The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Letters To Our Younger Selves: A Combat Manual For Mindful Living by F. Martino M.S. Ph.D., Justin R. Miller Ph.D., Nathan Gerowitz D.C.

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

Letters To Our Younger Selves: A Combat Manual For Mindful Living by F. Martino M.S. Ph.D., Justin R. Miller Ph.D., Nathan Gerowitz D.C. Paul, Nate, and Justin are professionals who have achieved success through little more than hard work, perseverance, and getting some good advice along the way. Their path to success was far from a smooth ride, and all of them have learned some painful but essential lessons. They would like to share some of these lessons as well a few mistakes they made through the telling of humorous, sometimes tragic, but always honest stories. The topics covered in this book include several universal rites of passage such as struggling, failure, finding purpose, and generating fulfillment Each chapter in this book is succinct and reads like a "combat manual" for mindful living. Ideal for any young professional or new college graduate, the advice contained in this book is timeless, encouraging, and applicable to life. Sometimes sarcastic and sometimes serious, the authors never stray from the central theme; don't take yourself too seriously.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from thechrismasshow.com thechrismasshow.com hey we're coming here with another podcast welcome welcome one and all. Everyone is certainly welcome. That guy in the back, though, security probably needs to take him out.

But everyone else is welcome. Welcome to the podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys doing it again for the umpteenth time. Who knew we'd do another podcast? To see the video version of this, it's free for an unlimited time. You want to get in on this special deal over at youtube.com, Porsche.chrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button.

You can see all the videos over there. I think there's about 4, Porsche.chrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button. You can see all the videos over there. I think there's about 4,000. There's at least 3,500 to 4,000 videos. We make so much content, we can't even keep track of what we're doing ourselves. I know there's 4,500 on the Chris Foss Show podcast. So go watch all that content, and you're going to learn so much. Your brain is going to expand so much. You're going to have to get a Your brain is going to expand so much. You're going to have to get a double-wide trailer expansion on the back.

You can order those from Amazon. Just Google it. Go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those crazy kids where they play, and you can see all the stuff we're sharing there, snippets of the show, et cetera, et cetera. Also go to goodreads.com, for just Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there, and I've got some Goodreads giveaways going on for my books as well. Today we have another amazing author. We just put in the Google machine, amazing authors, and they just come to us and we have them on the show and they just expand your mind. His name is Paul F. Martino and his

book is called Letter to Our Younger Selves, a combat manual. I like that word, a combat manual for mindful living. You can take and pick this book up. It's been out since June 28, 2021. This is something everyone needs. We really should have an owner's manual. He's going to be on the show talking to us about what he does and how he does it. And let me tell you a little bit about him. Since 2009, he has been a full-time tenure track facility member in the biology department at Carthage College, a small Lutheran affiliated liberal arts college in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was awarded the prestigious Teacher of the Year Award in 2017. Congratulations. We love teachers. For his outstanding teachers of anatomy and physiology.

I could teach that class too. To upperclassmen from the Carthage campus. I could teach that class. He currently leads the Carthage Professional Studies Division as an associate professor and dean. Welcome to the show, Paul. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Chris. How are you? Good. Kenosha, Wisconsin. That's in the news these days. I know. But we'll move on from that. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah. Buy our book, Letters to Our Younger Selves. It's on Amazon. It's on Book Baby. It's on Barnes and Noble. We have a Facebook page of a similar name. We also do some podcasts talking about the book. So that's a relatively new thing.

So come in and join. We love to have conversations with people about life. So what's the name of the podcast so people can check that out? It's the same thing. It's letters to our younger selves. All right. All right. And this is necessary. I learned probably I keep learning so much about myself and mainly from my parole agent, my judge. But no, I'm just kidding. My ankle bracelet is going off right now. But no, it's at 50. I think I've learned more about myself between 50 and 53, mainly because you have this arc of destruction or life, actually, we should call it.

Destruction life, one of the two. My judge says it's destruction. But we have this. You can look back on your history and you can go, yeah, there's some patterns of broken glass there and razor blades. What motivated you to want to write this book? Yeah, so Justin Miller and I, one of my co-authors, and I were talking. We both teach and we're both professors.

And we've been talking about this for years, about doing a project. And we wanted to do a project because what we were seeing was specifically in the young men, but in the young women, too, that come through the institutions, that they seem to be more lost. And the way they're lost is different between the young men and the young women. And we thought, we're already mentoring a lot of these people. How could we reach more people? And then one of my former students, Nate Gerowitz, who's another one of the co-authors, he's a chiropractor. And we kept in touch and we've been talking about doing a project for years. And he'd throw these ideas around and we'd talk about doing projects for

years and then the pandemic hit and we were locked down. Nate couldn't see patients. We were teaching on Zoom. We thought we need to be productive. Like we cannot just sit around and wait for whatever's coming. So we need to be productive. And it was a kinship that we had started between the three of us. So we met and we thought we need to help people, right? Because there's going to be a lot of people that struggle coming out of this. And we wanted to use humor and we wanted to use a format that was short. So we didn't want to write a war and peace type book. And one of the themes that we came up with, the main theme through the book is that growth through struggle. And it's the struggle that some people talk about growing in spite of the struggle, I would argue that you grow because of the struggle.

That's what crafts you into who you are. So that's essentially how we got going on this book. There needs to be an owner's manual to life. So give us a kind of an arcing tease, if you will, of the book and some of the things you put inside of it. Yeah. So we broke the book into three sections, right? So Justin wrote the first section of eight letters, and then Nate wrote the next set, and then I wrote the last set. And before the letters, there's a how to use section of the book. So we actually go through in a couple of pages succinctly and tell people, here's how you use this book.

And at the end, we write a letter together. And we wrote letters to ourselves. We all have a different style. We talk about some of the stories and we tell stories about ourselves and mistakes that we made, essentially, and what we learned and what we wish we would have known. So that's the overarching. Right. And each one of us took a theme. So in my end, which is the back end of the both, my parents were immigrants. And so I figured I would take the theme of a successful child of immigrant parents so that that seems like something I could speak about. Whereas Nate took a more holistic clinician's point of view, talks a little bit about more deeply about things like depression and gratitude. And Justin, at the beginning of the book, really sets the stage with a lot of things like the difference between strength and meekness and struggle and failure. So we run the gambit of

all of the different types of experiences that one might experience up into their 20s and beyond. And we each take it from a different perspective because we each have different personalities. So that's the overarching view of the book. That's pretty awesome. What are you seeing in The Lost Generation? And did you apply some of that into the book? You're saying that both men and women are coming to you guys and they seem like they're struggling.

What are you guys seeing in that purview? Yeah. So for the females, cause we also do research still, and we actually study something called behavioral inhibition. And so we've had some insights into this too, but I won't talk about that right now, but the females are high functioning, a very bright, hardworking, fantastic, extremely stressed out, high anxiety, more and more. I've been at Carthage for 13 years, and that's been ever increasing. And then the pandemic accelerated that. It made it worse.

So the females, high functioning, high grades, really have a view of where they want to be in life. And they come in, and they're anxious about everything the guys on the other hand you don't see as much of that anymore they're more the exception than the rule and there are fewer of them so that's a whole nother issue there aren't as many of them in college in college yeah yeah i think it's a 60 4040 split now, female. So the males seem lost, many of them. They don't know what they should be doing. It seems like they're good. If they're an athlete, they seem to be fine.

Like they do their sport. But then if the sport, they get injured or the sport is over, they seem to be more lost, right? It doesn't seem like they have this bonding experience with other men, although the athletes do a better job with it. And then generally the students we see like biology and neuroscience majors, those men really don't have that connection. They're missing this sort of brotherhood, I think. And so we, Justin and I, see many of these young men in our offices and we talk about life. And we spend more time talking about life in general than we do talking about academics. Wow. I just got done reading a book, and there's a lot of books I'm reading called No More Mr. Nice Guy. And it sounds like the title is almost deceptive,

but not really. It talks about the past few generations, boys being raised as beta males instead of alpha males and not having really good connections with their fathers, whether the father's out of the home or whether the father's emotionally detached or narcissistic like my father was. Really an amazing book that talks about this thing. And I've been alarmed with recent news coming that fewer men are, young boys are entering college. And you see the rise of the incel generation. They're not dating. They're staying non-sexual for longer periods of times.

I think the Washington Post just reported yesterday we're six years in a row of a massive drop in birth rates. There's a lot of societal things going on with this. But one thing that was interesting was I was lucky enough that my father stayed in the home until we left. We didn't have the greatest relationships. And now reading books like this and talking about this stuff, I've realized, you know, some of the different things that I've, issues I've had with him and how it affected my manhood, some of the different societal shaming and different things that have gone on have done that. But yeah, one thing I've had because I've been single all my life is men don't bond up with other men like we used to. When I grew up with my alpha

grandfather and stuff, he taught us we went fishing together. We did man stuff together. And a lot of men don't do that. About the only time I see men doing men's stuff with other men is in gaming, which is, I don't know, technically it's an accomplishing, going, doing stuff. But I don't see a lot of men doing men's stuff with other people. And especially if they're married or in relationships, they're alienated from other men. And there really is a need. And then I've seen, of course, the other side of it where it seems to be a society that's being told, hey, you can go pursue careers, you can do whatever, waste your youth. And in the end, everything will work out. And a lot of people are finding out that's a lie in this generation. It's really interesting what's going on. What are some examples of what you guys wrote to yourselves

that you think are really endearing to, or not endearing, but really might resonate with a lot of people? Yeah. So one of the letters that I wrote, it's the third letter. It says, don't be thin skinned. And I tell a story. I think I was in either the eighth or the ninth grade. It doesn't really matter. And go to your locker in between classes in middle school, bigger kid than me, slam my locker every day, got really irritated, but clearly wasn't going to do anything to him. He liked doing it to me so I could be late to class every day, yada, yada. And I take, it's a very short letter.

And in the end, I end up slamming the locker on myself. And that was the last time he ever did it. The point of it wasn't that he was bullying me, because I guess by today's standards, maybe you'd call it that. But I never looked at it that way. He just really irritated me. And the problem was, no, I was never scared. I wasn't stupid.

Three inches taller than me outweighed me by about 50 pounds. But the thing that I learned from that lesson was that I was thin skinned. I was allowing him mentally to get at me. And when I made that decision to slam my locker, which I thought long and hard about, like, if I do this, he may knock me on the ground or body slam me or something like that. But that was the key. And that's when I realized, oh, I don't have to be so thin skinned about it. Like you toughen up. It was, he wasn't really

hurting me. He may have said some things. He was joking. He actually wasn't a bad guy, but I ended up becoming quite friendly with him in the end, but he was just trying to pick on me. And I just didn't understand. He may have even been wanting a friend and just didn't know how to communicate. And I kept getting in my own head thinking, he's mean to me, he's this, he's that, whatever, eighth grader. And in the end of the day, it was being this thin-skinned, right? Like having to toughen up a little bit more and realizing that the world out there is a lot more dangerous than some big kid slamming your lock every day so that you get to class a little bit later. And so it was more, it was less about that bullying and more about me looking into myself and saying, you need to develop thick skin

because this is nothing compared to what you're going to see for the next 50 or 60 years. And that has held true. One of the things I would go back and tell myself is get help with depression. I didn't realize it, but I was suffering from massive ADD, ADHD, whatever, from childhood on. And I can now, looking back from 50, I can see the destruction in my life of not getting my ADHD treated. I've had two different episodes where I had it treated. And whenever I have people say, what would you go back and tell your teenage self? I'm like, my letter would be, please go see a psychiatrist for that and trauma. And it wasn't really until 50 looking back. And like I said, the saddest part about life is

when you look back and you can see the pattern that you've left behind and the wreckage and some winnings, there's a bit of destruction that takes place. And you can be like, that was something I really should have worked out before I shared it with everybody. Yeah. And it's interesting because I don't mention this in my chapters, but I went through a short stint of depression between my senior year of high school and my first year of college. But Nate's section of the book, he actually, I think his is actually centered on, because he's a clinician, on depression that occurred to when he was a student here at Carthage. So his entire section is essentially how to basically take care of yourself. And a lot of it's about mental health.

And so I think many of your listeners would appreciate his section because he's a very kind, gentle person. And he's a deep thinker and has thought deeply about how his depression affected him and has turned him into the person he is today. Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. So the three of you have different, that wrote the book, have different processes and things you went. Was there anything that you left off the table where you're like, maybe we shouldn't write ourselves about that? Or what was sort of priority? How did you give priority to the things to write yourselves about? Or did you make it a priority or was it just a preference of, oh, I like these letters?

So here's how we started. We said we write letters to yourselves. And so we wrote a number of letters. I think I ended up excluding about four total letters. And I think we excluded three of Nate's. And I don't know, we excluded any of Justin's. And then what we ended up finding is that there were common themes like failure came up over and over again in different forms. And so we call them different things, but failure came up. Gratitude came up in different forms. Strength came up in multiple fashions, sort of mental strength, physical strength.

It's actually my last chapter, which doesn't fit with the rest of the section, but it's a thing for me. So I wrote an entire chapter, a letter to myself. So these themes came up, strength, failure, gratitude, basically loving yourself. And then what we did is as we were putting the book together, we kept the best versions of that. And so we thought, yeah, that your version is, I think, would speak better to the general public than my version. And it made it fun to write and to see why. We talked about why certain things came up over and over again.

And it must mean that there's something, I don't want to say universal, but almost universal about it. And we talk about in the beginning of the book that we talk about ordinary and common experiences. And what we leave out, because it's a cliche, is that a lot of what we talk about 50 years ago would have been so much common sense that somebody would have looked at us and said, why the hell are you writing this book? And today it's not. So for instance, let me give you one that's just going to blow your mind. Chapter 2, 19 in my section says, make more good decisions than bad decisions for a successful life. It is so intuitively obvious, and yet it is so simple to say and understand. And it must be really complex for many people to do because as I observe, and I'm an observer because I'm a scientist, and I've observed my students over the years, I realize you're your own worst enemy. You just stopped making some

really bad decisions. You're losing because you keep making bad, and they're like, yeah, I know I need to stop doing that. Well, then do it. So I write a letter to myself and again, it seems intuitively obvious, but we wanted it to be somewhat humorous and make you think about it. What are they really saying? Cause it seems to me like we don't need a book chapter or a letter on this, but in fact we do, because if we didn't, then you know, people wouldn't have this problem. One of the challenges you have when you're young is you think you're immortal. You think you've got so much time and you think I can overcome everything. You're feeling all your oats. You're at the prime of your life at 20 where you just peak everything. And a lot of people

don't realize that actually is for a lot of people their peak at least physically and you just you're just like i remember uh putting stuff off and being like i knew a lot of the stuff that you and you had in the book yeah i should probably do that that sounds like a good idea but i'm gonna have a lot of fun first and i've got time to throw care to the wind and just do whatever i want and i'll play catch up later i used to see this in religious communities where, you know, here in Utah, you have to get married and in the temple and be chased. And people would just go on a party roll through their teens and early twenties, drinking, partying and everything that comes with that, let's just say. And then they would clean up their act and be like, oh, I can always clean up my act and do whatever. A lot of people do that when they're young.

They think, oh, yeah, I got plenty of time. And they don't realize that's some of the most prime time at laying a foundation. I started my first companies when I was 18. I built my first multimillion dollar companies when I was in my early 20s when everybody else was doing other things. And I was like, maybe I'm doing this wrong. And fortunately, I lived a really interesting life and I wouldn't trade it for, there are things that I would fix. What do you think about, that brings me to a good question. In writing this book,

what do you think about people that could say, if you go back and change things, you wouldn't change anything. Is that really the dumbest thing to say or the least insightful thing to say maybe is a better way to put it or what you're thinking on that. I'm curious. I, yeah, I, I think,

I think it's the answer is it depends, right? You're not going to get the answer, but I mean, it, I think if everybody's being honest with themselves, there are certainly things we would change. If you've got to be honest with yourself,

there are certainly things you would change. But if you look at the totality of where you've come, and so I think this is, this is people thinking about it two different ways. I think on the micro level, you totally changed some stuff. I shouldn't have done that thing. I shouldn't have bought that car. I really spent way too much money at the casino or from the booze. But if you look at the macro level, I think most people, if you're in a decent place now, and that kind of depends, if you're in like, I'm in a decent place, I would say overall, would I change lots? Probably not. Would I tweak a few things? Oh, hell yeah. I think I can make my life a lot more simplistic.

So I think it's a little bit of both. I would change so many things. And that's why I always give a, you pulled out the, if you're honest with yourself card, how dare you? How dare you be honest with yourself? It's true. There's so much, if you're so insightful that you're like, I wouldn't change anything. I don't know anybody who's had a perfect run from beginning to end. I don't know anybody. And I think it's delusional to think that you have. And maybe you're just really overlooking some things at that point. But it's interesting to me.

It's sad that, like I said, I wish there was an owner's manual that people would be given, the stuff that we teach in schools, in the high schools, in junior high. There is one class that made a difference in my life in school. One single class. You know what the class is? Typing. Yeah. Yeah. Typing. When I graduated high school and we graduated up here in American Fork, Utah, and ironically and definitively, the mascot was the caveman. Most of my co-graduates couldn't read or write well or type. And my business partner that I grew up with, when we started our first business, 22, together, I would be able to do QWERTY typing and have our invoices done fairly quickly and write all our letters for business and stuff. And then he would sit and

spend all weekend henpecking out his invoices when it was his week turn. And typing was the most influential, most important class I took. And there was so much of it in junior high and high school that you could throw away. I should have been taught how credit is important, how to be a good parent, how to maybe psychology, how not to be a freaking mess of a human being. There's so many different things, life lessons, how to buy a home, all these different things that you're taught. Algebra 2 and trigonometry, there are people that's really important for that go on to math-based careers.

Good for them. But that's not for everyone. And thankfully, I did learn basic calculations. So there is that. But that's what calculators are made for. Five dollars will get you that. Just thankfully I did learn basic calculations. So there was that, but that's what calculators are made for. $5 will get you that. Just being a shit at this point. But no, this is really necessary. And maybe I'll give this book to my 21 year old nephew, who's, he's trying to figure out life right now. And he's actually struggling with, I think a lot of people are struggling at 21. I don't want to single him out, but I think

a lot of people that are young, you're at that age where you're trying to figure out life and you've got the society that goes, you got to be this way. And you've got your parents that taught you something and you're, and then you've got your own self that's trying to self-identify, self-actualize. I want to do this. And this person says it's bad. This person says it's good. It's really hard. And would you advise people to maybe sit down and write letters to their past selves and maybe reconcile? Yeah, you reconcile with yourself because at the end of the day, it's more about you than anybody else. And so who better to write that letter? It may not fix anything, but it may give you some insight into what caused it. Like you said, there's a

lot of glass, broken glass along the way. And when you do that, you may then identify the patterns, which ultimately what it comes down to, and then stop making some of those bad decisions. So it's a great exercise. I really enjoyed it. And I remember we were talking about the book and I said, if we don't sell a single copy, but we give a few away and it helps one person, that's great. But the real benefit came in writing the letters for ourselves and the community that we built. So that to us was the key. And ultimately selling a few extra books here and there is great. If we can help others, absolutely. I'd love to do it. But we learned a lot about ourselves.

I think we learned a lot more about our students, our kids. Justin and I have children. Nate does not have any children yet. And so I think, yeah, I would do it. I think it's a great exercise. And I've had several people suggest that we should come out with some short workbook that goes along with it for people who want to do these types of exercises to take through it or questions that we could have done. We tried to not make it academic. We tried to

make it somewhat entertaining and short. And the whole book from front to back is 138 pages. And that's if you include the acknowledgement, the how-to, and the references. So it's roughly under 100 pages. It's really short. It's a fast read. I had a cousin of mine who was visiting some relatives in Colombia because his wife is from Colombia and he read it. I think he read it in like under two hours, the whole thing. And that was the design, right? Because if somebody will not read it, then it doesn't matter how good the information is. And we could have gone deeper and we could have made the letters longer, but we didn't. We made our point and we got out.

Do you cover that on the podcast? I imagine like you guys could create a mastermind group where you sit down with people and you say, let's all write letters to each other or to ourselves. And I think just opening up that door and exploring the thing. And I've done that with my life. I had to because I wasn't a perfect kid. In fact, I think my book would be called Letters to Myself would be called You're a Moron. And you're going to be a moron for 50 years and I'll probably hit 60 and I'll still be writing. You were still a moron from 15 to 60. I've often wondered that I see these people on

social media. They're like, I wouldn't change a thing. And I'm like, Siri, not one turn, not one fork in the road of life. You wouldn't have changed. But imagine you do that on your podcast, maybe cover some of that. Yeah. So we started just recently. So we, we just been going through each of the chapters to get people interested in it, but we have bigger plans to try and go through this. And we've had suggestions about getting groups together and working through that kind of stuff. And yeah, we're definitely looking at stuff like that, but yeah, I mean, definitely, like I said, I would definitely change things. Definitely. And you'd have to be crazy not to.

How can you have lived 50 plus years and learned things and done things that were clearly wrong, ignorant, asinine, and go down the line? Are you describing my life right now? No, I'm describing my life. Actually, you are describing my life. Yeah. It's amazing that i haven't shown up on the darwin awards that's i'm surprised i'm alive too yeah yeah the darwin awards no until you have anybody that says that you can't have taken an honest look at it again in the

map yeah that's scary actually that's a little scary they didn't learn anything yeah but if you've learned and the more you learn the more ignorant you realize you are. That has been true to me. The Dunning-Kruger effect, I think. Is that part of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Yeah. I wrote this letter to my niece and nephew who were going into adulthood with their age. And I wrote them, and there was a number of things that I told them. And I tried to tell them everything that I wish someone would have told me when I was their age. And one of the key factors

was in it too. I told them there's the things that there's the things that you don't know, but the most important things that you really need to focus on is the things that you don't know. You don't know. Yes. Those are the things that are going to get you. Those are the things that you don't know you don't know. Yes. Those are the things that are going to get you. Those are the things you're going to watch out for in life. Those are the traps. Those are the things you're going to want. But the other thing I told them is be story collectors in life. I wish somebody would have told me that.

Be a story collector. And I ended up being one without realizing what I was doing, but I wish I would have been enriched with it more. And then the other thing I told them was to have an open mind, to seek knowledge, to seek information, to realize that what they don't know, they don't know. That's the most important part. And to realize that life is a journey. One of the hardest things I had in getting through life was people would tell me, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey. And I wanted to punch those people in the face for most of my younger years.

And I used to wonder why that used to make me so angry because I was very destination oriented. I'm like, we're going to have goals and we're going to get this done and we're going to be happy about it. And I had to realize that it's the juices, the journey is looking around at the journey. And that's what I told him, too. I said, take your time. Look around. See the sights. It's a beautiful arc and a beautiful journey.

It's a beautiful forks in the road you're going to go down. Take the time to look around because it goes fast. And one day you wake up and you're an old asshole, bitter old man like me. I would say you're're pretty wise old bitter asshole i'm wise bitter yeah no yeah i would agree with that that's the title of the next book yeah yeah no but i think that would be great advice right just the things you don't know you don't know the blind spots and wise and bitter the new book by chris voss um the wise and bitter old man of the sea i've even got like that whole sort of thing going on yeah it's like it'll be parallel to moby dick or

something i don't know this has been pretty insightful what else haven't we touched on in your book that we should tease out yeah so one of the things we talk about, there's a bunch of chapters, obviously, is we talk about hard work. And I think you can't underplay hard work, right? Like, you have an old colleague of mine who is at Yale. And a buddy of mine was in his lab as a postdoctoral fellow. And hard worker, brilliant man. They're both brilliant. They were having a conversation one day, and the mentor says to the mentee, he goes, yeah, hard work, but a washing machine works really hard, too. It was all about working smarter. And, yeah, but, yeah, hard work sets the foundation, right? Anything worthwhile in life requires a certain amount of effort, a certain amount of hard work. You cannot get around it. What drives me crazy, students come to me, they're like, give me a hack for studying. How do I get the information in my head? How can I remember it better? Give me a hack for getting in shape faster. Give me a hack. There's no hack, right? There's a process and every process requires

a lot of work. And the higher level you want to achieve, the more work you have to put in. And I have yet to find a person that I know that is successful in any domain, in any domain that has not worked their butt off. We had a Nobel laureate come to graduate school when I was there. And somebody asked him, how do you become a Nobel laureate come to graduate school when I was there and somebody asked him, how do you become a Nobel laureate? He says, for the next 20 years, work 16 to 18 hour days. And then you two have a shot at becoming a Nobel laureate. And I think that entrepreneurs can say that, business owners, athletes, right? So hard work is another key here. You can't get around it. I know nobody likes it. You got to work smarter. That is true. But hard work's the foundation. And if you don't start with the foundation,

it doesn't matter how smart you are. I know a lot of really bright people who are just lazy, and they don't get anywhere because they're lazy. Now, if they worked as hard as I did, they would be much more successful, but they don't. And they just don't know how and they don't want to because life has come very easy to them. And whenever they hit a barrier, they don't learn to become like water. And that's the other thing. When you hit a barrier, you need to learn to become like water. You cannot let something stop. You have to regroup and you got to figure that out. Hard work is one of those things. The other thing I think is contentment.

I talk about contentment, not happiness. And I know we can have this argument till the cows come home about contentment versus happiness. What I mean by contentment is you got to assess where you are and have be in this position of gratitude like appreciate what you have doesn't mean you can't strive for more but there's always some there's always someone that's got it worse you seem to forget that you always seem to forget that there's always someone that has it worse than you and if you just smell the roses for a little bit, then you're probably going to see that your life doesn't suck as much as you think it does. And that may then set the foundation for the next step in your life. And happiness, look, when happiness comes, hey, it's fantastic.

But it's a fleeting feeling. I spend most of my time very content as a person. And the Danes who are come up and the people in Nordic countries come up over and over again as the happiest people on the planet. But they're not really like happy, right? They go by something called genre's rules. And it's basically about contentment, right? Like, we're happy with what we have right now. And if we get more, that's great. But if we don't, it could always be worse. And so I have this short letter about contentment. And I learned that from my parents, because my parents were pretty happy people, I would say, but they were just content. They didn't have much. They worked really hard, blue collar immigrants,

both came to this country with not much, had to build everything, didn't have much of an education. And yet they seem like they're pretty content with what they had and what they were able to gain. And when they had more, that was great. And when they had less, they were fine with that, too. They were content. So that was a special chapter for me because I think we talk about happiness. I've heard it once said that everybody on the Internet has a great life, but nobody's happy. And I think that's true.

And I think that may be true, but people could be content, right? Yeah, that's a special chapter for me. That's really true. Gratitude is really important. During COVID, I learned to embrace gratitude. I have something called Gratitude is really important. During COVID, I learned to embrace gratitude. I have something called Gratitude Sunday. And every Sunday, it comes up on my schedule. And it's a good day to write and think and be grateful of everything that I have. And I'm still alive, just like we

talked about some of the adventures. But I think in today's world, it's even harder for people to be content or find gratitude because we live in this hyper social media. These young people grow up seeing some of these really rich people that were born into money or something, or maybe they've hit the lottery with their career, whether Elon Musk or maybe a rapper. And clearly they've earned their money with what they've done based upon their work, but not everyone can be i remember a line from fight club where a generation raised on the um raised on the expectations that we'd all become millionaires and be success gods and we're finding out very uh slowly that's not going to

happen we're very angry i'm paraphrasing a little bit rapid and i find it harder and harder with this delusional generation that lives in this Instagram world where between body image for young women, between all the different things that are going on, people are just so unhappy. And then living these fake lives where they're posting everything. One final question I was going to ask for you before we go. One thing that's interesting to me about what we talked about at the beginning of the show is fewer men going to college. What really is interesting about that is women with hyperbolic nature that built our society, they date up.

That's right. So if there's fewer men now going into college, those women that are going to college and getting degrees are going to want to date men that have college degrees or higher than them to build families with. This is really a concern for the future of our country, for the future of families, for the future of just our society. Like, I'm not even expecting to get my Social Security check at this point because it's

completely falling off. And you've got less marriages now. I lived in Vegas. When Vegas' county thing shut down the 24-hour marriage license because no one's getting married hardly anymore, there's still a lot. But it's diving. So is the birth rate diving. Yep.

I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what the future brings from that. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts you want to comment? Yeah, I think you're 100% right about the hypergamy. And I think that's part of what's driving people to be unhappy. I think if people really, and I'm a biologist, I'm a physiologist, right? So if you take a look at this from a biological perspective, males and females are different.

We have different roles, equal in terms of IQ, no difference, potential, no difference. But there are definitely things that we are inclined to do. And I think with more and more successful females, and to be fair, like if you took anybody from my generation and put them in this environment or two generations back and put them in this environment, the same thing would happen. So there's nothing unique about the people. There's just the situation is unique because the technology is moving so much faster than our paleolithic brains can keep up with. And men are hardwired. Testosterone makes effort feel good, right?

Doing hard things is hardwired into males, physical things and bonding. That's something we're not doing anymore. Females becoming more and more successful are putting themselves in a position where they're taking over some of the manly roles, which is fine. I have no problem with that, but they're putting themselves in a position to have to find the unicorn now. Because how many Elon Musks are there? There aren't that many of them. And so if 60% of the college students are females and they're getting higher and higher degrees, and only 40% are males, and of the people that are not going to college, 71% are males,

then you see a problem. If you have a hypergamous nature, and men aren't going to college, and they're not as manly as they used to be, for whatever reasons, it could be plastics, it could be because we're not doing physical things, it could be because we're not socializing with one another. It's probably more complicated than all of that. But at the end of the day, all of a sudden you set up, yeah, of course the birth rate is going to drop. Of course the females, the females are taking on roles and putting themselves in a position that my mother would never have been in. My mother was not stressed out. She was a housemaker. She was a seamstress. She was really happy. When it came

to household stuff, my mother was the boss, and my father knew that. So they had this agreement, but she had no intentions of going out and struggling the way he did, working 16-hour days and doing the kinds of stuff that he did. And I think because there was more clarity in the role, it made things easier and simpler for them. How we get out of this, I have no idea. But, like, we're setting ourselves up biologically for some pain. I think it's already starting to happen. Yeah. That's why I'm starting to learn my Mandarin and Chinese. No, it's both sexes I think are most unhappy now.

In fact, one of the things I'm dealing with in the dating market is this has been blown out with this new Tinder generation, this disposable relation generation. 90, 100% of the women are chasing the top 5% of men. They're just after the high-value men. And you can't change the eons of time. You can't sit down with people and go, no, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that. The eons of time, we're still cavemen and cavewomen when it comes down to it. Correct.

And we're fighting this narrative that says BS in our society about how we can just switch roles. I see a lot of masculine women who think that somehow those traits are attracted to masculine men. And you're like, no, if I want to date another masculine man, I'll be on Grindr. And I've had women say to me, you need to get over that. And I can't override genetics. You can't do it. So it's an interesting thing that have happened. It was interesting to see you talk about this, but maybe you can write your next book on where we're going on the trajectory of this. I'd be interested in that. Anyway, thank you, Paul, for being on the show. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs.

Sure. Sure. Again, you can find our book, Letters to Our Younger Selves, a combat manual for mindful living on Amazon, on Book Baby, on Barnes & Noble, on Facebook. We have a new podcast that starts to look deeper into some of these chapters and letters. And Justin and I are also going to be starting a sub-stack on optimizing physiology in the next six months to a year to talk more about physiology and how people can get healthier. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. I love to see self-help groups where you get people to write these letters themselves and

probably learn about themselves. I learned about myself writing my book. It's half a memoir this last year. What's the old adage? The teacher learns more sometimes than the students. So there you go. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure and go order the book Letters to Our Younger Selves, a combat manual for mindful living. You can order it up wherever fine bookstores are sold. Make sure you only go to the fine bookstores. Stay out of those alleyway bookstores because there's broken glass and sharp needles in them. So just go to the fine bookstores. You can find it on Amazon and other different places.

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