Dr. Peter Attia On The Philosophy and Quality Of Life (Part 2)

0:00I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine which is I take them over to Whole Foods and we get all our groceries for the week then we have dinner it's one of their favorite. things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards.

0:31So you know it'll be delicious and good for you. You can also order online for pickup and even delivery in select zip codes to skip the crowds. Shop everything you need at Whole Foods Market, your holiday headquarters. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact.

1:14GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities. Over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than$2.5 billion over the last several years, and research suggests that these donations will save over 300 ,000 lives. I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me. And you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds.

1:48And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to GiveWell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the drop-down menu under Podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more.

2:15Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:05Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is someone who I've been all over the world. I've met a lot of really interesting, important, powerful, elite performers and leaders over the years. They're sort of a zealot-like figure who's connected to all of them. That's because he is himself one of the best in the world at something that those folks are often quite interested in and certainly have the financial wherewithal to pursue. I'm talking about today's guest, Dr. Peter Atiyah, who, in addition to just being an expert on the science of longevity, his practice works with, you know, I've met princes in Abu Dhabi.

3:55I've met sittings. I've met elected officials. I've met professional athletes. I've met billionaires. I've met a number of people who are clients, fans, followers of this guy's work. And I got first connected to Dr. Atiyah through a mutual friend, Tim Ferriss. Peter wanted to have me on the podcast. This was several years ago. And we sat down, we spent like two plus hours when he was in Austin talking about stoicism. He was clearly a fan of my stuff. And we became friends. And then he moved here during the pandemic. And we've gotten to know each other. So this is a long time coming. Peter has been out to the studio before, but we recorded this one remotely because he's got a cool studio.

4:42We've both been really busy. And I really wanted to do this interview. His book's come out recently and just absolutely crushed. Outlive, The Science and Art of Longevity is a massive bestseller for very good reason. I saw Oprah was raving about it, among many other people. I think you got to check him out. He's just a great dude. I'm sure you're familiar with some of his stuff. Maybe you've seen podcast clips over the years or you listen to his podcast, which is awesome. He's got a medical degree from Stanford. He spent five years at John Hopkins, been on the cutting edge of all sorts of scientific and medical breakthroughs for many, many years now, and is just a thoughtful dude.

5:22And I think you're really gonna like this interview. It's not gonna be about medical stuff. It's not even gonna really be about longevity so much, but it's gonna be about philosophy and quality of life, which I'm much more excited about. And he spends a good chunk of the last part of the book about. So that's where I go in this interview. Thanks to Dr. Peter Atiyah for coming out. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. You can follow him at Peter AtiyahMD on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Check out his podcast as well. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And check out the new book, Outlive the Science and Art of Longevity.

6:09Similar to like an eating disorder or a sex addiction, I think perfectionism and workaholism, where it's tricky. It's not just that it's hard for outside people to recognize where you're sick or where those behaviors are maladaptive or destructive. It's hard for you to separate when you're doing it for good reasons and bad reasons, when it's compulsion or when it's excellence, right? Or when it's just pleasure. And so it's hard to go, hey, I'm doing this, I'm insisting on this because it's the right thing in this situation, or I'm doing it because my sick lens, my lack of identity, you said, my lack of self-worth is compelling me to do it because it's the only thing that makes me feel like not a piece of shit.

6:58Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think those are great points. Yeah, I think with perfectionism and sort of discipline, one of the places I struggle with that, I wonder if you do too, where I struggle is, I was talking to you earlier about routine. It's like, okay, if I go, hey, I don't need to do that today. I'm going to take a break today. I struggle with, is that laziness or am I better? Have I actually conquered the compulsion and I'm acting in a way that healthy people are able to operate in, which is I decide consciously whether something is a good thing to do or not, or am I just doing the opposite of my compulsion?

7:49They talk about this in Workaholics Anonymous. It's not just the workaholism that the addiction can manifest itself. It can also manifest itself in work aversion or procrastination or the fleeing from the thing. They're both an inability to sort of healthily, reasonably do a thing that most people don't have any issue with whatsoever. ever. Yeah. I think that's one of the real perks I think of, of having a family is it makes it a lot easier to deal with that than if I, if I try to imagine my life today as a 50 year old single guy, which by the way, for me personally would be just a nightmare. So I'm really grateful that that's not the life I have, even though I'm sure there are many 50 year old single guys who couldn't be happier.

8:39But for me, if I decide not to do a workout and I choose to sit around on social media, I think I have pretty good reason to say that was a dumb idea after the fact. But if I skip a workout and instead I take my son to Home Depot to get some lumber to come home and build a target. I don't think that's ever happened and I haven't felt like that was the right thing to do. So I think there's just something about having a family that gives you a really good litmus test for what am I, what am I making this change for? Is it in service of something that is taking me closer towards my values and my goals in this case as a parent?

9:29Or did I skip the workout today because I wanted to do something that was effectively valueless, but just short-term idiotic pleasure like scrolling social media. Yeah. The horrible, torturous part about having kids is that, as they say, it takes your heart and it puts it outside your body, right? So there's this little vulnerable thing running around that you care about more than you care about yourself. and so you're terrified all the time because you don't want anything to happen to that thing. But one of the upsides of it, one of the things that can really be healing is that you can also recognize that heart outside your body, that five-year-old, 10-year-old, 15-year-old that's running around.

10:14That is your inner child manifested in human form. Inner child work is hard, right? To go back and sort of work on what happened to you when you were three or five or seven, that can be extremely difficult to do because you're having to imagine it. And you can't maybe, especially if there was trauma there, like I have trouble, I have trouble really identifying with who that person was. So I've been stuck in a lot of ways. But when I had kids, I'm like, oh, this is what a three-year-old needs. This is what a seven-year-old needs. This is what an 11-year-old needs. This is what I need or I needed at that age.

10:51And it forces me or allows me to, by being what they need, by focusing on them, by doing the right thing as opposed to the workaholic thing, let's say, or the accomplishment thing, it allows me to put it somewhere else where it's actually easier for me to make the right decision that's helpful to them, but also indirectly helpful to me. And I found that part of being a parent sort of an unexpected benefit that I didn't anticipate. I think that's an amazing point. And I agree completely that the way I think about that is that your kids can become a mirror for you. And I don't know if there's any actual data on this.

11:34So it could be anecdotal. And it just maybe hasn't been studied rigorously enough. But I've now seen it several times. and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a signal here in the noise, which is you'll have an individual who's had an awfully traumatic childhood. Something terrible happened to them as a child. So not kind of like a bunch of little T traumas, but they've really suffered some big T trauma at some point in their life. And let's say it occurred when they were seven years old or something like that. Fast forward 30 years and they have a child, presumably let's just say of the same sex.

12:13And everything seems rightfully repressed until that child hits the age at which they suffered the trauma. And all of a sudden they become completely unhinged. And again, I've seen this with my own eyes several times now that I have to believe there's something to it, which is that what you said, that only in that moment do they actually internalize what happened to them because now they say, oh my God, like all of this time that has been an abstract compartmentalized thing. But now that I can see my seven-year-old daughter, I now realize that's what I was when that happened to me. And then all of a sudden, you know, either things can get really bad or sometimes things can get really good.

13:02That's the That's the thing that they need to go and get help.

13:07So I think a lot about that as I watch my kids go through different stages of their lives. I know it had that effect for me with my relationship with my own parents, right? Because sometimes you can't really wrap your head around what it was like to be a three-year-old living with those people. And then you see those people around your three-year-old who's like you in so many ways, and you go, oh, I get it. This must have been very hard. This is where that started. These are where these habits or these coping mechanisms or that problem began. And so, yeah, it's a second chance. I talk about this in Daily Dad quite a bit.

13:49It's a second chance because you're getting to see yourself at each one of these ages. And although you can't go back in time and fix what happened to you, you can be what a different two-year-old or three-year-old or 13-year-old or 30-year-old, you can be what they needed. And there is something healing and empowering about that to give what you didn't get, so to speak. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's honestly probably one of the top three perks of being a parent. well you you talked about one of the most moving parts of the book you you tell the story of of your son uh having a serious medical emergency your wife calls you you're on a business trip and i know how these trips go you know it is a business trip but there's also dinner and there's also all the other things you're doing you sort of get this call on the way to dinner and then you know you hear he's at the hospital and then you go to the dinner and you don't come home right away.

14:55I have moments like that in my life. When I read people who share those stories, I try not to judge. I just try to go, when have I been like that? And I can think of times that I've been like that. But now hearing you talk about your own childhood a little bit, it also makes me think that sort of the metaphor there, the neglect in that moment is also the same neglect that you are inflicting on the 10-year-old version of yourself on an ongoing basis. Do you know what I mean? But it's like, you know, you need something, you know, you need someone, just as you know, he needed something and your wife needed someone.

15:32And then you're saying, but I'm busy, but oh, this thing is more important. And so that's kind of what I took from that, that little story that it's not just, it's like hurt people hurt people, you know, and you were hurting them, but also hurting yourself because all of you were wounded in some way. Yeah, it certainly would rank among the most shameful things I've ever done in my life. And it was hard to write about, actually.

16:07But again, going back to kind of what we were talking about at the outset here, I just didn't see a way to do this any other way. I didn't see a way to write about this and not include that awful example, which was, by the way, not a unique example of my selfishness, just one that was particularly egregious. But it's effectively an illustrative case of kind of how I lived most of my life. But isn't what's weird about those things, like when I look back at them, is that it made sense at the time. It made sense to me at the time. I didn't think I was doing something egregious and selfish. I thought the reasons made sense.

16:55And then what's remarkable is how not very long after, it does not age well. And it becomes overwhelmingly clear to me, the person who made the decision, who was on the other side of it not that long ago, just how embarrassingly stupid the logic that I rationalized the thing. I'll tell you, I was so deep in the throes of despair. So that event happened in July of 2017. So this was a month after he was born. um it wasn't until may of 2018 so 10 months later that a friend of mine was um she does a lot of work with people in prisons and she runs this program it's really amazing and um she said look i think you should come for a day to you know kern federal penitentiary this is back when i lived in San Diego.

18:00So this was, you know, five, six hours away or something like that. And she runs this event and it's, it was me and a few of my friends. And we spent a day in there with these men who were, you know, all in prison for, you know, homicide, you name it. I mean, these, this was not like, this was, this was not white collar prison, right? So a lot of these guys were never going to get out of prison. Some of these guys were on death row. Every one of these guys was in there for something violent. And we spent an entire day with them. And it was one of the most moving days of my life. And we did very structured activities at times.

18:42So for example, one of the things we did was we did the, I'm sure you're familiar with the step across the line game, right? So every one of the men who is in the prison is standing on a line. And those of us who were visiting were standing on a line. We were kind of facing each other. And then the moderator would say, okay, step across the line. If you grew up in a house with two parents and you look at the difference between those of us who are not in prison and those of us who are, those guys who are, and start, you know, step across the line. If you grew up in a house that had more than three books in it, step across the line.

19:15And you, you just start to see like, man it's easy to sit here and judge these guys but technically i can't relate to their life yes but the most moving part of the day for me was when we were paired up one-on-one with another guy with one of the with one of the inmates and we went through this exercise where we each had to tell each other the biggest mistake we've ever made in our life. And I tell him that story. Yeah. And he tells me the story of what landed him in prison, which I have to tell you, for a guy who's serving life in prison, I don't know the answer to how society fixes these issues.

20:11And I'm not saying he shouldn't be in prison and nor is he, but boy, one awful decision can ruin your life. And so the story that he tells me is, you know, he's, he's, he's dealing drugs and someone has wronged him in some way. and he comes home to get his gun. And as he's pulling out the driveway to go and kill this guy, his last memory is his five-year-old son trying to stop him and saying, Daddy, please don't go. And instead he goes, kills this guy, and now he's in jail for the foreseeable future. And it's like he can't get that image out of his mind that he, you know, in that moment, all he had to do was listen to his son and the world's a different world.

21:03And, you know, so he and I are telling each other these awful stories and we're just sobbing, right? I mean, it's just, it's such an emotional experience. I tell that story because it took that long, I think, for me to realize the depths of what I had done. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County. I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma.

21:38And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

22:28And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Well, it's almost here. Christmas is just a couple of days away and maybe you're scrambling. You're like, what should I get my dad? What should I get my mom? I got to get something to my sister. People love showing off pictures of their kids. And that's where today's sponsor comes in.

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24:34And you go, what a waste of time. And conversely for you, you cancel the meetings, you fly home. You're not going to regret it, but we come up with all these reasons why the other thing is important, even though it's not. And then the worst, most insidious part is that we continue to tell ourselves to identify as the person who does it all for our families, which couldn't be further from the truth when you look at the evidence. right? When you look at what you choose, like the calendar doesn't lie. You say you do it for your family, but why are you gone all the time? Yeah. I think I was mentioning this earlier on a podcast, but it's such a great story.

25:18I'm assuming you've seen Breaking Bad. Do you remember? I think it's like literally the very, very, very final episode when at this point, you know um he he's he's talking to Skyler and I forget why he goes to see her one more time or has her come to see him presumably it's about the kids I don't quite remember and Walter says something to the effect of you know I've always said that all of this business I've gotten into has been for you and for the kids and and Skyler kind of rolls her eyes as if to be like just shut the fuck up again, will you? But for the first time ever, he acknowledges it's total bullshit.

25:59He goes, but Skylar, it's not. That's, it's, it's been all about me. And it's the first time. And it's the final episode where he dies, where he finally fesses up to be like, this was all about me. None of this was about you guys. Uh, and that's just a, I think it's a remarkable and extreme example of what I think a lot of us do is we tell ourselves these lies about what we do and why we do them. Well, I mean, the deeper message of the show is like, he's not even doing it for the money, right? He's doing it for the grievance. He's doing it because he was wounded at some point. And because he can't process that wound, he can't deal with how certain things have made him feel.

26:46He'll literally kill thousands or hundreds, thousands of people. He'll abandon his family. He'll potentially spend what, for most of the show, he thinks is his very limited time left on earth. All of these things are more important or easier. It's easier to become a drug pin, king pin, than it is to go, man, those people really hurt me and I'm mad about it. and to process and deal with those feelings, which is actually, I think, a really important thing. You and I have talked about this before. There is this conception that stoicism is the absence of emotion or the conquering of emotion. And really what that stuffing of emotions down gets you is into dark, fucked up places like that because it doesn't go anywhere.

27:38It just festers and rots or metastasizes inside you. And, you know, maybe sometimes it propels you to be successful in one field or another. But ultimately, I think, you know, it kills you and the people that you love. Do you ever think through the, like, does the world need to have really extraordinary people who accomplish really extraordinary things at enormous personal toll? um you know like like i i don't want to use any people who are currently alive but like let's say a steve jobs for example right and let's be clear i mean i've only read a couple of his biographies i won't even pretend to know anything about his life but but let's say a case could be made that and maybe this is a lousy example but but a jobs like character who really actually is one of the few people who kind of fundamentally changes something about the world um but maybe and again whether it's jobs or someone similar, but like the cost on their own personal life and their own relationships was, was great.

28:48And maybe, you know, again, I'm trying to think of a better example. I'm sure you would have many better examples. Um, but, but do you ever think about like, how does one balance that out? How does one balance the, the bending the arc of the universe for good, but at the expense of your own thing? Cause my guess is there are a lot of people who think they're doing that, who are deluding themselves, right? Like, to be clear, I'm not for a moment including myself in that discussion. I don't think anything I do is relevant or should be viewed as relevant. And the only thing I think is relevant is my relationship with my kids as far as legacy.

29:25But I think there was a day when I was believing that I was more important than I was. Yeah. From an evolutionary standpoint, I think we can understand why these sort of, you know, wounds or, you know, sort of experiences that sort of transform someone into these, you know, the heights of power or success can be adaptive. I think we can understand why insatiability, you know, is maybe as generally good for sort of progress and the human species, but is maybe bad for individuals. But I imagine, and I can guess that part of the reason you don't want to name names is that some of those people are the types of people that end up coming into your practice.

30:13And you get a glimpse, certainly I've gotten a glimpse having met some of these folks over the years, they've read my books or whatever. You go, okay, yes, there are parts of view, the part of Steve Jobs that is brusque or impatient or doesn't have much sympathy for people's feelings on the way to accomplish stuff. Okay. Maybe. Maybe that's part of it. Maybe you can't run Pixar and Apple at the same time and be really friendly to strangers who make your smoothies. Maybe. I don't know. Does Steve Jobs have to repeatedly deny the paternity of his daughter in order to invent the iPhone. I'm not sure how these are related to each other.

31:00And I think what often happens is that people get really used to their success protecting them from having to deal with certain parts of their personality or their issues, right? And I think we all do this, right? We almost deliberately specialize in things so we don't have to deal with what's over here because over here sucks up all the attention. Like maybe one of the reasons someone like me becomes a public person and writes stuff and puts stuff out in the world to get validation is so I don't have to think about the fact that I don't just internally feel that way, right? So I think there's that.

31:45But what I have noticed up close and personal with some of these folks is that as constructive as it can be, it's also indisputable the areas that it holds them back, right? The places that it causes problems for them. And so you can't look at a successful person who's an asshole and go, oh, their assholeness made them successful. Because when you really parse the evidence, often what you see is all the areas that being an asshole prevented them from being even more successful. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it's more often success despite those things as opposed to because of those things.

32:33Yeah. It's like Michael Jordan takes the incident on his high school basketball team as this sort of formative moment. He tells the story over and over again, and I've heard it repeated that, you know, he gets cut from the varsity basketball team. Right. What gets omitted is he wasn't a senior, right? I mean, what was he like a sophomore? Yeah. Yeah. So he just doesn't make the team, right? Which is itself illustrative, the story that he tells himself. So he just doesn't make a team that he feels entitled to be on, but he is in fact not entitled to be on. He doesn't make the team. But what he takes from this is this grievance or this slight that he spends so much of his time trying to rectify, to punish, to prove wrong.

33:19And he does. The next year he makes the team. We also grows like eight inches between the sophomore and junior years. So he gets this narrative in his head that, hey, this thing happened to me and I conquered it by being driven and angry and seeking my vengeance. And it's actually a story with almost no basis in reality. And that is something you learn when you start to do some of this work on yourself, is that a story can be propulsive and totally untrue. And eventually the untruth of that story is going to start to cause issues for you, I think. And a lot of the work that we have to do in our lives is about asking ourselves, these stories that I tell myself, this identity, these assumptions I have about the world, do they have any basis in reality?

34:16Are they serving me well? And I think the alarming answer is how often they don't.

34:28I love that story about Jordan because it, um, it, it, it's, it's, it's one of the things that, that really caused me to kind of go back and ask the question of my own stories. Like we all have a story and I just think that some of us are really strong in those stories. And I know that that's sort of me. And my story, clear as day growing up, even though I can't tell you why this is the case, like I can't point to an event that said, this is why this story is true. But after a long enough period of time, believing the story, it is true. I mean, it just, it becomes your truth, regardless of whether it's objectively true.

35:10The story was your only asset, your only value, your only skill is your determination and capacity to work harder than others. And in fact, you're actually worse than others in every other way. So you're not as smart, you're not as strong, you're not as this, you're not as that, you're not as good, you know, you're worse than everybody in every other way, but you have a superpower in that you can endure more pain and you can work harder. And somewhere around the age of 12 and 13, that became codified into the motherboard as the story. And, and then at some point, like you, you lose sight of like, how did, what, where did that come from again?

35:55It just, it's no, no, that's, that's the story. And again, it's, it's a lot of work to undo that story. And to your point, that story can serve you pretty darn well. That's a net positive story for most of my life until it's not. You've talked about this, and I think it's great. That story can serve you well if you don't know what you're optimizing for. The critical question, you talk about this in your book and in lots of places, is if you don't know what you're optimizing for, then a story that makes you successful, a story that makes you money, a story that makes you famous, a story that makes you capable of doing things that people have never done before, then great, the story is serving you well.

36:39But if what you're optimizing for is, yes, success and mastery in my profession, but also not wanting to kill myself all the time, maybe that story is not serving you well. If I'm optimizing for having healthy, well-adjusted kids who don't feel like I do, then that story is not serving me well. Right. And so if if if you don't know what you're trying to do, you know, Seneca's line is if you don't know what port you're sailing for, no wind is favorable. But conversely, when you know where you're trying to end up, you can go, hey, this story is is motivating and propulsive in a professional context.

37:21but it is poison in a personal context or in a personal relationship context, then you can start to decide which parts of it you're going to keep and then which parts you're hopefully going to jettison. And by the way, that's the ultimate irony of that story is it starts to become really quite a bullshit selective story because I never once thought to apply that rigor to relationships or to self-improvement, right? Like you would think, well, Peter, if your, if your true motto is you have the capacity to work harder than anybody else and that's your only talent, shouldn't you be working harder than anybody else at fostering better relationships?

38:03Shouldn't you be working harder than anyone else on introspection? And of course the answer is no, of course not. Like it's just, I'm just going to work on the things I want to work on. Sure. So yeah, the web of self-lies that we can tell ourselves is truly remarkable. Well, and where it's insidious is in, say, Jordan's case, that's the story he tells himself when he's 13 or 14. The problem is when that story is now in a Nike ad campaign, and it's in newspaper articles and books and movies, and it's repeated over and over and over again, your lie is now a myth. like your other people are complicit in that story, right?

38:46And I think this happens all the time, right? Our story can be so preposterously untrue, but we got so good at marketing it that it starts to fuck with us and we don't know what's real or not. You know, I told this story in Ego is the Enemy. I think it's interesting. It repeats itself later with Trump. You know, Nixon had this sense that he was the underdog. right? That's how he always identified is, you know, the other kids had more money than me. The other kids went to better schools than me. The other kids were, you know, more handsome than me. They fit in. He had this sense of the underdog and, and he was kind of an underdog until you become the fucking president.

39:26And then you're not the underdog anymore, right? Like the, the ability for very successful people, in some cases, the most powerful person in the world to also simultaneously see themselves as a persecuted victim. That's one of the most insidious, destructive stories that can happen because in reality, you're here. But in the seven-year-old who lives inside of you, you're something totally different. And that's who's making the decisions, but they're being perceived and they're having consequences in the world, totally different. And, you know, you now live in this sort of mirror world. And eventually, I think that's why those people tend to destroy themselves.

40:11Yeah, it's a great point. Well, I think we've obviously been talking a lot about the emotional stuff, which I agree was the key to sort of unlocking the stuff in the book. because getting a sense of who you were and how painful it must have been. And again, some of these sort of very powerful people we're talking about. I can imagine a certain kind of person who has all the money in the world, who has access to the strategies in the book, into all the medical technologies that you talk about, where 20 years of life extension is like the worst thing you could wish on that person. Like where you go, hey, I'm actually just going to give you more rope to hang yourself with or another whip to whip yourself with.

41:00Like if you can't figure out how to optimize for happiness, for love, for relationships, for contentment, for stillness, why the fuck do you want to live longer, I guess is the question. which i mean let's i think that's almost verbatim how i talk about it in the first chapter when esther perel poses that question to me circa 2017 which is do you not find it the least bit ironic that you place such an emphasis on living a longer life and helping other people live a longer life and yet you place absolutely no emphasis on the quality of that life emotionally um And, yes, I think the point is 20 years of life extension to a miserable person, whether they realize it or not, is torture.

41:53I mean, it's a curse. Yeah, it's like you can imagine some play from the Greeks or whatever where the gods come up with a particularly terrible torture for Alexander the Great or whatever. And the torture is, we're going to let you conquer the world. and then we're going to let you keep living and you're going to realize, oh, it sucks to be Alexander the Great or whomever, right? That the life extension, the immortality that you seek, if you haven't figured out these other things, it's not only not a blessing, it's a curse. Yeah, 100%. And of course, obviously you talk about this, I think, more practically too.

42:37There are people who are really interested in life extension or if you said, hey, if you take this pill, you'll live longer. And then if you actually looked at their quality of life day-to-day from a health perspective, it's not good either, right? I mean, we see people extending end-of-life care and end-of-life care even though sort of day-to-day reality is almost excruciatingly painful. Yeah. And I think that's really the problem, I think, with our current medical system is, you know, the saying is what gets measured gets managed. Well, the thing that gets measured in medicine 2.0 is lifespan.

43:16It's the metric everybody cares about. So what's my proof of that? Well, it's self-evident. So what stats are tracked? Life, life expectancy, median life expectancy, maximum life expectancy, all of those things. Do you see a national database that's tracking strength, that's tracking cardiorespiratory fitness, that's tracking all these things? No. I mean, those data exist, but they're not at a national level. They're not the things that the CDC is tracking. CDC wants to know how long you live and what you die from. And if that's what gets measured, that's what gets managed. And we are, I mean, we're not even really moving life extension at this point.

43:55I mean, we've basically stalled out and it's kind of moving backwards now. Although that has less to do with chronic diseases and more to do with diseases of despair or deaths of despair. So it's, as maybe you've covered elsewhere on other podcasts, For the last three or four years, even pre-COVID and even net absent of COVID, life extension is actually going down slightly in the U.S. And it's driven by three things. It's driven first and foremost by opioid poisoning, but also alcohol-related deaths and suicides. None of those are, of course, chronic illnesses in the way we think of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease.

44:33But even if you ignore that, you would say, well, we're not really making any life extension gains on the big four chronic diseases that ultimately will kill, you know, 75 % of people. And that's why I think that we really need to focus on health span as the metric. Because again, if you make that the metric, that's the thing you'll manage. And if we focus on, okay, it's not just do you make it to 82 or not, but at the age of 75, how far can you walk? How much can you lift? You like waking up in the morning. Yeah, all of these things. If we could create a healthcare system that was focused on those metrics, people, by the way, would actually live longer because you can't fix those things, those health span things, without also boosting lifespan.

45:26but it becomes the indirect way to live longer by focusing on living better. Yeah, right. It is weird. I mean, I can see why it's been beneficial as a society to become more and more accepting, to be less and less judgmental, to let people live and act however they generally want to act. This is also just what it means to live in a free society. If if you want to stuff your face and not take care of yourself, that's, I guess, your choice, right? But you get to a place where people are profoundly unhealthy and they don't even have the ability to see anymore that that is unhealthy because everyone around them is simultaneously unhealthy and it feels relatively normal when it's not.

46:24Mobility should not be impeded by your size, barring certain medical conditions, let's say. But for the most part, you should be able to walk around and walk up a flight of stairs and not get winded. You should be able to go to sleep without the, you know, the help of this or that. You shouldn't be living in physical and existential pain on a daily basis. That's not what we were designed to do. And if things are going well with you and in society, you're not going to feel that way. Yeah. And I think part of the issue is we don't spend enough time around people at the end of their life to, and I don't mean like the last week of life.

47:10But I mean, like, even in the last decade of life, we, you know, there's been lots that's been written about this and discussed about this, but we're not a society that places great reverence in the, in our elders. And so, you know, the, the elders are not the, the, the people that we spend a lot of time around. And, and, and so in their marginal decade or their last decade of life on average, you know, they're less front and center to us. And therefore I think the message here is if you're a 40-year-old and you still have lots of runway in which to make choices about how you're going to live that last decade of your life, you don't have a great template for what to avoid or why you might want to.

47:53So in other words, imagine, for example, it was front and center to see every person who made it to retirement without saving enough and to look at the difficulty with which they're living their final years, where their Medicare, pardon me, their social service, social security check isn't covering things. They're barely getting by. And if you saw that and you're a 25-year-old, you might say, and that's not the life I want. Like, I need to figure out a way to save 10 % or 15 % of my check every month, even though, by the way, it means I got less money to spend now and there's a short-term cost to that.

48:31But now it's not just sort of an abstract exercise. Like now I really see why I'm doing this. And I think similarly, maybe the one thing I've had going for me in this area is I've seen so many people, both because of my career choice, but also I just think my innate curiosity about this particular issue, I've seen what it looks like at the end when you have not sown the seeds. you know and and and for me that has been a very powerful motivator to fixate not so much on the performance today you know how fast can i run a mile today you know what you know how good am i at anything today it's no what am i doing to ensure that in that last decade i'm functioning at the level of someone who's a decade or two younger than my birth certificate age and that means doing things that I know will bring me pleasure with, you know, grandkids, for example.

49:30Yeah. I've, I've come to say like, everything is a lagging indicator, right? All the, all the important things are lagging indicators. So, you know, when I sit down to write a book, that's a lagging indicator of whether I've done the research, had the experiences many years previous to set that up. And yeah, your health at 80 or 90 is a lagging indicator of decisions you made at 40 and 50 and 60 and 70. But we lack the ability to think in those terms. And we don't have enough cautionary tales close to us to really go, oh yeah, this is what happens if you don't do that. Like in the way that your parents might have said, hey, like, look, if you don't do well in high school and go to college, you're going to end up like these people.

50:21We kind of do that when kids are younger about maybe, you know, where they'll live or what kind of job they'll have. But then we kind of go after a certain point, everyone's equal. But everyone's not equal. There are 70-year-olds and 90-year-olds where the 90-year-old is way better off than the 70-year-old as far as day-to-day living because they made very different decisions. It's interesting we're having this discussion sort of culturally about our very old politicians, right? Which I think kind of illustrates what you're talking about in a lot of ways. First off, we don't always remark on the fact that a lot of these are pretty remarkable old people in the sense that they are still functioning at any level at that age.

51:07But we think about it, we go, oh, these old politicians should retire and make room for other people. And we focus on it from the perspective of opportunity and fairness and whether the system is functioning well. But we don't really focus as much on how profoundly sad it is. In one of Seneca's essays, he watches these old lawyers who are still pleading cases trying to basically make the headlines, make more money, be relevant. He's like, this is what they're still doing at the end of their life. They can't cede the stage. And there is something, although we can marvel at the fact that some 90-year-old is still sitting in the Senate from a health perspective, that's, I guess, mission accomplished in one respect.

52:00But in another respect, don't you have grandchildren that you want to see? Don't you have hobbies that you want to pursue? Don't you want to watch the sunrise and sunset? Instead, you want to be soliciting campaign donations still at your age? There's something pathetic about it that I think we have not maybe fully grasped culturally. I wondered what you thought about that. Look, if you're listening to this podcast, you've probably heard of HelloFresh, right? They're the number one meal kit in America. They make home cooking easier with chef-crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door.

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54:27I think that's such an interesting point, right? I thought you were going to go someplace different, which was around kind of age versus function. and you know i've heard people obviously especially in light of our current political climate where on both sides of the aisle you just have people who you know are going to be argued too old for their jobs and and my view is look i i to your point a moment ago about the 70 year old versus the 90 year old it's function that trumps age in my in my mind all day every day and at the end of the day, I'll take an 80 year old who's sharp as a tack over a 60 year old who's a buffoon or who's lost their capacity to think.

55:09So, um, so, so now how, how you actualize that is complicated, but, but that's sort of my view on that. But, but, but I think where you went is a more important point truthfully. And it's one that I've thought a lot about, and especially since turning 50. And I don't know why that is, but I've been slowly struggling this year with the, it's interesting. It's two things. I suppose it's turning 50 and having this book come out and having the book do really well, which by the way, the book came out like the week of my birthday sort of thing. So it's sort of like, it's just a weird coincidence that that would have happened.

55:52But it's sort of the, you know, receiving so much positive feedback on the book has made me realize how fleeting it all is. And realizing that in 10 years, like, it will be forgotten. Now, I don't think it will be. I think, you know, I hopefully don't think the book will be completely irrelevant in 10 years. But it clearly won't be sitting on the New York Times bestseller list in 10 years. Sure. and no one will be talking about it the way they're talking about it six months after it came out. And I don't know. I just think I'll be a lot less relevant in 10 years than I am today. And I don't know why, but there's a part of me that both finds that sad if I'm being brutally honest, but there's a part of me that thinks, well, that's good.

56:39Like, let's start preparing for that. Let's start preparing for what the next phase of your life looks like. And what does the next 10 years look like versus what are you going to be like when you're 70 and when you're 80? And as anybody this age knows, when you start to do the math, the next 30 years will go by on a relative basis much quicker than the last 30 years did. And yet I still remember being 20 like it was yesterday. The last 30 years kind of went by quick too. So to think that the next 30 are going to go by that much quicker. And oh, by the way, before you know it, you'll be dead. You know?

57:17Yeah. It's just, yeah, no, it's just, it's, it's, it's, um, I'll tell you in a moment, one way that I've come to grips with mortality, which is, is, is, is sort of a work in progress. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, but, but go ahead and tell me what you were going to say. Well, I was just reading this New York Times piece about senators who retired, and this was right before Dianne Feinstein died. And it was contrasting Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. Barbara Boxer, also a pioneering feminist California senator, and she retires. And Feinstein hangs on to the very, very bitter end, dies, doesn't look particularly happy in those sort of last month.

58:01And you go, yeah, if the entire meaning of your life in existence is about clinging on to your greatest accomplishment and wringing out a few more months or years from it, you miss the point. You miss the point. And even if you win, you lost. Being the longest serving senator, being the oldest senator, being the number one ranked in the world for this, none of it's going to matter that much. And the inability to let go and move on and be at peace with yourself, you realize that these are very powerful people who are in fact quite powerless in the sense that they're not in charge. Their ambition or their ego or their sense of identity, which is tied to relevance, that's what's actually in charge.

58:57And I mentioned Alexander the Great earlier. He dies this relatively gruesome death. I think he had a strange parasite that paralyzed him or something. They more recently discovered what it was. But his last words were to his men who wanted to go home. He goes, fine, go home. Go and tell people that you left Alexander to finish his work of conquering the world. And I think he thought that was this kind of mic drop moment, but he sounds like the loser to me. Like when I hear that, I go, you sound like the sad, pathetic one, not the people who want to return home to their homes and families. Yeah.

59:44It is amazing, isn't it?

59:50So, I mean, how do you, not to get too philosophical, how do you reconcile sort of how relatively short a period of time we have on this earth? I mean, does that create, what thoughts and emotions does that conjure up for you? I had a strange experience, I think it was a week ago or two weeks ago. I interviewed a friend of mine who's dying of terminal cancer, and then I went and visited another friend who's much older, who's sort of in hospice care and sort of towards the end, and sort of get hit with two reminders of that very quickly. It does bring home to you, yeah, 30 years, 60 years, 90 years, that seems like a big difference, but it's brief either way.

1:00:41Any of those numbers is actually a pretty small number. And yet it's also, the Stokes would say, quite a large number if you don't waste it, going down blind alleys or chasing things that don't matter. So I've tried to think less in terms of how long do I want to live and more about the day-to-day building blocks of that. So I go, do I actually like my life now? Or is my life built up around doing a lot of things I don't like so someday in the future I can do the things that I do like? Yeah, which is an interesting balance, isn't it? If you take that to extreme, you'd never study hard in college, right?

1:01:35You would never toil. You'd never chop the firewood to have the fire. So there has to be some balance of doing things that maybe in the short term aren't so gratifying in order to have the firewood in the winter where it is gratifying. But that's a very interesting balance. You know, one of the things that I've thought a lot about in the last six months or so is, and I don't know what prompted me to think of this, but I was just doing the math. And I was like, look, there have been about 110 billion human beings born to date. if you go back, this is going back 250 ,000 years ago to the, you know, basically the birth of the homo sapien.

1:02:27So there's what, like eight, eight and a half billion of us are alive at the moment. About a hundred billion people have been born and died over the last 250 ,000 years. And I was like, well, you know, one thing I could take, and by the way, when I say I, this is true of anybody today. One thing we can all take great comfort in is how lucky are we to have been born when we were. I mean, like, would you rather be you or the King of England 1500 years ago? Sure. Or 1000 years ago, right? I mean, it's like, even the wealthiest, most powerful person 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, lived an awful existence compared to the one we have today.

1:03:09Sure. And that's true of virtually any human on the planet today, not simply someone living in the United States. And so, you know, I guess I found myself taking some comfort in that, right? Which is, yes, on the, you know, grand arc of the universe, 13 billion year old universe, or life on this planet, or even humans on this planet, our existence is so trivial. But we picked, we really were fortunate. We picked a great time. Not that we had anything to do with it, right? But we hit the lottery when it came to a reasonable time to exist. And we could sit there, I mean, we can romanticize and say it would have been cool to have been born in the 20s and, you know, have lived your life into the 90s.

1:03:56Maybe that would have been a better 70-year window run. But all things considered, like, you know, we're staggeringly fortunate. Well, also, though, you zoom out, you go, okay, 100 plus billion people have ever been born. how many of them are truly sort of notable or memorable, right? The vast, vast, vast majority of people had essentially no significant impact and were totally forgotten. And there is something freeing about that. Is it Bertrand Russell? Some writers said something that I loved, which was Um, uh, the first sign of an impending nervous collapse is the belief that your work is terribly important.

1:04:42And, you know, when you, when you have this sense of grandiosity about what you're doing and how so much depends on it. And, you know, if you don't get to do this, that, you know, there will be consequences, you know, that's when you are in a delusional, manic, unhealthy state. And when you can zoom out and you can go, hey, the vast majority of people who have ever been born have been forgotten. And by the way, the ones who have been remembered, it doesn't do them any good. They're not around. You know what I mean? They didn't get to take that with them. and in fact it doesn't seem like it was actually that fun to be them it should help you kind of turn things down a bit and hopefully lock into the present moment a little bit enjoy the sunrise the sunset your family you know the pleasure of a nice hobby or whatever it should it should help you do that too i think that's i think that's that's totally spot on and And yeah, it's interesting to observe for sure.

1:05:53And by the way, how many of those very, very, very, very, very, very few people who did leave a mark did so positively? I mean, we have to sit and do the math and the accounting on that, but I got to think at least half of them did it negatively, right? Yes. Yes. Or that they were even in that position because of anything that had anything to do with them. Do you know what I mean? Like you're born in the moment that you're born in to the circumstances that you're born in. And you have some agency here or there. But we are also, you know, the Stoics would say like each of us gets assigned a role, you know, in the play.

1:06:31And some of us get starring roles and the vast majority of us don't. And you sort of just got to figure out how to play your role well. That's the, I think, humbler way to think about it. Yeah, yeah, indeed. But I think your point of the sort of marginal decade, what do you want that last year of your life to look like? And of course, I think people are going to want mobility. One of the ones you talk a lot about is, do you want to go skiing? Do you want to be able to keep exercising? Do you want to be able to go for your nightly walk? But the big one is probably going to be something like, can you pick up your grandchildren?

1:07:15And it's not just going to be, can you pick up your grandchildren? That's the physical component. But do your grandchildren want to come visit you? Right? And so that's where the emotional side of it comes right back around. You cannot escape those decisions as we're thinking about longevity and living a healthy life. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's why it's so important to frame it up as physical. We haven't talked about the cognitive, but assume there's a cognitive piece and then the emotional piece. It's not sufficient to wait until you're in your marginal decade to do something about it.

1:07:54yes in other words you can't get to the marginal decade completely out of shape and say okay now i want to make sure i can play 18 holes of golf in my mid 80s if in your 60s you couldn't do it either like it's this is a glider that is falling and you have to be able to make sure you start with enough physiologic headroom to make that work and the other point and this is where i think it's for, especially for someone like me, such a wake up call several years ago was you can't have this fantasy that, well, I don't have time with my kids today because I'm so busy, but I'll make up for it with my grandkids.

1:08:36And it's like, really, what in the world makes you think your kids are going to want to be around you, let alone have their kids be around you when you were, you know, a raging piece of shit. Like, in other words, this is the exercise equivalent of what you have to do today to make sure you have that life tomorrow. And in that sense, it's a perfect parallel between the steps you have to take physically and cognitively to ensure a high enough physiologic headroom in your marginal decade. You have to have a high enough relational headroom as well. Yeah, you can't have this, you can't neglect relationships and other people and friendships and all of those things, and then continue to indulge the fantasy that you will be surrounded by all the people who care about you on your deathbed.

1:09:30Because you will have pushed all those people away by the time that that happens. And you have to plant the seeds for the things that you are going to want to enjoy later. And a lot of us are not only not planting the seeds, we're actively salting the earth around us. Yeah. And I've seen some sad cases of people die, not even able to make peace with that. Like I mean, including someone I'm related to who was, you know, going into a very risky heart surgery. And And he had lived a bad life. There's no question about it, right? This is just a human being who had lived an awful life. He was my uncle, my dad's brother.

1:10:26And he abandoned his child when his child was young. So I never knew this cousin of mine.

1:10:35and I won't go into the details of his life but it was it was one awful awful misstep after another and all he did was alienate every human being alive and when he was going in to have this huge heart surgery that looked 50 50 he would survive you know my mom was like hey maybe you should come back to Toronto for this and I was like why what do I give a shit about this guy for he was he was the worst human being to me i've ever remembered um and she's like well for your dad and i was like all right fine so i come back and you know i i almost i don't know if he appreciated i think he did because it was made pretty clear how long his odds were so you'd think that as they're wheeling him off to pre-op where he's going to be anesthetized which is potentially the last conscious moment he will have on this planet, he'd have something nice to say.

1:11:36And he didn't. Instead, he just spewed vitriol to everyone in the room and said the meanest, most hurtful things I've ever heard a human say to someone that they are related to. Awful things I would never repeat. I can't believe he could say what he could say and enough to make you want to cry for the people he was talking to he has the surgery he survives the surgery but he never woke up again you know he died two weeks later in the ICU and I just remember thinking like how is this possible like how is this a life lived yeah and and what's not what yeah it's just it's just it just breaks my heart as an extreme example of no emotional health span as as i've gotten older i've i've you know i think early in my life when i would experience people or things like that it would make me angry at them you know as if what they were doing was unfair which it is right it's it's not nice to other people.

1:12:48And then you come to understand just how awful it is to be them. There's this idea that, hey, if you live a bad life, that you'll die and go to hell. This is the basis of a lot of religions. And I think the better argument, the stoic argument, but also maybe the medical and the psychological argument is, he's already there, man. He's already there. That's what that feels like day to day. It is not fun to be that person. Even, again, if that person is the most powerful person in the world, if that person has more money than God, at the end of the day, nobody is suffering more for those sins than the person who has to live inside that body physically, mentally, and spiritually.

1:13:41Yeah. if you only get one go around so what a shitty way to spend it you know what a what a waste yeah indeed um well as we as we wrap up you know uh it's been wonderful to get to know you over the years i i have been it's always cool to me when i get notes from you about having read daily dad or the daily stoic i i can tell stoicism has done for you partly what it's done for me or partly done for you what it's done for me, which is just sort of gave you a framework or a set of principles to maybe counterbalance or to rectify bad habits that you picked up early in life. Yeah. And I've picked up a lot.

1:14:28And as you've alluded to, for most of us who pick up quote unquote bad habits early in life, they're not all bad. They're partially adaptive, partially maladaptive. And the real challenge is in recognizing when these maladaptive components need to be addressed while accepting that they may have been temporarily quite adaptive. In other words, the behaviors that harm you in your 40s and 50s may have been very protective when you were seven and eight, nine years old.

1:15:09And I guess that's partly what I find very interesting in life right now is the softer side of this type of inquiry, right? This is not scientific in the way that I still have an enormous and deep fascination around the topics of science. But bringing it back full circle to the book, I think that this topic is no less relevant, in some ways much harder to grasp, but it is the essential human condition. And stoicism is a great vehicle, I think, to create a scaffolding upon which to understand that. it's interesting to read Marcus Aurelius as an old man, the most powerful man in the world, leading the most powerful army in the world.

1:16:02Literally, you know, he's writing chunks of it near Budapest, chunks of it near Vienna on what was then the frontiers of the empire. And he's having effectively the same conversation that he's had with himself his entire life. And at one point towards the end, he says something like, you know, he's like, you're an old man and you're still losing your temper. You're still afraid of death. He's like, you're still fucking doing it. Come on, man. And you realize that not only is it a timeless conversation in the sense that humans have been having this conversation for thousands of years, but that it's a conversation we have to continue having with ourselves our entire life.

1:16:42If diet or philosophical principles or psychological best practices were a matter of simply grasping them. You just hear them once and you'd be good. But it's actually the day-to-day practice and the reflection and the iteration and the optimization, that's the whole journey. Yeah, indeed it is. And so too is the reconciliation. If there's one thing I've learned over the past three years, and this has made life a lot easier. It's not that I'm not going to continue to make mistakes. Um, I would say I probably make half the number of mistakes I used to, which is still a huge number given the frequency with which I used to make mistakes.

1:17:34It's the speed with which I reconcile. And the goal, I think as a parent, given that the majority of the mistakes I make are around my family, but it would be true as a co-worker. It's true in all regards. The goal I think is not just, hey, can I minimize this? Sure. Of course, that's a good goal. I think for me, focusing on, can you take the gap between mistake and reconciliation and make that as small as possible? Can you get to the point where the moment you say that thing that you shouldn't have said, you can pause and say, I'm sorry. That was an unkind thing to say. I was wrong. As opposed to just saying it, feeling the shame for having said it and barreling down the road and maybe apologizing for it a week later.

1:18:27Have you read Dr. Becky's book, Good Inside? I have not. She's amazing. She would be a great guest on your podcast, but Dr. Becky is incredible. first off the the idea good inside she's basically saying that we have to start with this thing that we've known since the second we had our kids which is that they are good inside right and also you have to give that gift to yourself that you are good inside right um and that everyone's doing the best that they can and you know the behavior that you're dealing with responding to um trying to, uh, you know, fix is, is a symptom of, you know, is, is symptomatic, but, but it's not changing the fact that inherently they're good inside.

1:19:12If you could start from there, everything is, is better. But she has this great line in the book, a whole section on the book, you were using the word reconciliation. She calls it repair. She's like, don't try to be a perfect parent. Just try to get really good at repair. Right. And that's a better word. That's a better word. because it implies from my end what I'm doing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And, and I've just been thinking a lot about that. It's like, Hey, you know, how do, how can I get better at repair with my wife, with my employees, with, uh, my dog, you know, with, with, uh, with my kids, like I'm going to do stuff that I don't like that they don't like.

1:19:49It's not who I want to be. Um, but that I can repair. And her point, and this was very healing for me, is that it's never too late to repair. And we know this because there are things that our parents could say to us right now, 30, 40, 50 years after the fact, that we are craving, we are desperate for them to say, right? And would mean so much to us if they could even just touch on it. And so the idea that you can't talk to your six-year-old about how you were in a bad spot when they were five is preposterous. Of course you can do it, right? Or the fact that you can't say to your spouse, I was an asshole yesterday because I was tired and I'm just going through a lot.

1:20:40Of course you can't. And so I'm really excited slash reinvigorated by this idea of repair. Not because it lets us off the hook. I think in a way it puts you much more on the hook. This idea that it's never too late to repair and that our job isn't to be perfect, but it is to be committed to and good at repairing when we break bonds or mess things up. I'll be ordering that today. I wrote about 50 Daily Dad emails about it. I'm not even halfway through my notes and I've already written, I think, 30 emails. So you can just stay tuned to the Daily Dad. You'll get most of the book there. Well, Peter, this is amazing.

1:21:21I am glad you pushed through the perfectionism and got the book out. I think it's really powerful. And like you said, there's all sorts of amazing just basic cognitive and physical stuff in here, all the stuff that your clients get from you. And then there is this turn in the book where you get to the personal stuff. And I don't want to enable your perfectionism, but I'm glad you held out because it does make the whole book work, that stuff you didn't feel ready to do that you held out until you could do it right. And I'm so happy you did this book. I think it's awesome. Thanks very much, Ryan.

1:22:00And thanks for being a person that I could ask questions of. I remember, God, it was probably about a year in, well, it was the summer of 22. I remember my family came out to the bookstore. We hung out with you guys. In fact, I remember it was the end of the summer of 22. It was about August. And I still don't think I understood what was in store for me, even though I was effectively done writing. And you're like, wait, have you got into the typeset PDF 1P, 2P, 3P yet? And I was like, no. and you're like, wait, is it still in a Word doc? And I was like, yeah. And you were like, oh, you're not even close to done.

1:22:41I always tell people that it's a series of marathons and whenever you think you're done, you're actually just getting ready to start the next marathon. Oh God. And that's where you were. But I'm glad you made it through because the book is definitely worth it and clearly it's crushed. So congratulations. Thanks, Ryan.

1:23:04Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

1:23:39so

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