.

So people send me grants review and papers and ask for advice on things.

And, you know, and I love doing it because it's like sort of create, it sort of just lays the framework that this is about creating a culture and it doesn't end with the lab.

It goes beyond.

Like this is, you know, like we're all in service to each other.

And, and, and then another thing I'll say about the lab, which I think is really, really critical, is, so when I was coming out of my postdoc, I saw what was possible.

I saw it was possible to take academic discoveries and turn them into products and help patients.

But I had this holy crap moment because I was all gung-ho about doing it.

And then I was like, holy crap, I don't know how to do it.

I never done it.

I'd never gone through the work, you know, the process.

And so I thought to myself, okay, what can I do?

What's the process I can engage?

Anytime in my life now, because I've done it so many times, when I feel like I can't do something or I'm not good at something, I kind of gravitate to self-shame and I'm like, nah, nah, nah, nah.

You know, I'm like, okay, good try.

But I feel it.

I feel it, you know, and I kind of go there for a little and I'm like, no, no, that's not helpful.

It's not helping me.

I'm like, okay, what's the process I can engage that will work for me, right?

Not all processes do.

I started thinking about it and I was like, okay, I need to have people who have expertise like when when we're when academics look at moving products to patients they're like looking through a keyhole right at that translation like they're not really sure they kind of see a few things and i was like i need to knock this door down and see everything there's all this expertise that i don't have right like how are patents like what's the whole patent landscape like what's manufacturing so many technologies have not made it to patients because you can't make they're too complicated can't manufacture them what's the clinical trial going to look like so every two or three weeks for 10 years, I started to meet with people in the ecosystem in Boston, patent lawyers, corporate lawyers, reimbursement regulatory experts, CEOs, people in med tech, consumer tech, healthcare, or pharma, you know, all these things.

And I would, for a decade, for like about a decade, I did this.

And the goal was not to like schmooze over cocktails.

It was to develop like relationships with people.

And what happened was this informal advisory board formed for my lab, where now, as we're advancing a project from the very beginning, I'm reaching out to people and saying, Okay, if this goes well, what would the clinical trial look like?

And what would the comparator be that we would, you know, compare it to?

Because we want to include that early on in our experiment to determine whether we're on the right track, right?

Like, if something is the gold standard in medicine and we're not comparing to it, we don't know whether we're doing better or worse or where we stand.

And so that's a way of kind of failing early as well, is you do a comparison there and you're like, whoa, we're not like, then all of a sudden the project is like, okay, how are we going to do as good or better than what's out there?

And that becomes the focus versus all these other incremental ways that we typically go in academia.

That's so interesting.

So now that you've had all these exits, I would imagine you have a lot of money, though.

You don't need all these grants and you're not worried about your salary, I would imagine.

You've done okay.

Yeah, no, I've definitely done done well.

And, you know, I mean, that's another thing that I'm working on right now personally is just my relationship with money.

And I feel this gravity to just the more, more, more.

And I feel like, you know, I go into these social settings and I was just at a dinner the other night.

And, you know, people are talking about, oh, you know, I did this and 20 million here, 30 million there and this and that.

And I feel

because I'm like, I don't know, I'm just at this stage where I'm really trying hard to live with more intention.

I'm really trying hard to live with meaning meaning and have more alignment with what feels right.

I'm starting to take steps so that I'm not, so it's kind of like, what's the amount of money that I really need, you know, and sort of think about, okay, it's like a certain amount and that's it.

And now the rest of it, I want to, my goal is to put that into a donor advised fund, like one of these DAFs.

Do you know about that?

Like it's, and then to be able to

tell people what it is.

I know what it is.

Yeah.

So it's, and I'm probably not going to not get it perfectly right, but it's basically a, you can take money that you've made, you put it into this account, and it immediately is, it's locked into this charitable account.

But then there's another step where you can determine which charity you want to give it to.

There's a certain amount, I think, you have to disperse every year, but you don't have to choose the charity right away.

And so it kind of gives you a little bit more control over what you're doing because sometimes you might, you know, over time, you might have sort of more gravity for one thing versus another.

It could kind of change.

And so what I'm thinking about, and I haven't fully worked this out yet, but what I'm thinking about is work it out here.

Okay.

I'm thinking, I'm going to put the money there, right?

That's outside of what, you know, I feel.

And then what I want to do is I want to slowly transition to doing work, like nonprofit work.

And I want to use that money as a way to empower all these other things that I want to do.

Do you have any interest in like being an investor or starting any companies outside of what you do?

Like outside of biotech, like in the tech space, in the AI space, in the whatever space, or not interested?

Yeah, I think my sort of like the companies that have emerged from the lab have really started with really pure curiosity, like a curiosity-driven work where we really don't know whether it's going to get to that stage, but it just does.

And I think one of the reasons is because it's so curiosity focused.

And it's all healthcare driven.

Yeah, so it's all healthcare.

It's so, you know, everything from surgical glues to drug delivery systems to needles to a nasal spray to a, there's a, um, a skincare company that's based in Paris.

There's even a company that makes soap that, that, that, where we've, we created soap in these little bubbles that you hold in your hand, you squeeze it, and it splats out.

So it makes it fun for children children to wash their hands to encourage healthy habits.

Yeah, I love that.

Can you send me some of that?

Sure, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

I'm all about habits, obviously, healthy habits.

So, wait a second.

Okay, so do you have interest in other areas, though, or is your curiosity really strictly in the healthcare space?

Yeah, no, one of the areas that I've been gravitating towards is in sustainability in terms of like, you know, the green economy and in terms of just, I'll give you an example so recently i met this incredible man nathan gray who was part of the formation of ox fam america he's one of these guys who would be in some sort of basement of a library in cambridge massachusetts hear of a tidal wave in india and head right there to sift through bodies and save lives in any way he could like doing all that international work he did that for a majority of his life 23 years ago he moved to panama found some land in the middle of panama which was rancher land, which is terrible for the environment because, you know, they cut the trees down, burn them.

And then the cattle there are also like almost like anorexic because the land's not even that great for growing what they need to.

Like, I don't know, it just doesn't work.

And so, what he did is with collaboration with indigenous tribes and with locals who were there, he planted 500,000 trees and restored rancher land to primitive jungle in the middle of Panama.

Panama is really special because it's where the isthmus is, which is where North America and South America a few million years ago joined.

And so all the animals in, well, not all, but like animals from the north went south, animals in the south went north, and you know, plants and things kind of mix.

And so you have maximum biodiverse.

One of the most biodiverse places on the planet is in Panama.

And so what he's done is he's trying to set up this campus in the middle of the jungle.

He has these amazing bamboo.

It's almost like the Tajma Hall of Bamboo that he's built there and all these structures.

And so my wife and I and our daughter went and stayed there for over the break in December.

I just felt this deep connection.

I went back.

There's this oceanic institute in Bocas del Toro, which is the northeast part of Panama that's also part of this.

It's called Geoversity, Nature's University.

And so I've been getting involved in that.

And I really feel like a sense of a calling.

And I've been working with Nathan and now trying to figure out how to really come up with the vision the for the future for geoversity.

And a big part of it is training like biocultural leadership.

So people who like think of like children coming there and learning how to work with Indigenous tribes and how to learn about sustainability and then go back to their home countries and really have that as in the forefront of their minds that they're starting businesses and

creating value for society.

So it's really helping to shift things to ways that really consider the effects and the consequences of the decisions that we make.

I like that.

Wow.

That's

interesting.

Wow.

We got to wrap you because you got to go to your next thing.

But I will say, you are fascinating.

I love everything you're talking about.

And I have a bunch of questions that I haven't even gotten to, but the book is called Lit, by the way, you guys.

When is the book coming out?

April 9th.

April 9th.

Yeah.

So

is by the time this airs you guys are going to be able to buy the book you have you're you're like a plethora of information it's amazing really is Thank you.

I've really enjoyed this conversation.

And,

you know, I feel like anytime I talk with somebody, it sort of, you know, you frame things in certain ways and I think about things differently.

And it's like, it's very like, you know, mind expanding, really.

And I have a lot to think about after this conversation.

You got to take a 15-second pause, right?

Yes, I might

and digest everything.

Well, Jeff Karp, the book is called Lit, you guys.

Check it out.

And again, thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you.

It's been great.

Bye.