Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - How To Be Insanely Productive Even with ADHD w/ Dr. Jeff Karp | EP #111

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

In this episode, Jeff and Peter discuss how to be an entrepreneur in the biomedical field, Jeff’s journey with ADHD, and groundbreaking technologies pioneered by Jeff’s lab.   21:34 | The Future of Disease Diagnostics 44:54 | A Nasal Spray Against Covid-19? 01:18:26 | Surviving Imposter Syndrome Dr. Jeffrey Karp is a leading bioengineer, holding a professorship at Harvard Medical School and MIT. Karp has co-founded 13 companies, raising over $600 million. His Laboratory ‘Karp Lab’ focuses on advanced biomaterials and devices for therapeutics, and focuses on medical problem-solving fields like a nasal spray effective against viruses. Some of the groundbreaking technologies he’s developed are tissue adhesives (TISSIUM), target drug delivery needs, and 3D printing biomedical devices. His dedication to bioengineering research has led to over 30,000 citations for his publications (0.1% globally) and multiple awards by the National Academy of Inventors and TEDMED. Dr. Karp’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0063010739 Website: https://www.jeffkarp.com/  Profi Nasal Spray: https://www.profispray.com/  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6  I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

You know, I had a lot of teachers that were giving me labels. Lazy, lost cause, troublemaker. Once I was helping another child and the teacher came over and said, oh, isn't that like the blind leading the blind. They asked me one day, what do you want to be? And I said, I want to be a doctor. The teacher said, well, you better set your sights lower because you really just don't have that in you.

I felt like I always had to work twice as hard as everyone else. I was the kid who was going in on weekends, like trying to meet with teachers to go over things and after school. Like I almost felt like kind of looking back, like I had this hardware in my mind, but I didn't have software. What's your advice to a mom or dad in this situation

with their young child? What I've learned is, um. Welcome to Moonshots. Today I'm going to be speaking to Dr. Jeff Karp, professor at MIT and Harvard, the founder of 13 different companies, a gentleman who is using a whole slew of exponential technologies to reinvent products that impact our lives. We'll talk about this product. I love Pro-Fee Spray, 99.99% prevention of influenza and COVID-19, a couple

sprays in the nose. It's like a HEPA filter for your nose. But beyond that, we'll talk about his book, Lit, which is extraordinary. Talk about learning how to think about how you think, interviewing 40 extraordinary individuals on the processes that make them successful in life. Join me for a fascinating conversation. If you love conversations like we're about to have, please subscribe. Allows me to bring incredible people to you.

We'll talk about his MTP, his moonshots, and hopefully inspire you to go bigger and bolder in the world. Dr. Jeff Karp, welcome to Moonshots. So great to be here. Thank you. A pleasure. You know, it was the first time we're physically meeting. We knew it a lot in common because we both have these beautiful purple pilot pens,

which are, which I love. You're at Harvard MIT now as a professor, my alma mater, which I love deeply. What's it like there right now? Are you, is it, are you a kid in a candy store at this moment? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. Everybody's coming up with ideas. Our access to tools is just exceptional. New tools coming online constantly. Science is moving at a faster pace than ever. And we're

really faced with tough decisions to make about what to focus on. Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's so much going on in the whole biotech, AI, robotics, 3D printing world, new material sciences that it's like an abundance of massive entrepreneurial opportunities. And yeah, it's interesting. Do you know Martine Rothblatt? Yes, yes. So Martine's been a friend for 40 years.

I mean, during her extraordinary journey. And she once told me something that I'll never forget. She says, successful people say no to most things. The most successful people say no to everything. And that most successful people say no to everything. And that's always been a problem for me, just actually saying no and focusing. How about you? Yeah, it's definitely been a challenge, especially with my ADHD. I think it's because I find like I just have boundless curiosity about everything. But at the same time, I feel it's important to say no a lot of the time, but I think it's also important to say yes for things that you're unsure about because there's always opportunities to learn in every encounter.

And I feel that when I start saying no to everything, it kind of becomes this algorithm that then limits me from, it sort of narrows what I potentially can learn about, right? Because it almost, it reduces the diversity of opportunities that I'm engaging in. Yeah. And you never know where some right angle, where you break out of a local maxima and break

into a brand new space of discovery and joy. Right? Yeah. And I think given where you are in the, I mean, as a professor, I mean, you run the CARP labs at Harvard Medical School. I want to dive into what does that mean. We mind mapped your world. And I have like 50% on your mean. We mind mapped your world.

I have 50% on your labs. We'll talk about that. 40% on your seven-year effort on building this book called Lit. Then 10% on some other areas. Then there's probably another 50% we haven't talked about yet. Because it always adds up to 150%. 50%. But as a professor, as a scientist, as a researcher, going down rabbit holes has got to be part of the job description. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think for us, it's almost one of those things where whenever

we come up with ideas for projects, we get excited about it. But I know now from sort of engaging in this process many times that our best ideas come from the challenges, the roadblocks, the hurdles that we encounter along the way. That's when we actually become the most creative, the most insightful. And so often we need to go down these kind of rabbit holes in order to discover what's truly most important. Yeah, but you have another element to you, which is the entrepreneur, which is building companies. And that becomes interesting because while you've got

to focus on the product, the market, and make something that people want and need and is sufficiently differentiated, and if you keep on chasing it, you never get something out the door. Yeah, I had this kind of holy crap moment when I was transitioning out of my postdoc into my faculty position because I discovered that I was during my postdoc and my PhD, I had very entrepreneurial mentors. I trained in Bob Langer's lab for my postdoc and it was a holy crap moment for me because I really wanted to focus my laboratory on not just publishing papers, but taking that science and turning it into products that could help patients.

But I realized that I didn't have a process for doing it. I had observed other people doing it, but I didn't do it for myself. And anytime in my life where I encounter something I can't do or I don't feel I'm good at, I recognize that it's not because it's inherently bad at something, it's just because I haven't found a process that works for me. And so I began to explore how might I engage in experimenting with various processes to find what would work for me so that I could develop a translational program for my research. Well, that is fascinating.

And being in Bob Langer's lab, right, who's prolific, he, George Church, they're these prolific professors who are just driving science and building companies. And it's like, again, kid in the candy store type of. When I was at MIT, I was there from 80 through 90 at MIT and Harvard Med School. It wasn't the entrepreneurial era yet. I think MIT cared a lot more about Nobel prizes than it did anything else.

How do you feel it is now? I was just on the phone literally before coming up here with two of my fraternity brothers, Dave Blunden and Mike Saylor, both MITers and both incredibly successful entrepreneurs. We were just talking about how do we stoke that entrepreneurial fire? Is the ethos at MIT more about starting companies now versus fundamental science?

I think so. I think there's been a huge transition over the past maybe 15, 20 years or so. And I think what's really fueled that is just a few notable academics who have spun off companies that have had massive impact on society like Phil Sharp with Biogen, Bob Langer with Moderna and many other companies and I think when you know other sort of colleagues, academics see what's possible there's this huge gravity to sort of this realization that

there's an opportunity to impact the world in such amazingly positive ways through using company formation as a vehicle and seeing examples of it around you, I think just you kind of get inspired and it sort of creates this energy that maybe you could do it as well. And I think now it's almost every professor, every doctor that I speak to in Boston is interested in starting companies. Yeah. I mean, because it used to be like discovering some fundamental truth of science or physics was fascinating, but now it's like discovering it and actually using it to go and change the world, operationalizing

it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think one of the people actually I interviewed for the book, David Suzuki, who's an environmentalist and he had the longest running show on Canadian television, I think it called The Nature of Things. And one of the things that he focused on in my conversation with him was what is enough and how we need to spend more of our time on exploration because that's one of the things that I struggle with in my life

is that I've focused a lot on translation, but at the same time, the products that are being translated, it also creates environmental challenges. There's sustainability issues that come from the products that we're making. And it's sort of like trying to strike that balance between exploration and basic science and the impacts of what we're developing, but then also pushing the fringe, the leading edge on maximizing positive impact for humans and for the Earth. Yeah. And so the question becomes, when you're trying to get, what are you optimizing around? What's your optimization function? Right? Yeah.

And we'll come back to that. On moonshots, we talk a lot about to entrepreneurs about your massive transformative purpose and your moonshot. Like I define an MTP as something that wakes you up in the morning, keeps you going at night. It's your North Star.

It is what drives you. What drives you? I think what drives me has changed over time. Sure. And one of the things, by the way, for me too, right? I'm in my third or fourth MTP. It was like started at space and then going into solving global grand challenges and then

supporting entrepreneurs and now in longevity. But so take me back, what have been your sort of like your decadal MTPs if you would? Wow, I love that question. Such a great framing. So I would say, so I go way back. The initial one was really around, you know, I was struggling with undiagnosed ADHD and learning differences when I was younger. This was at what age? In the second grade when I was seven years old. I'd sit at the back of the class completely frustrated, feeling demoralized.

Nothing was working. My mom tried flashcards, cue cards, nothing worked. I wasn't able to keep up with anything. Wasn't connected socially with anybody. And what happened was the teacher at the end of the year pulled my parents aside and said that he would like to have me repeat the second grade. And my parents negotiated for me to spend time with tutors during the summer to then be able to catch up and go on to the third grade. And my parents negotiated for me to spend time with tutors during the summer to then be able to catch up and go on to the third grade.

And what happened that summer is I went in one day, and the tutor read a passage, asked me some questions. I gave some answers. But then she asked me a question that no one had ever asked me before that transformed my life and led to the first, um, you call that M M T P. Yeah. Uh, my first, uh, yeah, massive transformative, um, what was the purpose? Okay.

Um, and, uh, and that was, uh, so I gave, I gave the answers and then she looked me in the eye and she said, how did you think about that? And, and that question actually created this newfound awareness for me that was so transformative because it then became my mission to figure out, like I almost felt like kind of looking back, like I had this hardware in my mind, but I didn't have software. I had to figure out how do I test various algorithms, patterns that I was observing in other people to create my own software for functioning and surviving in the education

system. That was my first sort of mission that I was focused on. What's your advice to a mom or a dad in this situation with their young child? Well, one of the things that- And I know you've got an entire book on this, so we'll get into it, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think for me, what I've realized,

and I feel like parenting is perhaps one of the most challenging jobs, roles that anyone could ever have. And the most important for society and for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. And what I've learned is first and foremost is just to find ways to support children in whatever they're experiencing and going through.

I feel like there's been this tendency for me with my children to kind of try to push them to extract potential because I see this incredible potential in my children and I find myself almost sort of treating them as if I was treating myself. You know, like I was sort of trying to extract, I'm always trying to extract my potential and I feel that that doesn't work really well. And what works well, I think, is the support, just finding ways to support. And one of the ways that my mom supported me was, you know, here I was like a C&D student really struggling, feeling like I didn't fit in like an alien.

I think a lot of kids kind of slip through the cracks and who have, who are neurodiverse and become addicts. My mom wrote speeches for me because there was public speaking contests and she would coach me in memorizing and saying these speeches. I got better and better and better and I started to win competitions. That was the one thing that I had going for me where I was able to build my confidence. And so I think that kind of the parallel or potential there for advice maybe for parents is to find that one thing where whatever it could be anything where the child can build a little bit of confidence every day.

Maybe it's like finding a mentor who can help, you know, that the child's really excited to be with and learn from and to explore and build skills and really tap into that, the energy that we get from learning and gaining insights and building a skill because I think that can really carry the day and that always stays with you. Yeah, I think about, my parents wanted me to become a doctor. I wanted to become an astronaut, right? And that struggle, and I went through medical school and make my parents happy.

Shipped my dad a copy of my diploma when I graduated and then went on to follow my space passions. I've come back full cycle to medicine a few decades later. Did your parents have a mission or purpose for you? I felt like there was a lot of dentists in my family. There were some doctors in my family. I did feel that that was the path that people would sort of there was appreciation for anyone in the family who you know the way people talked spoke about other family members and going into careers if it was like a doctor or a lawyer or you know something

like that the dentist people would get excited about it so but I also, I think, you know, I had a lot of teachers that were giving me labels. And so like, like lazy, lost cause, troublemaker. Once I was helping another child and the teacher came over and said, oh, isn't that like the blind leading the blind? And then they asked me one day, what do you want to be? And I said, I want to be a doctor. And the teacher said, well, you better set your sights lower because you really just don't have that in you. American education system at work, ladies and gentlemen. So my parents were more focused on trying to not let that become my label.

My mom constantly was telling me, she was like, you have superpowers and it was kind of hard for me to believe, but she said it so often that I started to believe it and I started to imagine it and kind of fantasize about that. I remember distinctly in elementary school, being being in class, trying to almost like think that I could see things that others couldn't. And I couldn't really, but like I felt like maybe I could, you know? Like it's a confidence building game to believe in yourself and not let yourself be put down by the world around you. Yeah. So that was your sort of first MTP early on. Where'd you go next on your purpose? What was it that drove

you? So what happened was my, okay, so my mom, nobody wanted to do anything about these challenges I was encountering. No one was talking about ADHD at the time. My mom went up against the school board on her own with a massive file. She had recorded everything that teachers had ever said, written about me, all my grades and everything. She went to the school board and actually got me identified as having learning differences, which then got me special accommodations, a little bit extra space, extra time on my assignments and tests and exams. I had been

developing all these tools, studying patterns. How old are you at this point? At this point, I would have been, let's see, maybe 12. What happened was my grades went from Cs and Ds to straight As. The struggles remained. I felt like I always had to work twice as hard as everyone else. I was always the kid who was going in on, like trying to meet with teachers to go over things and after school and just constantly working and trying to focus because my, I was pretty extreme

ADHD. And so the next sort of, you know, MTP phase for me was focusing on how I could maintain straight A's because my grades went to straight, as soon as I got into the seventh grade, my grades went to straight A's, and so I just kept focusing on, I guess the MTP was on how could I improve my efficiencies, because everything took me a long time. It was almost like, you know,

in the movie Terminator, the original one, there's this scene where he goes to say something and the screen pops up and there's like five or six different options of what he can say and he's trying to figure out which one and then select something. That's how I feel even today. It's like I see many possibilities. When I'm asked a question in, let's say in school, I see many possible answers, and I don't know which one the teacher wants the most.

And so I need time to figure out the probabilities around which answer to give back. And that actually makes it really challenging for me to help my children with their homework. They don't like me. They say they don't want me to help them at all because I don't really see the linear way that this education system kind of works. So my focus then at that time was really on how do I get more efficient? How do I observe people around me and what are their tools and strategies for being efficient with their time?

How do they approach problems and doing their homework and doing these things? What can I experiment with? And I almost see everything as algorithms around me. So I'm constantly trying different algorithms that I see in environments, how people behave, what they say in certain scenarios, and then I try those algorithms on and see how they feel, and I'm constantly iterating and adapting them.

And so that's where a huge part of my life was focused after the seventh grade You sound like a perfect analog for an AI learning system. Yeah Everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and Could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called fountain life actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. It's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. Most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists.

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All right, let's go back to our episode. Fast forwarding to your professional career, what was your first MTP there? What was your first purpose? So my PhD advisors and my postdoc advisor mentor were highly entrepreneurial and I saw by being in their laboratories the potential of science to have a massive impact on humanity and so and then I realized kind of going back to this holy crap moment that I didn't have a process for doing it. So I was on the hunt for how could I develop a process to maximize the translation of everything that I worked on? How could every project I worked on turn into a potential company that could then bring

products into clinical trials and eventually to patients? And so what I did is I... By the way, that decision to make sure that whatever you worked on actually wasn't just for a publication endpoint or wasn't just for some prize endpoint was actually going to be meaningful for society, probably was a critically important filter for you. It was huge. It was, and it was also, I feel, because I was open to the cues, I feel all of us have this like core wisdom and in the environments that we're in,

if we sort of let ourselves sort of, you know, get into a state where we can, we can feel as we're observing what's happening around us. And when I was in, for example, Bob Langer's lab, and I could just see the positivity of how science could be translated into products and really change people's lives. And that just, to me, seemed right.

It just seemed like that's what I really needed to focus on. And so it was, I just felt deeply connected to that and that became my mission. But I didn't have a process. And so what I did was I said, okay, I started thinking about problem definition. So I started to realize that what separates a academic project from a translational project that can really lead to impact is the problem definition. Most of the time when we're doing academic projects, we're focused on just the biology problem,

like what's the target, what's this kind of thinking, or the medical problem. But I realized that it was almost like a Venn diagram and overlapping, overlapping circles where there was also the manufacturing problem. There was the patent problem. There was the regulatory problem. There was the biology problem. There was the medical problem. There was the practical implementation problem. There was the sales problem. There was a financing problem, right? Right. There's all these things.

And so the overlap of all all these things is where the problem definition lies. If we don't think about all of these circles, we can't maximize our chance of solving that problem. And so I asked this question and my whole life has really been about questions trying to figure out how to get better at asking high value questions. And so I said, okay, well, I don't have expertise in these areas, but who does? And I realized in the Boston area that there's like the world leaders in all of these circles. And so what I did is I committed to start meeting with people and not just meeting, but actually it's not just networking forming relationships.

And so every two to three weeks for 10 years I would meet with patent lawyers, corporate lawyers, reimbursement regulatory experts, manufacturing experts, people in med tech, pharma, biotech, consumer health. And I would look, I would meet with them, I would go to all these mixers and networking events and seminars and I would go and I would ask questions and I would try to develop the skill of interacting with people and finding ways to develop relationships. And what started to emerge from this was an informal advisory board for my lab. And so as we're advancing projects, I can reach out to people and say, do you think

this could be manufactured? Are investors interested in this? What would the clinical trial look like if this was to succeed? What would be the comparator? Because we want to include that early in our experiments to define what we're doing, if it's important or not, to make that the North Star. And so that ended up serving this mission, this MTP, because it created this North Star that then enabled my laboratory to spin out

almost every major project from my lab has spun out into a company. I love this. This is a masterclass moment for entrepreneurs here because a lot of entrepreneurs figure masterclass moment for entrepreneurs here. Because a lot of entrepreneurs figure, I need to do this myself. Right. I need to know how to do this. I need to read the right book, watch the right YouTube video.

But in building this ecosystem around you, did you just go, was it a haphazard or were you like, I need to find a great patent lawyer and you ask around and knock on their door and then what were you offering them? Was it like, hi, I'm Professor Karp, I do this thing, I just would love to have a conversation with you. How would someone replicate that? Because it's a brilliant idea. So what I would do is, it was very experimental.

It was not linear at all. I just felt this gravity that I needed to do this and that this is, and I didn't, I didn't exactly know it would lead to this informal advisory board as it did. That just kind of unfolded as, as I was advancing in this process. But I just knew that I needed to, I wasn't able to learn the expert. That just kind of unfolded as I was advancing in this process. But I just knew that I needed to, I wasn't able to learn the expertise on my own and I had to develop relationships with people who had that expertise. And so what I offered was I would talk to the people I was meeting about the projects that were ongoing in my laboratory.

And I sort of kept it open that their input could direct, help direct the trajectory of the product, of the technologies that we were developing. And so I think that generally humans want to work on things that are important and that can have impact. And so by tapping into that common energy, I was able to develop the connections around that. And so people kind of felt as I was meeting with them that I was taking their advice seriously and that I was gonna incorporate that into the projects in my lab,

which then created a connection. So they wanted to follow up. They wanted to see how their advice led to the next phase of the project. So it was a purpose-driven investment on their part. And like I teach and speak from the mountaintops where I can, do something that's meaningful. Do something that can change the world.

We don't need another photo sharing app. And the reason people follow Elon with SpaceX or with Tesla is because he's got this massive transformative purpose and people want to be part of that. People want meaning in their lives. Yeah. And so this was not a financial transaction with these folks. No, it wasn't at all. In fact, I mean, when I was meeting with them, it was really at the highest possible risk stage of the projects we were just beginning. But I think that the people in the community also felt like not only that they were sort of felt invested in the process because I was taking their advice seriously, but there was also this potential for the future that if things started to work out that they might be able to be involved in the translation

process. And that's what started to happen is that as we advanced things in the lab, I kept in touch with people. I sought their advice kind of over and over again. And then when something got kind of ready to be translated, there was a whole bunch of people who already knew about those projects. And that I felt is also one of the key things, is that one of the hardest things in spinning out companies is finding a CEO who has the capabilities and the network and the adaptability and the relationship component.

And what I realized is that when I started looking around, what sort of the standard process for spinning a company out from academia was, was to push the project as far as possible and then to go find a CEO. But what I discovered was if I could meet with potential entrepreneurs, potential CEOs of future companies early on, involve them, then there was almost like a number of potential CEOs of future companies early on involve them, then there was almost

like a number of potential CEOs that I already was interacting with. I already had relationships with. Who were circling and felt ownership. Yes. Yeah and feeling ownership. And by the way, you know, you're a serial entrepreneur as I am and until you find that CEO, you're the CEO and you end it, you'll get just pulled into the details and you need that amazing person. I love this. You mentioned the idea of your life has been about asking questions. One of the things I speak about to my kids and to the CEOs I mentor is the single most

important thing to do is ask great questions. That is everything. Everything, yeah. Well, there's actually maybe just three points that I can shed on the questions. The first is actually between the second and third grade when I had this transformational experience with the tutor who said, how did you think about that? That sort of led, sort of created this new found awareness for me. And I realized that when I asked questions that, you know, I couldn't really pay attention in class, but anytime I asked a question, I could hyper focus for a few moments afterwards.

And whatever was said to me, imprinted in my mind, I could connect it to other things I knew and I could recall it later. And so I discovered very quickly after that moment that questions were key to my learning. Interesting. And that's why as I navigated my undergrad and my grad school, I stopped going to a lot of my lectures

and I would just focus on figuring out questions that I could ask other students or go and ask the professor. Questions became the key to my learning. If I was in a class where I couldn't, a lot of lectures were so big that they didn't allow questions, so I stopped going to those lectures because it just, I needed to ask questions. So that's like one sort of, so I discovered the discovery of questions being important was sort of like happened in elementary school. But then what happened is I got into grad school and it was like I was about to learn

this, this whole new avenue of asking questions, this whole new level. And what happened was, is that, you know, academics typically go to into seminars and You go to these invited speakers and you sit there and you know I started going when I entered grad school at University of Toronto and then at the end there's the question-and-answer period Yeah and People start asking questions and I was blown away by the level of questions that people are asking and those questions weren't coming to me and

These questions were going right to the heart of what the seminar speaker was talking about. And I almost started shaming myself like why aren't these questions coming to me because I'd focused my whole life on asking questions. And so I started to think, you know, what could I do to develop my skill because again, it's like I know that if I'm not good at something, It's because I haven't engaged the process that works for me yet And I started to think about it and I realized that there was potentially an opportunity for pattern recognition So the next seminar I went to everyone was focused on what the speaker was saying

But I was focused on something different faster I was focused on the questions that were being asked and I wrote them all down I went to seminar after seminar and I wrote the questions that people being asked and I wrote them all down. I went to seminar after seminar and I wrote the questions that people in the audience were asking pages and pages for like two or three months and then one day I just stopped and I looked at it and next day I'm looking, next day I'm just sort of thinking about it and then boom, light bulb moment. I realized that all the questions that were being asked fit under four or five different categories. One of them was, was the experiment working?

Did the person act? Did the scientists have the right controls? Some experiments are really complicated. Another was, are the results important? So if they were developing a diagnostic for blood and they did all their work in saltwater saline and the results looked amazing, you know... It was relevant. It's not relevant, exactly.

And then another one was, did the speaker overstate their conclusions? Did the data support what they were concluding? A lot of the time, it actually doesn't. Then there were questions around statistics, and there were some other questions. So once I had that awareness of the motivation behind asking the questions, the next seminar I went to,

it was like I had my detective hat on, I was taking notes. All the questions that others were asking before are now coming to me. And not only that, I'm like tapped into my curiosity. Like I'm, because I'm thinking of questions, I'm also thinking of the next potential experiment that that person could perform

or other applications of their work. So I'm able to tap into my creativity. And so what I realized is that questioning is a skill, regardless of where you're at, you can always move that skill forward. And I've brought that to social settings as well, where there's always like, you know, early in my life, I really struggled socially to connect with people. And so what I started to do was observe what are the people who are really good at connecting with people and the sch what I started to do was observe, what are the people who are really good at connecting with people, and the schmoozers in social settings,

what questions are they asking? And I start listening to those questions, and then I start asking those questions, experimenting. You're training up your neural net. Yes. Yes, it's a beautiful thing. Questions are such a powerful part of our lives. I mean, I learn, so I use questions, for example,

when I'm going to give a presentation, I will write out the questions that I wanna ask myself and then present answering the questions I've asked myself in that structure, right? And then for me, when I'm on stage, that structure. Right. Yeah. And then for me, when I'm on stage, the most fun I ever have is in is the Q&A that follows a keynote. Right. And a lot of times I'll just forego slides and forego everything and just have a conversation with the audience. My favorite time is like, I'm going to say a few provocative things up front. And then I jump into the audience and I challenge them.

Call bullshit, tell me what you disagree with. What are you concerned about? And just get into a conversation. Because it's so more, unfortunately, when we go into a lecture mode otherwise, it just glosses over and people numb out. Yeah, I totally relate to that. In fact, one of the things that I like to do in my laboratory

is when people are presenting data, I like them to put a title with a very bold conclusion that may even overstate the results, but that will provoke a reaction in the room so we get the best thinking to happen at that moment versus just like watching somebody speak and there's no interaction. What does this mean? What does the data mean in its best possible case? I want to take you to what your massive transformative purpose is now and on the lab side,

we'll talk about the book side a little bit. Sure. Do you have a moonshot or a set of moonshots? Where, to find a moonshot is going 10 times bigger in the world where everyone else is moving at 10%, right? Where you want to just make, to use jobs as words, make a dent in the universe. What is it that drives you there? Right at this moment?

Yeah. Yeah. So, well, really it's about the book and … And we'll come back to that. Yeah. But we'll focus on your science a little bit first. On the science. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, for me, I feel like the moonshot is really in training and in trying to, I feel like I've spent so much time in deconstructing problem definitions and creating an ever evolving process for solving problems. And I would love to bring that to the world in the most massive way possible. Interesting. So the learnings that you've had in doing

and the successes you've had, I was talking to Elon and once he said, the design of something rounds down to zero in the process of manufacturing or making it live on. And so it's like, it's all of the processes that you've been developing that you think of as the most valuable assets you've been creating. Is that true?

Yeah, I think that's it. And I think a big part of that is problem definition. For example, when I look at the XPRIZE RFAs, I'm very inspired by the problem definitions because to me, the way to make the biggest impact in the world is to focus on problem definition and that can then mobilize the problem solvers to come in, many who which are not able to really define the problems, but once they see a defined problem, they can contribute their skills and their creativity to solving it. What I see in the world is that a lot of the problems are not well defined, and they're

ambiguous. What ends up happening is that they're great sort of maybe discoveries or science that is done, but that is not translated. The goal of a lot of these initiatives is outwardly stated as translation but yet the problem definition is not defined in a way that the problem can be solved or that you maximize potential for the solution. So I think that needs to be moved forward. I think in the entrepreneurial world that's also defining a product market fit, becoming

really clearly defined about what the market needs and what you're delivering. Yeah, like one example, just to throw it out there, is like in an academic lab, for trying to think of a solution for something, we might say, okay, we're going to have a drug delivery system and we're going to put three or four different molecules to deliver in there. Each one has a purpose and this sounds really great, but then if you look at it from a translational angle, that becomes extraordinarily complex. It becomes so risky to do.

Even the clinical trial of having individual arms for each of the agents and there's the complexity of quality control and all of these things. And it just, to me, there's all these amazing problem solvers who are thinking that are missing this concept of radical simplicity for being the guardrails for bringing their science to people in the most impactful, most efficient way possible. To me, there's almost like this process. We're not formally trained in science in terms of how we can impact the world. I think that because I've focused for many years on trying to figure that out

and I'm still trying to figure it out, trying to make it more efficient and there's always things we encounter that are big unknowns, I just feel how do we bring that process to the scientific community in the most impactful way so that people can start thinking about, like, you know, there's a dip, like if we're going to focus, for example, on an academic sort of exploratory project, it's okay to have a 10-step synthesis to create something, to test, to

question, to, you know, that's fine. But if it's a translational project and it's a 10 step synthesis, most of the time that's not okay. That's far too complex. Now it might be okay if you can create it, you get massive investment and it's still possible, but it's so risky to advance something like that. It's sort of like, okay, how do we take that 10 step process and turn it into one step? That's how I think you switch from exploratory to a translational project.

Yeah, for sure. I wanna dive down and explore one of your companies, one of your products. In fact, we've got one right here called Profi, which I love and thank you for this. What's the story behind Profi? Where did it begin? Where did this seed for this originate? So when COVID hit- And what is it?

Yeah. When COVID hit, we were developing a nasal spray to treat multiple sclerosis. There's a lot of immune cells in the nasal lining. And we had developed a platform spray that could attach to the lining of the nose, stay there for long periods of time, and deliver drugs to those immune cells. And we started to get some pretty interesting results. COVID hit. And we asked this question every single project in the

lab, how can we help? And we started to discover based on previous reports and some new science that was being developed that COVID spread via droplets. They stayed in the air for long periods of time, even after someone infected left the room, that these droplets- So the six foot rule was not actually going to be a valid option. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, some arbitrariness to the six feet. But we got to start somewhere, right?

We got to put something in the ground and then use that as a way to discover how we might change it. So we also started to learn that COVID combined to goblet cells that are in the nasal lining, and that's a major anchor point. In fact, we started to understand that many respiratory pathogens actually anchor and get the, you know, kind of take hold in the nasal lining. That's the major entry point into the body. And so we started to think, okay, how can we help? We thought, okay, could we develop a

three-prong approach for creating a nasal spray that could effectively capture respiratory droplets, that could prevent a barrier for the virus to cross the epithelium of the nasal lining, and could we also neutralize the virus and potentially bacteria when it binds to this spray? What we did is we also, in the concept, we applied this concept of radical simplicity because we didn't want to include drugs in it because we knew if we put drugs in it that it was going to take six, eight, 10 years to bring this to market. And so we said, we're only, the guardrails were, we're only gonna use agents

that are on the generally recognized as safe list or have previously been used as excipients, pharmaceutical excipients in nasal sprays. And so we looked at that entire landscape and we started sort of looking at the individual components. There's preservatives in nasal sprays that can prevent bacterial growth.

There's surfactants in nasal sprays. Surfactants can, soap is highly effective for most viruses and bacteria. If you wash your hands long enough, you kill most things. We started to experiment looking at hundreds of different combinations of agents that we thought might sort of achieve these properties. And we discovered a formulation where we got in laboratory conditions, 99.99% kill of COVID-19, H1N1, influenza A and B, adenovirus, RSV, E. coli, and a form of pneumonia. This was with an infectious disease researcher that we teamed up with at the Brigham. And then what we also did is we administered 10 times the lethal dose of H1N1 via nasal drops to a mouse, and they all, the mice, they don't do well, they all die.

But if we pre-administer the PROFI formulation, they all survive and we saw minimal viral load in the lungs. That's extraordinary. So what we did is we teamed up with two regulatory advisors, one Peter Hutt, who was previously the general counsel at the FDA, another regulatory advisor, and then an international toxicology consulting firm. They all agreed that the agents that we had in PROFI were safe and that we could regulate this as a cosmetic.

We can't make strong claims about this product, but we can talk about the science that we've conducted in the lab and the article that the science that we've been doing, we've put out into the public access so anyone can see our data and we've submitted it for peer review so it's out for peer review right now. So when did this become available?

So I launched the product at the near future summit in October. Zem's amazing conference yes. Yeah, yeah. So October of last year. Of last year, that was 23 yeah yeah I mean this sounds like what everyone should have on their shelves and I now have this can I just try it for sure yeah so what is happening as so what's in here a surfactant so yeah, there's, there's a few ingredients that are in there.

Prophy, everyday nasal spray. So this is actually something that you would recommend as a prophylactic everyday use before you got on the airplane, when your kids are sick at home. Exactly. Yeah. Before a meeting, before you go to an event, a concert. So I take it twice a day when I get up in the morning and then midday. And actually we have some data that's emerging from the lab that this may be effective for allergies as well to prevent allergens

from getting, so kind of creating a barrier to allergens. So the data actually is quite compelling and we're still doing some experiments to I think this is sort of a HEPA filter for your nasal cavity. I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, super easy, pleasant, nothing negative. Yeah, it's like a gel composition. Most of it's actually water. So there's, you know, it's like 2% gel and other components. So I'm just thinking about this because it seems like this is extraordinarily simple, effective, but you can't make medical claims.

What can you say about this? Well, what's on the box is kind of what we could say. And we're sort of experimenting with that as well. And we do have plans to investigate this more rigorously in people. And we're just sort of in the process. Is this available online? Yeah, you can purchase it online. What's it cost, by the way?

It cost $20 for a month supply. So that would be two sprays a day, one in each nostril, so for 30 days or so. I have my longevity platinum trips that I give out products and I need to put this in everybody's bags. I remember University of Washington has a protein design labs and they had been talking about a nasal spray for something that would bind the spike protein and disable it in that regard but this doesn't work in that way. No, this works I think like you know it's similar to how soap works essentially so we're disrupting the membranes of the viruses and bacteria, and that can neutralize them. And so it basically reduces the load that your immune system has to fight.

Exactly. Yeah, I kind of think of like protection in layers. So, you know, masks will provide a certain level of protection dependent on the masks. Actually, I did a lot of work with masks when, when COVID hit. I co-led this initiative to create a backup plan for N95 masks. So just in case the hospital system ran out of masks. And we made a lot of interesting sort of observations, which is when people wear generally a surgical mask, that the mass material is quite good at filtering out COVID and other pathogens. The problem is that it only filters about 40 or 50%

of the air because there's gaps that occur in the mass. So a lot of the air that you're breathing in and out is actually not being filtered. And that's where N95 comes in. And we actually, one of the technologies that we also developed during COVID was we developed a surgical, we took a surgical mask, which is readily available and has a wire on the top.

We added wires to the sides and the bottom of the mask so that you can face fit it like an N95. And then we created this flap on the inside. So if you cough, the flap opens up and captures the cough more efficiently. And then we put these little kind of additions here so that you could cinch the strap to make it tight, like to have a really good fit. We ran a mask competition at XPRIZE. We asked the wrong question.

We were asking, we over, we over specified because we asked for competition to design a new mask that would be more effective, manufacturable and so forth. What we didn't ask was create a mechanism that was cheap and affordable and easy to filter out because this would have been an even better solution. to filter out because this would have been an even better solution. So, um, uh, your process, you found a, you, you floated this as you spun this out as a company, found a CEO.

How long was that process going from the idea to the product and then getting it launched as a company? So we started working on this in 2020. So I think it was about three years for us to, for the discovery phase, the iteration, all the experiments we did, you know, the formulation, then to find a CEO, to find an angel investor in New York. So we raised a million dollars for it through a single investor

and then to find manufacturers to you know and and you know build the right model systems for testing and then to eventually launch the the product amazing How is it doing so far? Yeah, it's doing great. It's doing really great. We haven't really put much into marketing. It's more just sort of word of mouth right now. Yeah. And... And where do people go? What website?

Can they order it from? It's just profyspray.com is the website. Okay. And... Can you get it on Amazon as well? Yeah, you can also get it on Amazon. Amazing. Yeah, yeah.

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And I have to imagine that every biologist, every biomedical engineer, every medical technologist is seeing AI as a whole new set of tools. How do you think about AI? When did you start playing? How are you incorporating it into your research and your company formation? Yeah, so I mean, AI is, I use it more, I would say, personally than in the lab so far.

We do have a project in the lab where there's a platform that we've started using that kind of takes all the omics data and allows us to mine it in a very efficient way so we can identify new targets or new molecules to target old targets. And so we've been using that right now in the hearing loss space to develop new therapies that can functionally restore hearing. So that's kind of an ongoing project that's early, but we're gaining momentum on that. So there's a moment in time where you say, we're going to go and invest time in that.

What led you to focusing on hearing loss? So what happened was, I've always been interested in regenerative medicine and a lot of- You and I have that in common? Yes, yes. A lot of my training was in the area of mesenchymal stem cells or mesenchymal stromal cells. Would you define what that means for folks? Sure. So these are cells that exist pretty much in all areas of the body. There's debate over the nomenclature and how to define them, but essentially they derive

from pericytes, which exist on blood vessels within all tissues. They also, you know, they're in the bone marrow, they're in fat. People might be familiar with stromal vascular fraction. They're one of the core cells that have function in that type of a therapy. And so these are adult stem cells that are with us for life. They're very easy to isolate, to culture expand, to freeze, to administer. They've actually been quite challenging to bring to market as a therapy because you can apply them both as an autologous approach as well as an allogeneic approach. Yeah, right now one of the things we're doing at my company, Fountain, in partnership with

another of my company's, Cellularity, is we're beginning to bank adult mesenchymal stem cells and just having that on sort of an available asset for people over time. Yeah. So go on, please. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So mesenchymal stem cells are really interesting because they're almost like living anti-inflammatories. And so they have this immunomodulatory secretome that can downregulate inflammation.

Inflammation is a component of pretty much every disease. And so there's been a lot of work that's been done to demonstrate mesenchymal stem cells have potential to treat many possible diseases, although there have been few cases where they have actually been able to be brought over the finish line in randomized placebo-controlled trials, which are in regenerative medicine very difficult trials to run because there's a massive placebo effect. In fact, I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. One of the major trials that was done several years ago was in graft versus host disease,

extremely debilitating from bone marrow transplantation. And if you administer mesenchymal stem cells, you tend to see a very significant response, not just in the experimental group, but also in the placebo group, which is amazing. Some of these trials showed over 50% response rate. Mind over body, amazing. Amazing. And so I've actually been looking into that. And I think that, we don't fully understand the placebo effect, but one thing that really intrigued me was something I read about how, when we were all hunters and gatherers 10 to 15,000 years ago,

and way before that as well, how there would be this sort of evolutionary pressure or sort of aspect of life where if there was a treatment developed or a ritual performed and when people believed collectively that there was going to be benefit, that that actually would have benefit that we could. So it's almost like if we believed in an outcome, if we believed in the positive potential of what was being performed, even if the science wasn't there, and if there wasn't a particular mechanism of action,

in the way that we describe it now in pharma, just the belief that something could help, there's some reason from an evolutionary perspective that that can actually work in causing us, you know, benefit. And, and I think it's, it's just, it's just, to me, it's like tapping into the life force that we don't fully understand it right now. But it's there. I mean, if you just look at these, it's so many incredible trials where the response rate is just massive, especially in regenerative medicine with stem cells and other types of related therapies where placebo effect is just ginormous and it makes getting

experimental approaches difficult to get through medicine. And before we started speaking, you were asking about, you know, kind of FDA and how you'd run it differently. I really think there's something there. Like I really think in some ways that, you know, and it's challenging, but in some ways I feel it's unfair. All of these massive placebo effects that have helped people trying to weed it out instead of to your amplify it. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's, there's gotta be a better way.

And I think if we just set that as a goal, perhaps that's even an X-Prize to try to understand how could we actually commercialize the placebo effect. One of my favorite stats that I wrote about in my longevity book was a study done with 69,000 women and 1,500 guys. One of the few studies with mostly women that showed optimists were living 15% longer than pessimists, which again is the impact of mindset. Yeah.

Amazing. Yeah, because I was thinking about this this morning, I was walking along the boardwalk and I was thinking that, I think living with a very positive mindset for some people almost seems like a fantasy. You know, sometimes when you talk to, when I've talked to other people and they kind of say, oh, well, you're living in a fantasy world.

But you know, what struck me this morning as I was thinking about it is that it's, it's almost the same if you're thinking negatively, right? Because often things aren't inherently negative. They're just negative in your mind. Yeah, we perceive it. We give it meaning. We are meaning making machines constantly. You know, it's interesting.

We are, our mindsets determine what we do with a datum. We either, it's an attack or an opportunity. It's a scarcity or a opportunity to create and transform into abundance. Actually, just one more thing to add on that. Yeah, please. I feel like we're at this snapshot in time, right? Snapshot in evolution, where we have this survival wiring

that really served us well 10, 15,000 years ago, right? A hundred thousand years ago really served us well. We have the end that then with that, there's like this impulsiveness. There's this kind of reactiveness, um, very much focused on survival, but we also have this significant consciousness, this ability to leverage our prefrontal cortex, our neuroplasticity, to be able to plan, emotionally regulate, to, you know, we can actually decrease the size of our amygdala through practicing rituals that allow us to be more mindful and, you know, in a relaxed state.

And I feel like over time, what doesn't serve us well, this impulsivity, this survival wiring, will evolve out. But we're not at that point yet. And so it's kind of up to us individually to have strategies in our life where we can really tap into our prefrontal cortex. And you know, neuroplasticity, our brains are constantly rewiring regardless of what we're doing, but we can actually be intentional about that rewiring by using the conscious part of our brains.

And I think it's through rituals and practices that we can actually tap into that. Jeff, I love that. Our default wiring is fear and scarcity because that would save us a hundred thousand years ago. And they fear and scarcity doesn't work for us today. It puts you in a very bad situation, a bad place. And I think actively choosing your mindset and shaping, and the way we do this is our, you know, our brains are, are neural nets and you shape a neural net by showing it example after example, after example.

And if you're willing to take the time like you've been doing to say, I'm going to, and this is some of the work I do in a program I've been developing called mindset mastery, which is I want people to develop a purpose driven mindset, a abundance mindset, a longevity mindset, a moonshot mindset, because these are the mindsets are going to serve us, a curiosity mindset. Right. Yeah, I love that. And I think we can actively shape our mindsets and it's the differentiator

between success and failure and happiness and sadness and all of the things that we care about. And interestingly enough, right, genetically, we're very similar to hominids 20, 30, 40,000 years ago. You could probably grab a population, put them through our educational system and have some percentage go to MIT and Harvard. Society is what's been sort of shifting. And I think we need to be very careful about how the societal overlay is being shaped going forward. What do you think about that?

Well, I think that it's an indulgence to live in negativity. Interesting. I think that, because the negativity often is the default mode for most people. If you listen to conversations in coffee shops or restaurants or- Yes, yeah, for sure. And I feel like it's an indulgence-

Or the media who just abuses your amygdala for their own financial benefit. Absolutely. And I mean, to that point, I think that, and kind of going back to AI, I mean, one of the thoughts that I've been having is that, you know, technology can impact our brains, not just functionally, but also the structure of our brains. And so like the hippocampus can, you know, the gray matter can densify or we can reduce the density dependent on what media we engage, what we consume, what technologies we embrace.

I think that we need to study more how technology not only impacts the function of our brains and the rewiring of our brains, but also how it impacts the structure of parts of our brains like the amygdala, like our hippocampus, and use that as potentially biometrics for how we move technology forward. And I think that what really strikes me is that I like to think about what am I up against in society. And to me, there's two things that really stand out. One is $900 billion every year with a B is spent on marketing and advertising to hijack our attention and to serve us what's important. And the algorithms that were served and who's ever behind the algorithms is

essentially controlling us. And one of the major reasons is, is because the second thing that we spoke a little bit about that we're up against is this wiring that we have, this primitive wiring for survival, that where our brains also, another component of that is our brains gravitate to a low energy brain state and our bodies gravitate to a low energy body state. You know, it's not, it would not have made sense to exercise 15,000 years ago because

we were outside working hard to survive. Even our brains, it wouldn't have made sense to engage in things that would diminish our cognitive capacity. We need to keep that open for survival scenarios. Deplete resources to problem solve and figure out a way to survive. To survive. It was all about survival. And so these two things, when you bring them together, what happens is that if you don't have rituals and practices in your life to really activate your conscious part of your

brain, then you essentially just become robots. And so as you serve technology, serve technology, people are served technology. I think that's one of the biggest challenges is that the people developing technologies, we really need to deeply understand and every day remind ourselves that when we serve this technology to humanity, the majority of people who are not engaged

in rituals and practices to activate their conscious brain are just going to be robots and do whatever they're told, whatever the algorithms are served to them, they're just going to live those algorithms. And we need to start to better understand what the consequences of that are. Yeah, I think that is potentially one of the benefits that AI could serve as a warning system for you. One of the things along this lines is we develop these cognitive biases because our brain cannot process the amount of information coming our way. We are reactive.

There's a hundred cognitive biases, familiarity bias, you know, recency bias, negativity bias. And these biases basically allow us to make very quick snap judgments and not use the precious resources of our hundred neural, you know, hundred million nerves in our cognitive capacity. But I want an AI that I can turn on to say, Peter, you're being manipulated, you're being used, you're being lied to, you're over weighting information from this person because you like the way they look, over weighting information from this person because you like the way they look or, um, or because they've gone to the same school as you, but the reality is, let's look at this information over here. So, I mean, there's the countervailing force that could be offered by AI.

I think of Jarvis as my AI, uh, wraparound, that is my interface with the world. If you want to, if you want to. I wanna dive as we close out into your book Lit. And we got a little bit of its origin in your childhood, but what's the, let's jump into that. Why do you write it? What's its message? Yeah, please. So I wrote Lit because my life has really been a living laboratory and I have developed

a lot of tools and strategies to navigate all sorts of scenarios and I really wanted to share those tools with the world. That's really the kind of the the origin motivation for writing lit. My wife reminded me that even when we met, you know, over 20 years ago I carried around a little book and would just write thoughts that came to me kind of like journaling but more like more around processes, really focused on tools and things that were coming to me on a daily basis. And so that's kind of the origin of Lit, but it evolved. And I interviewed 40 people, including Nobel Prize winners and Olympic medalists and social justice leaders and indigenous leader and astronauts and people from my laboratory

and really just started to ask questions around how do you be intentional? How do you make deliberate decisions in your lives? How do you intercept patterns? Were these questions the same for every person you interviewed? They were different. Yeah, different. And just sort of looking for stories to tell and lit that might connect with different audiences and resonate with people in different ways.

So share a few of your favorite stories. Sure, so, well, one of the people that I interviewed, Nelson Dellis, is five times US memory champion. I could use that. Yeah, I think we all could use that. He spoke about how when he was younger, he didn't have a good memory at all. He wasn't able to memorize things and it didn't come easy to him.

Someone in his family developed Alzheimer's and that really created a pain point for him to find ways to improve his memory. And so he was motivated and he sort of practiced a number of different techniques. One that he landed on is called the Memory Palace where essentially you envision let's say a house that is your childhood home and you have a deck of a lot of the stuff he does is with a deck of cards. And so he someone will give him a deck that's completely you know randomly shuffled and he will go through and look at the cards and I forget the exact time

but it's like in a minute and whatever he can memorize a complete deck of cards and and so maybe it's like 40 seconds or I forget what the exact number is. And so what you do is you assign a card for each person in your life. So like his mom might be like the queen of hearts and his dad, the king of diamonds. And so he based on what he sees with the cards, he'll walk through his house and sort of put the card in different rooms in different picture frames and stuff. So anyhow, he talked about how he got better and better and better at it. And I asked him about the monotony of that process and how did he, you know, practicing can get very boring at times and hard to bring yourself to practicing.

And he said that, you know, he talked about a variety of techniques that he used to bring in fresh energy into it by adding, mixing things up or adding cards in or taking cards out. He just had ways of kind of changing it up so it would always create, be interesting and intriguing for him. Is that a beginner's mind that you speak about? I think it's the beginner's mind. Yeah, yeah.

I've been actually reading a lot about the beginner's mind recently. Anyhow, what happened was he tells this story about how he had gone, tried to climb Everest twice and failed to reach the summit both times. He trained again for a third time and he was on his way up. He went into the death zone where oxygen levels are so low you can't survive for very long. He was able to memorize a deck of cards in under a minute in the death zone. Wow. And because he was practicing the cards, he realized as he continued to kind of make his way up that he wasn't going to be able to make it the third time, even though he had

failed two previous attempts, even though he had trained for it and he really wanted to make it, that his ability to, you know, that the process of engaging in this, this memory work as he went up made it like he was cognitively sharp at that moment and was able to convince himself to turn back and survive. And there's a ridiculously high, you know, mortality rate in going after Everest. Yeah. So that's one, one, you know, story that I just found really fascinating. Another, Joyce Roche was an executive at Avon and she had worked her way up the corporate ladder and she described

how she had really debilitating imposter syndrome. She just couldn't figure out how she made it that far. She never felt like she was, you know, she just, she wasn't really tapped into what she had brought to the company. And somebody in her, someone was up for a promotion and it sort of created a pain point because she was like, wait, I should have that promotion. For some reason she was like- Just used to progressing. Yeah. She was just used to progressing, but then someone was up for promotions. She thought, well, that felt like she felt like she should have that. And so what she did is she went home and she did some deep thinking and she basically like journaled on what the value that she

had brought to Avon and what was holding her back. She started to realize through writing out all the valuable things that she had brought that she was indeed qualified for this position and that she really was deserving of it. That prompted her to really be able to break free from this imposter syndrome, advocate for herself and get that promotion. And she's told a number of stories around how that was just really empowering for her. And I think to me, that was just so fascinating

because a lot of people suffer from imposter syndrome. And I think that in many ways, I think it's connected to the beginner's mind. I think it's connected there because we engage in a lot of things in our life. Like I feel like I feel most of the things I do, I'm not qualified to do, but that actually maximizes my chance of bringing value to it because I'm focused on what's most important. Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting, right? I remember always thinking there's got to be somebody who's much more of an adult leading the stuff than we are. Right? But you find out that's not the case. How many total stories do you tell in the book? So there's 40 stories of people that I interviewed, and then there's a bunch of my own stories

as well. And to me, you know, lit is really about resensitizing our aliveness. It's about intercepting patterns and algorithms and habits. Thinking about your thinking. Thinking about thinking. That is the core of it. You know, it's interesting. I talk about this a lot that people don't stop to think about their thinking enough. And the other side of the equation is we don't know how to think other than the way we know

how to think. Which is an interesting question. So one of the things I love using large language models about is this is what I'm doing. This is the challenge I'm having. How would Steve Jobs solve this? Or how would someone else? So it's interesting that you can use, even within a company, within your board or your leadership team, you're limited by the cognitive experiences and thinking that that's within

that corpus of individuals. But if you can bring in external, this is where you bring in consultants and disruptors and so forth, but large language models can play that role for you too. Neurodiversity and just diversity in general powers evolution, right? If everything was the same,

everything would have become extinct. And I think that that's the case for everything, that the diversity of thought, the ability to switch between different frames of reference, the ability to look at things through different lenses. One of the CEOs that I worked with, I think, made him such an incredible CEO is that on the scientific advisory board, he populated it with the most critical scientists he possibly could in all the potential areas where there were holes in the story. And so it's about trying to look at things from different angles to

to be able to kind of put the ego aside and be able to consider the different perspectives, the different views. And to me, that's also what makes life so incredible is that there's so many different ways of being, so many different ways of experiencing the world, different ways of questioning and doing things. And when you're with somebody who does something different or thinks differently, it's an opportunity to contrast that with your process and to discover whether it is what is your process really working optimally for you or is it time to try on another? But there therein lies some challenges because you have to be willing. You know, it's I know a lot of people including myself sometimes I'm so sure of how I'm doing what I just don't want someone to tell me a different approach. It's like time is marching along, I have a limited amount of resources,

money, whatever it might be, and I'm just like, no, we're going down this road. I look at everything on a pendulum. So I kind of think that everything's a pendulum swing. And so I feel like there's times where, for me, I'm really certain about the approach and then there's times where I'm considering all kinds of different frames of reference. I feel like that pendulum, it's almost like a pendulum for everything, is constantly moving back and forth. In life, I've heard a lot, you want to strike balance, but to me, it's more you want to have awareness of where you are in the pendulum swing and you want to sort of be intentional of like, okay, that's where I want it to be or do I want

it to be more center or do I want it to be over here? I mean, this could be for an entrepreneur, for a leader, for anyone trying to make a difference that well for mom and a dad to, I mean, taking the time to understand that, understand your processes and your thinking and be conscious, right? And not reacting. Yeah, that's, that is huge. Oh my God. That's everything. Yeah. And I, I recognize that with my family, my interactions with my family and, and, you know, there was times where I became a workaholic, I became addicted to the dopamine hits that I was getting from my work and I really needed to change my way of being. And I got into experimenting with meditation and various mindfulness strategies.

And I started to realize that when I was interacting with family members, that there was an energy of the conversation. Like, let's say if I'm having a conversation with my son, for example, it's like, if he's speaking about something, I have an urge to intercept, to show, hey, take a look at this on my phone, or I try to say something, and I realize that I take the energy from him and I put it on me, that he stops speaking, and that that's not what I want. Like what my intention is to support him and what he's saying and for him to find his voice

and to continue speaking. And so to me, that's one of the things that I've been working on is to really in a conversation, you know, I used to interject all the time because I was, you know, with ADHD, I lose my train of thought, I want to say it, I want to get it out there. But I realized that, you know, other thoughts will come and that's fine. And you know, things go and things come, things go, but I want to, my intention is to support the people that I'm interacting with and to create the right environment for deep connections. I love it. So, Lit, Unaudible as well? Yeah. Do you read the book or did you have someone else read it?

Actually Fred Sanders reads the book who read Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk. Oh, nice. So amazing voice. I can't wait to download that. It sounds like a beautiful use of time. I mean, an amazing investment. So thank you for that. Jeffcarp.com.

Yes. And folks can find you there to learn about your work, hire you as a speaker for their events. Profispray.com. I'm going to probably buy this as a subscription gift for all my friends. I mean, this is like, thank you for this gift. Hey.

Yeah, no, I love it. I love the science behind it. I love the simplicity. I'm excited to build our friendship. Me too. Yeah. Jeff, thank you for spending our time together on Moonshots. For this opportunity.

Thank you. Pleasure.