That's what I'm really excited to dive into today, which is this idea of the building the imperfect family. And one of the topics that I've been researching in the last, I guess, six months or so is building dynasties and creating a family that is insular and helps each other out in order to leave that dynasty, right? And for each generation that comes up and lives within that dynasty, lives within that family. And there's a lot of important pieces to that. And your book touched on those five very important topics that need to be expectations that need to be set up within that dynasty in order for it to flourish. For sure. You know that right now in the United States, one in six Americans is not talking to a close friend or family member because of politics. We find that family schisms are at an all-time high. And the result is that people are suffering just completely unnecessarily. Like people don't know the rules anymore. It's like I'm gonna step over $100 bills to get to Nichols.  It's just so crazy. It's like we forgot all of these basics of what brings, how human love brings happiness to us. So that's one of the reasons that Oprah and I wrote that chapter is that everybody comes to us and is talking to us about this. It's like, ah, I haven't talked to my parents. I haven't talked to my children.  I'm thinking, no way, man, no way. I said, why? He says, well, we just didn't see eye to eye. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah, growing up, I remember spirited political discussions around the holidays. We had family members on both sides and they'd argue and yell and then they'd hug it out and go on their merry way and we'd see each other again. The next holiday was not this complete schism and separate from one another based on politics. Yeah, our families are microcosms of what's actually happening to our country and to our world right now, which is being pulled apart for a lot of different reasons. One is that the people are predatory. Leaders and media are predatory and the more we hate, the more they profit. And the less happy we are. And there's technology that's actually accelerating these trends and this is a huge problem. So we gotta, man, we need a love rebellion in this world. That's what we need. Well, we've been laughing about that internally because we found that our negative show titles perform better than the positive ones. And we're a show about bringing positivity but it doesn't lead to the clicks and downloads. I know. So what we should call this one, this is gonna be all about positivity and love but let's call it how to hate your enemies more effectively. There we go. So there was something very brilliant right that you just said and I was talking to AJ about this earlier when we were prepping for this interview which is if we're gonna discuss love in such a way, right? Then what we have is people that we care immensely about and we need to protect them. And the only way to protect them is with intolerance to which that would harm them. Right, no, it's crazy. I've been getting a little bit dismayed with some of the guests who come on and it's always about this love. And but we need to protect our family which we're now discussing is how important it is to us. But also as we're developing, we find out what our core values are. Those core values propel us into our best self. And if you are not ready and able to protect those core values with intolerance or hate, you will be subjected by outside forces that will work to destroy you. Right, no, this is all true. And the truth of the matter is of course we have values and that's a very good thing to have. But here's the point. When you have values, they should be only ever used as a gift and never as a weapon. You've eviscerated the moral content of your opinions and your values and your, I mean, all of your beliefs. If you use them as a cudgel, you can say, oh, I have these beliefs about my politics or my religion, whatever it has to be.  Well, guess what? That was not effective as a gesture of love. Quite the contrary, you have to understand that it only ever works as a gift, never as a weapon. And that's what people are being encouraged to forget quite frankly. They're like, if you have these views, if you have these values, if somebody disagrees with you, you need to cancel them.  But those are the people who are encouraging you to do that.  What I'm really curious about your perspective on is, so looking at the family unit and love and bringing positivity to those around us, there's this growing virtual world that we're all exposing ourselves to where most of this hate and intolerance lies, but we're not sharing that even with family members. It will be on our screen separately at the dinner table. I was traveling across Europe and I didn't see as many screens, but in the US, if you go out to dinner, you see the parents are on their phones, my wife and I will turn to each other, we'll look, and then the kids are on their iPads and they're living in a virtual world that isn't supporting this love, isn't supporting each other. It's full of hate, full of negativity, but they're not actually sharing what they're seeing and consuming that's then leading to these ideas internally, the struggle and ultimately this unhappiness. Yeah, to understand that phenomenon, we got to get back to the basic neuroscience of what's happening and how we're being manipulated in terms of our neurophysiology. So if I said, hey, I got a strategy for you for how to get your calories and become healthy, eat every meal at McDonald's.  Okay, now that's the same thing as what's happening to us when we're tied to our devices. Why? Because the one thing we really need from our family relationships, and for that matter from any relationships, is a neuropeptide in the brain that functions as a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the hormone of human bonding. It's intensely pleasurable.  And neuroscientists will say that so you don't leave the baby on the bus or something, but the truth of the matter is, no, no, no, no, no, it's magic, it's actually magic. We crave oxytocin with our family members, with our friends, with our close associates, with our kin, with our people is what it comes down to. Now, what happens is when we have social media, we think that it's gonna give us what we need because it's kind of a social contact, but oxytocin comes from eye contact and human touch. So social media is basically the McDonald's fries and milkshakes of social life is what it comes down to. And the problem is you don't get what you need but you get addicted. And so what's happening is that we're not getting what we need by being with our families because we're so addicted to this, we're not eating the asparagus and the salmon in front of us because the burgers and fries are so tasty but they're so low in nutritional value. That's what's going on. And that means, by the way, that our dopamine circuits are engaged, we're getting the reward circuits and they're unhealthy for us and we have to break the addiction or we're gonna get malnourished and obese, socially speaking. So how do we square that virtual world that we're consuming but not sharing with one another? Yeah, well, what we have to recognize knowledge is power. You know, there's a reason I do the work that I do because one of the things that I found is the best way for people to get better is to understand the problem in the first place. When I actually explain the science of what's going on, this new book with Oprah, by the way, it has a thousand academic references in it. Why? Because it's a version of the class I teach at Harvard on the science of happiness. And when people see, oh my goodness, this is what's happening inside my brain, they start to take control. When you actually see that you're being manipulated and your brain chemistry is getting torqued by these outside tools, then you're like, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, it's so fast anymore. And then you start to recognize it, you start to take action and this is the beginning of the solution. It starts with knowledge, it goes to habits, you share it with others and then you're free.  Absolutely, absolutely. Look, there's always been a lot of things out there that maladapt our evolution in nature. They're always happened. I mean, we're super good. We have natural endorphins in our brains that help us to cope with it, to mute our stress and pain responses in times of acute crisis. So what do chemists do? They figure out what those endorphins look like molecularly and they turn them into fentanyl. And it's like, oh good, yeah, you'll be super happy if you take this, it's all good. Words nobody's ever said, the secret of my happiness? Meth, you're fentanyl. Like no, of course, because you super charge these natural phenomena, you want more human contact. I'm gonna give it to you electronically and then we're wondering why it doesn't work out so great because we maladapt it with our human ingenuity. But if we understand that, then we can actually redress that with our own knowledge and our own conscious decisions as opposed to just kind of giving in. Exposing those forces and having a general understanding of the mechanisms and how they work is incredibly important. And now that all of the manipulation and marketing of what's going on online is now being exposed, people are now seeing it for what it is. We've now had what, 15 years, close to 20 years of all these social media platforms and what they're going to produce as we indulge in it as a culture, right? So once that happened, now I have to go back and think about television. And now I have to go back and think about radio. And again, it's those same forces looking to profit from that. And if families cannot build themselves up into powerful units and they cannot be competitive. Yeah, that's right. And so it works against the people who are running things, those forces in order to break that down and they keep those things atomized.  But that was the end of it because everybody had divorces from every one of my dad's side, everyone in my mom's side. And we begin to see the atomizing and of course how it affected my own self and how I looked at family. And now of learning all of this and getting to a middle age in my life where I'm able to put a larger picture together, I can understand that these forces have been there for quite some time. And now we need to counter them with having an idea that the social media is junk food just like McDonald's is. And it may keep us sustained. It may have the illusion of keeping us connected but it's not nourishing us to be our best. And then of course to be able to lead those around us to be at their best because they need to model somebody. Right, yeah, no, that's right. And you're bringing up a super important point just from the secret to being a happier person is not being managed by your urges and emotions and desires, your attachments and your feelings, not being managed by those things.  And so we talk about this basic technique called metacognition that lies at the beginning of building a better life, building a better family, building a better religious life, friendships, work life, whatever you want. That starts with understanding that you have feelings all the time. You have feelings that come from the limbic system of your brain, a very ancient system that takes outside stimuli. It turns them into feelings so that you can react to them appropriately. It's a natural human language across all cultures. Fear, sadness, anger, disgust, joy, interest, these basic emotions, we all have them. The problem is if we react according to them, if we live according to our limbic system, then we're just gonna kind of take these stimuli and walk through life and hope for the best. And so when it comes down to, for example, there's been a lot of divorces in your family, John, a lot of divorces in your family. So basically, well, God, I don't know. I guess this is the way that things work in our family. And if I feel unhappy with my wife, I guess we're just gonna get divorced, let's know. Learn from it and choose your reaction so you can break the cycle. And the way you do that is with metacognition, putting more space between your limbic system and the prefrontal cortex of your brain where you can actually react on purpose. And this book is full of techniques on how to do that from journaling, to meditation, to prayer, to walking in nature, to actually, to therapy, whatever it happens to be, where you can learn about yourself and you can be the pilot, you can be the CEO. So the workers are not running a muck inside your brain. You've got executives that are actually running the operation. Well, when we talk about social media, the emotion that comes up the most is envy. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Because for the first time in our lives, we're being confronted with how everyone else on the planet is living. You could pick up your device at any moment and see what people across the world are doing and how much more they have than you. So let's talk about envy in particular. How do we manage that emotion as it's evoked by media? Envy is an emotion that actually comes through human evolution. And the reason is because you don't know your place in the hierarchy or how you work in your tribe unless you see how other people are acting and you need some sort of an impetus to get better. So envy comes because people want to get better related to others. That's a very normal human emotion. The problem is it's deeply maladapted to modern life. We're not worried about getting thrown out or walking the frozen tundra alone and dying. We're talking about how many Instagram followers you have. I mean, it's idiotic. And yet we treat it as if I don't have enough buffalo meat for the winter. If I don't have enough people following me on Twitter or X or whatever the heck it's called at this point. Yeah, I mean, you get it.  So what we have to do is recognize why it exists, understand it and manage it is the way that we work on that. Now, envy has two kinds. There's two types of envy. There's benign envy and there's malign or malignant or malicious envy. Now, the benign envy is where we envy somebody who actually deserves to have a good thing happen to them. You can envy my co-author Oprah Winfrey, but nobody's gonna say she didn't earn it, man. I mean, she kicked butt for decades and created tons of value and has admired because people really know that she's done a good thing and dedicated herself to making lives better for other people, astronauts, this kind of thing. And then fill in the blank on anybody who didn't earn it, which is the reason when you pick up these magazines, Us Weekly or something, and it's like the scandal of the week from some person who's famous for being famous and you're like, yes, right? Because that's malicious envy. And the worst thing in life is malicious envy.  So the way to deal with it is to laugh at malicious envy on purpose, to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, forget about it. I am simply not, let me think a little bit about how crummy that person's life actually is. Famous for being famous, I'm sorry. I've met them, you guys have met them, you've had some on your show, not happy, right? And then think about the people that have benign envy. You think about the fact that they're actually admirable and say, I've decided to admire them instead of envying them. Turn your envy into admiration and you win.  And so that's the way to do it. You disregard through reality the people with whom your envy is malicious and you turn your envy into admiration for the people who are on the good side of the ledger and then you start to win. The other way to look at that as well is if you get consumed by the malicious envy, it takes you off of your path and puts you on their path.  And so you have to stay on your own.  Yeah, for sure. It's also being in touch with the things that kind of touch you off and it bother you most about your envy. I mean, I'm looking at you John or you AJ and I'm thinking man with that hair, I couldn't be stopped.  At one point, I mean, this is like a once great civilization on top of my head. Okay, so we all got our weak points, right? And we tend to focus on that kind of thing is the way that it works. And you got to turn it into a little source of hilarity because it's ridiculous. It's completely ridiculous the things that we end other people for. And this brings up the key point again, be conscious, be knowledgeable, be in charge, use your prefrontal cortex, don't feel, think, think, think is the way that it comes down. And that's the secret to almost everything with emotional self-management. And with that is a level of self-awareness. So some of our listeners are gonna say, okay, a Harvard professor on happiness, Oprah Winfrey, they're just naturally happy. Like what can I learn from them? And why should I be listening to you two tell me about happiness? Oprah actually is a naturally happy person. She's got a very, very sunny disposition, it's true. But not me, not me. I study happiness because I want it. You know, happiness is not like basketball where you get into the MBA because you're naturally good and then get better. I know everybody who's a serious scientist in the business of happiness from the social psychologist, the behavioral economist like me to the neuroscientist, et cetera, they're all studying it for a reason because they want it. It's not research, it's me search is what it comes down to. And I look at my students and I give them these happiness self-test. I have to take 16 of them in my graduate class and my graduate seminar in happiness. And the average comes above me every single time. Now I've gotten a lot happier since I started studying it because the whole idea was knowledge, practice, teaching. That's the algorithm for actually getting happier. And I've gotten 60% happier but I'm still below my students. Why?  And that's important to keep in mind because that means you got to work more on your habits. And for me, that means doing the work, man. You got to do the work like anything else, for sure. So you said something interesting there. How does teaching actually impact the happiness? Yeah, so there's this great set of studies that shows that if you want to learn something deeply and remember it, you got to teach it to others. This is how you do it. And the reason is because once again, there's a lot of research that shows that you think you understand something because it makes sense, but you actually haven't lodged it into a place in your brain and using parts of your brain where you can explain it appropriately and remember it. So the way that you can learn things very permanently is by teaching them to others even if your understanding is not yet perfect. So I assign people, my final exam in my happiness science class at the Harvard Business School is that they actually have to teach a version of the class and turn in a video to me of them teaching the class. So, and sometimes I'll get like a video in Indonesian or something, it's like, I don't know, man. I can look at the expression on your parents' faces over Zoom while you're teaching this class, but they have to teach it and turn in at least, certain number of minutes that kind of drops the needle at different points of the video when they're teaching this class because I know if they can teach it that they know it and that they're gonna remember it. This is the way that that works out. And so I have a lab at Harvard called the Leadership in Happiness Lab that is dedicated to teaching people how to be happiness teachers, whether it's formally in school or as a CEO or as a podcast host or a politician or whatever they happen to do, so they can embed the happiness technology in any other job that they have and become happiness teachers. I just wanna say to our X-Factor members who are listening to this right now, you're on deck, you're gonna be teaching one of the next sessions, guys. So how can we, is there a test that you recommend our listeners take to raise their own happiness self-awareness? Yeah, for sure. So there's a bunch of them, there's a couple of them in the book. There's a lot of general happiness inventories that you can take on the web. There's one by, that was developed by a researcher at the University of California at Riverside. Her name is Sonya Lyubomursky. And Google anything that sounds like that and you'll find her because she's one of the most distinguished, she's Russian, she's one of the most distinguished researchers in happiness and she has excellent self-tests on it. Now, if we wanna find out about our basic mood structure, this is where it really gets interesting because it turns out that happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. Happiness is not the absence of unhappiness nor vice versa. They exist and they're largely emotions that are produced in different parts of the brain. So you could be an unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person or happy and low unhappiness, high unhappiness and low happiness or low in both.  I strongly recommend understanding this and marrying somebody who's your compliment and not somebody who's just like you because it'll be like daggers drawn forever or worse. So here's how it works. This is this test called the PANIS test, the positive affect, negative affect series, P-A-N-A-S. After September 12th, you can go to my website, arthurbrooks.com and take a version of that test. And it's a super scientifically validated test. And that'll show you if you're a high high, a high affect person, you have more than average intense positive and more than average intense negative emotions. You're unusually positive, but unusually not negative. In other words, that's high low or vice versa. So high high is called a mad scientist. Mad scientists have extremely strong affect both positive and negative. Like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm a mad scientist, like to the max, man. And so I didn't know this until I started doing this research, this neuroscience research, because I thought I was just, you know, kind of melancholy and didn't feel good along. No, no, no, I'm super happy. I'm just also super unhappy.  My wife is a cheerleader. Cheerleader's high positive, low negative. Good for her, lucky for her. That's all I could say. Makes me sick. Anyway, so there's high, negative and low positive. Those are the poets. They tend to be extremely creative. They're really, they're really clear on what the threats to the environment are, right? They're not always fun to be around. And then there's low, low, people who are low affect. They're not less happy or less unhappy than others. They're just lower intensity of their emotions. These are called the judges. These are slow, they're steady. They're the people you want around in high stress professions, like being a surgeon or a judge, for example. Oprah Winfrey's a judge, by the way. She's very steady emotionally. So we're good compliments as writing partners because I'm a mad scientist, she's a judge. I find her incredibly reassuring. She finds me entertaining. And the result is that we work together really well. But when you have two people of the same kind, it can be a problem. You got to understand yourself because you have unique gifts. It's a quarter in each basket. We need all four in our society, but you also need to know how to manage it with the people around you. If you're a cheerleader, don't marry a cheerleader. Because you know what they do? They spend all the money. They always spend all the money because it's like, there's gonna be no problems, no problems. The money will come from someplace. It's like spend, spend, spend. Yeah, yeah, yeah, spend, spend, spend. So you get the idea on how you need to, and so that's all in this book and it's super interesting. And that's something I recommend everybody learn about themselves. So we touched on two of the four pillars, friends and family. What are the other four pillars? Well, the other two of the four pillars are faith and work. So it's basically think about it this way. If you want a better life on purpose, take it as a multi-year project, learn the science and build, starting with emotional self-management. When you've mastered that, that's the first half of this book, by the way. Then when you've got that, you can start, you won't be distracted with the stupid stuff in life like social media and shopping therapy and streaming Netflix in the middle of the day because you're feeling bored or whatever. You'll be able to pay attention to the stuff that you really want to pay attention to. And the four things, the four pillars on which to build your life, this is your happiness 401K plan, basically, is faith, family, friends and work. Those are the big four. Now, faith, I don't mean my faith. I'm a Catholic. I told you before that my kids get married at like nine years old or something like that and then have 40 kids each. You raise them Catholic, they do Catholic stuff. And I'm not saying that my way is the only way, but you need something transcendental to your day-to-day routine life. You need to get small is what you need to get, right? Back in the like in the 60s, I can't remember what rock and roller said that getting small was euphemism or getting high. That's not what I mean. Well, right now, yeah. People are a burning man doing just that. Getting small, man. No, but anyway, so getting small, that which means that you have to get yourself in perspective so you can have peace. So you're not focused on your own little thing again and again and again and again. And so that might mean reading the stoic philosophers like my buddy Ryan Holiday. That might mean practicing the faith of your youth or developing meditation practice or walking in nature or studying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach with great seriousness or whatever it happens to be. But you need something that zooms you out. That's the faith one and then there's the work one. And the work one is really simple.  It's not even earning a lot of money or having power prestige. It's two things, earning your success by creating value with your life and feeling like you're serving other people. Those are the characteristics.   So those are the four. Faith, family, friends, and work. So we have a lot of lone wolves listening to the show and that serving others peace. Why is that so important? Because dignity comes from being needed. Despair comes from being managed and not needed. That's the truth. I mean, everybody sort of asks why is American poverty policy such a catastrophe? And the answer is because we treat poor people like liabilities to manage. That's what we do. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at the problem. If people are liabilities to manage you have stripped their dignity away. People need to be needed. That's the bottom line. If you want people to have a good life they have to feel like they're needed people. And that's the reason that serving others is what brings you that sense of dignity that comes from your work. We're pack animals, man. We're social and we're made to serve each other. And this is sort of the divine path of human life is the love that we can express. And again, remember the four pillars faith, family, friends, and work you can boil this down. Love of the divine. Love of your family. Love of your friends. And an expression of your love through everybody in the way you earn your daily bread. Love, love, love, and more love is what it comes down to. That idea of serving your fellow man and which is gonna put us in touch with each other in a positive manner of serving others. You can make an argument that was at least the beginning dismantling of that was an industrial revolution because now we have all these people working for a paycheck but not directly seeing how their work enhances and improves the lives of other. And once that result, that being able to see that was taken away then anything could be put in its place. That's a really good point. The truth is the ultra mechanization of how people work dehumanizes us not because of what we're actually doing, stamping out widgets, sitting next to a machine. That's not the problem. The problem is that we can't actually see the impact that we're having on other people. We're too far away. We're contributing a concept called subsidiarity which is pushing things down to the lowest possible level. Now it doesn't mean that we all have to be backed out in the fields in some primitive society that Europe had in the 14th century. I'm not talking to, I know people who want that. I don't want that as the bottom line. But we don't have to choose. We can actually have a wealthy society that's advanced and does all kinds of good things but is not highly, this is what Karl Marx talked about, alienation. He got so much wrong by saying that all that mattered was just units of labor and that capital didn't matter. And the way that he got so much wrong about how humans are wired, that you could change human society so we wouldn't compete against each other and from each one according to his abilities and to each one according to his needs. I mean, it gets so much wrong about human behavior but one thing he got right was this concept that we are alienated from the means of production because to be a true human means to sanctify your work and understand the benefit that it actually creates. And what I think has happened, we've talked a little bit about this trend on the show is with what happened through the pandemic and coming out of it is our survival instinct was so strong that our focus narrowed to the here and now, like the creature comforts in the moment. And a lot of what we're talking about here on happiness is long tail stuff. This is like your entire life and we've gone into a remote work environment. We've seen some studies recently that socialization in the workplace was actually really important to our health and happiness and that's been severed with more time spent in a hybrid model or completely remote. And our focus was on, well, the here and now is I'm getting DoorDash, I have streaming, I'm safe and comfortable in my house. Who cares about friends? Like, why do I need to worry about this stuff? Why do you need to worry about family? I can just have a FaceTime with them. When in actuality, it's these moments together of helping one another, being in love with their family, being in love with our social group that actually creates the meaning in life that we're talking about, long tail stuff, not short tail wins. Yeah, for sure.  And if you look at the data, it just, it couldn't be clearer. So you find that happiness on average in the United States has been slightly declining since the late 90s and there's lots of reasons why. And then it would kind of punctuate the equilibrium a little bit. It's just sort of staying constant, slightly declining. Social media is introduced. It goes down like a big dog leg down because people start to get lonelier when they get on the burger and fry social diet we talked about before. And then COVID comes and it's in the tank. I mean, ordinarily about 30% of the population is very happy about their lives, 15% very unhappy about their lives. It's reversed. Those two things have been reversed since COVID-19. You're about twice as likely to say that you're unhappy as that you are about very happy about your life in general. And the reason is everything to do with the way that we've severed these social bonds for sure. And what happens, like anything else, when you provoke the symptoms of clinical depression which you will, if you take away all your social bonds, I mean, just will, what happens then is that tends to impair the executive functions of our brain. So we actually can't see the origin of the problem and we resist the way to fix the problem. So for example, you're really lonely and you're really sad. And so you cocoon in a warm, comfy blanket eating hog and DOS, watching Netflix at like two in the afternoon. That's a big problem. That's exactly the wrong thing to do. You should call a friend. You should ride your bike. You should get outside. You should see people. And those are all the things that are like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to go to that part.  And so that's the problem. And the whole nation had its executive centers impaired by the involuntary lockdowns. And you see people who still aren't going out. It's just the craziest thing. And people who have made life decisions that cut themselves off from other people. It's like, yeah, I decided to move into a cabin in the woods. It's like, I'm sure it's peaceful and beautiful, but bears are not gonna keep you warm at night, man. This comes back to somewhere we were saying earlier about hating the things that attack the things that are dear to us, especially our core values and the importance of relationships. And in the book, you discuss some different levels of relationships and how they make us feel. So I would love to discuss that for our audience a bit. There's a lot that definitely realize that since COVID something has happened and they also see that their peer group is dwindling without replacement friends. An idea we talked about with Steven Kotler. But the other part is I think a lot of people would recognize that they have acquaintances that are deal friends, but they don't have anyone who in the terms of the book, useless friends and what that meant and how important that actually is. Because I think we've now gotten to a point since COVID where we're now viewing everything as very transactional. Yeah. Now there's a lot to that. You find that people when they're dealing with each other, there's a particular reason for doing so. It's like, why am I gonna come into the office? Well, because I have to do X, Y and Z as opposed to the ordinary routine where you'd have some spontaneity and how you see particular people on your way to the office and around the water cooler. There's nothing spontaneous anymore when we have to plan everything out because of the logistics or such that people are working off-site unless they don't have to. So that basically gets to the big point that you're making right here, which is that when I ask people if they're lonely and a lot of people are but don't know it. This is a really interesting thing. And the reason is they don't know it is they're not isolated. 100%. I mean, there are around tons of people. And so I say, okay, okay. So let's do a little test for the audience here. We can go into the testing portion of the podcast here. It's like, make a list of the people that are closest to you by which I mean you have the most frequent interaction, okay? Now after each one right in R or D, real or deal, you know the difference. Everybody knows the difference between deal friends and real friends. And if you need a little primer on it then John just gave that to us, which is real friends or deal friends are useful. They're very useful to you. Real friends are cosmically useless to you. Not worthless. I love that. I have worthless friends too, but that's a different problem. So, useless friends, you just love them. You just love them. And that's by the way, there's a word in Greek that Aristotle used for useless friends. He called them italic. They're italic relationship. More telos means the reason for something. So they're just like reasonless friends. These are the people we lose contact with during COVID. These are the people we lose contact with when we become lawyers and join law firms and work a hundred hours a week. Why? Because it's costly to keep up with your useless friends. I mean, it requires that you go out of the way. Now, since I've done this research, by the way I've changed my life.  And my column every Thursday in the Atlantic, I always suggest three practices. And I've written my column eight weeks in advance and I've tried them out, right? So I'm the guinea pig on everything. So it's like I'm always cycling through these different practices. And when it came to real and deal, man, this was a game changer for me. I realized that I had a bazillion deal friends because I'm on the road 48 weeks a year. I have a company, I do all the stuff, right? And I teach at university, et cetera. The problem was that I was actually crowding out the real friendships. And so I said, no, no, no, no. I looked at the people that I have been closest with. I really love the most that are not my immediate family. And I made a point of an hour a week on the phone with a couple of guys. An hour a week on the phone with a couple of guys. And it's expensive. My hourly rate is like is $4 an hour. So that's not nothing, right? And so yeah, and it's been great.  Yeah, for our X Factor members, I encourage them all to have a Wednesday reconnection practice, hump day. Everyone's kind of doesn't have plans. They're tired of work and to reconnect and rekindle some of these connections that you've frayed or lost due to the pandemic or moving or career. As you said, it's so much easier to keep the deal friends because you think there's some payoff at the end. Oh, they're gonna help you move your career forward or they're gonna be there to do something that's gonna allow you to get to that next level for yourself. But in actuality, that's not really what we need only in our friend group. And another point that the book makes is that we've also started to homogenize our friends.  We're doing this in droves with our friends. We hear an opinion we don't like. We hear a view we don't like. And we're like, all right, you're out. And we see this rise online. And we've talked a little bit about the show, toxic friends. But now everyone's being painted as toxic. Oh, you're toxic, get away from me. I don't wanna be involved with you, friend breakups. And in actuality, we need these social connections in our life to be happy to sustain us. Yeah, and we need people who are really different than us is actually the point, I think that you're making as well, which is, by the way, you wanna know the number one reason why internet dating is a disaster? Well, there's many, but which one? The number one reason, the number one reason. I mean, there's a bunch of reasons, like the paradox of choice, like swipe, swipe, swipe, better, better, better, better, that's horrible, right? But that's not it. The number one reason is because in dating apps, people curate for people who are just like themselves. They curate for compatibility, which is similarity, which as my adult kids would say, that's not hot, to look like a solicitous sibling, to look in the mirror and say, oh, that's what I want. No, but 71%, for example, people who describe themselves as politically progressive, 71% say they will not date somebody who's not politically progressive. Now, interestingly, 41% of conservatives say they won't date somebody who's not a conservative, which just shows that conservatives have lower standards. Conservatives are like, yeah, whatever, what do they look like? But it's impossible.   I don't know what, it would fill into blanks and suddenly you have a null set of everybody except you. It's just so, look, there's a lot of biology that shows, by the way, that we're not attracted to people who are too much like us. There's a lot, there's a wonderful study from the 90s that's since been replicated around the world in which these scientists, they go onto a college campus and they ask dudes to wear a t-shirt in for 48 hours and go like, sweat it up.  Okay, now it turns out that by far women rank as most attractive, the guys who are most immunologically different than they are. Different. Different race, different part of the, if the same country, different part of the country, really different upbringings and part of the reason is because they're so far apart in the gene pool that they have different immunological profiles and they're sensing through the olfactory bulb in their brain that this is somebody, I better find them as hot because if I have kids with that person, our kids are gonna have a better immunological repertoire. Yeah. And so this is another example of even biologically we need more complementarity and less compatibility and we're gonna like each other a lot more. So the book goes through five challenges that we face socially right now with our relationships. We started to unpack a few of them but I'd love to dig into them because it really is the core tenet of the show and many of our listeners are feeling these things but they're not necessarily understanding how they can start to change and shift and build better relationships in their life. Right, so what's the first one as you look at it? What are you thinking? What's the first one that's on your mind? Well, the first one for me was the hemogeny because I find this over and over again and even with our X-Factor members, I challenge them to look outside of the box with who they're meeting and try to find activities that maybe on first glance wouldn't sound necessarily fun to them to meet people completely different than them to bring in different perspectives that allow you to have different experiences. Yeah, and if it's a potential romantic partner, it'll be much hotter is the point that, and look, this is just a science talking. So I say this from a scientific point of view, you're gonna enjoy your life a lot more for sure. The second is basically understanding how to deal with conflict. One of the biggest problems that we find is that there's tons and tons and tons of conflict but everybody's afraid of conflict. That's craziness is the way that that turns out. The best way to have a lonely life is to be resistant to actually having disagreements with other people. We don't need to disagree less. We need to disagree better and actually in a lot of cases to disagree more. That's actually what brings people together. When I talk to married couples, for example, you find that the coldest marriages never fight. Now, the marriages that fall apart, they fight like crazy, but they don't know how to fight is the way that that works. And so I work with couples all the time on how to fight and actually how they do that. And a lot of people will say, it's kind of interesting married couples will say, you know what, after we have, we haven't fought for a long time, you know, it's been weeks and weeks we haven't seen each other. We have a big argument.  It's like, it's not makeup sex. That's actually not right.  And when somebody's super honest with you and you're being super honest, you're just completely in love even if you're angry. That's the way that that works. And that's what we have to keep in mind that conflict can be incredibly healthy if we know the rules. I also want to add to that. And that's an incredible point. And to go back to a point I was discussing about my dad's family and my mom's family, both of the grandparents stayed married until there was a death. And you could look at that and think they hated each other. They should have been divorced a long time ago. Or you can look at that saying they did what it took to stay married for that family for all those years. So you could say, and it depends on observation and a worldview but learning to fight, learning to stay together, right? And that fighting plays an intimate role in that relationship and keeping those things together. Yeah, right. I mean, nobody knows what's going on inside an individual couple to be sure. Only the couple knows that. And you find out things about people after the fact et cetera, you're always kind of surprised about that. But when we say that these older couples, the reason that they stay together is because of the social strictures against divorce. That's not usually true. The number one reason is that they were highly complimentary to each other because they were probably set up by a loved one who thought they might make a kind of a good match based on their complementarity and their difference. And the second is because it was really, really inconvenient to split up, they learned how to have conflict. They just actually learned the rules of the road is what came down to. Now, when I'm working with couples, the number one thing that I work on is I listen to them having an argument and all the couples that are really, really struggling, it's always me and you and I and you, and they're always talking about these personal pronouns either in the first and second person, always move to the we and us pronouns. And it's gonna change the way you think and change the way you fight, it turns out. Because you don't say, you hurt my feelings. You say, we had an argument and that really hurt me. We had an argument that really hurt me. You're taking responsibility and you're defining the problem as a project for the two of you to solve. And so when you actually solve it, you've made progress together. It's like your fights become projects just because of the pronouns that you use. It's so critically important. And couples that always use we and us, always use we and us, they're a team and they don't split up is basically what you find. So that's idea number one. Well, not only you're staying married together, you're growing together because if you had gotten married kind of early in life in your 20s, you haven't really even discovered who you are, let alone your significant other. And that process, if you're able to be able to do that together, only lends itself to building, constructing a North Star between you and your partner and working towards that together. This is actually one of the reasons that the marriages, they tend to do better when they're startups than when they're mergers. You have to use the industrial language. And so people are like, you know, I got to get through law school and I need to get my career down. And then I'll think about marriage. That's the wrong order. Startups where people is like, we got nothing. We got nothing together.  And man, I was like a starving musician in those days all the way through my 20s.  I mean, it was, that's what she fell in love with me by the way. And we, you know, we got married. We were poor. We were, we had big ideas. We had dreams and we learned how to live together so that, you know, people change over the course of their life. Couples that are startups, they tend to change together. Mergers, it's harder. And don't get me started on hostile takeovers and acquisitions. Those are really there. You can tell I teach in a business school. Well, I mean, listen, a marriage basically is a business arrangement the way it is presented on paper. So let's be honest there. Yeah. Yeah.  I mean, you, I mean, it just, you don't think about your marriage in the same way. And it's why there's hostile takeovers. Oh yeah, that's right. And acquisitions, exactly right. Well, we've heard a lot of studies, you've mentioned it just that lowliness is rising. Right. And yet at the same time, we're making choices that don't move us away from loneliness, but entrenched loneliness. Right. The streaming platforms and the empty calories. What are the choices we should be making around building relationships that can start to foster and form these real relationships that we need? So the key thing to keep in mind is eye contact and touch, eye contact and touch. That's what we need to actually get the oxytocin. But those are also really good rules of the road for any sort of a relationship. Never substitute electronic media for eye contact and touch unless you absolutely have to. So have an order of operations. See somebody in person if you can. If you can't talk on the phone, if you can't talk on the phone, text and only then if you can't then actually use lesser order, less contact means of communication with other people and never, never, never, never binge the bad substitutes. When you're really lonely, don't binge social media. It's a complete mistake to do that. It's one of the things that we should always be thinking about that order of operations. The other thing is to just think about just in general in this and every other subject, what it is that we want. And people, when the kids come into my class, I say kids, they're 28. You can tell them an old dude at this point, but they say, I say, what do you want? They say, we're in this class professor, we're here because we want happiness. I say, okay, I got it. What is it? And they can't define it. Stop thinking of your happiness as a feeling that you're chasing. Feelings or evidence of happiness like the smell of the turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are like smell, just evidence of the food.  Now, I can go through that, and I can actually diagnostically figure out where somebody's problem is. The same way that I can go through, because I'm kind of a nutrition and fitness nerd, I can actually look at your diet and say that you've got a macros problem because you're getting too much carbohydrate and not enough protein or whatever it happens to be. It's the same sort of thing. And so that's where I really start with people, with their relationships or any other parts that I talk about a lot in this book and in every other place that I write. So I find, for example, a lot of young, a lot of lone wolves. The big mistake that they're making is they're trying to get enjoyment in their life, but all they're getting is pleasure. Why?  What you need is the source of the pleasure plus people plus memory. That's what creates enjoyment. And so the rule of thumb for all the lone wolves and we've all been lone wolves in our lives, dudes, we know what's going on here. How do you actually get happier? And the answer is you don't have to stop doing anything. You just have to stop doing it alone. That's the key. Don't drink alone.  That's the key thing because what that does is it severs the pleasure from the enjoyment by taking away the people and the memory and then you're not gonna get the happiness that you seek. So you can see that this happiness science, this neurochemical happiness science is really important and very, very practical for our day-to-day living. So this goes to the levels of friendship that were discussed in the book. And we were, as you were mentioning with introversion, they tend to not have a lot of acquaintances but they'll have maybe it's easier to have deeper relationships because there's less people in their lives and those relationships are more important. And then the opposite with extroverted people, they're gonna tend to have more acquaintances but less deeper friends. Now here in lies, an issue that I've witnessed because AJ would consider me the extrovert and I would have to say, both of us, yes, I'm the extrovert as I've gotten older probably a little bit more of an ambivert. But however, in my extroverted days, I had tons of acquaintances. I could go anywhere.  You're my new best friend for evening and we're gonna have a blast and I'll see you again next week. However, outside of that, this is where I've recognized that I had become a lone wolf because though I had all these acquaintances, there wasn't anyone close to me. So if I was going to make plans, I wouldn't call anybody because I'm like, I'm just gonna hang out with whoever's there. Well, I'm gonna do this.  No, because whoever's there is gonna be my new best friend for the evening. It almost goes to that idea, what's the movie AJ with single serving friends on the air club? Fight club, right? And being able to easily identify. I speak Johnny. Well, the first rule of fight club is not remembering the name of the movie, man. Yeah, there you go. Johnny nailed it. And exposed AJ. Well, it's funny because I say in the intro of the show that I'm a recovering introvert and some listeners are like, what's wrong with being an introvert? And it's like, I've recognized it has some weaknesses to it. It has some strengths, but it also has some weaknesses. I tend not to share my hopes and dreams with people. And because of that, I only have a few really close, deep friends, but I can't go like Johnny, no plans just go out socially and have as great of a time. Yeah, for sure. And the truth is, you're both bringing it up a very important point, which is you know yourselves, and when you have the knowledge, you can consciously change your habits and design your life the way you want it to be.  And I had to learn to build deep relationships. I had to learn how to use vulnerability to my advantage in order to build relationships and then also become choosy about who was going to be coming into my life that I didn't bring in folks who would destroy my core values or take me off of my game. And in learning this, I was older and more aware of these behaviors in me that I wanted to fix. So it was a bit easier for me. However, for somebody who's younger, who may not be so aware of this is that each person that comes in is going to have a certain influence on your life to some degree, and you have to be able to manage that, whether it's gonna be a large influence, a small influence or no influence. Exactly right. Exactly right. To understand that, yes, I have a lot of acquaintances. Maybe I am extroverted, but I am a lone wolf due to not having many people that I can discuss what's important to me, my values, my dreams, because it is those relationships that are going to add the social pressures that produce you to being your best. Yeah, totally, yeah. So you're basically trying to find this balance, understanding that left to your own devices and going through life, not thinking about it, you will be missing something big and you have to add it in on purpose. Now, remember, we're all created in a particular way, we all have our differences, we all have our tendencies and our urges, and Mother Nature pushes us along this path, but Mother Nature doesn't care, Johnny, if you're happy. She doesn't care. She wants you to be at the bar and meet more people and pass on your genes and survive for another day.  And that's true for all of us. That's the reason that know yourself, know the science, adjust your habits, teach the ideas, and what you'll get on is off the animal path and right on to the divine path. As sure as we're talking right now, I guarantee it's true. Beautiful way to end it. Our last question we asked you before, but I wonder if it shifted at all, what is your X factor? What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, Arthur? Yeah, my X factor is the fact that I have learned that everything comes down to love. It all comes down to love. And when things are off, I've learned to ask myself, where is the love missing? Where am I denying the love that I need? Where am I pushing away the love that I need? Sometimes it's my love for the divine. And my prayer life has become desiccated over a week period, for example. Sometimes it's because I've denied my love for my lifelong companion on whom I will give my dying glance, which is my wife Esther. And I've just been cold to her. Sometimes it's because my real friends have drifted a little bit, but that's my X factor, is my knowledge of the fact that I need more love to be happy. So the book comes out tomorrow. Where can our audience find out all the great resources from the book? Oh, it's arthurbrooks.com. It's got all the details. There's classes you can take. There's surveys that you can take. And so if you read the book, which I hope people do and get a lot out of, it's fast read. It's not a very long book. It's only a couple of hundred pages. And then they want more. They can go to arthurbrooks.com and take all the surveys and take different classes and have downloaded exercises that they can do. And just remember, Oprah and I wrote the book for you. Thank you, Arthur. It's great having you back. Thanks. It's great to see you guys. Thanks for what you're doing. You're making the world better. Thank you, Arthur. You too. Thanks.


Working on your memory actually increases your confidence when you're going into a presentation or a job interview. I can't tell you how many times where I spent time focusing on just remembering names and coming back later at an event, two, three day event and remembering that person's name after meeting hundreds of people throughout the weekend, how impactful that was and really sets you apart. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Now, we talked about an exercise and I'd love to give our audience an exercise that'd be fun for them to start working on their memory now that we know it's something we can train and improve no matter where we are in terms of how we view our memory. Yeah, sure, let's start with that. So what I want to teach you here just a short glimpse into that is a memory palace because that's the most powerful method. It's already 2000 years old so the old ancient Greeks used that to give speeches and it sounds a bit wild to use techniques which are 2000 years old but they work pretty well so let's dive into it. So what we first need is a memory palace and a memory palace is a sequence of locations. For example, through your apartment.   And then you go inside and look to the right. What is there? What is next to the door? What is it, AJ? It's a guest bathroom. The guest bathroom, okay. So let's take the guest bathroom. So that's location number two. So if you pass by, what is next? The dining room. The whole dining room but let's say you don't use the whole room but enter the room and what is next to the door here? Is it a table or a board or what is it? Yeah, there's a bench. The bench, okay. So we have door, we have bathroom, we have bench. What comes next? Then it would be the full dining room table. The dining room table is number four, okay? Let's do seven. What comes next? Okay, then there's the kitchen island. Okay, number five, number six. There would be the sofa. Okay, and number seven. The television. Okay, so everyone knows right now how it looks in your apartment, nice. So please recall the first seven. So door, bathroom, bench, table, island, couch, TV. Perfect, easy. So that's your memory fellas right now. And that's the tool we use to memorize a shopping list right now, just easy one. And so you would tie each item to each specific place. And Johnny, what do you wanna buy? It's your shopping list. Okay. First one, first item. Uh-oh, steak. Steak, okay. And what you do now is you connect it to the door.  But the important thing is you have to see it in your mind and smell it in your mind. And you have to trust the method. So don't go back and back and back, but just go with the story. Okay, second item. Hot sauce, it is the bathroom on the right. Okay, hot sauce. Yeah, yeah. So how do you memorize it in your bathroom, AJ? Picture and get next to the sink and the soap to wash my hands.  Okay, next item, Johnny. Sparkling water. Sparkling water on the bench. So what do you imagine? I would say it's like there's some fountain out of the bench. It's like sparkling water. You're coming home and you're so happy about your fountain. So you get a nice drink here from the water fountain, the sparkling water fountain here. Okay, number four, Johnny. Number four will be eggs. Eggs, okay. The location number four was a table, right? That's correct. So what's your story? I'm picturing a chicken walking around the table laying eggs. Now we are getting close to it. So you're making creative and like not the normal realistic story. And yet maybe smash the eggs on the table. Everything is over the place and yeah, maybe two days old, it smells quite, okay. And what's number five? Item number five. Candles. Candles. So my kitchen island is on fire covered in wax. Because of candles, so you didn't, yeah. Okay, cool. Numbers? I had to light candles because of Johnny's cooking in the kitchen. Special, special state. Okay, two to go Johnny, what's the next item? Next item will be apples. Apples, okay. Okay. I'm picturing my dog, Puppers, sitting next to a bushel of apples on the couch that he's trying to eat. He's pretty happy to have the dog there, nice. Cool. And last item, Johnny. Bananas. Bananas, television. So I'm picturing the woman from Chiquita banana on the TV juggling bananas. Okay, the question is, you wanna buy a woman or a bananas? But anyway, so let's see if you memorize them correctly. So what are the items? Steak, hot sauce, sparkling water, eggs. Candles, apples, bananas. Perfect, easy. And you could also do that backwards. It's no big deal about that because you just go backwards through your memory balance. And that technique just doesn't work for seven, but it also works for 20 or 40 or even 100. Wow. That's actually my grocery list, weekly. Okay. Thanks for letting us know. He doesn't need to memorize it, but now I sadly have Johnny's grocery list memorized. So he can call you then and ask for that. Simple pleasures. Yeah, so next week when I visit you, Johnny, before the boot camp, I have your shopping list memorized. Yeah, you got it. And the cool thing is, you will be able to recall it even tomorrow because it's connected now to the locations and it's really about that connection. Making a story, create a connection and then you will be able to memorize even more. So what I start or what I would suggest to start with, create a memory palace through your apartment, write down 10 words, 20 words and connect them to the locations and you will see, works pretty well. See, and now you don't need pages open on your phone in your list. You're using your mind. It's like a secret notebook. There's one or like secret cheating papers for school kids. So you're just walking through their room and their mind during the class test and there is everything. So yeah. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. So is this because I already have my home memorized because I live in it. It's something that is visually cute in my mind. I could walk through it blindfolded in the middle of the night, no lights on it, no exactly where I am. That's what I'm using to link my existing memory to something that I need to memorize in the future. Exactly. So this memory palace is your tool, which you already have and then you connect it to other items. I have, you have seven locations now and I have about 2,000 locations in different places in the world. I'm not living in a palace. So no worries. It's just 30 in my apartment, but there is the apartment of my mother. There is the shopping mall. There is the park. There is the hotel in Las Vegas, for example, which I visited once. And I'm still walking through these locations using them when I try to memorize stuff. So it's also nice memories. So you are always there walking through on former buildings. Speaking of Vegas, I live here and perhaps you and I will have to have a separate conversation.  So I need to make a little money out of here. I see. I'm not sure if that's allowed today. It was back then. There was no problem, but there was has been this 21 movie. Maybe this is thought out. Oh yeah. After that, they changed everything. So it's quite tough, but let's have a private talk and see if we can get something out of it. Johnny's going to be arrested at his memory valve. Yeah. So we can use this not only for a shopping list, but if we have a big presentation coming up where we have key points that we want to get across or even a job interview where we've prepped our answers and we want to be able to mention those key words when we're responding. And that leads to confidence, right? You're not second guessing yourself or facing doubt. So working on your memory actually increases your confidence when you're going into a presentation or a job interview or even socially and you're meeting people for the first time. I can't tell you how many times where I spent time focusing on just remembering names and coming back later at an event, two, three day event and remembering that person's name after meeting hundreds of people throughout the weekend how impactful that was and really sets you apart in a networking situation. Now, are there any other techniques or strategies that maybe aren't 2,000 years old that you were excited to learn in your journey? Actually, no. I mean, it's a bit too simple to phrase it like that because it's all about visualizing images. And this memory palace method is the main key to all the other disciplines or all the other techniques. For example, if you want to learn vocabulary, you also would try to memorize the word by memorizing an image. I'm not sure. Do you speak any foreign language? Well, my memory of my French training from high school and college is fading. I wish I would have known the memory palace back then when I was taking exams. Yeah, so I mean, the key part is always to... Even if it's a foreign word which you don't understand try to create an image out of that. It's quite tough now to find a good example here in English because you know that word already, but maybe a foreign word like a German word. Let's see. I mean, do you have anything you want to learn in German right now? Johnny, you know some German. I only know one phrase. Ich heiß Johnny, V.I.S. du. Okay, so... I'm not sure how to explain that. I'm very honest, yeah.  Let's say you have the Spanish word caza, caza. And caza means house, okay? So what you do is you have this word caza and you have to think about something what that word reminds you of in your native language. So caza in English, what is it close to? What could it be? Castle. Castle, yeah? So you think about a castle and you think about a small castle. A small castle is a house. Oh, you have caza and you say, okay, caza is a bit like case and then you say, okay, you lose your case in the house or something. And yeah, and that's actually the story. This method is called the keyword method. So if you want to look it up, you can find a lot of stuff about that. The keyword method and the internet. We're learning vocabulary. Now we love asking every guest what their X factor is, what it is that makes you extraordinary. I have a feeling that we might know what your answer is. But what do you think has helped you become an extraordinary memory champion? It's a mixture. I mean, this is my whole story about overcoming depression and going to, at some point I have to decide I have to use a wheelchair. I didn't want to use it. But to become the world champion, I have to go to a world championship and without a wheelchair, I wasn't able to walk any more really good. It was just falling down the floor and I had to make this decision. And this point in my life when I was crying and I was depressed, I was like, I want to be a world champion and I have to do everything in my power to do that. And it's not just about training. It's about doing more than that, doing the right, making the right decision. And I think that was a crucial point. And that's my, I'm not sure if that's an X factor, but it's the moment when everything changed for me. Not on sport, but over time and making the decision and finding out what is necessary to achieve your goals. Sometimes it's not what you think of. It's not just training, it's even more. It's maybe ending a bad relationship or it's maybe about overcoming a depression or getting a wheelchair, whatever. And that was my key point here. And now, yeah, of course, my X factor is I have a really good memory if I want to have. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can our audience find out more about you and the training that you offer your clients? Yeah, just visit my website. It's just my name, Johannes. And then there's a minus or a hyphen, I think you say hyphen, mellow.com and Johannes minus mellow.com or a memory spots TV on YouTube. Those are quite nice sources. So it would be nice to hear from you. And thank you very much for letting me be on the show here. Hope you will remember the items for Johnny next week. So, yes. I already remember, I'm going backwards now. Yeah, hopefully many people might start with memory spots right now because in the U.S. there are not too many, but the three times world memory champion is from the U.S. So, Alex Mullen and maybe you have the next one there. So, let's get into it. And is that the most championships ever won? Is that three? It's not because back in the days in the 90s there was someone Dominique Bryan from the U.K. who won eight times. But Alex is still a young competitor, he has 29 and he just started in 2014, okay, seven years ago. But he was a first from the U.S., going to the number one spot in the world ranking and he grabbed some world records from me which was not very kind, but he's already a friend and it's always nice to get in touch with all these people all around the world. And when is your next competition? My next competition is next weekend, middle of August, and it's an online competition. So, I am also doing a Twitch stream on it and it's in the middle of the night for me. My first match is 4 a.m. in the night. And an interesting experience to complete at this time. Let's see how it works. But I'm quite of a late night person, so maybe not that late, but I try my best to have a good competition. And what is your Twitch username for our audience? It's awesome, memory sports TV. Easy to memorize, memory sports TV, and that's it.  Johnny and I appreciate you. I will and hopefully you have a nice weekend, thanks. Goes good with steak. Thank you so much. Steak and eggs and hot sauce and everything. Bananas.


I feel like there's nothing to do. Self-isolation can get a little repetitive, but that doesn't mean you need to sit in your room and stare at your phone or get familiar with the back of your eyelids. There's tons of stuff to do online from your room, like... Just because you can't get a physical copy doesn't mean you have to slow down in reading habits. A virtual library works the same way as your public library. It's a repository of knowledge, and these institutions have downloaded thousands of books and archived them online for you to access anytime. It's a great way to keep up with your reading plans and not have to go outside. Have you ever wanted to visit museums all around the world, all in one day? Well that's where virtual museums shine. You can see amazing art installations, historical exhibits, and cultural artifacts, all from the comfort of your own room. So why not take a trip around the globe and go visit a virtual museum? There's no better time to start an online education. And that doesn't just mean taking traditional college classes. Well that may be good for some, but for others you want to learn a practical skill, and the internet is perfect for that. It's full of videos and tutorials from experts just trying to teach you basic tricks of the trade. So why not take up a new skill, maybe learn how to cook, or how to draw? It's the perfect time to take up a new hobby, and this is by no means a comprehensive list. It's just a reminder that you can still explore from your own room. So read a book, learn a new skill, go to a museum, find the things that interest you because they're out there. And most of all, stay healthy.


In this presentation, we will take a look at the tools needed in order to complete a statement of cash flows. To complete a statement of cash flows, we are typically going to need a comparative balance sheet that's going to include a balance sheet from the prior period, whether that be the prior month or the prior year, and a balance sheet from the current period. Then we're going to have to have an income statement, and then we'll need some additional information. In a book problem, it'll typically give us some additional information, often having to do with things like, were there any equipment purchases, were there equipment purchases, or equipment sales, were there investments in the company, were there sales of stocks, what were the dividends within the company. In practice, of course, we would have to just know and recognize those types of areas where we might need more detail, and we would get that additional information with the general ledger. We'd go into the general ledger, look at that added information. Now once we have


Think Tech Hawaii, Rule of Law in the New Abnormal, whatever that may be, and welcome. We have just another truly stellar Paul Starr panel here today. I'm going to start with Professor Renalia Randall, Professor Emerita, University of Dayton School of Law, and one of the leading experts anywhere on race, racism, and the law, which is particularly germane to what we're going to be talking about today. Ben Davis, Professor Emeritus from University of Toledo, School of Law, and now teaching with the University of Illinois School of Law in Chicago remotely. And Ben is in Virginia where he's been able to look at some historical presidential sites and ancestral homelands, in a sense. Tina Patterson in Germantown, New Jersey has mastered many trades, business, entrepreneurial, mediation, arbitration, both domestic and international. And Doug Shin, our former Hawaii Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General, now a partner at Starr and O'Toole, Marcus and Fisher, one of our leading commercial law firms. And welcome, Doug, with Professor Randall, Ben Davis, Tina Patterson. Today we're going to dive as deeply as we choose into freedom of thought, expression, and the restrictions on that, not only in academic freedom, but in all sectors that we're seeing put into place by particular groups. Which are the ones that concern you the most? Ben, you brought this up. You want to start us off? All right. So at the first level, I think there's an effort at, I've become aware of at the University of Georgia system to end tenure. All right. Now, most people out there say, what's tenure and what does it mean to me and all that? But what I can say in the academic space, at least for me personally, the sense of tenure was the opportunity to think freely on a topic and not feel any risk as long as you're a reasonable person in terms of not doing weird things at your school, but on any topic that you were thinking of working on and having the freedom to explore to whatever the views of powers that be might be on this or that point. It was that freedom that you get from tenure that allows for the more, I think, rich intellectual processes in university. So one part is the University of Georgia kind of threat to tenure that's going on now, and I understand others places too. Second aspect of this would be boards of trustees putting pressure on deans and deans possibly succumbing to the pressure with regards to somebody who is quote unquote doing something that is out of line with what some member of the board of trustees thinks is appropriate. And that kind of whispering in the ear to a professor that what they can't talk about this or that in their classroom, the distinction between Dean being able to maybe say something, which is a whole issue in itself, and the professor having the academic freedom in their pedagogy and what they're trying to teach their students in their classroom is a real concern that I have that people are feeling pressures like that. I know if people are feeling pressures like that and having to deal with it. And my concern is I know people who are leaving schools because they can't take the pressure. A third kind of issue of this is a professor talks about things that they think are important and you know some group of students in the classroom don't want to hear it. So they start a whole protesting up to the Dean and all that about this professor talking about things that they don't feel comfortable with hearing. Okay. And the professor may have the view that this is important. In fact, some case books may have sections on it that point point out that is part of the pedagogical process. This is helping people to understand whatever the rules are the particular topic is and this kind of again whispering to the professor to please don't talk about. I'm not talking about a professor being obnoxious or acting irresponsibly or anything like I'm talking about somebody who as part of their academic goal of preparing people in their classroom are being told to quote unquote trim their sales a bit away from what would be totally in another environment I'd say in three four years ago five years ago would have not been controversial at all and would have actually been something totally totally normal. Those are the kinds of things that that I worry about. The last one I just want to add is when you have legislatures that are passing laws and you can't talk about something in the classroom whatever that means because you know for example that there might be a professor who teaches environmental law and the legislature will pass the law saying you can't speak about climate change how can you teach environmental law to people when you can't talk about climate change you know what I mean but obviously critical race theory which by the way is carrying a lot of weight as a term not being able to talk about it. I live here in Charlottesville, Virginia okay Charlottesville, Virginia you know the capital of the south in the civil war race pervades this history but the blood is in the ground. Then I kiss I want to separate the the legislative action from the other kinds of things that you mentioned but my experience is that that's been going on I've been in legal education for 30 years it has followed me the entire 30 years of my teaching of the exact behavior that you're talking about. I got taken out of classes I got petitions made up against me because I was teaching race and racism I got told that it wasn't an issue of academic freedom that it was an issue of a dean's right and there was no media to rally around you know and I think and I'm not saying I was unique I think that that kind of thing was happening to people who was teaching about race and racism in the 90s okay wherever they happen to sit in the 80s and you know what really is different to me even 15 years ago there was discussion about getting rid of tenure so that discussion is not even new what's new though I think to this whole process is the legislature passing actual laws saying you know you can't talk about that and I'm wondering if this is I you know if I'm wondering if this is sort of like they know that cannot that it really can't stand up under challenges but the idea is to damp down the discussion while challenges are happening which could take year two three years to overturn the laws so I'm not sure that I think the laws are legal I think the but the impact will be that until they are litigated out uh it'll have an impact of damping's discussion but I think that's the only difference I see not the other thing you mentioned but okay well then what I would say to you is the common denominator of all these things for me is instilling fear okay instilling fear in the professor as to what they're going to do to create a second guess idea in the professor's head and you know I'm not going to go down with the old chilling effect thing I'm just saying that the you know it's enough fear trying to get to tenure okay I mean about you know whether everyone in the faculty will vote for you and all that stuff okay but in addition to that now setting up rules that uh have the effect of making a professor hesitate like oh my gosh does this term I'm talking about like uh the water crisis in Flint is that talking about climate change so I can't talk about it because uh somehow that might be conceived as being related to climate change and climate change is something I can't talk about I mean that kind I know that sounds crazy but I'm telling you that that instilling that second guessing in your head as opposed to you being in the pedagogical space of trying to teach what is the things that you think are useful for your students to be uh uh the best prepared for what they're going to have to face out in the real world that is really what I feel is about trying to get us all to feel fear okay and fear in this sense that obviously oh my goodness you're not going to get tenure or or alternatively it's fear like you're going to be moved around all the kinds of things that you describe but these are all efforts of instilling fear and right now it seems to be that there's an an effort to really heighten the amount of fear and to basically repress thought or intellectual intellectual uh adventurism intellectual uh exploration to have something that even seems a little bit like trying to have a part party line and uh it's very totalitarian to me especially when the legislators get involved that's the word that came to my mind is that this is a very totalitarian you know remaking the past in terms of what is acceptable I heard one professor talk about a lot of their students have had the disney version of american history and that they are confronted with this and trying to explain them and I know professor at randall you've had to spend time in your classes just having people understand the history you know because you can't even get to the theories because they they don't understand they don't even know the history and uh and that can become traversal just to tell the histories differently here's one thing I will tell you that I learned recently when I was visiting james madison's plantation which is that the marquis de lafayette in 1824 when he was doing his national tour sort of everybody thanking him for what he did in the revolution a war visited uh james madison for four days at his plantation and the first two days he spent talking to the slaves or the enslaved people about what they were going through and at the dining room table when he was there with madison he spent a lot of time trying to convince madison to get rid of his slaves to free them I hadn't heard that until I was out at the plantation I know about marquis de lafayette from all we to know about from back in the revolutionary war park but apparently even said you know I'm not sure I would have come back here if I knew you were going to keep your slaves well now was that controversial you know that's history that's reality but that that that kind of thing might be oh you're talking critical race theory or something that's got to be I still I still feel like that I I understand what you're saying and maybe it's just I've been fighting this so long that it doesn't feel different to me it really doesn't feel different to me it feels like more of the same uh and uh and I don't know I mean it is not a feeling steer but it's been about instillings instilling fear as long as I've known it and let me ask you and just one sec before let me ask you folks is there another very real very practical very threatening aspect of this fear and that is the legislatures state and national those are the funding sources for all the public schools k-12 and university and gretch school well sure you know there there've been clinics that send a message that right this law may not be enforceable but when you come back to us for funding if you are on the wrong side of this law guess where you're going to be on our priority list yeah there there are clinical programs that have uh you know obviously somebody with some insignificant power of business interest has been upset about some of the work that they've been doing and they put pressure to try to get those clinics made to be disappear because at law schools because they were taking on cases that were uncomfortable to that particular business interest you know but didn't it start about 12 years ago that I'm just saying that that that that that people that the clinics were threatened that have been threatened for the last 15 years by conservative groups who and laws have been passed as a matter of fact I'm trying to think which state actually passed the law saying that the law school clinics could not represent people from a certain group uh and that's you know that's been around a while uh and it's a problem I mean I'm just saying this this is this is a package okay this is what we're going through in this period now I can tell you in the 30s I know that there were people who were talking pro union stuff at different universities who are professors and they would get hassled about their pro-union approaches that happened to Toledo when I was there unfortunately Toledo had a point of view which was that you know hey academic freedom the person is free to do the research that they want to do you know but let me add another one that's in this game is that uh the public and private version of the of the professor a professor goes to something as a private person and you know how you're at it anything that you go to pump buddy might ask you uh uh general chin so what do you do you know I was the former I'm working with a law firm or used to be the attorney general something like that or somebody asks you uh uh miss Patterson you know what do you do oh I do this to that right okay all right and then you get an article put up like I don't know attorney general goes berserk in meeting you know like that right you know you know right and uh maybe even letters get sent to the governor right or to the head of your law firm where it is saying we are shocked that you know uh this partner said this thing or kind of thing like that when you were acting completely in your private capacity or were shocked at where you work uh uh miss Patterson that they you know and that kind of stuff I've seen happen too you know and in fact that happened to me once it was really funny because I went to a true the vote meeting because they're talking about voter integrity back in 2012 and I asked a couple questions the place went crazy on my questions right I was the only black guy in there was anyway they called the police on all me oh I mean I'm kind of good and then I you know I there was an article put up saying you know law professor goes berserk now how do you know it's a law professor I'm talking to the guy today well today what do you do oh yeah you know I I work down here I'm just here you know seeing this is like ordinary citizen I was accused of being a compliant of the Democratic party to be in conspiracy with the New York Times you know I mean I'm giving you all the craziness and this got back disagree I just think that in 1987 I was working for bull event how's your daily pentagraph in Hoffman in Portland Oregon and I went to speak to a junior high school and I've always been political so uh and I pretty much told them that everybody was racist and they should say so right that and we should deal with it when I got back to my firm you can bet the pressure was put on me oh sure okay I mean I mean the thing is is that let's deal with the legislative component because the personal pressure component is one that has always been around and will continue to be around even professor Randall I hear you but the personal pressure part two as well as the legislative for me are all part of the same thing and the battle we have is to fight those things that if you are in a that law firm and if they're going to like make you lose your position so to speak because of what you said in that kind of setting that's a comment on them not on you understand in the in the in academia there's this kind of intellectual process you're supposed to go through and intellectual exploration that is crucial to helping our country I think become a better place and really want to protect you I just want to add something here just to bring it home back here to Hawaii I I want to thank very much the academics here for for just constantly speaking up and and and I want to encourage you to keep doing that more I'll tell you a quick story which is that my parents were brought over by Christian missionaries to the United States and and so as a result I was raised in a very sheltered very conservative religious background that taught me a lot of great things taught me a lot about faithfulness and perseverance and mercy and things like that it also taught me a lot of not so good things in terms of you know in terms of like kind of just what I would think about LGBTQ issues what I would think about whether or not minorities should speak up or whether we should just go along and just you know let things happen and never say anything and there was a lot about there was a lot about my own culture that taught me about you know perhaps wrongly about about uh just being a model minority and not saying anything so to me I always think to myself when I look back in my life and go how do I go from this conservative sheltered background to like being a Asian-American who then sued the president for a Muslim ban how did that all happen I'll tell you what it was it was it was my undergraduate education and it was my law school okay so I went to Stanford you know I actually I actually remember writing to the people at Stanford saying I'd like to have someone who's my roommate who will be the same religion as me because I feel more comfortable with that and they just know that's not that's not what we're about and you know and then and then the same way you know when I went to law school I remember being challenged and hearing so many different different viewpoints that I resisted honestly because of the way I'd been raised and yet it stuck with me they were seeds that were planted inside me that that the longer I the longer I lived and the more I experienced things I was able to you know like change and evolve and grow and and I just want you to know that that you're you know even when you think you're falling on deaf ears or you're feeling all this pressure that that as somebody who was one of the students who came from that background I needed to hear that like I needed to be told no you're going to listen to a different viewpoint and and to be able to think differently about something because I think it really it really helped me along the way so so I appreciate that just thinking about things locally here there is no question that that the legislature every single year holds their funding of our universities over their heads and I know that for people in Hawaii we tend to think well we're not we're never going to get to that place where you know our progressive values will be challenged but I think that's something to always be careful of because I think Hawaii will often look at what's happening on the mainland and then you know and then start adopting some of those things into their rhetoric and so so I appreciate the warning signs you know if not the actual signs of racism that could potentially be pervading and causing our academic freedom with freedoms to be stifled yeah but let me give one more second okay because I wanted to ask Tina we're hearing now about the role and the value of this freedom of thought expression to contributing to leadership abilities to stand up to speak up and the individual abilities what kind of difference has that made in your life Tina what learning experience that you've had that have enabled you to stand up speak up take choices and chances and risks I think much of Doug indicated it's the being in an environment where intellectual curiosity is welcome and supported um undergraduate school it was encouraged to ask questions to to challenge to to literally make your own decision to give him what was presented to you to do the analysis thoughtful analysis intentional analysis I think back to your original question that's one of the things that concerns me most is that we're we're seeing and we're being bombarded with the message of you don't need to think about it I'm telling you this is the message this is the message you're going to carry forward um whether it's everyone is going to be the model african-american the model asian the model it muslim um this this is the message that you're going to carry forward and drawing or moving outside of the lines has consequences whether that is losing your job being presented in a such a way whether on social media or in the newspaper so um I think ben you talked about this but I think it really really being um vigilant and knowing that there may be a price that you you'll have to pay for for taking that stand as as we were talking I think about the book how democracies die and it's this it's that attack um and it's the attack on the leaders those who are take a position that are is not favorable or favorite as well as those who are you know holding status quo um you know right now there's this tug of war and I think about what you said Doug I'm recently graduated from the public leaders for inclusion council um cohort and it was focusing on islamophobia and I thought how are you know the focus recently in the media has been about islamophobia but where have we seen this repeated elsewhere and it's the same message of where do you stand on this do you do you take a stand or do you just go along because it's good for whatever fill in the blank whether it's your your purse or your your reputation or your long-term career goals yeah I understand very much this this whole idea of like being this motivator I remember just you know like even as a as a young student feeling like feeling afraid you know like I'm afraid to hear a different viewpoint because somehow that would you know mess me up you know and and and it took professors and counselors and mentors being able to say don't be afraid like it's okay to think about another side to this um and and I needed to hear like even like the smart guy I was you know I was going to there like I I needed to hear that in order to you know to develop and to become a more full person so so I really appreciate that I even thought about the the fear of like just what Tina was just saying about you know having a fear of you know Muslims and you know to me I thought one of the greatest like one of the greatest rewards from being able to bring the lawsuit against President Trump was meeting the the Muslim folks the people in our community and and just hearing their stories and speaking to them and and realizing that there are so many stereotypes that I have in mind since 2001 that that was from the message that I've been hearing so much from everybody else that that just being able to like meet them it was it meant so much and yeah and so and so I really appreciate that this is you know like we really need those academic freedoms in our last couple of minutes and from each of you what's the kernel the most important thing we really need to stand up and speak up for now to protect freedom of thought and expression in our learning how do we do that I think we need if I jump forward it's very difficult um whether case through 12 college or in a graduate program as a teacher but I do think that whatever the level you're at you have to model freedom of thought for those who are your students there's a wonderful image always comes to mind it's an old Charles Lawton movie called this is our land where he's teaching these little kids in France and the Gasapo are coming along to arrest him and so he finishes sort of with a wonderful soliloquy and then they're starting to take him out and they grab his two arms as they're taking him out the door and he does this one move with his arms where he just goes like that which is like I walk out of my classroom as the professor okay I'm not it was like this kind of academic freedom even though the system is going to come down on him it was this act of defiance against efforts to make to diminish him as the person who was in instilling information to the best of his ability to his students and I think you know I personally thought they always get moved when I see that little scene in black and white about what we could you know what is possible now there's a lot of fear though okay there's a lot of fear I respect that there's a lot of fear and you know fear to be a motivator I mean I've always felt like I've always used fear in my life to move me to move me forward to move me ahead to to do something to use that tension in my body to step out of where I am as opposed to withdraw but one of the things we didn't talk about which I I think we should I'm not for complete freedom of thought I don't want racist sexist homophobic transphobic thought in my classroom I'm sorry about it and I will facilitate you trying to move out of it but you will know that what you said what you did is completely unacceptable to me uh you had that thought but no not all thoughts are acceptable I'm laughing because my my foster mother used to say to us you can think what you want but you can't say everything and I you know I think that that there is some truth in that that that and part of what we've gotten into is the feeling that if I think it I can say it and then I don't want any backlash from it because that's my freedom to be able to do it so okay so we're going for boundaries yeah that's a great insight and thanks much for us we're out of time for today but we've dive pretty deep into what our responsibility to truth really is and part of that is the freedom to be able to get to it through critical thinking but another part is the responsibility to put that truth first and not to sacrifice the truth for the sake of irresponsible freedom it's a good place to wrap up today it's a good place to come back to and let's see where that takes us next time folks thanks for joining us think tech Hawaii keep us in mind our donation month begins November 1st and we'll ask you to support us to the extent that you feel it's worthwhile and can for us a Randall Ben Tina Doug thanks so much for joining us and come back again in a couple of weeks we'll be back