Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Jeff Karp on How to Ignite the Spark That Lights Us Up EP 438

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

https://passionstruck.com/passion-struck-book/ - Order a copy of my new book, "Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life," today! Picked by the Next Big Idea Club as a must-read for 2024.In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles sits down with Dr. Jeff Karp, a distinguished figure in bio-inspired engineering and a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT. In this episode, Dr. Karp delves into the core principles of his latest book, "LIT: Life Ignition Tools: Use Nature's Playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action." Dr. Karp's insights on activation energy, neurodiversity, and the power of asking the right questions provide valuable guidance on igniting the spark within us and leading a more intentional and fulfilling life.Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-jeff-karp-on-cultivating-a-lit-state-of-mind/In this episode, you will learn:Activation Energy: Dr. Karp explains activation energy using a chemistry analogy, emphasizing the importance of putting energy into a system to initiate a reaction.Neurodiversity: Dr. Karp discusses the beauty of neurodiversity, highlighting how different perspectives and ways of thinking can lead to valuable insights and learning opportunities.Importance of Questions: Dr. Karp emphasizes the vitality of inquiry and the significance of asking high-value questions to unlock curiosity and drive progress.Live for the Questions: Dr. Karp shares a personal story about learning to ask high-value questions by observing patterns in seminar questions and applying a systematic approach to improve his questioning skills.All things Dr. Jeff Karp: https://www.karplab.net/team/jeff-karpSponsorsBrought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place.Brought to you by Nom Nom: Go Right Now for 50% off your no-risk two week trial at https://trynom.com/passionstruck.Brought to you by Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth provided an exclusive offer for my listeners. 35% off site-wide when you use the code “PASSIONSTRUCK” at https://cozyearth.com/This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://www.betterhelp.com/PASSIONSTRUCK, and get on your way to being your best self.This episode is brought to you By Constant Contact:  Helping the Small Stand Tall. Just go to Constant Contact dot com right now. So get going, and start GROWING your business today with a free trial at Constant Contact dot com.--► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to:https://passionstruck.com/deals/Catch More of Passion StruckMy solo episode on Why We All Crave To Matter: Exploring The Power Of Mattering: https://passionstruck.com/exploring-the-power-of-matteringWatch my interview with Robert Waldinger On What Are The Keys To Living A Good Life.Watch my interview with Dr. Michael Lewis On Breakthrough Integrative Medicine Approach For Traumatic Brain InjuryCan't miss my episode with Dr. Mark Hyman On How Personalized Medicine Is Revolutionizing HealthcareListen to my interview with Dr. Scott Sherr On How To Improve Brain Function With Methylene Blue And NootropicsCatch my episode with Jim Kwik On Unlocking Your Best Brain And Brightest Future.Like this show? Please leave us a review here-- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally!How to Connect with JohnConnect with John on Twitter at @John_RMiles and on Instagram at @john_R_Miles.Subscribe to our main YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMilesSubscribe to our YouTube Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@passionstruckclipsWant to uncover your profound sense of Mattering? I provide my master class with five simple steps to achieving it.Want to hear my best interviews? Check out my starter packs on intentional behavior change, women at the top of their game, longevity and well-being, and overcoming adversity.Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/

Coming up next on Passion Struck. Activation energy is something that I learned about a long time ago in a chemistry class. And it just really jumped out to me. You put, let's say, two molecules in a beaker of water and they don't react. Nothing's really happening. And then you add some heat to it and the molecules start moving around a little bit more. They're not really bombarding and reacting. Then you add more heat. Now they're really moving at a little bit more heat. And now they interact, they bombard, they hit each other, and then a reaction takes place. So the amount of heat that you add to the system is the activation energy, the amount of energy that you've put into the system. And that jumped out to me because I was like, wow, this really

applies to everything in my life, all the things I want to do. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.

If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 438 of passion struck consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast. A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you

who returned to the show every week, eager to listen, learn and discover new ways to live better, be better and to make a meaningful impact in the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here or you simply wanna introduce this to a friend or a family member and we so appreciate it when you do that. We have episodes starter packs which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize in a convenient playlist that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to passionstruck.com

slash starter packs or Spotify to get started. Are you curious to find out where you stand on the path to becoming passion struck? Dive into our engaging passion struck quiz crafted to reflect the core principles shared in my latest book. This quiz offers you a dynamic way to gauge your progress on the passion struck continuum. It consists of 20 questions and will take you about 10 minutes to complete. Just head over to passionstruck.com to embark on this insightful journey. In case you missed my interviews from earlier in the week, we dove into the world of high performance coaching with Sean Foley, the renowned golf

coach behind some of the biggest names in the sport. From his unique coaching philosophy to the mental strategies that can turn a struggling golfer into a champion, Sean shares insights you won't want to miss. I also interviewed Ethan Malik, a Wharton professor, author of the groundbreaking book, Co-Intelligence, Living and Working with AI. I also wanted to say thank you for your ratings and reviews. And if you love either of those episodes or today's, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families. I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners. Today, I am replacing my solo episode with an interview that I felt was such a compelling one and tied

directly into the philosophy of becoming passion-struck and the power of intentional living. Today we welcome Dr. Jeff Karp, a luminary in the realm of bio-inspired engineering and a professor at the Harvard Medical School and MIT. Jeff's journey from a curious child grappling with learning differences and ADHD to a Titan in biotech innovation is a testament to the transformative power of being lit, a state of heightened awareness and engagement with the world. In his latest book, Lit, use nature's playbook to energize your brain, spark ideas, and ignite

action. Jeff unveils the secrets of tapping into this dynamic state, drawing from his profound connection to nature and a life rich in experimentation, he presents his life ignition tools, which means lit, that promise to elevate our mental and emotional states, fostering creativity, focus, and innovation. Today, Jeff will share how anyone can apply these principles

to break free from habitual thinking, ignite creativity in their lives, and manage the relentless flood of information in our modern world. So be prepared to be inspired as we delve into the life enhancing wisdom of nature's playbook and discover how to lead a lit life with Dr. Jeff Karp. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled today to have Dr. Jeff Karp on Passionstruck. Welcome, Jeff. Hi, so nice to see you. Jeff, I thought we would start out by talking about your origin story, and I understand that growing up you had undiagnosed ADHD

and that must have presented some unique challenges during your childhood. Could you share a little bit about how that experience impacted your early life and shaped your approach to learning and problem solving? Absolutely, yeah, it really shaped my entire life and pretty much almost I I'd say, every moment of my life right now. When I was in the second grade, nothing was really sinking

in. I wasn't able to keep up with the material. My mom tried flashcards, she tried phonics, and I just wasn't getting anything. I wasn't socially connecting with anybody. And I'd sit at the back of the class, frustrated, angry, feeling demoralized, and just pretty much like an alien. I didn't belong there. And then at the end of the year, the teacher pulled my parents aside and said, Hey, I'd like to keep Jeff back to repeat the second grade. And my parents negotiated with the teacher so that if I spent the summer with tutors catching up, that I'd be able to go on to the

third grade if I made enough progress. And so all my classmates went on vacation and here I am in summer school and I go in every day. And I remember one particular day that I went in And I remember one particular day that I went in and a tutor read a passage. I answered some questions. Then she looked me straight in the eye and she said, how did you think about that? And nobody had ever asked me that question before. And I was like, it was like a shocking moment for me because I didn't really know how to answer that question. moment for me because I didn't really know how to answer that question.

And I think almost like the pain of the moment, not being able to just be my impulsive self and just say what was on my mind or what I was thinking and didn't have a response it all of a sudden, it was like this light bulb moment, this flash of awareness that I could actually think about thinking. And today I look back and see, that was my first sort of experience with metacognition, with this idea of just having awareness of my thoughts. And so what happened right after that, it wasn't anything dramatic that immediately happened,

but this new found awareness I started to bring to everything. And just one example is I would be in class and very few things would sink in. I have a very difficult time keeping up with anything, which was very frustrating being in class and then actually in college was similar to, I stopped going to classes because I found there were more effective ways that I could learn just on my own. But back to the third grade, what I noticed is that when I asked a question,

my own, but back to the third grade, what I noticed is that when I asked a question, I had this moment of hyper-focus where whatever, and then I listened and whatever, and I could listen right after that question was asked. And that would sink into my mind when I could connect it to things that I knew and I could remember it later as well. And so I figured out that asking questions was my way of learning, that I had to ask a lot of questions. If I didn't ask questions, I just wouldn't be able to process anything. And it also really, I found it as a tool to slow things down, to slow down a conversation. If I was, people say things, even to this day, people will, in a conversation,

if I don't ask a question frequently enough, I miss a lot of what people are saying. I just, I can't keep up. It's not fast. My brain doesn't work that fast. And so it was like this canvas open to me to be able to almost like it was like the start of my life as a living laboratory. So experimenting with all sorts of different things, pattern awareness of my own thoughts, my own actions, observing other people and how they react to things and how they act and what they say and the questions that they ask and what the responses are. And I just started to become hyper focused on that as a way to learn and to experiment.

And I would just say a lot of my life has been trying things out that are not me. So it's almost like I need to try things to determine what's not me to figure out what really is me, live these different experiences and live these different ways of being, and then get in touch with my feelings. And is this really me? Because I feel I can do that well, but I don't know unless I try it out and road test it. Yeah. I love talking to researchers and for those who are listening and don't understand the different areas of research, there's in lab research,

there's field research, and then I love it when I talk to scientists and researchers who talk about me research, because I can completely relate to your journey as a kid. I didn't have ADHD. I suffered a traumatic brain injury when I was five and it caused a number of side impacts, including auditory processing issues. So for me, being in a classroom was just devastating because that was not how I learned. And that is

preceded all throughout college. I hate lectures, because I learned by doing and by either visually seeing it or having to read it. I also had a lot of cognitive issues that came about with it. So similar to you, my own me search was vital in helping me to cope with this new life that I inherited from this injury and having to move beyond so that I could perform as much as a normal person as I possibly could.

How do you think that this me search inspired your role into getting your PhD and this path of bio-inspired innovation that you found yourself in? What happened was, so after I was had this kind of light bulb moment, really, I still was struggling a ton. And it really wasn't until the seventh grade when things opened up for me, because the school system didn't want to do anything about it. They didn't want to investigate. And my mom actually prepared this massive file on me and went to the school board herself and brought the case. And then I became, they identified me as having learning differences.

And that was this incredible moment because I'd been developing all these tools and trying to do pattern recognition and really try to clue into what works for me and how can I really fit in and get by and survive. And so my grades actually went from Cs and Ds to straight As in the seventh grade. I also had a very inspirational teacher, which I think also played a major role in that as well. And I actually became very interested in medicine. And I saw myself as I wanted to become a doctor.

In fact, in my early years, the teachers would ask me, what do you want to be? And I'd say a doctor and they'd say, you better set your sights lower because you just don't have it. Like I, I got a lot of that. I feel like a lot of kids get those comments of you're lazy or I got that, or you're just not going to amount to much. I got a lot of feedback like that. But what, what happens, I was so excited about medicine and flash forward a bit.

I got, I was at McGill university. I was in the chemical engineering program. I applied to three medical schools and I got rejected from all three schools that I applied to. And it was like these moments that have happened a lot in my life. I feel through experimentation, you've set yourself up for, I don't know if I call them failures, it's so easy to just use that word, but setbacks or just, it's almost like it sends you into the self-reflective mode. And I realized that those modes are really like that. That's the time. It's almost like an

after the rain moment, or when something's happened, you almost expect something to happen a certain way. It doesn't happen that way. You're emotionally charged. But two or three days after I've realized this, there's this pattern where the emotions subside, this opportunity for looking back and analyzing and doing a little bit of detective work and just being open to these insights. They just start coming. And I started to think, well, wait a moment, here I am in engineering. I really like the problem solving aspect. I really like medicine.

I was like, maybe there's a way I can combine these together and I don't have to be a doctor to do it. And then what happened next was I was at this 24 hour coffee shop in Montreal near McGill and I overheard some classmates talking about tissue engineering and engineering organs and tissues and drug delivery and all sorts of biomedical engineering things. And I said, well, what are you guys studying for? I didn't even know there was a course like that. When they said, oh, there were these grad level courses that you could take as an undergrad in your final year. So I went to the course director and I said, Hey, I'd love to take these courses. And he said, no, you need three physiology prerequisites to take these courses. And I was

like, come on, it's my last year, next year. He said, no, you have to do that. So I called my parents and I decided to spend an extra year at McGill. So all my friends graduated and here I am taking three physiology prerequisites so that I could get into these tissue engineering, biomedical engineering courses. I had done a couple summers of research earlier with

bacteria, which I liked. And so I took these courses and that's what really set me on course to getting into the field that I'm in today, where essentially I define my laboratory as we focus on the process of medical problem solving. So my life through this me search, I like how you said, I've never heard that before, but I love that term. This me search, which I've done my whole life. I just feel like I really, to do that, I've had to really engage processes and systems and really test things out. And what I love about medical problem solving is that it's really about trying to understand how people have defined problems and how can we take steps forward to learn something

that others haven't learned yet that might be critical to prying open a new opportunity or new shot on goal at this, some sort of medical problem. And that's what we focus on now. I had a different question I wanted to ask you, not prepared at all, but it just intrigued me to ask this. I have had a lot of doctors on the show who were talking about the need for personalized medicine or functional medicine, because right now the medical system, because of how payments are done, really focuses on the protocols that you need to put in place, which in turn really creates a system

where you're looking at the leaves or branches, meaning the symptoms rather than the holistic being or the person or the tree. How have you approached the research that you're doing? Are you looking at it holistically or do you look at it more in those subcomponents? Well, we look, I would say very holistically in the sense that, I'll just give you an example. I've figured out that the most effective way for me to run my laboratory is to minimize the overlap

in expertise of the people in the lab. And for example, we have engineers, we have biologists, immunologists, we've had a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac surgeon, we've had a dentist in the lab, it's constantly changing. But it's this sense that if we can, I kind of envision if we're sitting around a table brainstorming a particular problem or solution, everybody can provide a unique perspective. If you're minimizing the overlap in expertise, everybody has ideas, ways of thinking, tools at their disposal or that they know how to use, knowledge that others don't have.

And so to me, that's a very holistic way of approaching problem solving, because I think a lot of the problems that we work on require lateral thinking. They require taking information from different fields and combining them together, weaving together like a kind of mosaic of knowledge and skills and tools and approaches, ways of doing things. And so that has been really fundamental in my laboratory, I think, to make progress. And I think it's one of the major reasons why almost every major project in my laboratory, we've been able to spin out into a company and then be able to bring multiple products into clinical trials and a number on the market as well. Yeah, and I was very keen to understand Harvard and MIT, for those who aren't familiar with

Boston and Cambridge, sit right next to each other, probably a mile apart from each other. What has allowed you to be able to work at each institution? Well, first of all, I'd say in Boston, you need to have at least three affiliations for people to take you seriously. So I have five, just in case I lose one or two along the way. So my home institution is the Brigham and Women's Hospital. So I'm right in the hospital, which is critical because the team, like we're constantly interacting with patients.

Like we're seeing patients every day. So it's, we're very proximate to the problems that we're trying to solve. My academic appointment goes through Harvard medical school. So where I'm, they say full professor, that's just the title. I always get a chuckle out of the word full, like it was, what was I before a full professor? And then I have an appointment at MIT through the health sciences and technology program. And then I also have an appointment at the Broad Institute and the Harvard STEM cell Institute. And so I see these, all of these affiliations as access to resources, access to being able to tap

into core facilities and various equipment and also people. It makes it really easy to go walk in the door and collaborate with people. And again, it goes to your previous question, which is this kind of holistic approach to solving problems. The way I look at it is that we need to be able to access as much knowledge from different places and tools from different places and ideas. And also another reason why we've had over 30 people from over 30 countries in the lab, because people are subjected to different education systems. They think differently. And I think all of these things just are critical.

So that's how I do it. I've taught courses at MIT. I engaged in mentoring students as well. And so the grad students who've been in my laboratory have come from MIT. Well, that is awesome. And thank you for sharing that. It made it a lot clearer for me to understand

how you have all these different affiliations. And I love that you work in the hospital primarily so that you are getting that in-person research that's being done. So today, Jeff, we're going to be talking mostly about your brand new book titled Lit, which stands for life ignition tools. The subtitle is use nature's playbook to Energize Your Brain, Spark Ideas, and Ignite Action. And as you and I were talking about before we came on, I love this because I found so many parallels

in your work in this book and the work that you do overall to the work that I do in Passionstruck. And my subtitle is Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. struck and my subtitle is unlock your purpose and ignite your most intentional life. And for me, ignition is an extremely important aspect of intentionality because I equate ignition to your intrinsic motivation because if you don't have that, you're not going to ignite action. And I utilize a process I call deliberate action process that has six steps.

And the third one is ignite. And people ask me all the time, why would you have ignite as a step in this process? And I said, because once you've analyzed something and you prioritize what you wanna get done, if you're not igniting your inner energy or that of a team to actually do it, you're not going to execute it with the enthusiasm and rigor and energy that you would if you don't have that ignition spring. So I thought it was important to maybe

have you describe what you mean by ignition and its importance. Absolutely. I love what you just said and that you think a lot about ignite because I think that we need to tap into motivation to create momentum and to really move forward in the things we really want to get done. And so for us in the laboratory, for example, there's a lot of problems that we want to work on, but I think there's also a lot of aspects of human nature that we're up against, right? In terms of, I think if we go back 10, 15,000 years ago, when we were all hunter gatherers on the Savannah, the goal was really to conserve energy and to use our energy very purposefully for survival.

If we needed to move to another location or if we needed to hunt or run away from something, for example. In some ways, I feel like our brains are wired to not initially be motivated to do things that don't involve survival. And so in the lab, we're trying to solve medical problems and we need to find ways to motivate ourselves and to maximize our potential to gain momentum and remain persistent towards these goals. And so I think one part of it really is being in the hospital, seeing the patients that really keeps us that helps that kind of adds that kind of fuels to the fire. And I think that other ways that we think about ignition is often we may just stay in the drum rolls

and we don't actually take that first step forward. And the drum rolls are important or we're like planning or thinking about things, but sometimes we're like hesitant to start experimenting because we never know just like the fundamentals of research. You don't know what you're doing is gonna work out. And in most of the time it doesn't work out. And so there is hesitation there. And so to me, the ignition is, is really just doing enough planning, doing enough thinking and taking

a step forward and believing that step is going to unlock some insights that you can't get unless you take that step. And so to me, that's really the essence of ignition is thinking about, we have a lot of hesitation, a lot of fear to take steps. And I just find that if we believe, the more we can believe that first step is gonna help us uncover an insight or some sort of knowledge

or teach us something that we didn't know, it's gonna unlock something by just taking steps, even though we're taking steps into this unknown space. And to me, that's what really ignition is all about. Yeah. I like to think of it this way. I'm not sure if you're familiar with self-determination theory, which Edward DC and Richard Ryan created up at university Rochester, but basically says that humans have three psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy means that we all have a choice

and we willingly endorse our behavior. Competence refers to this experience of becoming a master of one's activities and relatedness is really the work that Bob Waldinger does around feeling connected and the sense of belongingness that came out of the Harvard study of adult aging. But when I think of competence, in order to achieve mastery,

you really have to have that constant ignition to stay motivated to be effective in anything that you pursue. Do you look at it in a similar way? Yeah, I look at it in a very similar way. And I think even, I would say, coming back to the word holistic, I think, for example, to me,

it's all about having the courage to take those first steps, knowing that you might not get where you expect to go, you often don't get where you expect to go, you often don't get where you expect to go, but having the courage in knowing that you're looking backwards in your life and saying, okay, things have worked out in many ways. And it's like, sometimes we just need to believe that, okay, we have some fear about taking a step. But if we can just step

into the fear, I think that's where we end up getting a lot of key insights. I don't know if I'm answering your question or not, but that's where my mind is going at this moment. But yeah, feel free to bring me back on track here because my mind does wander and jump around. So, well, Jeff, I'm going to bring you back to the title of the book because we hear something like lit and you describe it as a state of heightened awareness and engagement, but I was hoping you could describe for the audience what lit means to you and what lit could mean to them. Yeah. So lit to me is really that spark of inspiration, that infusion of fresh energy into any moment that we all have access to.

It's really the ability to tap into what's in all of us. There's just so many examples. It's like when you're talking to somebody and all of a sudden you become a little curious, like that's lit. Or if you look up at the night sky and see the ocean of stars and you're in awe, that's lit. If you are following your passions, that's totally lit. Lit to me is it's about really looking within to uncover these opportunities that we all have to just embrace this energy transfer

of life, which is, I just, there's just so many things in my life where lit has just been so instrumental in just connecting with people. Like I'll give you an example with my children. Actually, maybe I'll go back and just tell this story because I think it's just really fundamental to the whole lit premise, which is when COVID hit, my life literally crashed down in my living room because I had been focused my entire life on efficiencies and productivity,

really almost like over swinging, for sure over swinging to compensate for these learning differences in the ADHD. And I was always up against time. And so I was looking for patterns, looking for ways to be more efficient, be more productive. And it was almost like this endless cycle because I just kept becoming more and more efficient and more and more productive. And I became a workaholic.

I became addicted to the dopamine hits and just, there was, I just couldn't get enough of it. And so when COVID hit, all of a sudden we had this unintentional pause and it just hit me. I looked up and my son, this kid is now in high school and a teenager, like he was the quarterback of the football team

and my kids just stopped coming to me. I was going to birthday parties and I was trying to network with other parents who were there during the birthday party because I was just so focused on my work at the games like soccer games or whatever it was. I'd be walking around the field just trying to get my steps in like very everything super goal focused. And it just hit me that what was most important to me, I wasn't prioritizing. And while things were going extremely well with me at work and in the lab, at home, it was a completely different story.

My wife and I, our relationship had deteriorated. It was like ships passing in the night. We just weren't really talking. And I noticed this inner desire for possibility. And this really gets to one of the core tools of lit, which I call flip the switch. And so I noticed there was this, there's this possibility that I'm not engaging in, there's another way of doing things. And a second step of flip the switch is to consider other, let's actually take stock

of what's working, what's holding you back. And I realized that I was really being held back by just being impulsive towards and just focused on my work. And so what happened was I, the third step is considering other ways of thinking and other possibilities. And I started to look around and it was right there in front of me. My wife was exploring various aspects of spirituality.

And there's some questions that she was exploring. And I said, I was like, Jessica, can you please introduce me to your teachers? And to me, that was the step. That was the key step that I had to make. That was the lit step. Like it was like, it was seeing that there were these possibilities that, and with the, it was living, like figuring that was the step towards intentionality, right? There wasn't intentionality in my relationships. There wasn't much of it until that moment when I decided to take the step to engage. And I started to meet with these spiritual leaders and I started to just ask questions and explore and try to keep an open

mind. I had previously experimented with meditation, but I didn't really find anything that worked. But I then at this time during COVID actually found transcendental meditation. It's this one word that you say over and it just helped me get into this observer mode and see how impulsive I was. But I started to be able to see that I would these ideas, let's say an email would come in for work and I would just jump on it right away and try to respond. And I got to get this done immediately. Or someone asked a question and just jump over there to answer the question. And I would just be jumping around. And I noticed in my

mind that these things would actually subside. Like my desire, my sort of that instant sort of hold it, do something that if I just waited, it just faded away. Like I could actually watch it fade away out of my mind. And so I started to bring this energy to my family. And I started to, I'll give you an example. When my children are speaking, I noticed this desire to interject and say something to shift the energy from them to me. And what I did was is that in this sort of meditative mode, I was like, okay, let's just let that pass. Let's keep the focus on my children to support what they're saying, because it's rare, first of all, for a teenager to be speaking to their parents, I think, in certain ways.

And so I just needed to just pause because what I felt like saying in the moment really wasn't as important as I felt in that moment. It really was so like it would just pass. And so to me, that was, and my relationship with my family started to improve from that moment. And I've put all these guardrails and things up. And to me, that's one of the core essences of lit is noticing the inner desire for possibility could be in anything relationships.

It could be in works and self-exploration. It could be in being more creative and curious and tapping more into your passions and anything really. But it's like noticing there's this inner desire for something a little different and then figuring out what that step is to take and then just taking that step, even knowing whether it,

you don't know whether it's gonna work out or not, but the step is almost like in an experimental way, you're gonna learn from it, you're gonna grow from it, you're gonna have new insights. And it just, it's always worked out that way for me. Yeah. I often say that the most difficult step or choice you have to make is the initial one. And that's the one that holds so many people back because they're so afraid of failure or self-doubt or the consequences of it that they don't end up taking it. Do you find that to be true in your research as well?

That's absolutely true. And I think that to me, we're hesitant, we're fearful of the first step because we have an expectation associated with it. We expect a certain result. And the way I think about it is that if we flip it to expecting a result from that to more of an expectation that you're gonna learn something,

I think it's okay to, that there's gonna be some insight, there's gonna be some piece of information that's gonna come to you and that you're gonna think about and that is going to add to the puzzle. It's gonna add to the system. It's gonna inform you in some way. I think if we shift from expecting something positive, like some goal to achieve some goal,

we shift that to learning, even just something tiny, just these little things, little piece of information. I think then we're more likely to take those steps because the focus is not on something that is high risk. It's something that's actually very low risk. And to me, that's what we've done in my lab is switch from the high risk, like expecting something which is high risk to believing something will happen, which is actually low risk. And that thing happening is just learning. I want to go back to your introduction and I'm actually going to read from it because what you're talking about here, I think, is something that we fail to often see.

And that is many of the people we consider to be trailblazers or luminaries have had catastrophic failures in their lives. And the differences that they take the action that we're talking about, and it takes them in a completely different direction. So I'm going to read this. You write, some people assume that they don't have what it takes to be highly creative and focused or to maintain a high level of productivity, discipline, and engagement. All too often, people believe the lie because of messages they received at an early age. Type famous people who failed into any search engine, and you'll quickly learn that educators considered Albert Einstein to be a poor student,

and that Thomas Edison was addled and not worthwhile to keep in school. Walt Disney was once fired because his boss thought he lacked imagination and had no good ideas. And one of Oprah Winfrey's employers told her she was unfit for television news, not to mention all the negative things that happened in Oprah Winfrey's wife life from being raped and other things in an early age. And you mentioned this in the topic of mining your neurodiversity. What do you mean by neurodiversity?

I think that everybody is on some sort of spectrum. I think we're a collection of our sort of genetics as well as our experiences. And we all have unique ways of thinking about things. And I think that sometimes because we as humans have such a need to have a sense of belonging, we kind of gravitate towards wanting to be the same as others and connect with everybody. But I think that neurodiversity is just such a beautiful thing because if we were all the

same, life would be so incredibly boring. We just wouldn't learn. And that's to me, like that is also like the essence of how my laboratory structure is like maximizing the diversity and thought diversity of the origin where people came from diversity in experiences that people have had in the ways that they think. And so to me, neurodiversity, it's about just the beauty around how all of our brains

are wired differently and how we respond to things differently. And the reason I say it's beautiful is because it just presents this opportunity to constantly learn about other perspectives, other frames of reference to look at things in different ways. And it's like you could have a plant and have 10 people look at the plant and they're all sort of processing it in different ways.

You think that everyone's processing it like you're thinking about it, but everyone's thinking about it differently. And then if you start having conversation, what do you see? People are going to start talking about different things that they're experiencing. And that is inherent. Like that's part of the learning process. Curiosity is like a fundamental core source of energy for everybody. And so to me, the neurodiversity is something that unlocks our curiosity when we are in a room with other people, just because everybody's

having different experiences and there's just so much to learn from each other. Well, I wanna take you now to activation energy. So we've been talking about this need to take this first action and then after that many actions after it. And I like to say that you have to learn how to align action with ambition and aspirations. And you do this by being intentional. So there's a graph in your book where on one axis you have energy, on the other axis you have intentional action. And you've got this stick figure who's pushing

a boulder kind of over a hill, and it's this activation energy that needs to be consumed in order to do it. When I describe this in my words, to me, it's as if your car is broken down on the side of the road. And this is before we have cell phones and you're left with two options. Either you can stand there and be a victim and raise your hand and try to flag someone down, or you can choose to take intentional action and to start pushing the car forward. And when you do so initially, it's going to be extremely difficult, but the more you put energy into it, this activation energy, it starts to roll and you start making progress. Is that a way to think about how to lower this activation energy?

Yeah. So activation energy is something that I learned about a long time ago in a chemistry class. And it just really jumped out to me because this sort of traditional way of thinking about it is you put, let's say two molecules in a beaker of water and they don't react. Nothing's really happening. And then you add some heat to it and the molecules start moving around a little bit more. They'm not really bombarding and reacting. Then you add more heat. Now they're really moving at a little bit more heat. And now they interact, they bombard, they hit each other.

And then a reaction takes place. So the amount of heat that you add to the system is the activation energy, the amount of energy that you've put into the system. And that jumped out to me because I was like, wow, this really applies to everything in my life, all the things I want to do. If I want to go, for example, to ride my bike and I haven't ridden my bike in a long time, then that could be a very high activation energy. And this actually happened to me last summer. That's why I'm bringing it up. But for example, a friend of mine called me Michael Gale, who was actually over yesterday. We're like coworkworking together. And he called me last summer and he said, being on his bike is his happy place.

And immediately I thought it's my happy place too, but why am I not riding my bike? Or right starting to get into the middle of the summer. And I thought, okay, if I decide to try and go ride my bike today, I'm just going to set myself up for not doing it. And then shaming myself and get into the cycle. In fact, I feel like people practice not achieving their goals because they set the goal to be too high. Then they don't achieve it. They shame themselves. And it makes it even more harder to achieve goals. And so what I did was, is I said, okay, I'm going to break things down to lower the activation energy. So the first thing I did is I cleaned up my bike.

I hadn't used it a year or so next day I, and I was like, I'm only going to do one thing a day and I'm only let myself do one thing a day because that actually builds up the momentum and that kind of pressurizes the system, right? So the next day I went, I put air in the tires. I'm like, I'm not going to allow myself to do anything else. And so I'm now I'm getting, I'm building like the momentum, the desire to ride the bike is now building and that's lowering the activation energy as well. And then I go, I hang my helmet on it. I put the bike somewhere where I'm going to see it every single day. And so now all I need,

now the pressure's built up because I'm excited to get on my bike. I know I can do it, but I'm like holding myself back just a little bit. And all I need is like 15 minutes to get on the bike, to go around the neighborhood a couple times. And that's what happened. And last summer I biked over a thousand miles. And so I think that for hardcore bikers out there, I'll say, look, that's not a lot of miles, but for me, it's a lot going from really not much. I ended up almost biking every day in the summer to work them back, which is four miles or something like that. And I do bike rides on weekends and it just actually led to all this fresh energy in my life, but that to me is a key example of many I could give where

the idea is how do we define in just a qualitative way or just think about like how much energy is it really gonna take me to do X? And then to say, is there a step that might reduce that amount of energy? It's really just reframing taking steps towards a goal, but thinking about it in terms of the amount of energy that you need to exert. And I just found it's been like incredibly useful way

to approach life and new things that I want to do because it helps to really, it helps me to identify those big steps really will require a lot of energy and that it helps me clue into the fact that high energy step I'm unlikely to crack with one shot. Like I need to make multiple shots to make this happen. Yeah. Well, I love that story because I'm a huge cyclist myself. In fact, I rode 20 miles this morning, which with the cloud cover we had today at 5 o'clock in the morning was very dark.

But I like it because there's not that many cars on the road where typically here in Florida we have a ton, which can get pretty scary given that I don't think many motorists like bicyclists. So I want to move on to your chapter on live for the questions, swap caution for curiosity. And you emphasize in this chapter, the vitality of inquiry. And as I was reading it, it reminded me of an interview that I did with my friend, former Navy SEAL, Mark Devine, who's got a great podcast himself. And before he became a Navy SEAL, he got really introduced to martial arts and through that

mindfulness. And he came to the conclusion, and I love when he told me this, that the quality of your questions determine the quality of your life. In the context of lit, why is asking the right question so crucial? Wow. Questions have just been so crucial my entire life. And I would say that one of the reasons I think that we have such a hard time asking high value questions is because we've all been shamed at some point in our life asking high value questions is because we've all been shamed at some point in our life for asking a stupid question, right? And what that has done is that it also, it creates like a stigma around asking questions. If you're a hesitation, we might, someone might, a speaker gets up and we have a question. We're like, ah, well, is this really a good question or what will

people think? We hold back. And so not only has that prevented us from asking questions later in our life, but it actually has prevented us from getting better at asking questions. Cause I really feel asking questions is a skill. And I'll give you an example. When I entered grad school at university of Toronto, I would attend these invited speaker seminars that would happen. And I'm trying to pay attention. I'm trying to like little, my mind's wandering. And then we get to the question answer period and all of a sudden the arrows

start flying three o'clock sweater vest boom, like a question just right to the heart of what the speaker just asked. And another era, like the arrows just keep flying and I'm like, Oh my God, this is unbelievable. Questions are just incredible. And then I thought to myself, I don arrows just keep flying. And I'm like, Oh my God, this is unbelievable. These questions are just incredible. And then I thought to myself, I don't have any arrows. I don't, I don't have any questions. And I didn't even own a sweater vest.

And so I'm thinking to myself, okay, how can I really, I felt this talk about inner desire for possibility. I thought I really want to learn how to ask questions, these really high value questions, but they're not coming to me. And even though I spent my whole life like iterating and trying to figure out the best questions to ask. And I used to play chess with my dad when I was younger. And if you look at like an amateur chess player versus an expert chess player, the difference really is pattern recognition. The expert chess player is able to see 12, 13, 14 moves ahead or something

like that. And so I started to think, okay, maybe there's some patterns here because again, I've been involved in like, engaging in processes my whole life. And I'm at the, was at the point where I knew if I'm not good at something, it's not because I'm inherently not good at it. It's just because I haven't engaged the right process that works for me. And I've just applied that concept everywhere throughout my life. And so I said, okay, well, what can I do here? So the next lecture, everybody's there to hear what the speaker's saying, but I'm there for something else. I'm there to listen to the questions. And so what I did was I wrote down all the questions that people asked at the end of the seminars. And after a couple months, I thought,

okay, now I'm going to look through them. And I started to look through them. And it was like an aha moment because I noticed patterns. I noticed that there were four or five categories to the questions that people were asking. One big category is the experiment working. Did they set it up correctly? Do they have the right controls to show that it's actually working properly? A lot goes into setting up an experiment and a lot can go wrong.

Another set of questions had to do with importance. Someone's trying to develop a diagnostic for blood to detect something and they've done all their experiments in salt solutions, saline, then their results may not yet be important. There were a lot of questions around statistics as well, and a few other things. So all of a sudden, I was like, wow, I knew I figured out the motivation behind why people were asking the questions. Next lecture, I go in, and I it's like I have my detective hat on I am laser focused on what they're saying,

because I'm looking for holes in their presentation. I'm writing down the questions that come to my mind. All of a sudden, I feel myself even become more creative because I'm thinking critically about what they're saying. I'm thinking of next experiments they might perform. I'm thinking of where their technology might be useful to apply next. And so through this process, I was able to figure out how to ask better questions. And I feel we can bring this, like, the power of the question, it's like the best technology that we have at our disposal

because it can help us solve a problem, it can help us to connect with people more deeply, it can help us to unlock, to problem solve, and to think about things from different angles. These questions have just been so fundamental to everything that I've done in my life and at my lab. Well, I completely agree with you. And I think that quote from Mark is a great way to remember the importance of these questions and asking them throughout your entire life, because for him, it helped him to realize that he was meant to be a warrior, not a tax consultant, which he was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and it changed his whole life trajectory.

And he continues to ask them on a regular basis. And I think that is so key to all of us to do. Actually, one thing just to add to that is that so my postdoc mentor, Bob Langer at MIT, he once said that in school, we're judged by the answers that we give. But in life, we're judged by the questions that we ask. And I think that to me, that's so true is that the education system, we're just giving answers if you think of the format of tests, imagine what it would be like if tests were what questions would you ask versus what answers? What are the answers?

I think that it just in my life, it's the, it really comes down to the questions and some of the greatest breakthroughs that have ever occurred in science are from people who asked questions in different ways, who asked the question that no one else had asked. And it just cried open a completely new field, a new avenue for research. Well, Jeff, one of the most fundamental questions that we all need to ask is what is our why? And you discuss this in your chapter titled, Get Bothered, Wake Up to What You Want. And you start this chapter out by talking about James Ancrum, who you covered in the book, and the fact that he was adrift. And it made me go back to some of the people you brought up earlier that we recognize now as

superstars. And it made me think of Dwayne the Rock Johnson, who in his early stages of life was extremely adrift until he found his why. And this whole chapter made me think of the work that Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dr. Hal Hirschfeld do on future self. And it made me think of the concept of life crafting. I was interviewing Jim McKelvey, who founded Square, and I was interviewing Jim McKelvey who founded Square and I was asking him, what is the most important thing that a person needs to do in life? And he said, it really comes down to your why it's finding a problem that's worth solving for humanity that you have the unique capabilities to solve. Do you view this in that same type of lens?

A hundred percent. Yeah. I think that I've just noticed also in my laboratory that when we really get in touch with the why, which I see is like the importance of what we're doing. So let's say there's a certain medical problem that we want to solve. We want to try to figure out a way to deliver drugs to the back of the eye to treat macular degeneration, for example, or we want to find a way to deliver medicine into joints to treat osteoarthritis and prevent the future degeneration. Or we want to find a way to have a system where we deliver nanoparticles into the bloodstream and have them target the brain so that we can treat neurological disorders when we're really connecting with the why, and we understand the patient group that we're trying to treat.

It's the magnetic. It's, you know, everybody wants to be involved. Everybody wants to help out in some way. And so to me, when you get in touch with the why, it just, it's just an unlocking moment. I'll give an example from the book, it just comes to mind, someone that I interviewed elder Dave Corchain, who actually I dedicated the book to, he passed away a few months after the interview, but he spoke about, so he's from an indigenous group in Canada, and he spoke about how when he was younger, he had all this anger for what had been done to his people and assimilation

and torture and all sorts of terrible things. And he went to the grandmothers for advice, what to do. And they said, you need to get in touch with the ceremonies. You need to attend the ceremonies and really get involved. And so he started going to the ceremonies with a new sense of observation and curiosity. And he talked about how we started to get in touch with the drums of his people. And as he went on, they advised him that he needed to go do a vision quest.

And so he went into this vision quest where he went into the forest for several days without food and water. And this vision came to him that he needed to construct this center for knowledge exchange called the Turtle Lodge in Manitoba. And almost like the middle of nowhere, he needed to do it. And he came out of that vision quest with no money, no resources whatsoever. He just started talking about it and how that was his purpose. And the next thing he knew, people started showing up with materials, lumber and nails, and people from all over just started appearing,

people donating money. And the next thing, he was able to build this massive turtle lodge structure, which has become like this key center for sharing indigenous wisdom. And so it's, it's that type of thing. When we get in touch with our why it just, there's nothing more powerful to create momentum and to bring people together and to solve problems. Well, thank you for that, Jeff. And I wanted to just go to two more areas before we end up. One is your chapter on Pinch Your Brain, Attention is Your Superpower,

where you really go into discussing the interrupting distractions that we all face in life. And I loved something that you talked about in this chapter, and I'm going to just quote it. thing that you talked about in this chapter, and I'm going to just quote it. In the 1971 book, Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon wrote, and again, this is 1971, hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. And I, in my own book, wrote a chapter on conscious engagement. And in it, I described that the vast majority of people are living, whether you want to call it spontaneously engaged or subconsciously engaged. We often hear the term autopilot, and I don't think it's the right analogy because when you're on autopilot, I think we're still going in a positive direction.

I think too many people are living life that contemporary life isn't solely to blame. It's how we ourselves are interacting with this life and choosing to undertake actions that are facilitating us to live this life the way we're doing it. So from your perspective, how does someone break free from this? Yeah, there's a lot that's happening. I think that there's a lot of complexity to all of this. And one is, it's just like our primitive wiring, right? In terms of how for tens of thousands of years, we were hunters and gatherers and our brains are really wired for survival. And we're meant to be able to look at the horizon and we detect something different. We're going to hyper-focus on it and it could be a potential thread or it could be something

important. And I think that you flash forward to today, there's $900 billion a year is spent on marketing to hijack our attention. And these cues and pings are coming at us from all directions. We have a knowledge information overload, and I'm all about technology and I love it. And I feel like there's so many positive ways to use it. But for whatever reason, our culture, our society is such

that we've allowed this fog, this cloud to just exist around within everybody's mind. And it's what's happened, I think, is that the large corporations and such are really controlling what we believe is important. And I think what you're talking about intentionality is really where you sort of look within to identify what are your core values, what are really your feelings about things, like how do you feel when you wear certain things? And I'm not talking about clothing, I'm talking about when you make certain decisions

that have been almost predetermined by the forces to be the external forces. How does that really feel? And I feel that we all get these cues from our minds, our bodies are very intelligent, people around us are constantly giving us cues. And when we start to detach and untangle the web, and we start to really look within and be open to these cues, we start to realize that a lot of the decisions that we're making are not decisions that are in alignment with what is truly important to us. And so to me, to break free from that, we need to have tools, we need to have strategies because we're up against a lot. We're really up against like massive powers, $900 billion in marketing and that's, and

we're letting it happen. Like it's everywhere with like billboards and spam mail and just all over the internet, everything. And so I think to break free from it, I think part of it is just sort of acknowledgement and recognition of what we are up against and that these powers are extraordinarily strong and these poles, there's a lot of gravity there. And so to me, that's part of it. Another part of it is experimenting with things that will allow us to be open to the cues

that we all have available to us. So in Pinch Your brain, I talk about early childhood experience that I have encounter with a bat, where all the thoughts in my mind basically were squeezed out because I saw this bat in as I was walking home along this driveway, I was out in the cut lived out in the country. It was like 1000 foot driveway, walking home and this our driveway was carved through a forest. And there was this bat. My mind is drifting all over the place. I see the bat and every other thought gets squeezed out. And it was like, my brain was being pinched.

All I could think about was the bat. And I started thinking, okay, well, maybe I could bring this to other areas in my life. And I think that at any moment, we can change what we focus our attention to. And one simple way to do it, just to give an example, is let's say when we're eating, we often eat these days where we're like on our phones

or we're watching something or we're engaged, even in conversation, we're like, we're engaged in conversation. And we're not that good at multitasking in terms of like, it's hard to experience. We talk about the five senses. It's hard to experience all five of them in a very focused way. Usually it's hard to experience all five of them in

a very focused way. Usually it's like one, maybe two that we can experience, but as soon as we're have a lot of sensory coming at us from all directions, it's just, we're not really getting that much. So when we're eating, if we intentionally say, I want to taste the flavors of the food that I'm eating and you set that as the intention and you start eating and you chew a little bit longer and you're thinking about the flavors, then you can really experience it in a different way, in a more, in a deeper way. And to me, that's one of the ways that we can start to become more intentional is we can say, so to me, when I do that, then I'm not going to look at my phone

because I've set my intention as being, I want to experience the flavors. If I say, I to me, when I do that, then I'm not going to look at my phone because I've set my intention as being, I want to experience the flavors. If I say, I don't want to look at my phone, that's a really hard intention to stick with because it, I don't know, just to me, it doesn't, it's not that meaningful to me. I'll just keep picking it up. But if I say, I really want to get in touch with the flavors, then take picking up my phone is going to go against that intention. I can't achieve that. And so I think there's a lot of things that we can do in our day to break free from this cloud, from the fog to disentangle. Another thing I'll just give one other example is one of the chapters or tools is press pause.

And to me, I just noticed that there's this tendency in my day to just have back to back meetings and I can do that all day long. I could easily, every single day, I could have back to back meetings. And I can do that all day long. I could easily, every single day, I could have back to back meetings. I could get home. I could eat my dinner. I could then just work and have more emails are flying and everything like that. And I get to the end of the day, I'm like, wow, I really feel like I've been busy. I really feel I accomplished a lot. But the problem is that what I notice is that it actually holds me back from doing my best work. It holds me back from doing my best work.

It holds me back from moving the needle in the most maximal way in everything I do. And what I've realized is that I need to make time in between the things that I do. And I'll give you an example. So if I have a meeting with somebody and we're in conversation and my mind's open, I'm listening. And if I don't, they could say things that could connect to other things. I know like they often people will say things and I'll think, Oh, well, actually maybe I should introduce that person to this person over here and they could work together.

Maybe we could all work together on a new project and that could lead to something, but I'm not going to think about that unless I pause and have time to reflect. And I'm not talking about lausing and going on my email. I'm talking about pausing, like going for a walk, just letting my mind wander and drift around that interaction I just had. And so to me, that's one of the ways that we can intercept this pattern and we can break free to be more intentional. And there's so is we can bring this to any moment and it doesn't take that much effort. It's just cluing into that. We have this possibility. We have this

potential to do it. And again, you can look at your window. It's a really simple example. You look at your window and trees and sidewalk and everything. And you could say, okay, I'm just going to pay attention just for a moment to the bark on the tree and the pattern of it. And then you're harnessing your attention. You're cluing, you're actually intentionally focusing on something. I'll give one other example. The one thing that I do is when I walk around my neighborhood with the dogs, I cycle through my senses. So I'll say sight and I'll look at the trees and I'll look at the pattern of the bark. I'll look at the leaves. I'll look at the animals moving around the squirrels and the birds. And then I'll say sound and I'll just listen for

the rustling of the leaves or the birds chirping. And then I'll say touch and I'll feel my heels hit the ground. I'll slow down a bit and I'll get more in touch with the feeling of my feet hitting the ground, the wind hitting my face. And I find that as I do this, it's like resensitizing my aliveness, my ability to experience the world and to observe. And I just think, so there's so many things that we can do in our day to break through and to be more intentional. Yeah, I love that explanation.

I do something similar. And in fact, this past weekend, my fiance and I were up in Chattanooga in the mountains and on this nature walk. And you could actually taste the difference in the air between how clean it was up there in the mountains compared to where we live here in the Tampa Bay area. It was just amazing to see the difference of all these toxins that are getting into our bodies. So I just wanted to highlight two things that you talked about. So the first comes out of your chapter, press pause, protect time to be and behold.

And that is this whole idea of white space. And if the listener wants to get more information on that, I did two interviews a while back. One was with Dory Clark, the other was with Juliet Funt, where they both talk about this concept of white space. Juliet Funt actually wrote a whole book on it. The other thing that I think you really touched on was this whole concept of focus.

And to me, one of the best ways I have utilized is Stephen Covey's matrix where you look at what is important versus urgent against his four quadrants. And that's another thing the audience can look up in addition to what you taught them. So the last thing I wanted to cover was nature plays a really profound role in your book. And your second to last chapter is hug nature, revitalize your roots. But I want to go back to an earlier portion of your book and you write that nature holds the deep circuitry. Of our embodied intelligence, the complex evolutionary smarts derive from our species, constant interplay with our environment and a multitude of sensory experiences. And then you further say that we need to recognize the powerful mind body

interconnectivity and to some degree have extended that understanding to include the interconnectivity of mind, body and spirit. And that all we have left to do is to recognize that each of these domains is grounded in nature. Can you explain that a little bit more because I thought it was really profound? Yeah, no, absolutely. I've had so many profound transformative experiences in nature. And I think that I've also had experiences where I go out into nature and I don't feel connected. And when that happens, that is a signal of how far I am attuned from the rhythms of life. It actually shows me how much work I need to do to get back, how far my sort of being

submerged in technology has taken me. And I'll give a couple of examples. When I was in the third grade, I mentioned I moved out to the country and literally I'd wake up in the middle of the night, there'd be a pack of wolves on my front lawn going next door, which was like a 15 minute walk to the sheep farm for a late night snack. For example, there was a buffalo farm across the road. We had a creek that ran across our property and there was like snapping turtles and all kinds of crayfish and things like that. And so I would get off the bus because I was out in the countries, I'd take the bus to school. I get off the bus coming home and

I just would be so frustrated. My mind just racing, ruminating on the challenges of the day. And I remember distinctly remember as I walked along this driveway, carved through the forest, and I just be looking at the trees and the leaves and animals. I just felt this sense of solace, this like I was being hugged by nature as I walked home. It always helped me feel better. And there's a lot of data now to support scientifically that when we spend time in nature, it actually helps us switch from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system. So essentially moving from being like having anxiety and stress to lowering our heart

rate, lowering our blood pressure, lowering our breathing rate, having an increased sense of wellness. And I think that it goes deeper than that because in nature, there's so many nuances. We actually had somebody come into my lab, Vivek Ramakrishnan, who I talk about a little bit in the book. Actually, it was one of these things in COVID, I started to bring spiritual leaders to my lab

because it just, something just felt like I needed to do that. Like people who were exploring mindfulness and meditation and various elements of spirituality, I interacted with Vivek and I asked him to come to the lab and talk about his practice. And that soon evolved into his passion, which was impermanence. And his practice of impermanence was really

noticing all everything around us is changing in various ways. And how if we look at the human constructs in our lives, if we, let's say we spend most of our time in our houses or in our workplaces, what to me is really crazy is we look around and the wall doesn't change very much. Like we keep things very clean. We have HEPA filters, we keep nature out. That's like one way of looking at it. So in our, these human constructed environments, like not much is changing on a daily basis. You go out into nature, everything is changing, right?

That's a huge contrast and those nuances in nature. So what we did in this product, we engage in this permanence project that Vivek led from my lab where we go out into nature and we find something like, it's just our backyard pretty much. And you'd find a tree or a plant or a flower, whatever it was. And you go to take a picture of it. You just pause for a moment and you think about it. Just focus your attention on it. You pinch your brain trying to look at that flower, whatever it is, you just pause instead of, you know, we're so quick to just take pictures that we just pause to connect, just to experience it in a little bit of a deeper way.

Then you hit the button, take the picture, you come back the next day, you take another picture and you compare them and you see that they're completely different. Like they're shaped, they've grown, they're pointed in different ways. There's new things that have sprouted. And so it's like getting in touch with the nuances. There's so many nuances in nature. And I feel like one aspect of sort of our current society is that like we're focused on human made products and technologies.

It's all human constructs. And so we're in this world where we're not able to see nuances. We're actually being, we're training ourselves to not be able to detect the nuances because things that humans make don't really change that much, right? Like my laptop here hasn't changed much, right? Over time, but if it was made out of plants, I'd be changing all the time. And we're meant to pick up on these things. That's what really, I think fuels our curiosity is the nuances. And then the other thing I'll say is that this interconnected mindset that everything depends on everything. And it's hard to see that in our current way, like that we live life, our current way of

being because again, we're so far detached from nature. Like we're born in hospitals where there's HEPA filters. We spend our life in houses and cars and buildings. And then when we die, we go into coffins where life can't even get in. It's like, I don't know. I just look at it from that perspective. But when I think about the interconnected mindset,

I'll just give you one example. So I learned recently from a world leading water filtration expert that over half the oxygen that we breathe is actually from the phytoplankton in the ocean. So these sub millimeter creatures are producing oxygen that most of the oxygen that exists in the air is from that. It's not from trees. It's actually from the ocean. And so the sense of, wait a moment, my survival is dependent on the sub millimeter creatures in the ocean

that like I never see, but they're there. And so it given me this like appreciation, this gratitude for how everything is connected, how everything is working. And I feel like once we start to appreciate that, once we start to realize that everything depends on one another and that we're not this isolated being that is just conquering the earth and doing whatever we want and we're the center, we're the focal point, but that we're not this isolated being that is just conquering the earth and doing whatever we want. And we're the center, we're the focal point, but that we're all contributing to and depending on

everything else, I feel it really just helps to connect all of our minds and bodies together. Like we are all connected, but the way that we're living our lives now, we're training ourselves that we're not connected. And I think it's a big problem. And I think it's contributed a lot to the loneliness epidemic and a lot of the anxiety and depression issues that we're seeing. Yeah, well, it's creating a sense of unmattering in life. And what you're saying is really profound and really close friend of mine,

who's a retired NASA astronaut, told me that all the astronauts who've been up there experienced this thing called the overview effect. And for him, when he went on the space shuttle the first time, it was like such a novelty just to be up there that he didn't really get the sense the first time. But on the second trip, he went to the International Space Station and he was looking at the Coppola and they were going over New York City. And he just imagined himself being one of the drivers in those cars who was getting so angered by the traffic and everything else. And he said it made him realize

how small and insignificant that is to the interconnectedness of the universe and the role that we play in it. And to your point about microorganisms in the oceans, that's a major reason why climate change is so important because the whole ecosystem is changing and those microorganisms are dying off, which means our air supply is. And I think people don't look at how these underlying things interact and are interconnected to each other and how all of this creates imbalance and shifts. Well, Jeff, I really enjoyed this interview today. We could have talked for a couple more hours. What is the best way for a listener to learn more about you?

I have a website, just my name, jeffcarp.com, Carp with a K. And there you can find information about the book. You can access content that's not in the book. I also have a description of some of the projects that are currently ongoing in my laboratory. And in addition, my mom has just been such a huge supporter of mine and really helped me navigate, especially early on with the challenges in elementary school. I'm going to have a part on her site. Don't have it there yet, but I'm going to add it for her to showcase some of her poetry because she's been writing poetry in the last couple of years.

And it's really been like her way of really just creatively expressing herself and her poems are really beautiful. So you can also find my mom's poetry there too. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today. It was an honor to have you on the show. Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Jeff Karp.

And I wanted to thank Jeff, Alyssa Fortnato and William Morrow for having them appear on today's show. Links to all things Jeff will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel, John R. Miles and our clips channel at Passion Struck Clips. Please go check it out and subscribe and join over 250,000 other subscribers on the channel. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show and make it free for our

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