The Tim Ferriss Show - #77: What Do Google X, Medicine, and Great Relationships Have In Common?

Episode Date: May 20, 2015

Dr. Astro Teller is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who currently oversees Google[x], Google's moonshot factory. Dr. Danielle Teller is a physician specializing in intensive care and lung medicine; she has trained doctors and run research programs at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh. In this conversation — my first podcast with a couple — we cover a lot of my usual questions (favorite books, routines, philosophies of living, etc.) but focus on something I haven’t personally figured out: relationships. It's important to note that the Tellers are not “for” marriage but, rather, “for” the freedom to decide how to live most honestly and happily, whether as part of a couple or as a single person. Combining the rigor that has established them as leaders in their respective fields, Astro and Danielle walk me through how they think about relationships, and how they survive and thrive as two driven people.  All show notes and links can be found at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This podcast is sponsored by LSTN Headphones. LSTN Headphones are gorgeous headphones that I use. They're made of real exotic, reclaimed wood. Proceeds from each purchase help a hearing-impaired person hear for the first time through the Starkey Hearing Foundation. Here are some of the headphones I wear and travel with: LSTNHeadphones.com/Tim. On that page, use the code “TIM” to get $50 off orders of $99 or more! This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for the 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run and share your results!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello, homies and homettes. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where my job is to deconstruct world-class performers, to dig into the minds of people who are the best at what they do, to try to pull out the tactics, the routines, the habits, the favorite books, et cetera, coping strategies in some cases that you can implement right away. And that ranges from hedge fund managers to chess prodigies, to celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, to iconic music producers like Rick Rubin and everything in between. This particular episode was an experiment. And I think very appropriately an experiment because it includes two people, a couple, my first couple on the podcast.

The first person is Dr. Astro Teller. So Astro is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who currently oversees Google X, which is Google's moonshot factory. They basically try to do anything that seems completely absurd and world-changing, uh, like putting up balloons to give broadband to the entire planet, or who knows, teleportation, you name it. If it's crazy enough and big enough, chances are it falls under his purview. Then you have Dr. Danielle Teller, his wife, who is a physician specializing in intensive care and lung medicine. She has trained doctors and run research at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh, for instance. They are both very, very powerful minds. And our conversation is about many things,

but it focuses on something I personally have not figured out, which is relationships. And both Astro and Daniel know from personal experience that finding the right life partner doesn't always happen the first time around. And through their own respective divorces, they learned how widely held assumptions and misinformation about relationships, what they refer to as sacred cows, create all sorts of unnecessary suffering. Uh, so the, the approach here and the idea was to really dig in because these are two very driven people dig into the rigor that has established both of them as leaders in their respective fields to have them walk me through how they think about relationships.

How do you take two very type a personalities and have them survive and thrive in a relationship? That's something I have not figured out, but these two really seem to have figured out, uh, many different aspects. So we sat down to have some wine. And so thank you for putting up with all sorts of echoes and dramatic wine pouring acoustics. But I greatly enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. So please meet doctors Astro and Daniel Teller. Welcome to Tim Ferriss' dining table. This is clearly Tim Ferriss, and we have some incredible guests here. We've already warmed up with a bite to eat, some salmon as well as some wine. We've had some Malbec, of course, as you know, one of my favorites.

This is Trepice Terroir Series 2009, and we have a backup just in case we need that to facilitate the conversation so you don't hear a bunch of sighing and glugs of wine for an hour and a half or two hours. I don't think that'll be a problem. We have two very, very bright folks here. And what makes these folks so interesting is that they are a couple. This is the first time I've interviewed a couple. And on top of that, people who can talk about not just being top performers in their respective fields, but how to harmonize a family, how to operate with significant others,

uh, and with children. So I'm really looking forward to exploring this. And, uh, we have Danielle and Astro Teller. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having us. And I know it's very typical to sort of ask you to do the Dr. Eagle thing and explain your background, but there's a lot that can be found, I'm sure, on the web when people want to search and explore your respective expertise, but I do want to dig into a little bit of what both of you are up to, to provide some context for the conversations that we'll have and the topics we'll dig into. So maybe we could start with you, Danielle, and just chat a little bit about what you've been obsessed with or what has consumed you for the last year, year and a half, and maybe a snapshot of what you did before that? Sure. My current obsession is writing.

So writing was my childhood dream. I always wanted to write novels. I was a typical bookworm, loved to just immerse myself in books all day. And then I realized that it's a really, really hard way to make money. Yeah. And I got scared and decided to go to medical school instead. But for the last year, I have actually returned to my childhood dream and I'm writing a novel about Cinderella's stepmother, which has been a lot of fun.

Yeah. Why Cinderella's stepmother? I mostly, honestly, because I am a stepmother and I think a lot about being a stepmother. And the more I think about it, the more I think they get a really bad rap in fairy tales. They're always the bad guy. The mom's always dead. And if there's a villain, it's most often the stepmother. And I just wanted to sort of correct people's impression about stepmothers a little bit.

I feel like the stories are not being told from the stepmother's perspective. So this one is from her perspective. And what were you doing prior to starting this ride? Prior to that, I was working most recently in Boston at Harvard as a physician and researcher. So I did my teaching and my medical work in the intensive care unit. And I did my research in a basic science lab. I had a small lab that I ran there and we looked into the origins of chronic lung disease. That's what we were excited about. And, uh, the, so the chronic lung disease is interesting to me. Some people may know this

already, but I won't belabor the point, but I was born premature and had a lot of lung issues when I was born. And my left lung collapsed and had five full-body blood transfusions. And I still have a lot of thermoregulation problems that I think are related to my decreased respiratory volume. So I can't dissipate heat as well. But we can dig into that perhaps another time. Astro, what about yourself? Well, over the last year for my day job,

I've been spending time at Google X and trying to make the world a better place, having a good time doing it. And then Danielle and I have finished the book Sacred Cows. I got it out there and are starting to explore what we might write next together. How do you choose? How did the two of you and I asked her, of course, we've known each other for, for quite a few years now. And how do you, how do you decide what the next big project is or the next, you mean personally, or you mean at Google X either if you, and, and, uh, I mean, that tells me that you separate the two also. So, so what, how do you choose either of them or both of them? I don't think they are that separated. I think choosing anything to spend your time on,

or to have a group of people spend their time on is a confluence of events and opportunities. You know, at Google X, we focus more on, you know, is there a huge problem? Is there a radical new way to get at solving that problem? Is there some science or technology perspective from which we really think we could make progress in that radical solution? That's the confluence that we tend to look for there. But it really does mean that you can have two of those things. And if the third one doesn't connect, there's just nothing to be done. But in our case, you know, we were both going through divorces and then ended up marrying each other. And because we were going through our divorces at the same time, we spend

a lot of time as we were falling in love and preparing to get married, talking about our divorces. And that led to ultimately this book where we would never have planned to write a non-self-help book about the truth behind marriage and divorce. If we had been happily married and just met at a playground or on the street and said, hey, you want to write a book together? That's just not realistic. And I think a lot of the opportunities that come to us in life are these confluence of events that you can't plan on. You can only recognize when they happen. Now, does that mean this is, that's, that's, that is something that I often say when people ask me what my 10 year plan is. Do you have a 10 year plan? Because I feel very conflicted about preventing the serendipity of these confluence of factors by having a very long-term plan that I try to hold to. Is that what are you, what's your thinking on that? My long-term plan, I've had the same answer for that for kind of a while.

Again, I think this is both in my professional life and in my what's called pseudo-professional life, like writing books. I want to be working on really hard things that matter with really amazing people I can learn from. Yeah. And that has nothing to do with whether I'm getting paid to do it, whether it's because my coauthor in a book is my amazing wife, or if it's people who I work with at Google X or at some other place in the future. I won't do anything that doesn't have those characteristics. And I'll sign up for almost anything that has those characteristics. That's a good answer. How do the two of you, maybe danielle you chat you talk about this how do you attack problems differently or or do you maybe you have complementary skill sets

i'm just very curious when you have a challenge as uh as a couple or if you were just in a parallel universe sort of working together and trying to solve problems in front of you, whatever those might be. How do you, how do you, I think we're actually fairly similar in how we approach challenges in the, how we approach the future. We're quite different. I have Astro's a planner and I'm not, I read a column a long time ago by David Brooks, where he described, you know, everyone's got two kinds of people, but he described these two kinds of people. Either the planners who have got everything worked out for the next decade or two. And then there are the people who wander through life looking for the next open door.

And if it looks interesting, they go through it and they don't really worry about whether that's part of a 10 year plan or not. So he's the former. I'm the latter. So we're very different in terms of planning about the future, et cetera. But I think, I think when new challenges arise, we both tend to be very, um, logical people and that it's not that we're not passionate or emotional about things, but we both approach problems from a pretty intellectual perspective. And so because we approach them the same way, I think that helps us to talk through them and get as close as we can to a solution. I think that's true. I would color commentary on that. We have a joke, which is if we were World War II era British posters, she would be keep calm and carry on. And you know the Silicon Valley version of that, the one that's

all green and has a crown at the top, but if you look closely, it's made out of like wrenches and screwdrivers and stuff. Okay. And it says, get excited and make things. Ah, yes. That's me. And it's not, I think there's actually quite a bit of truth in that. My way of trying to get through adversity is to change things, is to put out effort. When things get really shitty, I don't like to sit around. I like to change something and I kind of just, uh, uh, churn up my gears if I can't. And Danielle is sort of the opposite that when things get really complicated, she can be much more Zen and patient and just get through it. Um, that doesn't chew up her gears. Ned. Uh, obviously listened to the TED Talk that you guys did together.

I've read through the book, and even though it is looking at relationships, not exclusively, certainly, but through the shared experience that you have, many shared certainly, but, uh, through the shared experience that you have, um, many shared experiences, but one of them being divorce, uh, I found that a lot of the, the thought experiments and questions in this were, were very fascinating. And, uh, we're going to delve into a lot of that. I, and I'm sure we'll jump around, but, but I'd love to start with the, the idea of a, uh, a soulmate and sort of the one that is, is meant for any given person. You know, there's that, that shining star. And, uh, I'd love for you guys to, to, to talk about your position on that.

And, uh, maybe as part of that, just elaborate. This is something I'm 37. Of course, I'm thinking about these as well. What were the non-negotiables for you both that allowed you and that are allowing you to have a happy union? Does that make sense? You can separate those two things. It does, but those are two totally different questions. Yeah, those are two totally different questions that I thought I would just make one very difficult, long question.

You want to answer the one true cow and I'll answer the second one? Sure. So the way we approach it in the book is as one approaches religion, which is to say, I might be a very strong believer in my religion and feel that at an emotional level, as well as an intellectual level, that what I believe is true and recognize that other people don't have that faith that they can't, they just don't believe it. They can't bring themselves to believe it, even if they wanted to believe it. I was a, an agnostic, I guess about true love. Well, I was an atheist about true love. I guess I, I really didn't believe that there was such a thing as true love. And I approached my life through that lens. Basically when we fell in love, it was as though the way I viewed everything in life changed. I just, I saw even the literature I'd read before poetry I'd read before. I felt like

all of a sudden I had this superior vision. I could tell which poets were really in love and which ones weren't. It's like having tasted something or experienced something for the first time. And then you sort of see it around you. And I don't know, it's, it's, you see something that wasn't there before. Right. It's like the sixth sense when they're like, Oh my God, they're doing it. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, so I think that what we say in the book is that we're believers and yet we recognize that not everyone is. And I don't know.

I mean, certainly we don't think that everybody's going to find their soulmate or that there's a soulmate for everybody or that there's even just one soulmate for, for people, but that there is a very important qualitative difference between different kinds of romantic love that not every romantic love is the same. And there are some types of love that just require that you be together. And Plato described it, you know, the original sort of platonic ideal of love was that humans were cut in half by Zeus and were forced to wander the world looking for their other half. And then once they found their other half, they just became bonded to that other half. And they could just lie down and stay together for forever. And if you ask them, what is it that you

want? What is it that you're looking for? They wouldn't be able to tell you what it was. And Plato says, it's not sex. It's not, you know, it's, they can't explain what it is because they have just found that, that thing. So, uh, Danielle got, uh, the poetic version. Let me give you the intellectual version. So I personally agree with her. So what I'm about to describe to you is what we say in the book on the same subject. I feel exactly the same that I was an atheist and I'm now religious in this sense about true love. in our society on the subject of marriage and divorce, one of the unfair narratives which society keeps and uses to bludgeon people as it chooses

is that true love exists before marriage. Yeah. If you're not married yet, then your only best, highest purpose in life is to find true love. And anything is worth it to find that thing. Including, up to and including, ditching somebody moments before you say the words, I do. Yeah, well, that was one of the thoughts I had. And yet, moments after you say the words, I do, true love does not exist. Because if you tell your family, if you not exist. Because if you tell your family,

if you tell your parents, if you tell your spouse, for sure, if you tell your children, moments after you get married, weeks, months, or years after you get married, that you have now fallen in love with somebody else, or that you think love is out there, but it's not with your current spouse, what will everyone tell you? They will absolutely positively tell you that what you have is as good as it's ever going to get. And that schizophrenia, that like we want to have it one way up to marriage, but then we all pretend that it's the opposite, that this thing doesn't exist after marriage. That's BS.

And that's hypocritical. And our society uses this to try to create fear and shame to force people into marriage, but then to try to keep them from leaving marriage. And though we're believers in true love, we're not advocates for true love or against true love. We're really advocating against hypocrisy that it can't be both. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, that's fair. Now. So I realized my question about the, uh, sort of the one true love might, might actually not be the right question. So before we, that, that's, that's sort of predicated on, I think, a narrative that a lot of people have, which is find the one true love, get married, have kids. And, uh, in my own personal life, looking at a lot of my, my friends, there are people who are happily married. And I, I do know some older,

uh, folks, usually men that I'm closest with who have been happily married for a long time. And I'm sure they have their ups and downs, but I've also seen the sort of the collateral damage or the, uh, the explosions of marriages all around me just with friends who are saying they're in the mid thirties or so. And so I'd love to ask both of you, what is your, what are the misconceptions when people think of the word marriage, what should they think of? How should they define it for themselves? What, what does it represent? And, uh, is it for everybody? I mean, is, is there, is, is it a, I, I, as I think a lot of people feel pressured to, to strive towards marriage, uh, and then the, the downstream effects of kids and whatnot. But when people are thinking of marriage and feeling that type of pressure,

as I do sometimes, quite frankly, what advice would you give them? I don't think there is a should. I think if we would advocate for anything, it's just having the space to make your own decision without a lot of social pressure. The social pressure doesn't help, and it's not aimed always in the right direction.

I think that there are a lot of different reasons to get married, and I'm not sure. I mean, we talk about true love in these highfalutin ways, like it's this really awesome thing, which it is, but not everyone finds that. And maybe if you don't believe in it, you're not going to experience it. Just like some alternative medical treatment, if you don't believe in it, you're not going to experience it. You know, just like some alternative medical treatment that you don't believe it, then you

don't experience it. Like maybe you need to be predisposed to it. Some people get married because they want to have a family and they like the person that they're with and it's not true love, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. I guess people just need to go into it with an open, with open eyes and, and realize what their motivation would wish that everyone could be happily married, but certainly marriage isn't for everybody because being unhappily married is not better than being single. I mean, it's sometimes lonely to be single. There, there are downsides to being single, but there are a lot of downsides to being unhappily married to. The other thing I would say is that marriage is not only something that you can enter into for different reasons, but one of the main challenges associated with marriage and divorce is that people don't necessarily go into them

with clear expectations that they share with themselves even, or let alone with their spouse. So one of the other sacred cows that we talk about is the holy cow. And we talk about the marriage contract as though it were almost like a business contract. And the concept of a contract is that you pre-negotiate friction. That's the entire point of a contract. It's not for the best case scenario. That's right. But when you look at the marriage contract that is the vows that people say in front of their friends and family,

it is the worst possible form of a contract. It has all of the pressure and seriousness of a big contract, but it is ultimately ambiguous. Because to say, I promise to love you for the rest of my life, since that's not something anyone can control how they will feel in the future, is to leave completely unspoken what actually you're promising. Now, so if you were to say, I promise to stay with you no matter how miserable I am, that's a concrete promise. Not a very romantic one, but it's a concrete promise. If you were to say, look, I hope that I love you for the

rest of my life. If I stop loving you, I'm going to work really hard to work it out with you and start loving you again. But if I can't, I'm going to leave and you should want me to leave. That's also concrete. But we don't, as we're entering into marriage, have a real conversation typically with our soon to be spouse about what it is we think we're getting into, what it is that they think they're getting into and whether or not it's the same. Because a lot of the hard feelings that happen at the end are really

generated by this ambiguity that's set up at the beginning. And I think our society makes it harder for people to really think about these things in a really rational way because of the pressures you're talking about. I think because society just puts a lot of pressure on people to get them to the altar, but also the way we've turned weddings into this fairytale event. I think it really places the emphasis on sort of the magic of love and love is wonderful, but we can't let our desire to have this wonderful romantic event make us blind to the fact that love isn't something that we control.

You know, that love is actually an emotion and it's not something that you can just, there's no switch inside your heart that you can just turn on that will make you love someone. Or if that love fades away, that can make you continue to feel the way that you used to feel. I mean, if there were match.com would be the most successful business in the world, right? You just pick someone who seemed like they fit certain criteria. You just reach in for your love switch, turn it on. You'd be like, Oh, I'm so in love with you. This is great. Right. But it doesn't work that way. And, and it doesn't work that way after you're married either. There's no magic threshold that you cross.

You're the same as the person that you dated for two years that you thought was really great for the first eight months. And then things got worse and worse. And you finally decided to go your separate ways. It's not really any different. If you happen to have gotten married before that eight month had elapsed you would be in the same position but society would see it very differently and would and would treat your feelings very differently so here's a question for you guys then if um you you both experienced divorce uh why did you choose to officially get married again because i mean of all the places that uh granted there Because I mean, of all the places that, uh,

granted there's still pressure, but of all the places that are somewhat forgiving, the Bay area is pretty forgiving. I mean, there's, there's something for everybody here. And, uh, maybe some other podcast I'll talk about the time I accidentally wandered into a polyamorous dinner party by myself. And then they all sat down to do self introductions. And I was like, I don't know. I was a big party. I'm not sure. Anyway, that's a separate time, but the point being this, that the Bay area, San Francisco is, is pretty forgiving. I think it's as, as far as those things go in the United States. So why did you guys choose to get officially married again? It had nothing to do with what society wanted. I wouldn't have felt whole until we'd been married.

I would have been fine not to get married for the rest of my life otherwise. So it's not about marriage per se, but it just would have been tragic to have found my other half and then not to have gotten to get married to her. That would have been just not sort of a formalizing that devotion. I mean, whatever. We didn't need the wedding to know that we have the feelings that we have,

but to not celebrate it, uh, just would have been a missed opportunity. I don't know. You know, when you're madly crazy about someone and you just want to do everything you can to bring yourself closer to that person, that it's a, it's just another level that brings you closer. It's not that we wouldn't have been happy living together without being married, but it's when you're, when you're that in love, you want to be bonded in every possible way.

And it's just another way. Yeah, no, no, I, I, I get it. I just, I had to ask, uh, the, uh, I want to come back to the, the one true cow for a second. Because I feel like there are many, many people, and I talk to a lot of friends, for instance, who have been with someone for a long time. They feel like if they were putting together a report card for that person, you know, they're like, they're doing really well. Like they're in the 90th plus percentile and they're like a 10 out of 10 on all these various important things. But then they're very, very low on a couple of other maybe critical factors, right? But they feel like this person is as close to the one true love that I've found. I'm X years of age. Let's pretend like the kids is not a factor at this point.

If I break up with them, I have to start from scratch. I just feel like that type of anxiety is very pervasive, uh, where there's a certain, uh, maybe sunk cost fallacy, um, that just, that, that goes along with being with someone for a long time. But if you were sort of advising a friend, what, what would you say to them? What questions would you have them ask themselves or, or how would you help them get through that? Because I think it's, it's easy for people in that situation to feel like they could roll the dice and go out and continue searching, but it's like having a revolver that they're playing Russian roulette with where there's, you know, a hundred chambers and 99 of them are loaded. Um, and there's that fear

factor. So that, so they don't leave. Right. Yeah. What did, what did you say? And this is a very difficult question, but I mean, it's not an uncommon situation. What, what might you say to someone like that? Yeah. I mean, it's really hard. I don't think that we are very good at giving advice in the situations because we know people who have chosen to get married for a number of different reasons. And there's more than one reason that works for people. So I guess, I guess my question to them would be what,

what is it that you want? Like, why do you want to get married? And if your answer is that you want someone to grow old with, that you want someone to have children with, that you really value the familial bond, it may not be that smart to just continue to wander the world and look for your other half

because you're not guaranteed to find your other half. And you might get to a place where you feel like, wow, now I'm too old to have kids. Now I don't have what I want. But I guess if what you want is this, if it's more about the passion, then I think you have to be extra careful about what you're getting into.

So we run this experiment, I'd say, at least two weekends a month. My brother is single, and my brother meets a lot of wonderful women, and he's just never found someone that he wants to marry. And he asks essentially exactly what you just asked. How old is he? He's just never found someone that he wants to marry. And he asks essentially exactly what you just asked. How old is he? He's 41 now. Yeah. Two years younger than me. And so he asks us this, and we say the same thing to him every time.

And there's a presumption buried in here. You make it sound very bright, but he's actually incredibly bright. He's incredibly bright. But it's stupid. This is a hard question. But what we tell him is, for God's sakes, if you don't have to be with them, don't be with them. Right. Not only don't get married, but probably don't even date them.

Like, move on. Yeah. Not only don't get married, but probably don't even date them, like move on. But hidden in that statement is an understanding that we have about him in particular, that we believe that he's wired the way we happen to be wired. That is that he has it in him to feel the thing that we feel. I think I believe he does. And that he will be unhappy. I believe he will and that he will be unhappy. I believe he will be unhappy if he settles, which as Danielle pointed out, that is not true for everybody.

That's not necessarily at the top of everybody's list, but because we believe it's at the top of his list, having something that is qualitatively better than anything he's experienced before. What we tell him is if you don't have to be with them, you probably have to not be with them. Right. And that's not a checklist.

When you get to the place where you have to be with someone, there's no like they're a nine out of 10 there. It's just, it's different. Yeah. What now of the marriages that you both have observed where the couples would honestly say they are happy, they're not putting on a show, they're not acting, what were the reasons they decided to get married. Right. So if the outcomes are highly dependent on sort of the reasons for getting married in the first place, what are the reasons that tend to have better outcomes than others? I think it's when the couple is aligned in their reasons. So I do know couples who have gotten married really to have children. I mean, it's not that they didn't love each other, but it was much more people it's, it's, it's accelerated or the decision is made for that.

Right. So they might not have ended up together except that having children was what they wanted and they love being parents and they love their families. They just love being part of a family. So I think that that can work. But you know, the one thing I, I feel this is just, you know, my opinion when I see people who are happily married. I remember one time sitting around the Thanksgiving table, uh, and my brother and his wife were there and he described looking at his wife, he'd been with her for 10 years, you know, married for five years or something like that. And he described looking at her and thinking, that's my girl.

And I just thought like that feeling that you have of like, I'm just, I'm so happy that I'm with that person. I'm just, I admire that person. I'm proud of this person. It's my spouse. I just love being with that person. That is one of the qualities I think that I see in the happiest marriages. Hmm.

What Astro, what are the, I think you and I have some similar DNA. Um, well, I mean, beyond, beyond the fact that a lot of humans have a lot of similar DNA, but the, uh, 90, like 90%, so that's, that's pretty close as well. I'm feeling really close to you right now. What are the, what are the most common mistakes that you've observed that sort of type a personality driven guys make when it comes to these big relationship decisions? I don't know if this is going to be a list of the things, you know, in proper order that are a problem, but I'll tell you a story. I like stories. I have a friend who had, um, become single and had moved to a new city and was just, he's a good looking guy. He's in his late 30s. And he was just having a hard time kind of getting back into the swing of being single.

And he went from that to discovering Tinder in this case. And once he got on Tinder, he went from almost not seeing anybody to exhausting himself with how many people that he was seeing. He described it almost like being able to just select the attributes that you wanted, like ordering a pizza, and then the girl would appear almost literally at his doorstep. And the thing that I thought was interesting about this was that he said after he had ordered a good 30 women who happened to fall into a particular category, they were blonde, they were six years younger than him, they'd all gone to Stanford, you know, technical, that he had this set of things that he was positive were his type.

And he said, now that I've been with like 30 of those women, I've discovered that's not my type. And I think that that's probably more typical than not. And he just discovered it a lot faster than many people do. But the types that we think we have come from the movies, come from who knows what our parents said to us we were supposed to be with from our own insecurities and hang-ups and those things aren't going to make us happy and so those can't actually be the checklists but if you don't use and i'm not picking on tinder but if you don't use tinder it could take you decades to find that out instead of months, right? Because it could take you several hundred experiences to really verify that it's not just her or her or her or him or him or him. It's

actually that you were misguided, that you had the wrong sense of where people would resonate with you. So a lot of type A people think that a type A person is who they have to be with. Danielle is a introvert. I'm an extrovert. And I don't know. I've never had a checklist, but I wouldn't have probably written introvert on some checklist of mine. But really loving somebody is about throwing the checklist out the window. And so thank goodness I wasn't like trying to satisfy some checklist because I'm not sure introvert would have like made the list for me.

But that doesn't make us incompatible. I would have had a bad list if I had been making a list. How did you first meet? We met in 2001 in Pittsburgh. I had just moved there and I had just gotten married. Oh, putting it together. All right. The Carnegie Mellon connection.

Right. Yeah. So I had just gotten married and my husband was still in Boston and I needed to find a place to live. And I was uncertain as to whether I'd be able to stay. My mentor had just moved from Yale where I had started my training. I still wasn't quite finished. And my mentor moved to University of Pittsburgh.

And so I either had to find myself a new science mentor and start all over with a different project or move to Pittsburgh. But as a Canadian, I didn't have a visa that was going to allow me to remain in the U.S. necessarily. And so I needed to find, I needed to get a waiver. So I needed to find a way to be able to stay. So, so I was looking for a rental. I couldn't buy it. And in Pittsburgh, the housing costs are so low that nobody rents except students. And so every place I looked at was just a smell of beer.

Very different from the Bay area. The floors were all crooked. And it was just, it was sort of, it was ridiculously hard to find a rental. And then I found, uh, on the web, a rental, this cute little house, this guy who was going to Stanford for sabbatical, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. And so I went to look at the house and it turned out it belonged to Sebastian Thrun, who is a good friend of Astro's. And so I walked in the house and I was like, I'll take the house. And he said, don't you want to know anything about it? Don't you want to know what the heating bill is or anything?

I was like, no, I'll take the house. I was so desperate for a place and it was a really nice place. So anyway, we hit it off. We had a fun conversation and he said, well, you know what? We're leaving to move to California. But why don't you guys come over for dinner the weekend before we leave? So my husband was backing down. We went to Sebastian's

for dinner and the only other guests were Astro and his then wife Zoe. And we just, we hit it off and our families became friends. So we were friends for a long time. So let me, this is, um, so many questions I want to ask you guys. And it's, it's been very sort of fascinating and, and, uh, comically tragic to watch my own monkey mind at work in the last, say five years, just as like more and more friends are getting married, more and more friends are having kids. Uh, you know, the, like, well, maybe someday I'll have grandkids kind of comments or maybe more people than they used to be. And, uh, the anxiety that's produced. And what I've realized is one of my big fears is, uh, and, and this is probably right. I mean, I think a lot of

it's addressed in sacred cows, but is I don't want to lose. I don't want to do a bad job. And so I don't, if I think I'm going to do a bad job, I don't sign up for the job. Does that make sense? What counts is losing for you? Is it a bad marriage or not or failing to get married? I'll tell you. So here's, here's a very granular concern. So when I was thinking, when I was listening to your story about your friend on Tinder and how he had the, you know, doing on 30 dates with, you know, whatever. I'm just like, you know, 28-year-old Stanford grad, technical woman. And he's like, I don't think they're my type. Part of me, and call me cynical, but you could read, you know, Sex at Dawn or just look at, you know, monkeys if you want.

And I was like, maybe he just got bored. Maybe he had exhausted, maybe he was looking for novelty after that point. And that's a fear that I have in so much as I've been very good at, uh, monogamy. I've never cheated on a girlfriend. And, um, but I find after a certain period of time, I kind of have to, I have to put a part of my, a lot, a part of my psyche into like a straight jacket to make it work. And, um, it affects my mood and behavior and everything else. And so I've, I've never had an issue up to say several years of dating someone, but I, I fear, my fear is that I marry someone and then X number of years

into it, who knows five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, whatever it might be. I cheat or that need, I could call it, call it a want, but I feel like it's very much hardwiring, uh, screws everything up. And it's like, we have kids and then the whole thing explodes. How do you encourage someone to think about that? Because I honestly, this is something I really struggle with because I don't want to be a bastard. I don't want to lie. I don't want to sign up for something that is a doomed mission from the start. How do you think about this stuff?

I'm so troubled by this. I don't even know where to start. It's a big question. Well, I mean, if you wanted to get married to me, I would hope that you would bring this up with me before we got married. Right. Are you proposing? I accept.

Right on! Mission accomplished. What about me? No, no. She's going to be wife number two. Oh, yeah. No, no. This is a very, like, you know, all my company mind kind of situation.

Wife number two. No. If I were your lady friend and we were considering getting married, I would, at the very least, want you to talk to me about this. Yeah. Now that might be a deal killer for me, but if this is something you're really worried about and you talk to me about it and then I say,

look, deal killer, you know, that's probably not the right person for you to marry. So there's some good self selection going on there. I can't promise, but I don't think we're the only ones who feel like this. Yeah.

If you're worried about that, wait till you don't feel like that anymore. Because I think we both feel that that's not an issue for us. Yeah. Not because we aren't sexual beings and have desires. And, you know, it's not like we don't crave novelty generally, but I don't think either of us has like a pressure to leave our marriage to seek out more novelty. And I think it's possible for many people. I bet possible for you to feel like that.

And maybe that's just part of your body telling you you're not ready to get married or you haven't found the right person to get married to. Yeah. Entire married to. Yeah. Entirely possible. Yeah. It's, it's, um,

it's, it's, uh, it seems to be a very perennial challenge for a lot of people. Um, not just men. I think just men just coming back to the societal framework within this operating,

it's just more accepted, I think, for men to talk about it or to lament it. But, um, let's shift gears just a little bit. So when, when you guys have a conflict, I'm very curious, is there, what have you guys found to be the most effective way of resolving conflict? Because I think a lot of the relationship problems that end relationships ultimately could probably not probably, but a lot of them could be averted if people just managed conflict better or set expectations in the way that you were talking about since, you know, me being wife number two and everything.

So how do you, how do you guys think of conflict resolution with a significant other? I want her to talk first because I don't want to get yelled at. I'm the boss. There's no conflict. There's no conflict. Or else, yeah, it's an iron fist. As soon as you see any sort of dissent, you smash it with an iron fist.

It works. It's working iron fist. As soon as you see any type of descent, you smash it with an iron fist. It works. It's working really well. No, I mean, I don't think that there's, there are a lot of books written about this. So I don't think anything that I could say would be novel. I'm not looking for novel, I'm just looking for reflective. I think if you have basic respect and love for the other person, then you're not going to allow your conflict to escalate to the point where you're hurting the other person's feelings. So you're not going to be, I mean, if you read a book about how to keep your marriage together or how to not have such bad conflict, they'll tell you things like be respectful. Don't call each other names.

You know, that's sort of the basis. These are things we learned in kindergarten. Um, and, and when you're in a relationship, that's a loving relationship. I think that you often don't do those things because causing pain to the other person causes you pain yourself. Um, I think that we try to be as rational as we can. I think that helps both of us, but that's just a style thing. There are people for whom that doesn't work. You know, just like everyone has different coping mechanisms. Like Freud had all these different, you know, mechanisms for how people cope with various psychological disturbances. We have our, like our, our ways to intellectualize everything, but that just, that works for us. That's not for every couple, but, but I think

that's good. And then I think the other thing is we agree to disagree about some stuff. We don't always come to a place where we're both like, yep, I totally get your perspective. I totally agree with you, but we can respect the fact that we don't always completely share the other person's opinion. And then that's okay. I would say I agree.

I know how ridiculous this sounds, but I think that the conflict resolution in a way that works the best for us is going to sleep. Just, it's so frustrating. But whenever we have conflict, if we allow ourselves to sit up and talk about it for four hours, typically the conflict really doesn't go away. No. But it doesn't matter if we talk about it for four minutes or four hours, the conflict, if anything, will get worse, typically.

Yeah, that's my experience. But if we go to sleep the next morning, we're like lovebirds again and we can't even reconstruct why we're like... See, this is really... But we've gotten good at it, so now we will just say...

Sometimes it's hard, but we are much better than we used to be at just saying, why don't we go to sleep? We'll talk about it tomorrow. And we both understand that that means like we're being ridiculous. It doesn't feel ridiculous, but we also understand intellectually that we're going to feel different the next morning. And then we run the experiment and sure enough, the next morning, we don't want to fight about it anymore. No, I like this advice because it's simple, but it's also, it runs counter to what you are told a lot in relationship advice books, which is never go to bed angry. You have to resolve it before you go to sleep.

In my experience, it's yours. It's like, all right, the only thing that was just accomplished is we took something that was nonsense and two humans being stupid from four minutes to four hours. And now we're just not going to get any sleep and we're going to be bitchy and grumpy tomorrow. Like not much point to that. Okay. Um, what other,

what other, uh, rituals or routines or, uh, habits do you guys have that you think help the relationship or help the family? We have a lot of rituals in our relationship and those have just grown and multiply. We joke that eventually our whole day is just going to

be a 24 hour ritual because we've built all these rituals into our lives, but the rituals are really wonderful and they help to preserve our sanity when things are crazy. I mean, we have four kids, we've each got two, so it's a, it's, there's a lot of chaos sometimes, but having our rituals where, you know, after work, as long as the sun is still up, we have, we carve out a period of time, even when the kids are there to go and sit in the Papa sun in our backyard. And we have our special drink. You say the Papa song? Yeah. What is it? I'm putting a hyphen in there. Like what style? What's a papasan? It's a chair, a bamboo frame with a big cushion in it.

Oh, sounds great. Yeah. Okay. It's comfy. So we'll do that. And then we have a morning routine. This is where we have our monogamy. This is where you have your monogamy, which is a nickname for?

Explain the drink. I love this. It is a rosemary martini. How does one make a rosemary martini? So it's not a secret. We're, uh, we only drink it when we're together, but we're very happy to push it on other people though. Typically other people don't enjoy it, but one of the jokes about it being monogamous, it seems like we're the only two people who actually like it. But the recipe, the recipe is three parts, ros-infused vodka, two parts vanilla-infused cognac, and one part lemon juice. And there's some sweetness from the vanilla, and then there's the tartness from the lemon juice, and the aromatic sort of pungentness of the rosemary and the vodka.

And it's really wonderful. I'll have to try that. And so by infusing, really, I mean, you're just taking like a sprig of rosemary and dropping it in the bottle. Well, we take about 20 sprigs, drop it in the bottle, and leave it there for 24 hours. Okay. So it's really rosemary-ed. So I like this. I like this.

So that's one ritual. And then we have a morning ritual where Astro always wakes up earlier than I do. And he goes and makes coffee and then he waits till he thinks I'm waking up and he brings the coffee to bed. That's, that's us sitting in the Papa sign and drinking. Oh man, that's a great ritual. So, so in the morning morning, he wakes up earlier. And when he thinks that you're not going to throw a book at him.

Right. I would not throw books. I'd worship books. Worse. Like me, but the book. Ninja stars. Yeah. I care more about the books.

Molotov cocktails. Right. So he'll come and he'll wake you up. Yeah. And then we have our time in bed where we just snuggle and drink our coffee. And that's also sort of sacrosanct time. And the kids are up and they're doing their thing, but we just, we carve out that time so that we're in our little bubble and we start our day out just by being just the two of us and having this calm moment. And this is, now this is before the kids

get up? No, they're up and getting themselves ready. I mean, they're older now. They were 13, 12, 11, and 10. They're old enough to... Yeah, they're not banshees necessarily. No, and they don't need us to do everything for them. They're self-organizing banshees. When the kids were younger, in both cases,

I'd be interested to hear... We were chatting before we started recording about this when the kids were younger in both cases, I'd be interested to hear, uh, so we were chatting before we started recording about, uh, this, this article that was written some time ago by, I'm blanking on the author's name. Uh, what was that?

I wallet. I think so. Yeah. About how she loved her husband. Excuse me. She, and I'm paraphrasing here, but prioritized her husband over her kids or, oriding with the spouse over the kids

or the kids over the spouse. I think that like you said, Astro earlier about, uh, expectations being clear. I was very fascinated when I was in college, took a year off of college for a whole lot of reasons. We can talk about another time. Uh, I was on the extended plan and I lived with this fascinating Mormon guy who is very high up at Unilever. And he said that part of the reason he felt his family had a very low degree of conflict is that he, his wife was always prioritized over his kids, so they couldn't be divided. And so it made conflict resolution much easier. And I'm not saying that's the answer, but it was, it was thought provoking enough to a college kid. It really wasn't thinking about marriage at all to stick with me. So I'm curious, uh, so how you

think about managing the spouse or significant other relationship with the kid relationship? I don't think it has to be about love. I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with loving your husband more than your kids or loving your kids more than your husband. I mean, I wouldn't cast judgment on anyone for how they love. I think love is just what it is. It happens. It's not something we control, but, but I think that being a team is absolutely necessary. And I think this is the message that we always try to give to the kids, which is that we're, we're on the same team and they're on the same team. And that may seem like we're setting things up to be a little war at home,

but it, but I think it works because they, they band together more and they don't try to divide and conquer with us because they know that we will refuse to allow them to divide us. Oh, totally. We're playing two men down as it is. If we allowed

any opportunity, you know, we're like, you know, fighting back to back like Batman and Robin. If they could separate us and like take one of us down and then come get the other one, we'd never survive. What is, what is some of the worst advice that you think people are routinely given about

relationships? And that could be marriage, but just I'll keep it broad. Just about significant other type relationships. Well, here's one of the ones that bothers me a lot. We refer to it as the defective cow in the book, which is there's a strong social narrative. It's one of these other boogeymen in our society

that if you are married and you are in an unhappy marriage and you're getting anywhere close to thinking of leaving, you're not just a bad person. I'll get back to how bad a person you are in a minute. But you're also a broken person. You are a defective person because you got married to them. So obviously, because I mean, it would be even worse if you were a liar. You at some point loved them, so you lost your way. So you were whole, now you're broken, and it is your job to mend yourself. And we'll know that you're mended, we'll know that you're no longer a broken human being

when you love your spouse again. And this narrative is incredibly strong in our society and confuses people very badly because not for all of them, but for some of them, the answer might be, actually, I'm not broken. I'm just not in love with my spouse anymore. But if you don't allow that to be one of the possible explanations for why you're having a hard time in your marriage, if the only possible explanation is that you're a broken human being, people spend a lot of time being very unhappy at themselves and trying completely futilely to fix themselves when

the problem is in fact not that they're a bad person, that they're not trying hard enough, all the things that they go to their therapist and say. I think it's not just love. Love is that it encompasses desire as well. Because this is probably even more common with sexual desire than it is with love. Cause I think a lot of people still really do love their spouses, but are not sexually attracted to them. And this idea of focusing on like, what is wrong with you,

that you lack any sort of libido is, I mean, some people do have medical reasons or psychological reasons for why they may have an abnormal desire for sex. But we don't, as a society, spend enough time talking about the fact that sometimes it's about the relationship. You know, it might be that if you were with a different person and maybe it's a novelty thing, as you were talking about before, there are other issues. But we're so afraid as a society of coming close to that because that is threatening. Because that might mean that, well, we can't be married anymore. If, you know, if the problem is not you, if it's not your libido, that's got to be fixed. It must be that our relationship has, isn't working. And maybe one of the solutions is you need to be with someone else and that, and that's not something we want

to talk about, but I think it does cause a lot of pain and confusion for people that we're, we're not willing to at least bring that up. Like if that may not be the cause, but the fact that we never bring that up as a potential cause. And I think it's a lot more common because then we let on is it's, I think it's hurting people. Yeah. Uh, do you, do either of you know any, uh, long-term single people who, uh, older than 40, you would consider to be genuinely happy. Yeah. Okay.

Tell me about them. Um, because here's, I'll give you, I'll give you, I'll give you the time out so you can think for a second because part of me is like, you know, yes, he just got married, but like George Clooney had a pretty good run of things. And it's like, I wonder if there is, especially as a male, I just,

I felt so much pressure from different corners, uh, in the last few years related to marriage. And I'm like, is it really so bad? Like, I'm pretty happy guy. Uh, I would love to be with the, the, you know, the true love of my life, of course. Uh, but if there's any degree of doubt, it doesn't see it's, I don't want to rule that out as a completely non-viable path, at least for a period of time. Uh, and, uh, so I'm, I'm just very curious to know because now the feedback that I would get, which is very much kind of this conversation in the book and elsewhere about societal pressure will be like, well, like, that's great. You can focus on yourself and do this, this, and this, but like, that's not true happiness. And it's just like, well, maybe, maybe, uh, but you know, maybe you're taking a bunch of baggage

and like anger and stuff that you haven't been throwing it on me. Uh, so yeah. So I'd be curious to hear of sort of any single people, male or female who you think are genuinely happy and why you think that's the case. And it doesn't have to necessarily do with their singlehood. Um, but you mean specifically single people? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that we've lived long enough now to have seen a lot of our friends go through various states of singleness, marriedness, divorcedness, remarriedness, you know, the,

we've seen people cycle through these things. And I think people are in a way their own best control because you, people probably have different happiness set points. You know, some people are probably just more predisposed to being happy than other people are. And I think what I've gathered just anecdotally from watching friends go through various types of relationships and singlehood is that they're, they're kind of, there are times when they're very happy as married people or as a couple and times where they're very happy as single people and times where they're very

unhappy in both situations. And I don't think that their overall happiness correlates very well with their marital status. I think if you sort of graphed it, there wouldn't be like a super good correlation to how happy they were. You know, when they first got married, there was a lot of happiness and then there were some very dark moments.

And then, you know, after they split up, they were happy again. They're just, they, they go through happiness and sadness at kind of the same rate as happy as single or as married people.

And the people I know who have remained single their whole lives who are now in their forties and fifties, I think that they, the reason that they're, so the people that who seem unhappy are the people who are obsessed with why aren't I married? You know, I should be married. Society is telling me I should be married. Should I have had children? You know, can I still have children? What's wrong with me?

But the people I know who just have a very strong inner sense of this is how I'm meant to be, you know, I tried being part of a couple. It really isn't my thing. I just like, I, it just doesn't really work for me. They seem as happy to me. I mean, you never know how happy any other person really is, but they certainly seem as happy to me as I mean, you never know how happy any other person really is, but they certainly seem as happy to me as any married people I know. Yeah. I would also say that I think one of the things that does correlate with happiness, this is well known to be part of what

tends to cause happiness in people is a sense of gratitude, a sense of connection to other people and a sense of caring for spending time on thinking about people other than yourself. Now, having a family happens to drive all of those things. And so there can be sort of happiness benefits of a kind. There's lots of stressors also, but happiness benefits to being part of a family. But that doesn't mean that you can't get all of those same benefits as a single person, right? And I know, for example, entrepreneurs who treat their companies like their families, and they really care a lot about their companies and about the people in the company. They care about it more than they care about themselves, and not just because they're trying to win or make a lot of money, but because they're very purpose-driven and they're very community-oriented. And this

is the community that they've created and they care for. And so I've seen people who are single have all of the same benefits that you get from having the benefits of having a family. So I think it's a sort of false sense that you have to be selfish or an egomaniac if you stay single. I don't think that's a necessary outcome. So much food for thought. These are big, big subjects. I mean, there are very few things that really, really, really stress me out these days. And it's like this relationship stuff is one of them because I think there's, there's so much subjectivity involved. And I

like to be able to kind of like slice it and dice it and put it on a plate of glass and be like, okay, here's what we have. Great. Okay. All right. Fantastic. Whatever our assumptions. Okay. And here are like three or four things we can test and great, which is where like Tinder is, is, is potentially valuable where you can spend like three weeks figuring out like, Oh, maybe this isn't my type as opposed to three years or three decades. Uh, what, uh, uh, what are the, uh, our little things that both of you do independently to, uh, help happiness or wellbeing. So not, not a routine with the other person, but things that you guys do separately or individually that sort of help you maintain an even keeled sense of wellbeing. Well, exercise, I think that's a pretty,

not a very interesting answer, but. No, no. I like the real answers, not that. Well, exercise is the answer, but we do a lot of exercise together. So it happens to be that if you separated us for a year, we would both keep exercising. Yeah. It is also the case that whenever we can, we exercise together and it's one of our favorite things to do. It's one of our rituals.

And that's running or what other types of running, running primarily. Yeah. Do you talk or do you just run? We usually talk. Sometimes we just run, but I have always felt like exercise is the, the cure for everything. Like, no, I agree. My favorite form of our talking when we run is she listens to more podcasts than I have time to listen to. And she'll, she'll narrate podcasts like, like this one. She'll hear something that she really loves.

And then in an hour long jog, she will narrate, I think often better than the podcast itself, which sometimes she later plays for me. Almost like thought for thought, everything in the podcast. It's a particularly fun way for us to spend our time. You could just listen to the radio or listen to the podcast. No, it's way better.

Now, what are your go-to podcasts? You mentioned Serial? I'm an NPR junkie. NPR? Yeah. So I listen to all the NPR ones. Okay. Have you sort of wandered out into the odder neighborhoods outside of public radio or not yet? Not much. I probably should do more of that, but there are just so many. There are so many podcasts and I can't listen to as many as I like. There are so many.

I've recommended it before, but I'll recommend it again. Check out Hardcore History. Okay. It's so amazing. Yeah. Maybe it before, but I'll recommend it again. Check out Hardcore History. Okay. It's so amazing. Yeah. Maybe one episode every two to three months. And it's phenomenal. Check out Wrath of the Khans.

It's a multi-part series on Genghis Khan, as he says. Genghis. So let me ask a uh, very different questions. They're not necessarily relationship related, but they're, they're questions that I know the listeners enjoy hearing answers to, and I enjoy hearing answers too. So, uh, the first one might sound odd, but it's, it's related to a purchasing behavior. So what is the most impactful $100 or less that you've spent recently? And it could be on anything.

But curious, and it could be something free for that matter. But what have you spent $100 or less on in the last six months year that has disproportionately positively impacted your life? That's a really hard question. We can plant that seed and come back to it. I'm going to tell you the first thing I thought of. It's not something we spent money on, but as many people do, we pile up stuff that we don't need anymore. And we took a big pile of it to Goodwill today. And we were saying how wonderful the Goodwill sort of jujitsu is that many people don't understand that it's not just that they happen to sell the stuff that they sell cheaply, but they have this balance just right where they take the stuff that they get for free and they market up a non-trivial amount, but still a lot less than the people who go to Goodwill would otherwise pay for that stuff.

It has no value to us. We would otherwise have thrown it away. So it's sort of something for nothing. But then they take the profit they make from that, and they have other philanthropic enterprises. They use up all of that profit doing other things. And I don't know. So that was the first thing I thought of. That's the opposite of spending $100,000, because we were saying how great it is that we give away something that has no value anymore for us, and they derive so much value from it. Right. I know. Because we were saying how great it is that we give away something that has no value anymore for us, and they derive so much value from it.

Right. I know. It was just the first thing I thought of was drop it. It's not just that it feels good to donate something. It's that I particularly love the idea of a well-crafted business model. And there are many NGOs that are just highly non-efficient with the money that they get to put it diplomatically. And Goodwill is not one of them. Goodwill has actually got the sort of flywheel going in a really positive way where everybody goes home happier. Yeah. And it's just like the world should be more like that.

So, Oh, you know what has made a big difference actually? So this is not to plug Google because that's what works for Google, but that's okay. Google play. Yeah. Getting that a family account for Google play has really changed everything

because we used to have to listen to the radio and the car cause the kids all want to listen to pop music and they would switch from one station to another. And we'd have to listen to this to listen to the radio in the car because the kids all want to listen to pop music. And they would switch from one station to another. And we'd have to listen to this horrible advertising on the radio. And then at home, they would play it on YouTube. So then they'd all be hunched around the computer. And then they'd end up watching videos. And it would just be all sort of choppy watching what they wanted. And so we finally got them their all-you-can-eat buffet of Google Play.

And now they can, for a flat fee every month, get as much music as they want. And it has made our car rides much nicer. And then because for whatever it is, like $7.99 a month, they can make their playlists as long as they want. Instead of listening to the 10 popular songs, they've made playlists that are several hundred songs long. They left today.lists that are several hundred songs long. They left today. And we kept their playlist on.

And we kept their playlist on because at least it's not repeating for 20 minutes. We saw we heard 20 minutes ago. And they're not asking us to buy music for them. That's right. That was a good use of money. Very cool. I like that.

Oh, yeah. So a side note, very closely related. It's taken me years To upgrade to Pandora Pro, which is like $3 a month or whatever, to get rid of the Horrible ads And now you wonder why

Yeah, and you're just like, why Did it take me so long to do this? And what's really funny Is I set up My Pandora account initially when I was On Long Island, so all of the ads are targeted locally to Long Island. So it's like, Hey, come on down to Cormac Ford and minivans. We'll show it to you. It'll be great. Yeah. And like all of these ads and they're so bad. So finally I was like, all right, I'm going to sit down for five minutes and like fix this

problem once for all. It's like, yeah, $3 a month or whatever the hell it was that's three dollars right so well spent oh my god uh so it'd be like you know pretending to dance pango with my girlfriend or something we'd be like on this like romantic moment and then it'd be like yeah this is jimmy jones from madagascar back in uh again. It's like, Oh Jesus. Really? Like Saturday night, there goes the magic. Uh, so, uh, books. I want to talk about books for a second and documentaries. Uh, and there, there, there are two options. The first is favorite book. If there's one that immediately comes to mind that usually people don't know, and they kind of just pick one randomly out of memory or most gifted book, the book you've gifted to the most people. Uh, start with books, Astro or Daniel.

I'm not even going to try to go for favorite book, too many books, but I will tell you the sort of recent books. Okay. Most recent gifted book from our family is What If? This is the XKCD. Amazing book. The kids are obsessed with this. They can quote it from memory. They've learned probably more science from the What If book than they have

from their science class in the last two years. We've given out quite a few copies. We just finished reading. We read in bed together a non-trivial percentage of the evenings. Like, that's just what we do. No, you read silently. No, no, no, no. We read to each other.

I mean, at least lately, I've been the one who was reading. So I just finished reading a Ready Player One. Oh, you know, I just bought that audiobook. I haven't. It's so much fun. And now we're in the doldrums because it was so fun that we're like pouting because nothing's going to be as good. Do you know that feeling after you read it? I do.

I have a suggestion. Yeah. Do you have any interest in fantasy? Yeah. No, no, no. Yes. No, no. Yes.

Yes. The Name of the Wind by Patrickrick rothfuss all right well i've yet to suggest it to anyone who hasn't enjoyed it all right uh now the other option uh that also has a really good track record so far as far as people have recommended to is the graveyard book by neil gaiman it's about a young boy who's raised in a graveyard. Really, really stellar. I think the audiobook is partially what drew me in,

just because Neil Gaiman is such an incredible narrator. Okay, so what if? Isn't the Graveyard Book a recreation of another famous book? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. It might be. What about you, my love? Uh, well, I would say the, the one book that I probably tried to push on the most people and it really didn't take, so I stopped pushing it on people

was Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. I just fell in love with that novel. Oscar and Lucinda. Yeah. When I was, uh, this was a long time ago. I just really, really loved that book. What did you like about it? It was just so lyrical. Every single chapter is like a little jewel. He has the most amazing way of bringing to life a scene with not just beautiful language, but incredible imagery like a,

a coat rack with hats and coats on it, looking like it's covered with crows. Like you have this image of these birds who are going to take flight. This one of a bird diving into the water, piercing the membrane between dreams and reality. And he just has these wonderful turns of phrases. Or this woman who, there are parts that are really funny too. It's not just all lyrical but this uh the lucinda character in the book gets really angry and yells at someone and then the she realizes that she's

created a scandal and this is going to create a problem and there's this great image of her saying that as her anger cooled it was like an athlete who had torn a muscle in the middle of a race or a game and then as the anger went away then she could feel the pain you know the pain set in it's such a common feeling right where you do something in a moment of anger but this comparing it to this this athlete who's just feeling the pain for the first time anyway i love that and the other one i love is the hours for a very similar reason the hours byours. By Michael Cunningham, yeah. Now, why did the first one not take? So you're trying to push it, but it didn't take.

I think because it doesn't have, it's not very plot driven. It's kind of long and it's really about the moments and about the writing. And the plot is very slow to get going until you get halfway through the book. You're really not sure where the book is going. And then it's a romance, but it's not a very uplifting. See, this is why we And then it's a romance, but it's not a very uplifting. This is why we're each other's other half. My favorite books have the exact same problem and I push them on people and nobody likes them either. It's the Gorman guest trilogy by Mervyn Peake. What was the name of the Gorman guest? Gorman guest. Gormenghast. How do you spell that? G-O-R-G-E-M-G-H-A-S-T.

Gormenghast. It's the name of a castle. It's this castle. It's like a fantasy story, but there's no magic or witches or elves or anything. It's just this castle that's set in this very abstract place. And it's just the political life in the castle. So it's like Downtown Abbey in a castle? It's more abstract than that.

It's like a cartoon version, but a very gorgeous cartoon. But it's written by an artist and a poet who had, until he wrote the first book, never written a novel. And it reads like that. They are word paintings. Right. And so many people read them and just are like, I can't keep going.

But I just... I have another book recommendation for you. It's called Motherless Brooklyn. It's about a... It's by Jonathan Lethem. It's a fantastic, hilarious novel about a detective with Tourette's Syndrome syndrome and it's based in Brooklyn

and uh it it fully embraces all of the cliches of the detective genre it's I love it it was recommended to me by two staunch critics who seldom recommend books my mother and my brother and I can count on one hand the number of books that have been recommended to me by both of those people. So motherless Brooklyn might also be a fun one. Um, when, uh,

I'll, I'll, I'll, uh, ask each of you separately. So Astrid, when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind?

Uh, the first person who came to my mind was elon musk i don't know that i would yeah i mean obviously he's a successful person but there's so many different kinds of success uh no let's dig into that yeah that's that's worth exploring i think i admire the fact that he has single-handedly done what most other people need a large crew to help do. He has started a series of really successful things, and he's highly involved. And I admire that sort of boundless ambition combined with the seriousness about digging in and doing what it takes to get it done. And he's quite purpose-driven, which I happen to like also.

If you had to put half of your net worth into SpaceX or Tesla, which one would you choose and why? This is dramatic wine pouring. That's the sound of Astro's money going down the drain. No, I'm going to say SpaceX. Okay. I think Tesla will be a more financially successful business, but it would be hard to get as excited about that. It is just inherently more audacious, more in the spirit that moves me to dream about going to Mars, which is what fundamentally drives Elon and especially about SpaceX. It's just the ethos

of that adventure is worth more to me than the dollars that would be created by better electric cars. That's not a knock on Tesla, but that's my knee-jerk reaction. Yeah, okay, cool.

What about you? I think I'm going to take a. What about you? I don't, I think I'm going to take a pass on that one. I don't really have, I like that. I like that. Like leaps to mind. No, no.

I mean, not that there are just so many successful people and I, I, I don't know. I feel like I, it's the benefit of going second or the curse of going second. Well, I had all this time to think of it.

And I was thinking, I was thinking like, who could I, but there are just so many people. I just, I don't know. We didn't know where to start. If you could choose anyone throughout history to ask a hundred questions, I'm not going to ask you to give the questions, but who would you, who would you choose?

Ask a hundred questions. About anything. About anything. Life, career, otherwise. Preferably a factually verifiable figure. Right. I think I'd be most interested in, uh, talking to one of the Greek philosophers.

Cause I feel like we have a lot of documentation about what they thought in a fair amount about how they lived, but it's not a complete picture. Yeah. And, um, obviously they spent a lot of their lives thinking very deeply about things, but I would like to get their sort of take on the questions that I would, I would want to ask them. Any particular philosophers?

Probably. I mean, Plato is, I think, the most interesting. Interesting cat. They're all such fascinating, conflicted characters. Just like modern human beings. Imagine that. If you had to point to ways in which your medical or scientific training has helped your, your relationships with family or significant others. Is there anything that you could point to? Yeah, I think there are a lot of

things to point to. Um, probably the most significant is that being in medicine, you deal with people from all walks of life, from all cultures, all parts of the world. And working in an intensive care unit, you're working with families and patients who are in some of the most dire straits that they've ever been in. to not just pay lip service to seeing things from the perspective of other people, but actually having to really try to understand where they're coming from and how to connect with them. It's really important in those times to connect when you're trying to talk about decisions surrounding life and death, you really need to have a strong connection. And I think that opens your mind so much to realizing how differently different people feel about the world and think about the world. And it puts you in the mindset of having to adapt yourself to their way of thinking. And so I feel like that

has been very valuable that I don't sort of have a knee jerk reaction to whether a perspective someone has is right or wrong, but I've been trained over the years to not see it in black and white terms, but just see it as, you know, people are different. And so it's, it's sort of pragmatically trained you to have, uh, an immediate degree of empathy that you wouldn't have otherwise? Empathy, but also just not to shut my mind to what they're trying to say because they, they might have, you know,

I might be speaking with someone, I'm not religious. I might be speaking to someone who's very religious and I need to try to see the world from their perspective. And when you're talking to a teenager, you, you need to imply, you know,

employ these sorts of skills and see that they may have a radically different way of seeing the world than you have of seeing the world. Yeah. What type of medicine were you involved with in the ICU? which is the unit for everyone who's severely sick enough to either be on machines to support them or are going to soon potentially need to be on machines to support them who don't have a surgical issue. So the people who have had surgery, they go to the surgical intensive care unit. And then there's also a separate cardiac intensive care unit. So if you have a heart attack, you go somewhere else. So we kind of get like we're the grab bag of everything else.

And those are chronic sort of progressive diseases. Acute. Well, no, I mean, we see them when they're in their acute phase and hopefully get them better and send them on their way. Okay. Oftentimes they don't get better. And this is the real sort of last. So you're having a lot of sort of what if conversations with a lot of, yeah, you have a lot of, a lot of conversations about

the end of life because that's a lot of these people were at the ends of their lives. Do any of those conversations in particular stand out to you just that have kind of stuck in your mind? Well, I think, um, yeah, a few of them do. I think one of the ones that's pertinent to seeing people, a different perspective, was one of the problems that a lot of the medical professionals, nurses and physicians who work in intensive care units in this country, is that we end up having a very different view of the end of life than people who are coming in, than the families and patients who are coming in. Our society has such a strong optimism and such a belief in the medical system that they believe that everyone's going to be made better. Not everyone, that's an exaggeration, but I think that they have more confidence than maybe is warranted in how much the medical system can do to save their loved ones. And a lot of people have, you know, in order to provide them with hope, they have been told along the way that things were maybe rosier than they actually were.

And then we were put in the position of having to deliver the news. Right. It should have been delivered earlier. Unfortunately, we've already passed the point where there's nothing left to do. And at this, this point it's, we're just coming to the end. And what's very difficult is when families won't hear that and don't, they want us to continue to provide life support. We know that it's going nowhere. We know that it's just a bridge to like a more difficult, challenging death for this person. And that, and we feel like we're sometimes torturing these

people that were just causing unnecessary pain and harm, that the outcome's the same, that they're going to die very soon. And they may die in one day and maybe two weeks, but if it's two weeks, it's going to be two very horrible weeks. And we feel awful doing that to people. We just feel like it's undignified and it just, people have very strong, the staff have very strong emotional reactions to that. So I had one patient who was a very successful medical researcher who had a type of cancer that had spread throughout his body. And he had insisted on having it hacked out one piece at a time, even though it wasn't really the thing that you, from a medical perspective, that wasn't going to improve his life expectancy, but he was young. He was only in his forties and he had, you know,

been very successful, very well-known scientist. And, um, he insisted that he needed to have everything done, absolutely everything done. And when I met him, he was at death door, but because his underlying body was so strong, he could stay at death door for a long time. You know, he, it could take a long time for him to actually die. And I spoke with his wife, we had, um, you know, we had, we had talked to the other teams who had taken care of him and they had said, look, he's never said that he's willing to let people stop with any kinds of aggressive treatment, even if it's futile, even if it's hopeless. And in theory, doctors don't have to provide treatment that is futile, but because we so strongly right now in our culture want to respect the wishes of patients, we often

do provide futile care, which is where, where it's hard emotionally for everyone. I had this conversation with his wife and she said to me, she said, look, and she was this lovely, lovely woman. And she said to me, I know where you're coming from. I totally get what you're saying. I know he's going to be dead soon. And he wanted to die a warrior's death. And he is a warrior. And this is how he's going to go out.

Like he just wants to go out fighting. And I just suddenly felt at peace. I was like, you know what, from my perspective, this is the wrong thing, but we are honoring his wishes by letting him breathe until the last moment where even a machine can't support him. It's not what I would choose. It's not what I would choose for anyone I cared about, but he was dying as a warrior and that was what he wanted. And I just, I felt so much better about what we were doing. And it also let me see that. Yeah. There's my perspective is not the only one. Like there are other ways of looking at life and death. Yeah. It's a, I have a very close friend.

I had no idea. He had metastasized pancreatic cancer. We went on a skiing trip in South America, which I knew was very, very, very expensive for him, with another friend. The three of us went down and skied in Las Lenas in Argentina. Literally, I think it was less than six months later, he was dead. And it's part of the reason that I read so much of the Stoics because they reflect on death.

Some might say obsess on death. They can't seem to get tired of talking about it. How do you think about death, Astro? How do you feel about the prospect of biological death? I'm not particularly looking forward to mine, but I've made peace with it, I think. I recognize that it's going to happen, and I worry, frankly, about people, especially in the tech community, who are obsessed with trying to prevent death. I have no objection to generally trying to help people live longer or be healthier while they're alive, more functional while they're alive. Those are all good things.

It still sometimes smells like kind of a creepy desperation, the way the tech community can get overly obsessed about death. And I think that they're chasing something that they won't find and making themselves miserable in the process. Because trying to convince themselves that they're going to be able to avoid death, which they don't really believe in their hearts, leaves them feeling panicked in a way that if they just made peace with the fact that they're going to die, they could just focus on being happy. My personal philosophy is to live my life as intensely as I can every single day. And if I do that, then it doesn't matter when I go.

Um, I had this experience when I was just a middle of graduate school, but I was playing soccer very competitively still. And it was the last time I ever asked someone to take me out of a game. I said, take me out. And cause I was, I wasn't dying, but I just felt like someone else could be doing more for the team because I was sufficiently tired. It was the middle of the second half. The coach got me out, and as soon as he got me out, I was dying to go back in. I thought, I am never doing that again. I would rather collapse on the field, which was, I suppose, a somewhat selfish perspective to have. But I just thought, you know what? Wait. It's the coach's job to tell that I'm tired. And I sort of overthought the whole thing.

And then I had all these regrets after I got off the field and they couldn't put me back on because there's only two subs a game. And it's become very metaphorical to me. It doesn't matter when the game's over as long as I don't leave anything on the field. So this is for Vince Lombardi. I like it. So this living intensely, I want to dig into this for a second. When you come to the close of the day, what does a successful day look like versus a failed

day or a suboptimal day? It's entirely a perspective thing for me. I mean, I never cross everything off my to-do list. Well, I mean, just to give some people, people may not be familiar with Google X. I mean, let's give some, if you wouldn't mind, giving some examples of the kind of stuff that you guys are working on. And what is the function of Google X? It sounds very X-Men. The function of Google X is to try to find some new, really important problems with the world that are not yet Google's problems and to make them Google's problems, to take on things like the transportation problem, solving the connectivity problem.

There are 5 billion people in the world who don't have connectivity, who are not connected to the Internet. Let's make that not be true. There are very few things that would make the world a better place than solving that problem. What could we do to produce electricity cheaper than a coal-fired power plant? That would radically change the world. And we think we might have a way of doing that via these energy kites that we're working on.

So we have some in healthcare, some in sort of human-computer interactions like Google Glass, but each of these have wild, I don't know, the technical equivalent of mood swings every day. We are, you know, I came home one day and I told our kids, I couldn't tell them this is before Loon had actually launched, but I told them, truthfully, that one of our creations had gotten free, and we had to send one of our, a marine, or an ex-marine, I guess,

after it with a Bowie knife to take it down. Wait, a Bowie knife? Yes, I'm sorry. And I told them that our creation was the size of a house, which was also true. You're talking about a balloon. Yes, in this particular case, it was a balloon that was like half inflated and then took off rolling across the countryside. We had an ex-Marine sort of hop a couple fences and chase it down and sort of slash at it

with a bowie knife until enough of the helium came out. It stopped rolling across the Central Valley. But, you know, the good parts and bad parts kind of play like that. Have you guys publicly disclosed how many balloons you've released? Several hundred at this point. I think it's, you know, when we're ready, it will take a lot more than several hundred to be put up. But we have, I don't know, on the order of like 100 in the air, but will take a lot more than several hundred to be put up. But we have, I don't know, on the order of like 100 in the air, but it's a testing process. So whether it was 100 or 50 or 150 doesn't really matter.

I think we just had our first balloon sort of, I'm not sure exactly what the birthday was, but we've now had many balloons that stayed up more than 100 days, many that have gone around the world on the order of 20 or 30 times. So we're running all of the experiments that we'll take so that Loon can, in the not too distant future, do what we've aspired for it to do, which is to set up an infrastructure that then the local telcos in various regions can use to provide internet to everyone in their region and and by doing that everywhere to everyone on the planet hopefully and with your subjective assessment of uh success or failure in a given day how do you

how do you how do you approach that or how do you just feel about it at the end of the day? Like when you're like, fuck, yeah, that was a good day. What are the things that contribute to that? Or the like, Oh Jesus, I don't know. I have no idea what I did all day. Maybe you don't have that feeling. Oh, I do. I do. No, I mean, it's, was I authentic? Did I really bring my, did I say what I mean? Yeah, exactly. Um? Did I really bring my... Meaning, did I say what I mean and do what I say? Yeah, exactly. Did I really bring both the best part of me intellectually and the best part of me emotionally to work? Did I really share that with people? Did I move them? Did I help them to get to a better place? Um, we, um, had a team meeting recently for one of the teams where, you know, they have some hard work to do in the not too distant future. And I needed to deliver some, um, hard news to them. And, you know, the one version of it could be like, you suck, shame on you run harder,

run faster. And that was not the version that I gave to them. I helped them be inspired. I helped them feel like a family again in a way I think they had been struggling to feel like. And I left that meeting feeling incredibly good about myself and about them. And not just because I had given a rousing speech, but because they had met me halfway. They had responded in the way that I was hoping for. And that's a good day when, when I leave the office feeling like I've helped people. I've,

you know, I'm, uh, someone recently said, it's kind of a funny way to put it, that I'm like a big flywheel at Google X that when things are going well, I have no effect, but that as soon as things start to wobble, I prevent things from like getting crazy. Right, right, right. You're like the safety guy at the amusement park. Well, I mean, I hope not just that, but yeah. But I'd love to ask you just about your own, and we'll close up in the next five minutes. For yourself, I feel as a writer, a degree of kinship with what you guys have gone through and what you're tackling at the moment with the writing.

For me in the last few years, it's been very much a case of losing my identity in a way. So I've pegged myself to being, say, a writer, but then I'm not identity in a way. So I've pegged myself to being say a writer, but then I'm not working on a book. So what am I? And then I'm working on a TV show, but that falls through. What am I? And, uh, I'm not saying you're in that position, but I certainly have been and, uh, not having an, uh, sort of a big team to account to or account for. How do you, at the end of the day, what makes you feel like a day has been successful or not? Well, that's very interesting that you should ask that question because I feel the way you do probably times 10. I was hanging on to my job with my fingernails. I really loved what I did, and I couldn't find an equivalent position in California

and decided to take a risk and do something very different and that I don't know if I'm at all qualified for, and I don't know if I'll have any success at. So this is actually the big struggle in my life right now is I spend my days writing and I have no idea if anyone's ever going to read anything that I'm actually writing. So every day I ask myself, is this, was this worth it? Was it not? I think, I don't know the things that make me feel like it was a successful day is if I feel like what I wrote was good, but I don't always, I mean, there are days when I just think that was crap.

My day writing something really quite terrible or I don't make any progress on it. So that's, that's hard. The small projects, you know, we've been writing a lot of op-eds and so on to support sacred cows. And you had one that had more than 4 million, 4 million or so. Yeah. At this point, that's, that's a lot. Yeah. So when, so when, when we gets at this point. That's a lot. Yeah.

So when we get feedback. She has high standards. 4 million is a lot. That's probably more than anything I've ever written, in fact. So when we get feedback from people and they say, that was great, that really helped me to see things in a different light, I really appreciated that, then that makes me feel good. But, of course, as a writer,

most days you get no feedback at all. I, I love, I saw this interview with, um, the guy, I don't know his name who wrote the faults in our stars, which my kids love.

Uh, John Green. Is it? I think that's right. Yeah. Thanks. Anyway, he gave this interview and he was saying that being a writer is like playing Marco Polo,

where all you say is Marco, Marco, Marco. And then, you know, if you're successful two years later, finally, someone will say, that's a great description. Yeah. I think it is when I write, I feel like an armless and legless man with a crayon in his mouth. All right, guys. Well, where can people learn more about both of you, about the book, about what you're up to? Tell us where people can check you out. They can check out Sacred Cows at Amazon, at Nook, on Google Play. They can get the book.

iTunes has the book. They can order. Astro has a website. Yeah, you can go to astroteller.net to learn more about me or go to sacredcowsthebook.com to learn more about me or you go to sacredcowsthebook.com to learn more about the book. We just gave this TEDx talk, TEDxBoston about sacred cows that we gave together that I think is a good sort of 15 minute intro to the concepts in the book. It's another good way to go to YouTube and you can check that out too. Cool. And what was the piece that you wrote that stirred up so much fire? Oh gosh, what would they call it? American parenting is killing the American marriage.

That is a good one. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming over guys. This is fun. We should hang out more. And lots of food for thought. Lots of stuff for me to consider. And hopefully everybody else out there listening can find the show notes, obviously, on the website. I'll include the links to everything included in the book at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And that is it for this evening. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having us, Tim. Oh, yeah. My pleasure.