Good Life Project - Dan Heath | Upstream Thinking & Moment Making

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Dan Heath is the co-author, along with his brother, Chip, of four New York Times bestselling books: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. The Heath Brothers’ books have sold over three million copies worldwide and been translated into 33 languages. But, interesting, separated by 10 years, the two weren't super close until they began to collaborate later in life. Their work has transformed not only the lives of millions of readers, but along the way, two brothers as well. Dan’s new book - his first solo release - Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (https://amzn.to/3hmfMC7) debuted in March 2020 and was an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who are fighting for social good. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.You can find Dan Heath at:Website : https://heathbrothers.com/books/upstream/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Dan Heath. So Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University's Case Center, which supports entrepreneurs who are fighting for social good. And he's also the co-author of a series of mega bestselling books, Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, The Power of Moments. And he co-wrote those with his brother, Chip. They've kind of come to be known as the Heath brothers. Collectively, they have sold over 3 million copies that have been translated into 30 something languages. Funny enough, Dan and Chip actually have a pretty large age gap between them. And

it was the decision to start writing together later in life that really deepened their relationship and brought them together with that sense of brotherhood. But recently, Dan did something really unusual. He wrote his latest book, Upstream, the quest to solve problems before they happen, as a solo effort. We explore this decision

and also dive deep into some of the key ideas from his earlier books before landing on the big idea in Upstream, which is all about how to solve problems in a very different way and at a very different point than most people focus on. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk.

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available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I want to bounce around with you a little bit because I have been reading you and Chip and now most recently you alone, which I'm curious about also since Made to Stick came out. Also, just a little bit curious about your decision to focus on what you focus on. It's funny, like I mentioned, when we first started as a video series, I sat down with Dan Ariely and kind of asked him a similar question.

Like why the obsession with why people do what they do? And he had a very specific tie in. 18 in the burn ward in hospital in Israel and starting to get really curious about why certain people who he knew had run out of their morphine allocations were given saline by the nurse without being told and were responding to it. And that was pretty pivotal in his fascination with the stories we tell ourselves and the way that we behave. I'm curious if there's any kind of similar sort of inciting incident or origin story for you. No, no. I think Dan's story

makes a whole lot more sense than ours. In a way, ours was the product of serendipity. I mean, so the backstory was Chip had written some articles about some research he was doing on the marketplace of ideas. This was pre-made to stick. And in particular, he'd been researching what made urban legends stick with people, you know, with all these crazy stories of the Kentucky fried rat and, you know, exactly. Yeah. And so he'd written up some of his research in a publication called the SSIR Stanford social innovation review and an editor at random house named Ben L Yeah. And so he'd written up some of his research in a publication called the SSIR, Stanford Social Innovation Review. And an editor at Random House named Ben Loonan happened to see it and called him up and said, hey, was really interested in this stuff about sticky ideas. You know, is there is there more here? And so anyway, sort of opened the door to Chip submitting a book proposal.

And then eventually Chip roped me in. I'm more of the writer between the two of us. And so it was just like life gave us this incredible opportunity that neither of us ever imagined would come. And I think the only kind of thing that we can credit ourselves for is saying yes when that opportunity was presented. Had you guys collaborated on anything substantial

before then or was that the first thing where you kind of went all in? I mean, obviously your brother, so you've been doing stuff, but, you know, like sort of saying we are all in on this like pretty substantial project. We had, I mean, we're 10 years apart. So when we were growing up, I mean, he was out of the house to college by the time I was eight. So we didn't have a very tight relationship growing up, but we got to know each other

pretty well right when I was graduating from college. And we actually worked on a couple of business ideas together when I was kind of fumbling about to figure out what I was going to do for a career. One of which was, I think, the right idea, but we were just the wrong people to execute on it, which was the kind of agent technology that's now routine on Amazon and Netflix, where if you like this, you'll like this other thing that's similar. We were working on something like that back in 1995. So our timing was right, but unfortunately neither one of us had any idea what we were doing. So we worked on a couple of things like that where we had ideas and he was doing it in moonlighting fashion and I was doing it in hopes of avoiding the regular workforce. And so I feel like our relationship was really formed as a collaborative relationship, maybe even more so than like a traditional brotherly relationship. Yeah, that's pretty wild, actually. I mean, do you ever, do you ever pause for a moment and wonder

about the nature, what the nature of your relationship as as brothers would be now had you never decided to both say yes to that first professional project the the agent thing or you mean the the book well I guess the agent thing and then eventually the books and this yeah cuz I guess in a way one led to the other yeah it's hard to imagine us just picking it up as full-grown adults yeah it is it is interesting to think about I I mean, we were so far apart in age that there was just no natural reason for us to grow close. And neither one of us are very good at, you know, picking up the phone just to catch up on things. I think if it

wasn't for writing and for books, we'd probably talk three or four times a year. And instead, you know, we've been weekly collaborators for a decade plus. So it's transformed everything, having this stuff to work on. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. So Mate to Steak was the first major project, and that was the boat that just kind of dropped into his lap, and then he brought you in. When that came out, I mean, that was huge. That made an absolutely giant splash. Did you guys have any sense? You know, you've, you now have a string of four, you know, like

very well selling your tons of sellers out together, but I'm all, I'm curious when that very first thing dropped, did you have any sense for what was about to happen before it happened? We had no idea. I mean, it it was it was just completely out of left field i mean obviously we we took pride in the book we loved how it came out but but we were also very realistic i mean we thought you know there's a lot of good books in the world and it'll come out and it'll sell 50 copies 38 of which are to family members and you know we'll go back to our lives it was just it was a hobby it was just something fun to do and i think the first time we started to kind of feel like hey something's going on here is you know the fall it came out in early january 2007 and then the fall prior we started to

get like a level of media interest that we never imagined like time magazine back when it was a magazine flew down to texas Texas for Christmas and like shot cheesy pictures of us, like covered in duct tape. And then the week the book came out, we were on the today show, which was one of the most terrifying experiences in my life. Uh, so, you know, we, we just completely hit the lotto. I mean, we really did it. I think if it had been released another year or a different time, it probably would have gone differently. But we just we released the right book at the right moment and it opened up a lot of doors. We were flabbergasted.

I mean, that's such an interesting point also, because I'm sure people have asked you over the years, as you guys have seemed to repeat the phenomenon of creating well-selling books that hit. And I've been asked this, and I've thought about it a lot also, is there any repeatable formula to creating a phenomenon? And I've landed in an area where I do believe there are some elements that are repeatable, but then there are some, like you said, timing. You can't control whether you drop something that just happens to speak to the zeitgeist until you're in the middle of the zeitgeist and it happens. And if it's off by six months this way or that way, it's just... I'm fascinated by this notion of trying to time the creation of a phenomenon. And I've just never seen anybody that's been able to make that a consistent science

because I don't think it can be. No, I completely agree with you. I mean, it's like the old William Goldman, the screenwriter from Hollywood who said, nobody knows anything about which movies are going to sell and which aren't. And I think the same is true for books and really probably for any media for that matter, unless you're Taylor Swift or something. I mean, in my mind, the kind of model that's in my head is about a third of it you can control. And it's important to control that third because that's what you own.

And that third is, did you invest in a good product? Did you do your work? Did you, in the book world, did you come up with a good cover and a good title? And, you know, do you have an audience in mind that it's going to help and on and on and on? But probably two thirds. I mean, no joke. That's what's in my head is two thirds of it is out of your control. And it's just timing or luck or, you know, who else had a book coming out that week?

You know, Jessica Simpson comes out with a diet book that crushes your, your, your, your oxygen for the first week or who knows what. Of course, you're not speaking from personal experience at all. It leaves a scar. It's kind of funny also, because, because made to stick was fundamentally, I mean, if you think about it, actually in this frame, it was kind of about that third to a certain extent. What can you do to take an idea or a concept or something and craft it in a way where when it goes out into the world, it's just people are like, they hear it once or they experience it once, they remember it for life and they can't stop telling people about it.

I mean, this is 14 years later and it's one of the few book covers that i can sit here and describe you know to you because it was so it just it jumped it you know the cover itself did what the content of the book promised and it was it was powerful on a lot of different levels there's actually a whole backstory behind that cover so just for listeners yeah you may have seen this book. It's like an obnoxious day glow orange, like a Halloween orange with a strip of duct tape that looks surprisingly real, like as though someone just tore out a piece of duct tape and stuck it on the cover. And that's the cover of this book made to stick. And my guess is probably 20% of Americans would recognize this cover and 0% would recognize my name or Chip's name. It's just it's kind of taken on a life of its own.

And I wish I could show you some of the covers that came out of the design process. Because, I mean, publishing is, it's a volume business. You know, those poor folks are launching a dozen or more books a month and they just don't have time to obsess about any one. And of course, your book, you're obsessing about 100% of the time. And so, you know, when the artists got around to designing the made to stick cover, they were just like, okay, what's what's sticky? Okay, scotch tape, let's let's run with that. So there were like some scotch tape covers, and there were a bunch of post it note covers, you know, it's a business sort of book. And so that kind of made sense, but, but honestly what makes post-it notes valuable is that they're not that sticky. You know, that's the whole point is you can move them from place to place and they don't stay. And so we, we just fought tooth and nail and as first time authors, we had zero power. So we were just kind of begging and pleading and, and we were just determined to get duct tape on that cover. We just went to the mat for duct tape. And, and so, you know, I'm glad we did because it seemed to strike a chord.

It's like, Hey, listen, you can do anything you want, but there's one thing that has to be, there's gotta be some duct tape. Cause it's just, it has all these, especially in America. We learned later that, that in other countries, it doesn't have the same kind of MacGyver-ish overtone that it does here. But you can fix anything with duct tape. And that's sort of the spirit of the book is whether you've got ideas to make your biology class better or to sell your business plan to investors, or you're trying to get your colleagues excited about a memo at work. There are ways to make those ideas stickier and more practical. practical. Yeah, no, I, I love it and I loved it.

And, um, and that was really, it touched off this series of collaborations. I mean, you, you move from there. It was really, it feels like it was every couple of years, switch comes out a couple of years after that, which is all about really behavior change. You know, how do you actually, how do you change the things in your life, in your work, even things that are positive and constructive and you say you want to change, but most people don't. You drop into decisive came after that. It's really about better choices. So you're certainly picking off one at a time, these sort of like singular things that people are trying to work on about themselves in order to live better lives functionally.

Then the power of moments drops after that. Curious because it was the first book also where, well, actually it wasn't, but it was hands down by at least 25% the longest title you've ever had. Dr. Andy Roark Yeah, those four words. They were pushing the limits of our capacity. Right. That was pretty aggressive right there. It was.

You're right. The inclusion of those articles, I mean, prepositions, we really branched out. And that I want to actually talk a little bit about. That's fundamentally a book about why certain moments leave us changed, why they affect us so deeply and so profoundly. And that has been a deep fascination of mine for my entire adult life. I was actually a club DJ in college and I learned really quickly that being behind the tables, I could control the energetic and social dynamic of hundreds of people for four to five hours based on the choices that I was making. And I could manipulate the entire dynamic if I wanted to. But I also realized that there were certain things that you could do that would create what Durkheim described as

collective effervescence, where there's this transcendent collective moment where many become one, and there's this feeling like you are leaving the present moment in time. And so I was fascinated by the way that you sort of deconstructed four elements of these moments. I'm curious what your curiosity was about these in the first place. This one had a relatively underwhelming origin story as well, but it was something I remember specifically because there was a moment in time when it popped out and it actually popped out of, we were procrastinating work on another book. We were together, which is rare for us because he's on the West Coast and I'm on the East Coast. And we were together for Christmas. We were in my dad's office. We often kind of hole up there and work while the rest of

the family's having fun. And we were talking about another book topic that we'd been working on for probably six months. And it was one of those things where we were just getting to the point where we'd invested a real good chunk of time. But it was kind of clear, even though neither one of us would say it, that we weren't that jazzed about it. But it also felt painful to flush it because so much, you know, if you've ever been a part of a project like that, where it's like, you've come

too far to quit, but you don't really want to keep going either. And so I think in an effort to just delay work on that, we started talking about moments and neither one of us can really remember where the topic came from, but we started talking about, at that time, we were talking in terms of defining moments. What makes a defining moment? And all these examples came to mind, ranging from politics, these kind of bizarre stories that take on popular significance, like George Bush Sr. during his campaign against Bill Clinton. He was just mocked for purportedly not understanding a UPC scanner in a grocery store. And of course, there's a whole lot more to the story. He wasn't actually as mystified as he seemed. But anyway, it kind of took on this symbolic status of how

out of touch he was. And then that weird thing where Howard Dean just screams at a rally. He's just excited for Pete's sake, but people act like it was the scream of a madman. And it, and it sort of, uh, uh, eventually seemed to auger his, his exit from the race. And so we were talking about, well, what are these moments? And then we started talking about the business equivalence where, you know, you go to Disney world and you take a photo by the castle and, memory it comes to stand for something that is much cooler and more fun to make sure that when you fire up the car, you get like a very satisfying, like growling, you know, just a meaty, you know, driving energy sort of sound. And so we just started this feverish brainstorming about

this idea of moments and coming at it from different perspectives. And do you control these moments? Can you control these moments or do they just happen? And we just benefit from the ones that happen to bubble up successfully. And what bodies of research tie into this that we might consult for more insight and on and on and on. And we go on like this for probably an hour. And it was like, we knew instantly that was the, that was the new book. And we, we had no remorse at all about ditching the old book. And so we come out to our family where they're all sitting in the living room or like, guess what? Got a new book topic. And they all have this kind of palpable sense of relief on their faces because apparently

they all hated the old topic and were too polite to tell us so so that was where moments came from uh that's i love that it is it is amazing though right it's the sunk cost fallacy right you sort of like you're so far into a project you're so invested in it whether it's time money energy love and even if it's telling you you know this just isn't the thing you hit a point where you're just like, but how can I walk away from that? And so many bad decisions are made from that place. the space even serendipitously for something that actually was calling you much more directly to pop up, it would just make it a lot easier to walk away from that. I wonder if that's true or not. I mean, for you guys, clearly the answer was yes. Yeah. It's hard to know what lesson to take from that. I think for me, it reminds me years and years ago, and I can't even remember the context,

but this little slogan just stuck with me. A reader told us a story that she said she had changed things in her life according to the following phrase that I think was in the context of when do you say yes to things and maybe saying yes to too many things. And her slogan was, if it's not a hell yes, it's a no. And I think that was maybe the moral of this story for us is that you shouldn't try to talk yourself into a book. I mean, there's probably other things in life you should try to talk yourself into. But investing years of your life in a book, that's something that's got to be a hell yes. And Moments, thankfully, was a hell yes. Yeah, I love that. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. And moments, thankfully, was a hell hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

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You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. I remember talking to an author a couple years back who shared a similar metric. He said before he said yes to writing a book, he would always assume it was going to take two to three years to research and write it. And before he said yes, he had to truly believe that the process of researching and writing the

book would transform him, not just the people that he was writing for. And if he didn't believe that, he just wouldn't, it wasn't enough for him to say, I'm going to give two to three years of my life to this. I love that. That's pretty cool. Yeah. When in that book, you talk about these, these things, elevation, insight, pride connection. One of the things that actually really stayed with me was this thing, the peak end rule, which you kind of referenced, but not directly. And when you're talking about Disney, which is we, we are weird beasts, right?

In that we don't judge or recall how, you know, uh, an experience made us feel based on the, the, you know, the cumulative, um, moments of this entire thing. It's sort of like, we kind of forget most of it and, and reflect on, um, how awesome it was based on a much smaller slice of it. Exactly right. And, and in fact, I just experienced this in early February. We went to Disney World for my daughter's fourth birthday. I mean, we timed it well about four weeks later, you know, the pandemic hit. And I'll tell you, as a parent, I mean, I'll be a somewhat skeptical parent, battle-hardened parent. It's not that great to go to Disney World. It's just not. It's hot.

There's lines everywhere. Everything's overpriced. You're walking all day. Your kids are irritable half the time because they're overstimulated. But, and this is where the academic research comes in, the experience of going to Disney World is very different in the moment than it is in your memory. And I've experienced this now because I look back already. I mean, it's barely two months I've gone by and I already look back with this kind of romantic glow. And literally this morning, my daughter and I were just like playing through some videos of some of the rides and looking at the photos and it looked amazing. And what psychologists tell us about this is that when we talk about the memories that we have of our experiences, we tend to dramatically oversample some parts of the

experience. So our memories are not like videotapes where we just queue them up and watch the Disney World experience. They dissolve and they dissolve and leave us with little snippets or scenes from what we experienced. And psychologists know that we tend to remember two kinds of moments disproportionately. The first is what they call peak moments, which are the most positive moments in an experience. So for us, you know, with some of the rides, like my daughter's in that age where she wants to be on the spinning teacup and go as fast as we can without vomiting, you know. And she's also in a princess stage all of the time. She got to meet a couple of the Disney princesses. Those are the peak moments.

And then there's the ending of our experiences. You know, you talked about DJing. One thing I was always curious about, and until I got in this research, I never really understood understood was you think about a great concert you went to I was often curious why do concerts always seem to kind of stumble out of the gate you know it's like the band would come out people are really psyched and then they would play like a song from their new album or something that nobody's that into but but they they understand that what's important is not the beginning it's the ending and and so there's always just a fantastic

climax to the show. And I think that relates to the psychology research as well. And so anyway, the kind of overall takeaway from this research is to say something that's probably all of us have experienced, but maybe we never really realized, which is there are some moments in life that matter a thousand times more than others. They're more powerful. They're more emotional. They're more memorable. And if you catch on to that, what you realize is we can also be practical about that, that we can be thoughtful about creating more memories for ourselves or for our families

or in some cases for our customers. And so that's kind of the launching platform for the book is can we be more thoughtful about designing experiences so that they have more of these these peak moments? Yeah, I love that. It just I'm constantly looking at that and looking at ways to create them. just to have clearer language around both to sort of like look back at what had worked and what had hadn't worked as the person who sort of was helping to create the container and to sort of say oh like yes you know like i can see why this worked and i can see why this didn't work and so as a dj i mean i'm curious like if you were gonna this is sort of a geeky question but if you were gonna map out like the energy of the crowd over time, like, I imagine the end is a big deal,

but, but like, what does it look like in the middle? Is, is there like a, a middle of the show peak and then you let people get a breather before you build for the grand finale or like, what does it look like?

Yeah. You know, it's sort of like a series of, um, so I rock climbed for a little while and there was a term called false peaks where, you know, you kind of like, you felt like you were coming up over this summit and you're like, yeah, I made it.

And then you just climb over the edge and you realize there's a much bigger summit, like right in front of you. And then you go to the next one. You're like, yes, I'm. And then, so it's sort of like this wave of increasing peaks and troughs, you know, where, and then you finally you know you have the the the biggest moment which generally tends to be fairly close to the end of the night and then you got to bring everybody down so they're sort of like in a in a in a quieter place and the last song was all like we i can tell you what the last song every time i played was you know for years that we took people off the dance floor with. It was all really intentional. What was the song?

It was Forever Young, which has been remade a whole bunch these days. But it was this really chill groove. Back then, we had vinyl, it was all vinyl, and we worked by beats per minute. We would control the energy by mixing up the beats and then mixing down the beats so i can tell you like i can tell you the beats per minute of most of the

top songs in the 80s because you would just have them memorized and where to drop mixes into each other so you control it by literally controlling the beats and like and if most people are dancing on the beat you know you're literally controlling the physical movements of hundreds of people on a dance floor for hours by doing this. It's really wild. I mean, it's really, do you just get faster over the course of the night or is it more subtle than that? No, you have to kind of go up and down and up and down, but, but each peak is a little bit higher and a little bit higher. And also, you know, like if you're doing it in a club, that also tends to match the relative accumulation of substance and its influence. Because people become much less constrained and restrained over time. Yeah, Disney would probably be a lot better too on ecstasy.

Yeah. From what I hear, people have may have done that yeah and that kind of brings us also to your the most recent book which is really fascinating and talking about being of the moment in a lot of ways also um so upstream which is out um i guess just last month curious also because this is the this is your fifth book, but it's also your first that you didn't do with Chip. What's up with that? Yeah, good question. So it's a very simple answer. Basically, we released The Power Moments back in fall 2017.

And Chip was just feeling like he kind of wanted a breather. I mean, it's a lot of work. And Chip, to his credit, has more interest than I do. For me, it's all about writing and speaking and teaching. And Chip does a lot of work. And Chip, to his credit, has more interest than I do. For me, it's all about writing and speaking and teaching. And Chip does a lot of stuff. He's an angel investor. He's involved with Google X, which is their moonshot factory. And so he's got a lot going on. He didn't want to dive back into the full-time author thing right away. And I was chomping at the bit and actually had this topic upstream that had been

in the back of my head since 2009. I mean, that was the first time I opened a file with the title upstream and Microsoft Word and started accumulating notes. No kidding. I mean, so it had been almost a decade at the point when I decided I got to do this. It's just, you can't have something tickling your brain for a decade and not do something with it. You know, back to our earlier conversation about, is this, is this topic good enough to keep me engaged for a few years? I already knew that. And, uh, and the origin back in 2009, like where the word upstream came from was this parable that I had heard that is pretty well known in public health, but not so much outside.

And it goes like this, that you and a friend are sitting on the side of a river, you're having a picnic. And right about the time you've laid down your picnic blanket, you're about to have a meal, you hear a shout from the direction of the river. And you look back and there's a child in the river kind of thrashing about as if drowning. And you both instinctively dive in the river and you fish out the kid, you bring them to shore. And just as your nerves are starting to settle a bit, you hear another shout. Now it's another child in the river thrashing about. And so you go back in, you get them, you bring them to the riverbank. And then it's two more kids. And so you're in the water, you're rescuing kids, you're out,

you're back in, it never seems to subside. And then you see your friend swimming to shore and stepping out as though to leave you alone. And you say, hey, where are you going? I've got all these kids to save. I can't do it alone. And your friend says, I'm going to go upstream and tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. And that was the origin of this upstream book when I heard that story. And we can talk about the next couple of things I ran into that convinced me this had some legs in a second, but I just love the vision of that, that so often in our lives, in our work, we can get trapped in these cycles of reacting, reacting, reacting to things. And we put out fires and we respond to emergencies and that taxes our, uh, our capacity,

our wherewithal so much that we never get around to solving the problems that led to these emergencies in the first place. And so that's the origin of Upstream. Yeah. So since you teased there were a couple of other things that made you go all in, what else happened? Well, I had this conversation, it was probably within a couple of months of starting this file with a deputy chief of police in a Canadian city. And we were talking about something totally different. And he happened to just throw out this thought experiment that I immediately said, aha. And he said, imagine that you've got two police officers and one of them goes downtown during the morning commute hours and stations

herself at this one intersection that is chaotic where a lot of accidents happen. And just by being a visible presence at that intersection, she slows people down. She makes them a little bit more cautious and she prevents accidents from happening. And then a second officer goes to a different part of downtown where there is a prohibited right turn signal. And she hides around the corner. And whenever drivers sneakily make that prohibited right turn, she jumps out, gives them a ticket. And the deputy chief said, which of these officers do you think did more to protect the public safety? And he said, indisputably, it's the first, right?

She stopped accidents from happening. She may have actually saved lives. But if you ask which officer is going to get promoted, which officer is going to be praised, which officer is going to be rewarded. It's the second one because she comes back with this stack full of tickets that are the evidence that she quote unquote succeeded. And meanwhile, that first officer, if you think about it, how does she prove that she did anything? You know, there was a guy driving to work that morning who crossed through that intersection and in the alternate reality where she wasn't there, he would have been in an accident. He would have gone to the hospital, but he doesn't know. She doesn't know that she helped him. I mean, the best you can hope for is to keep such careful data from this intersection where maybe on a chart, you could see,

Hey, before we stationed an officer, their accidents were at X and now it's X minus something. But even to establish, hey, did you accomplish anything? If so, how can you prove it? And who exactly did you help? It's very, very different from downstream work. Fishing kids out of a river is very tangible and leads itself easily to heroicism in a way that upstream work doesn't. Yeah, it's so interesting that you use that word heroism because that was exactly what was in my mind when I was thinking about this idea,

because on the one hand, people are often rewarded for perceived heroism. And even reflecting on our conversation about moments, a lot of defining moments involve heroism. But if you were to solve problems upstream, you know, I wonder if that then removes the need for heroism in a lot of different parts of life and work and business and society. And there's this weird disincentive to do it. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. And this was kind of what just leaped out of the research and hit me at some point is that I didn't really see this coming, but upstream versus downstream is really

about distinguishing different kinds of heroism. And the kind that we're familiar with is the downstream kind, the firefighters who put out the burning flames or the lifeguard that fishes the drowning child out of the pool or whatever. But, you know, as I say in the book, the need for heroism is usually evidence of systems failure. You know, something went wrong that shouldn't have gone wrong and that yielded the need for a hero. But meanwhile, there's a whole nother set of people, much quieter, who don't save the day, but try to keep the day from needing to be saved. So you think about firefighters putting out a burning building, it's easy to see who the heroes are. And let me be clear, I'm not demeaning or dismissing heroes. Of course, if my house were

on fire, I damn sure want the firefighters to come and be the hero. That's not the point. The point is that we shift so much of our attention there that we forget, hey, there were a lot of ways to prevent this emergency from ever coming about, but it's more diffuse. Because if you ask whose job is it to put out the fire, the answer is the firefighters. If you ask whose job is it to keep a fire from ever breaking out? Ooh, well, all of a sudden that's partly the homeowner's job and partly the people who built the home's job and partly the people who wrote the building codes. And all of a sudden it gets very abstract and there's no concrete ownership. And so you get into these interesting issues where even though most of us would surely vote for a world where problems never manifest, you know, rather than having to deal with them as emergencies, there are all these obstacles in our way to try to push upstream. Yeah.

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stories and examples that you share. Education is one place that we see this in a really big way. And you speak to kind of a fascinating example of this in the context of Chicago public schools. Chicago public schools back in 1998 had a graduation rate of 52 percent. I mean, just shocking, right, that as a high schooler in Chicago, you had basically a coin flips chance of graduating from high school. And if you put yourself in the shoes of maybe a teacher or an administrator who wanted to change that, boy, this was a heavy lift. I mean, this is one of the biggest districts in the country. We're talking about 300,000 plus

students. That's like one of the top 50 cities in the United States. The budget of the district is $6 billion, which is the Paul Batalden, who's a healthcare expert, said, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And I think what's so powerful about that quote, and I hope it sticks in your head the way it's stuck in mine, is it just reframes the discussion. So if you look at Chicago Public Schools, what that quote instantly tells you is we're not failing half of our students because people aren't trying hard enough or because people don't care enough. You know, it's not the kind of thing where just turning up the volume on enthusiasm is going to graduate more students. We have to realize is somehow we've unwittingly created a system that is optimized to fail half the students. And when you come at it from that lens, you start realizing things.

Like what they realized, for instance, was, you know, late 90s, early aughts. This was kind of the tough on discipline era, zero tolerance. And so they had a standing policy of kids got in trouble. You know, one expert I talked to said in that era, if a couple of kids shoved each other in the hallway, they would get slapped at the two-week suspension, that they were doled out like candy. What we now know from the research is if you take a kid who's kind of at risk and you kick them out of school for two weeks, what happens? They never make it up. They never get back to where they were. They come back, they're lost, they end up failing classes. And so they realized that, you know, back to that systems quote,

they realized that parts of their system were actually sabotaging their own students. The second thing that happened was some academics, including Elaine Allensworth, who's done amazing work on this problem, figured out that you could predict in the ninth grade who was likely to graduate and who was likely to drop out with 80% accuracy. And so it was like this door opened for them where for the first time they had a kind of smoke detector for dropouts and four years early, which gave them the hope that maybe they could change the student's trajectory. And so what happened was, you know, armed with this

ninth grade metric, which they called freshmen on track. And by the way, the constituents of this metric were, did the student pass five full year course credits? And did the student avoid failing more than one core course like English, math, science, you could fail one semester and you're okay. But if you failed two, that seems to be like a threshold for serious trouble. Notice what's missing there. Like we might've predicted that income would have something to do with predicting graduation rates or race or performance in K through eight, certainly. Wouldn't we have thought that, well, if you're an A student in eighth grade, you're in good shape. And if you're an F student, you're not. It wasn't that simple. There was some kind of transformation that happened in

the ninth grade where even students who performed badly in the eighth grade, if they could be kept on track in the ninth grade, they were in pretty good shape for graduation. My favorite part of this story is that, and this is how they eventually began to move the needle in a serious way. They formed what they called freshman success teams, where all of the faculty would come together, biology teachers, English, math, PE coaches, the counselor, they would all get together and meet maybe once or twice a month. And they would go student by student to look at who was off track by that freshman on track metric I was talking about, like who was in

most danger of not passing that metric. And they would talk about them as human beings. They say, okay, Michael, how did he do last week? Was he here every day? We knew last time we met, he was struggling in math. Did we get him some extra help? Yeah. Okay, great. What about Keisha? Well, we figured out Keisha has this thing where she has to take her younger sister to elementary school every morning. And so she's always showing up late. But unfortunately, that's math class first period. So if she's going to be late every day, we need to really switch her into PE first period,

because then at least if she fails something, it'll be PE and not a core course. And that was the texture of change that happened student by student, school by school. And over a period of years, magic starts to happen. Kids start coming to school more because they're paying more attention to attendance. They start passing more classes. That freshman on track metric goes up. And then four years later, when those kids who had been kept on track hit senior year, they start graduating in higher numbers, just like they had predicted. Last year, the graduation rate was up to something like 78%. I mean, we're talking about 25 plus percentage points in a district of just unimaginable scale. And there's so much built in that story that I love. It's like it has so many

of the clues of how to do upstream work. And if anybody listening to this has a problem in their business or in their life that you've been agonizing about, that's taken a lot of time, I hope the story gives you a lot of hope. Because if we can move the needle to that extent in a district that big, with that much complexity, I don't think there's many if we can move the needle to that extent in a district that big with that much complexity, I don't think there's many problems we can't solve. Dr. Andy Roark Yeah. I mean, if you can take something like that, that is such an incredible, it's an astonishing outcome.

And, you know, it's funny when I first started thinking about this, I was like, oh, this is the difference between reactive versus proactive, but it's really, it's really not, you know, it's, it's about where in the point of breakdown are you choosing to intervene? And it's interesting how it looks really different in every kind of problem. So if we reflect on what we were talking about before, you know, the people were getting credit for excellent classroom management, for removing the problems so that everybody else could learn for, you know. And we think about how you get rewarded and promoted within the context of an education system, sort of like the way that it was traditionally. And then we see, okay, so a bunch of people have decided to innovate and see if we can actually solve differently in a more upstream way. And it worked.

So part of my curiosity is, did the system also change to reward people to solve in that way? Because that's a huge sort of cultural change within a massive educational system also to make and not easy to do. It was a massive cultural change. And I mean, it really spoke to the heart of the identity of many of these folks.

Like if you're a teacher in a high school in CPS, I mean, your old mental model was I'm here to teach these students and to assess them. You know, it's my job to present good lessons, to deliver evaluations, to score people, to let people know how they're doing. But in that model, if a student is failing, it's the student's problem. But in this new model where you say, hey, we have an obligation as a district to do a better job graduating these students. That's on us. We're going to own that. Well, that means if a student is failing your class, it's both of your problems.

You have to get invested. You have to try to do some problem solving to figure out what's going on here. And you can't just detach yourself from that. And I think that's powerful. It's also difficult, right? Because it means you have to kind of change your model of what you stand for and what's admirable work. And that's the kind of slow but powerful cultural change that allows a district like CPS to succeed. And so, you know, it took a long time, right? This wasn't just like a one semester project. It took a decade plus. But now all those

same things that made this a slow change have locked in in favor of the students, right? Because that same inertia you had to fight initially, now that inertia is in the favor of a system that graduates 80% of its students. It's like you've rebuilt the machine in a powerful way. And that's the kind of insight that I think helps us when we think about problems ranging from societal problems like homelessness to more mundane problems like customer satisfaction at work, is if we can think about things in terms of the system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, it arms us to think upstream about all of the variables involved and not just get lost in that cycle of reacting to things once they go wrong.

Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful if you think about that. And then if you go from there and you go really micro into the context of one person living a better life, you know, we can apply this exact same principle. So there's nothing. I wrote a book called How to Live a Good Life a couple of years back. And one of the things I said in the introduction was, effectively, there's been no new fundamental wisdom here

for thousands of years. The problem isn't information. There are a handful of core things that we all know to do. The challenge is we don't do them. And I wonder if in the context of exercising, of eating better, of doing all the different things that we need, we kind of know that we want to do and we should do, but we don't solve for them effectively. We just kind of blow them up. If we can apply this same concept of, well, you know, how do we solve upstream for the day-to-day failures that are taking us away from health and vitality and connection and

living a better life? Well, here's, here's kind of a trivial example of that. I talked to a guy named Rich Marisa who, um, who was married and, you know, I guess every couple has their thing that they bicker about. And his thing with his wife was the hallway light. So he would go in and out of the house a lot, often to take the dog out, and he'd flip the hallway light on, go out, and he'd come back in. And he'd always forget to turn the hallway light off, and that bugged his wife. And so that was their little thing that they bickered about. And then Rich realizes one day, like, hey, I can fix this. And so he goes to Home Depot and buys like a $15, what they call a light switch timer,

where it actually has these little buttons that say five minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. And so now when he goes outside, he can just press the 15 minute button and he comes back outside. And even if he forgets, the light still turns itself off. And what I love about that, it's such a corny story. But if you think about it, this is real stuff. I mean, to eliminate a source of bickering for a couple for the rest of their marriage, because of 10 minutes to run to Home Depot and screw in the plate.

I mean, that's the kind of thing that we miss because of the way our psychology works, where, you know, because we're always kind of scrambling to react to what happened an hour ago or last week, you know, it's like we starve ourselves of the resources that we would need to anticipate what's going to be bugging us next week. And often the fixes for those things can be surprisingly simple if we just have, you know, kind of the awareness and, and the, the breath to, to take a moment and deal with them. So what you're telling me is that the person who invents a hinge for kitchen cabinets that automatically closes the doors. Oh my God. Are you like that? That's what drives my wife crazy.

I don't, I don't know why I do that. I just, it is not intentional. It's just like, I guess there's some part of me that is just sufficiently lazy to think after I've extracted what I need from the cabinet, there's no reason to, you know, exert further effort to close it. Yeah. But it is so funny when you think about, you know, okay, so is there an upstream way to essentially stop this problem from happening before it happens so it doesn't repeat itself all day, every day, you know, like in perpetuity? For so many things, even in your personal life, there are probably relatively easy, if not accessible answers.

But if we're not asking that question, we just never even consider it. And I think it's also, I mean, there's always like a short-term, long-term dynamic here. You know, as a father, you know, there's little problems that recur again and again. You know, there's always like a, you're always a hair's breadth from a meltdown over getting shoes and socks on or, you know, things like that. And in the moment, you know, there's like an easy way and a right way. And the easy way is usually like one quarter of the time of the right way, you know? And so in the moment, the easy way is always the right choice. It's faster. But then, you know, the error in judgment is you, you then do the easy way 500 times in a row when

you could have just solved it had you incurred, you know, the 4X penalty upfront. And so that's the kind of, it's like payday loans, right? You can get your money right now, which can help you pay the bills, but then, you know, you just incur more and more debt over the long run. And that's the sort of dynamic that I think that our brains are really ill-suited for. Yeah, so agree. And it kind of brings up the issue of, this is funny because it brings us full circle to that conversation that kicked off Good Life Project back in the video days with Dan Ariely, which is around compliance, which is that it's really hard for us to invest the energy in addressing things when we're not presently aware of the pain

of we're feeling. And I think we're all living through this in this moment right now. And it also ties into this, I think in the bigger context of what Nassim Taleb would describe as black swan events, things where they're massive, they're disruptive. In theory, we don't see them coming, but I'm not as sure that we don't see them coming. It's just that we know that there's a microscopic possibility of them happening. And if they happen, it would be catastrophic. But the experience of the felt experience of pain that it might bring so distant and so remote that we don't have the internal motivation to reach upstream to try and invest any level of

energy or time or money, let alone a massive amount of energy, time or money to solve something when it's at that level. Well said. And I think you see this again and again and again, you know, with Katrina, there's a story in the book, which I was never aware of, of about a year before Katrina hit, there was a simulation done in New Orleans of a massive hurricane hitting New Orleans and the consequences that it would, it would, it would cause. And all the right people came together, all the right federal agencies, all the right city and state agencies, they got together, they did this, this simulation was called Hurricane Pam. And I'm telling you, they had it nailed. I mean, the dimensions of the storm, its consequences were eerily similar to what would happen for real a year later. And so that's the perfect kind of upstream work, right? Where

we're conceptualizing the right potential problem. They knew that a major hurricane hitting that area because of the geography would be a big, big deal. They got together the right people. Well, here's the thing. This was intended to be the first meeting of several to happen over the next year or two so that people could get really prepared. And Hurricane Pam was a huge hit. They made a lot of progress. And then some reporters who wrote a book called Disaster said that the FEMA decided to opt out to cancel the rest of these installments because they balked at the travel costs, which were

$15,000. And then it turns out after Katrina hit about, you know, 50 or $60 billion were spent rebuilding the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of that. And this is not quite fair. I mean, it doesn't matter how much they prepared, Katrina still would have hit and still would have caused a huge amount of damage. But I think the point is that there's this weird shift in ownership between downstream and upstream, where once Katrina wipes out New Orleans, there's no one that would question the need to rebuild it. I mean, we open up the purse strings, we get down there, we do what we need to do to get

things back to normal. But before the fact, when we think about how do we get ready for something like this, even a $15,000 expense is worthy of being nitpicked and ultimately becomes a veto point in the preparations. And so I think we see the same dynamic again and again, right? With climate change, with other things, when climate change is still relatively abstract, relatively slow moving, it's like we can debate about it. We can question how much is too much and blah, blah, blah. As soon as Miami is flooded, no one's going to be arguing about whether we

should help. And so that's the dynamic that's very, very difficult to fight is how do you create the urgency that comes naturally with downstream work for work that could be preventative? Yeah. And that actually is the exact question that I mentioned earlier that I wanted to ask, because that is, even if you look at this, you know, and, and it sounds like, you know, the, the team that came together to, um, for the, the hurricane Pam preparation, they, they saw it coming. They were trying to address it upstream. And, but how, how do you, when you're not feeling the pain of this actually happening. Yeah, I mean, why is it that we as individuals, as societies, finding upstream solutions until after the pain has

become entirely real and massively more expensive than it would have been had we be able to prevent things. I mean, is it just that the human brain is wired in a way where we just, for some reason, won't act until we're in the grips of the worst effects of a cause that we might have been able to fix upstream? I think part of it is just, you know, we've got a lot going on in our lives. We got to pay the bills. We got to take care of our parents in the nursing home. And we got kids to get to school. And it's like just our natural rhythms squeeze out a lot of our capacity to think about upstream problems. If you think about it this way, how can you afford to be

solving next year's problems when you're working on this week's problems? And so I think a lot of that is very understandable. I do want to say that despite the kind of psychological deck being loaded against us, we often succeed. So in the story, in the book rather, I tell a story of the work on the ozone hole. And for a lot of us that happened in our lifetimes. And then we talk in mid eighties is when the first agreement started to happen. And it's exactly like climate change in a lot of ways. There's this very abstract problem, hard to understand, you know, what's this? I don't think most people had even heard of the ozone layer. And then it turns out that these chemicals called CFCs that are in your underarm

spray deodorant, you know, can, it can erode the ozone layer. And, and so we had to go through a lot of the same cycle of, of educating people about what are these invisible chemicals that erode this invisible layer that allows invisible rays to come down and give us skin cancer. But it worked. We did something about it. And this was during the Reagan administration. It's not like there were far left leadership in charge at that time. And it's not that the ozone layer has been completely fixed. We just stopped digging our graves basically, but that's still something to be celebrated, I would think. And so there are times when we come together and we think long-term and the question is,

can we recapture some of that? Like this pandemic, I think was a classic example of an upstream problem that was entirely foreseeable. I mean, there are weird things that happen that we can't have expected people to have prepared for. This was not one of them. For decades, public health experts have been warning about exactly a scenario like this. And in fact, there have been several near misses in recent years with the swine flu and the Ebola scare during the Obama administration and others. And we still didn't manage to do, you know, the adequate amount of preparations that the public health leaders would have expected. And even when the outbreak started to happen, we still weren't

in fifth gear, you know, until the body started to pile up domestically. So, I mean, one, it's sort of like a half full, half empty thing. I mean, the half empty thing is it's a little bit depressing that it took, you know, the body count piling up for us to do something. The half full side is there really have been a lot of advances that have lessened the significance of this pandemic than if it had happened 50 years ago. I mean, the surveillance systems, for instance, not surveillance in like creepy Orwellian sense, but in terms of like disease tracking are incredibly sophisticated. The fact that we can, you know, be tracking a strain of the flu in countries all over the world, you know, in a matter of hours rather than months is

spectacular. And the fact that we have, you know have these protocols and hospitals and ways of accommodating this and that the supply chain can be responsive. I mean, all of these innovations have made us stronger in an upstream way, but they're still so far to go. Yeah. I wonder if we have a window here where the focus is on the immediate problem and all the energy, all the effort, all the investment goes there. And then once we feel like we've got that, however you define under control or on the right path to resolution, that I wonder if there's even a window that exists sort of an afterburn effect there where the experience of what we have just come out of is so felt that it reminds us that there

are other things out there in our personal lives or in society that are equally likely. It's just a matter of time that we've chosen not to address that maybe the pain of this current experience activates a willingness to take those other things more realistically. And if we can start to address them within that window, then we start to gain momentum. Whereas if we just let the sort of afterburn effect of pain meets problem identification drift away, then we kind of lose it and drop back into complacency. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I like that's kind of the hopeful story in my mind

is that even though this is something none of us would have wished for this pandemic and there will be horrible consequences. I mean, does it actually leave us stronger? Have we been given a chance to rehearse skills that may be even more urgently needed a few years down the road? And like you said, my hope is that we can abstract from this, that it's not just that this is the disaster of the week and we can move on next week to a different disaster, but rather, can we extrapolate from that that, hey, we need people who we can trust to be watching for these things and preparing for these things? You know, this is one reason why I think it's difficult for me to imagine like bottoms up pressure on things like a pandemic response. You know, for all the reasons cited earlier, we've all got enough to deal with. We can't, you know, self-train to be, you know, pestering politicians for improving surveillance systems for the next pandemic. I people who are paying attention to pandemics every day and then and then trust what they say. You know, it's really not complicated.

There were there were a lot of people who've been thinking about this pandemic for for many, many years who had recommendations ready to go. And all we had to do was listen and arm them with the right tools to make those things happen. And we fail to do that this time, but maybe we'll get it right next time. And while we're moving through that, you know, I think a lot of people might be sitting here saying, well, what can I individually do? Well, maybe there's not a direct role in this, but I think just if you take the concept of upstream thinking and you just look at and apply it in the context of your own life and just kind of ask the questions, well, what are the things that I'm feeling now or I have felt that have repeated and the outcomes that

I hoped to get that I'm not getting and they keep happening? What if instead of, is this the type of problem where instead of focusing on just fixing it when it happens, if I can look upstream, like, is there some sort of further down or further upstream origin for this, where if I fix that, if I address that, then I don't have to deal with any of these downstream effects, you know, for a long time. Well, and I feel like I should also say, I mean, I think because when we recorded this, we're in the midst of the quarantine, I think I'm probably expressing more pessimism than is actually in the book. I mean, this is a book of solutions. This is a book of extraordinary upstream victories that have been

won. So even as we're realistic about all the barriers that are in our way, I mean, the point of this thing was to say, hey, we can jump over these hurdles and we have done it. And let's pay attention to how we've done it so we can do it again. Like here's one of my favorite examples. There is a European nation that has basically eliminated the problem of teenage alcohol and substance abuse.

I mean, of all the things that people would have bet against as a proposition, we would have thought we live in a world where forevermore teenagers will abuse drugs and alcohol. But Iceland, over a period of about 15 years, has almost eliminated it. I mean, to the point where if you look at stats on number of teenagers drunk in the last 30 days, number of teenagers who have experimented with marijuana, number of teenagers who chain smoke. I mean, it's single digits, just extraordinary. I mean, to the point where it's kind of weird now in Icelandic teenage culture, if someone is like a binge drinker or a frequent drug user.

And they did this with explicit upstream intent. They got together a group of politicians and academics and parents and school leaders. And what they all had in common was the desire to see teenagers free from this. And so the first thing they did was they said, okay, well, let's figure out what are the factors that protect kids from drugs and alcohol? What are the factors that exacerbate it? And they just kind of approached it scientifically. And one of the theories that they bought into very early was this idea that the teenager are going to be persuaded by just say no. And those sorts of campaigns like that, that the idea is you just, when confronted with drugs or alcohol, you're just going to be the heroic one that says, no, no, I'm above that, was wrongheaded. That in fact, it was more fruitful to think, what would an environment look like for a teenager where drugs and alcohol actually seem like not

that great of a choice? Like what if teenagers were actually having so much fun and thriving in other ways that they kind of just didn't feel like getting drunk. I mean, what an extraordinary way to reframe the situation. And this is partly based on the research of an American academic named Harvey Milkman, who says that teenagers love highs, like all of us do. And drugs and alcohol provide a kind of insta high. I mean, all you got to do is take a drug and boom. But he says, so if you want teenagers to something that's kind of like a more professionalized version of a YMCA or something where you can learn better skills at soccer or handball or gymnastics or whatever. But they started to professionalize this in a way to up the stakes. So it wasn't just, you know, a bunch of kids shooting hoops down the corner. It was, you know, there's a former soccer national champion who's

your coach and he expects a lot out of you. And every day you're stretching and learning and you're competing at the highest levels. And what that does is it's an environment that produces natural highs. So back to the chain of collaborators here, you figure out that everybody's got a piece of the puzzle. Like the people at the clubs, they professionalize their work and the politicians, they authorized what amounted to a gift card

for each family to spend more on training and instruction to give students more avenues for natural highs. And the school leaders figured out ways that they could bus kids from the school to the clubs to make that easier and on and on and on. And it's like, everybody has a piece of the puzzle, but when everybody is aligned toward the same goal and when everybody realizes what a difference it

would make to create a world like this, it kept them moving. And, and these days, as I said, I mean, the, the, the trend lines and the graphs are just, it's one of the few graphs that you get an emotional response looking at. You just see them plunging and you realize how many thousands of lives have been changed as a result of this. Yeah, I love that. I love that we're sort of like leaving it in this place of not like this is, this is really interesting wisdom and there's a lot of hope behind it. And I think awareness of just taking this approach to looking at situations and problems is a great starting point. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. I'm going to ask you a question I always round the corner with everybody. So we're sitting here in this container of the Good Life Project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life,

what comes up? I think for me, it's about the ripple effects of your life. The ripples that go outward from the way you've lived your life and how they affect the people you love, your family, your friends, the people in your neighborhood, the people in your community, maybe if you're lucky, outside that even, that we in some ways can be defined by the positive ripple effects we leave. Did we leave this place better than we found it? Maybe there's some upstream spirit in that. I love it. Thank you.

Thank you. It's been a fun conversation. Thank you so It's been a fun conversation. created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something so you never miss an episode. And then share. Share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation.

Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-nest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.