#92 Lisa Feldman Barrett: Balancing the Brain Budget
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If you love something, you're reading something or you're hearing something and, you know, on the news maybe, or you're watching a YouTube thing or whatever, and you love it, whatever was just said validates everything.

some deeply held belief that you have. And whenever you hear something that you hate, that just violated probably some deeply held belief that you just had. So stop and take a moment and think about it and try to observe what's going on. You know, if you take a moment before the heat of the moment has you in its grip, you will make better decisions.

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This week I'm talking with Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University. What first attracted me to Lisa's work was her book, How Emotions Are Made. And while emotions feel automatic and uncontrollable, Lisa's theory is that emotion is constructed in the moment. This conversation focuses on emotions. We'll dive into what they are and how they're made, and how this understanding helps us perform at our best, raise kids, and understand others.

It's time to listen and learn.

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Can you tell me how you got interested in emotions? Where did that come from? Wow. Well, you know, who's not interested in emotions since we all have them. But when I was a graduate student, I when I went to graduate school, I did not go to graduate school to study emotions. I went to study the self, you know, your view of yourself and why that matters.

And I was using some measures of emotion that were not behaving themselves. They just weren't working the way they were supposed to work. So I thought, all right,

I'm going to use very objective measures of emotion. So I'm going to, rather than asking people how they feel, which is what I was doing at the time, I thought, all right, I know that there are universal facial expressions. That's what every textbook says. So I'll just learn how to measure emotion in people's faces. And then I went to the scientific literature and I read and I realized, okay,

Actually, even though people claim there's a lot of evidence for universal facial expressions of emotion that everybody scowls when they're angry. Are those the micro-expressions that people talk about? Well, these are actually not micro-expressions. The idea that there are micro-expressions and the idea that there are full-blown facial expressions of emotion, scowling in anger, smiling in happiness, pouting in sadness, come from the same theoretical view.

And although there's a lot of claims that, you know, everyone in the world scowls when they're angry and everyone in the world recognizes a scowl as anger, that's not actually what the data show. And I was so I thought, oh, OK, well, I guess I can't measure emotion in the face. I'll measure emotion in the body because everybody knows that, you know, there's one bodily pattern that

for anger and one for fear and one for sadness. You see your blood pressure goes up and maybe you flush a bit in anger, but your heart races in fear and so on. And so again, I went to the research literature and I read what the papers said, and then I read the data and they didn't match. In fact, there is no universal physical signature for any emotion that's ever been studied.

And I thought, okay, well, I guess I better figure out how to image the brain because, you know, everyone knows that there's going to be one circuit for fear, one circuit for anger, one circuit for sadness. Everyone in the world has these circuits, are born with them, and maybe even some animals have them too. And, you know, what I found for the body and for the face is also what seemed to be emerging from evidence from the brain. And I thought,

Wow. So many people believe that there are these diagnostic signs, objective signs for emotion, but they don't exist. But we feel emotions. I mean, I feel angry sometimes. I feel happy sometimes. And these feelings, emotions feel like they happen to you, like they hijack you and take you over and cause you to...

you know, think and do and say sometimes things that you rather would not have. So I thought this is a real mystery. And I just abandoned the work that I was working on. And I completely switched my research program at that point, because it was a real puzzle. And I'm, you know, here I am almost 30 years later. So let's start at the beginning. What are emotions? That's not starting at the beginning. Where's the beginning? Okay.

Well, you know, here's the thing. The linguist George Lakoff calls emotions essentially contested concepts, which means we all think we know what emotions are, but no one can define them. No one can agree on their definition. So, for example, scientists, the way they typically define emotion is a package of emotions.

Thoughts and feelings and facial movements and bodily changes that are all coordinated with each other. That's the way they define anger and sadness and fear. But the evidence from science tells us that those coordinated packages don't exist.

There isn't one coordinated package for anger that when you're angry, you always feel the same way and your body's always doing the same thing and your face is always doing the same thing. All the pieces are coordinated, but they look different every single time. Well, maybe not every single time, but they look different in different situations. And it's not easy to scientifically define what emotions are.

If I gave you a definition, I don't think it would be meaningful to you or your listeners. So the way I would define emotion is the way I would define thinking. What is a thought? What is a belief? What is a memory?

Your brain is conjuring all of these events in exactly the same way. It's just using different information to make sense of what's going on in the immediate moment. So there are no telltale signs that you could see, even if you could see inside somebody, would you see that this is anger or is there something in our blood or physiology that no, and it's not cultural either.

Well, it's not completely a big random mess. I think the way to think about it is this, that first I'll give it to you by analogy and then we'll say it by emotion. So before Charles Darwin wrote his book on the origin of species, people believed that

a category of animal, like a species of animal, like say a dog, there was a particular perfect dog. You know, there was a dog, it's kind of like the dog show view of dogs. There was a perfect Cocker Spaniel. There was a perfect Dalmatian. There was a perfect Siberian Husky. Every dog had some of the features of what made that breed perfect. And

But there was a perfect animal with the perfect tail length and the perfect coat thickness and the perfect eye color. And all the individuals that you would see of that kind of dog varied from each other. But that was just error. It was just mistakes that really there was this perfect dog out there. And philosophers would say there was an essence, you know, an essence of Cocker Spanielness that

that was there. But what we saw in the world, all the Cocker Spaniels we saw, they had varying features. And so there was a lot of error in the mix. And Charles Darwin came along and said, no, actually what a species of an animal is, like a breed of Cocker Spaniel, is a collection of highly variable individuals. That what's real and meaningful is that variation.

And our idea that there's this ideal Cocker Spaniel is actually a myth. It's a fiction that doesn't really exist in nature. So scientifically, what Charles Darwin was saying was that there aren't fixed types of animals. Each animal is a populate, each category or class of animal is a population of highly variable individuals. And the variation is really important because

Some animals will do well in one context and some will do well in another context, right? And they'll differentially breed based on how well they're doing. So you can look at any biological category that way, like anger or sadness or fear. There isn't a perfect example of anger

with a perfect facial scowl and a perfect change in the body and a one particular circuit firing or pattern in the brain. Instead, what your brain is doing is it's making instances of anger that fit the situation that you're in. So sometimes when you're angry, you might shout, you might raise your voice. And sometimes when you're angry, you might laugh. Sometimes when you're angry, you might cry.

Sometimes when you're angry, you might sit quietly and plot the demise of your enemy. Sometimes when you cultivate anger, it feels pleasant, actually. And sometimes it feels unpleasant. Wait, say more about feeling pleasant. Well, have you never, you've never felt aggressive and felt like it was really good to express that aggression?

Like when you're playing soccer or you're trying to beat somebody in cards. So there are some people who, for example, when they're about to debate someone or negotiate with someone or they're about to enter a competition with someone, they get themselves pretty worked up and angry. So it feels good to be angry and to express that anger. But at other times it doesn't.

And that's not error in the system. That's not stuff happening randomly. That's not a bug. That's a feature of how your brain works. It's a feature of how brains work. There is no essence of anger. There's no essence of sadness. Your brain is creating instances based on

what you learned in the past, it's creating instances that will work in the present. You know, it's the same thing is true for fear, the same thing is true for happiness, and so on. So sometimes I'll, you know, when I say that people say, really, when are you ever happy when you're afraid? And I'll be like, well, have you ever been on a roller coaster? Have you ever gone to a haunted house? I for 13 years, we had a haunted house in my basement on Halloween, right before Halloween. And

We did it as a charity. All my graduate students and postdocs, we would get all dressed up. We orchestrated the whole thing because, you know, we're really good at scaring the crap out of people in a lab, right? So we thought, well, hey, let's just do this for, you know, we'll scare little kids in for money and then give all the money away to the Boston Food Bank, which is what we did for many years. But we would all get together and we would scare the crap out of people, like little kids, you know, again and again and again. And they loved it.

And they were really enjoying themselves. One time I talk about this in my book. I threw a birthday party for my daughter when she was 12. It was a disgust party. And so I made these kids like exuberantly disgusted. They were having the time of their lives and they were totally grossed out. So disgust is often unpleasant, but sometimes it's

It's really pleasant. And, you know, often when you're disgusted, you withdraw from something, but sometimes you approach it because it's more interesting or it's fun or it's, you know, a challenge. So I think the point is that when it comes to emotion, as with almost everything in biology,

Variation is the norm. There isn't one anger. You have a whole population of angers that you can feel and your brain doesn't conjure them randomly. It conjures them according to your brain's best guess of what's gonna work in a particular situation. - Is there a difference between feelings and emotions or are those interchangeable? - So again, I have to give you the wishy-washy science answer, which is that some scientists

want to define emotions as actions, behaviors, not as feelings, because they would like to search for a common physical basis of those actions in humans and in non-human animals. Because they want the pattern.

Because they want to, they want to, they're looking for the one pattern of that emotion. So for example, oftentimes you'll hear about, you know, fear learning or fear. And then you, when you read the article in the newspaper or you hear it, you know, on a podcast or whatever, it turns out that, that the scientists have studied a fly or they've studied a rat. And what they're studying actually is freezing behavior.

that if you create a situation where an animal freezes because the animal is uncertain about whether or not a threat is present, they call that fear. And the assumption is that the circuitry is very similar across all different species.

Well, it turns out that the circuitry, it's more complicated than that. But it turns out that, you know, in mammals, for example, the circuitry for freezing, freezing behavior, where you, you know, is somewhat similar across, you know, rats and monkeys and humans. But the only way you can say that's a fear circuit is if you define fear as freezing. What about all the other parts of

What about when animals try to escape a situation? Or what about when they attack a predator, which happens often? So rats, for example, if they can't escape the situation, they'll attack the predator, particularly if it's a mother and she has pups.

And in humans, like it can motivate us, right? Like sometimes fear drives us to do other, is that because it's a particular type of fear or is that because? Right. So that's the, that would be the old way of doing things. You could say, okay, well, instead of saying I have this category that's highly with highly variable instances of population in the Darwinian sense, you say, no, okay, really, I just have to find types of fear. I'm just going to, so I'm going to take the category fear and I'm just going to chop it up into smaller bits.

So because of what you're trying to do is say, okay, all the instances in, you know, this kind of fear are the same. But even no matter how small you make those boxes, there's still variation in the boxes. You just can't get rid of the variation because it's inherent in the phenomenon. So there are some scientists who define emotions as behaviors. There are other scientists who define emotions as feelings.

In our culture, colloquially, as people, we tend to define emotions as feelings.

In other cultures, emotions are the action that's predicted in a particular situation and feelings don't really play into it at all. It's in fact seen as kind of disrespectful to presume that you know how someone feels by how they act. In our culture, we very much think that we know how people feel and what they think by what they act. That's why words like microaggression or microexpression exists because we make an inference

Your brain is automatically making inferences about the internal thoughts and feelings of people based on their actions, but we are blinded to the fact that they're inferences, that they're guesses. We think we're reading people when in fact really all our brain is doing is guessing. Is there a way that we can check ourselves on that? Yeah, ask.

But how do you remember to do that in the moment? Right. Because you just instinctively like somebody's acting like that. Do we learn that? Like somebody's acting like, is that cultural? Like we were taught that. Yeah. You're taught that. And you're taught that in ways it's, you know, when I say this, well, yeah, we've learned it. I think people, people need to understand a little bit what it means to say that something is learned. They'll say, oh, so it's not hardwired.

It's learned. But actually anything which is learned is wired into your brain. If it wasn't wired into your brain... It wouldn't be learned. You wouldn't be learned. So the question is, were you born with it or was it bootstrapped into your wiring by experience? So one, you know, I just, I have a book coming out in the fall called

It's called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. And it covers some of these ideas because I think they're really fascinating, but also most people just don't know. So most people don't know, for example, that

An infant brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's when human infants are born, they're born with unfinished brains. And those brains are waiting for wiring instructions from the world. And little brains wire themselves to the world, to the physical world and to the social world. So for example, the brain needs

information from your eyes in order to finish wiring itself so you can see. And if it doesn't receive that information after you're born, you will never see normally. Similarly, so it's learned something that's been wired into the brain. And if you live in a culture like ours, where there are rooms with corners and

you know, buildings and square things with corners and edges, you learn to see the world in one way, physical world in one way. And if you live in a culture where there's nothing square and there are no corners and

you learn to see the world in a different way. So much so that some things for us that are visual, we have these like visual illusions where we see something and, you know, if you see two lines and they actually are the same, but you know, if one line, the, there are arrowheads pointing inwards and then on the other line and pointing outwards called the Mueller-Lyer illusion, the one with the ones pointing outwards look like a longer line than the ones with the arrowheads pointing inwards, but actually they're the same.

So that illusion doesn't happen to, for some people in the world because they didn't, they weren't exposed to buildings and boxes and corners and things when, when their brain was finished wiring itself for, to be able to see. And so similarly, everything you do, everything an infant experiences is a fair game for it to learn about. And that becomes in, you know, shapes it's wiring, including, um,

When you label things for the child, or you speak to someone else in the child's presence with words. So for example, in our culture, we do a lot of curating of objects.

for infants will say, you know, we'll hold up a dog and say, you know, like a play toy dog is like, look, a doggy or like, look, a truck or look, a train. We do that kind of labeling. But then we also say to kids, you know, oh, you're crying. Don't be sad. Or, you know, when the kid, you know, throws, you know, his Cheerios on the floor. Oh, don't be angry. Or when he cries, when, you know, someone takes his toy away.

Those incidental things, the child's brain is picking it all up and learning it. And so what the brain is doing is it's learning patterns. And then those patterns are available for the brain to use later to make sense of what's happening. That's really interesting. Should we label emotions with kids? Absolutely. In this culture, yes.

I mean, in all culture, I think that kids have to learn, they have to become culturally competent in the categories that are meaningful in their culture. Otherwise, they can't communicate with other people. So remember, what a word is referring to is a whole event that's occurring. That is how the child feels, what's happening in the world around the child in that moment.

what's going on in the child's body in that moment, and then what actions happen next and what the consequences are. For example, when you feel bad, do you know what to do next to make yourself not feel bad?

Not really. It's a kind of a crapshoot. But if you know that you're sad or angry or afraid, well, there might not be one thing to do when you're sad, but then maybe there are two or three and your brain can kind of make a pretty good guess based on the situation, which one of those you should try. And so in a sense, you know, emotions are ways of understanding what's happening in your own body in relation to what's happening in the world.

as a prediction for what to do next to make yourself feel better or worse or get yourself into a state that your brain, you know, thinks would be a good state to be in.

And I say it that way because people don't consciously do it a lot of the time. It's just that's just business as usual for how brains work. And so there's research which shows really clearly that in in Western cultural contexts like ours, knowing a lot of emotion concepts and a lot of emotion words and and being able to use those.

to create very nuanced, precise, emotional events actually is really helpful. It's helpful socially. It's helpful in school. Those kids do better. They perform better in school. It, it is, um,

allows you to be resilient to when bad things happen to you. It helps you cope. So kids who, what we call this emotional granularity, meaning your emotional life is very precise and granular, you know, so one grain of sand is not the same as another grain of sand. So one instance of anger is not the same as the other instance of anger.

Those kids, you know, tend to use alcohol less when they're stressed. People even recover faster from physical illness when they're more granular. And that sounds like magic, but it actually isn't magic. If you understand how the brain works and you understand kind of what's going on under the hood, well, we don't understand everything, but we understand some things.

it makes complete sense that these things would be true. Do we unconsciously send the message that you shouldn't be feeling when we say don't be angry or don't be sad?

Well, I think that's really complicated. I'm full of complicated questions today. Yeah. So here's the thing. You and I are not in the same physical space, right? You know, I'm in my office at home and you're in your studio. But let's just say we were. Let's say we were both in the same studio or maybe we were having a cup of coffee.

Even though we don't know each other, if we like each other, if we're getting along pretty well, if we trust each other in the moment, our biological signals will start to synchronize. Our heart rates will synchronize. Our breathing will synchronize.

And if we know each other really well, when I get a little worked up, you might get a little worked up. Actually, we don't even have to know each other that well. We just have to be around each other for a little bit of time. People call that emotional contagion, but it's actually not emotional. What's happening really is that human nervous systems regulate each other.

We're social animals. We evolved that way. So we have lots of ways that we affect the nervous system of another person. And when I affect your nervous system in a way and you're not aware of it, your brain's just going to try to make sense of it. And so it makes sense of it sometimes as emotion. So my point is that when someone else gets worked up, you're more likely to get worked up too. And if you don't want to be worked up, you don't want that person to be

worked up. So a lot of times when people say, don't be sad, don't be angry, really what they're saying is, I don't want to deal with you being angry or sad, and I don't want to feel that way. So I want you to calm down. Oh, that's fascinating. I'd never heard it explained that way before. Yeah. You know, I trained as a therapist a really long time ago, like in another life. And one thing I learned is that it's really hard to sit with someone else's distress and

and just let them be distressed. It's like one of the hardest things to learn to do. Instead, almost your knee-jerk reaction is to help them regulate because really what you're doing is you're helping yourself regulate. You don't want them to be upset because you don't want to be upset. It's not a completely selfish act. It's just that part of the mechanism for you to have empathy is

is to feel what someone else feels. And that can be a really challenging thing. And often we don't even want to feel it in ourselves, let alone with somebody else, right? It seems like we suppress a lot of feelings. Talk to me about that. Does that come back to bite us? Does it make them linger? Does it cause other behaviors later on? The idea that suppressing feelings is really bad for you

It's part of an old hydraulic model of emotion that, you know, an emotion triggers in your brain. You need to let off steam, have catharsis, kind of get it out. And if you don't, something bad will happen. That's not really true. Here's more the way it works. You can think about your brain as running a budget for your body. You have cells. Those cells require energy.

You're thinking, what the hell? I just asked her a question about, you know, is it bad not to express emotion? She's talking about cells. I'll get there. But I mean, I think the problem is if you really want to understand it, you have to start. Oh, yeah. Let's go into the weeds. Yeah. Well, we're only going to briefly glimpse the weeds and then we'll get right back out. But my point is that what's your brain's most important job? Why do you even have a brain? Why did a brain evolve? It didn't evolve for you to think or feel or see.

It evolved to regulate your body. As brains get bigger, bodies get bigger. As bodies get bigger, brains get bigger. What is your brain doing? Your brain is regulating. It's running a budget for your body. Oxygen. It's not budgeting money. It's budgeting oxygen and salt and water and sodium and all these hormones and all this stuff.

all this junk that your body needs to function. So in a sense, you can think about your brain as kind of the financial office of a very large company that's like a multinational company. It needs to try to get the resources where they need to be before they're needed. Just like if you're going to spend a lot, you want to go buy something really expensive, it's better to have the money in the bank

and buy it than it is to buy it on your credit card and try to pay it back with interest, right? And so that's how your brain basically tries to work. So what's bad is if you make an expenditure, so let's say you buy a bunch of stuff on your credit card and you pay the bill really fast. There's no tax. You haven't paid any interest. I mean, there's no additional tax, right? There's no interest. You just pay the bill and it's paid.

That's like your brain preparing you to do something, to yell, to talk, to breathe, to run on the treadmill, to get into an argument with a friend, to have sex, to do something, to eat, right? Your brain prepares, it makes an expenditure and it's preparing to get something in return, like to have the bill paid.

But let's say that doesn't happen. Well, then your brain is your body starts to run a bit of a deficit, right? And then there's a little bit of interest. And if that builds up over time, that's very bad for you. So the thing is that when your brain is about to make a big expenditure, those happen to be the moments that we call emotions.

When your brain is preparing your body to do something or even thinking about it, you have a big cortisol release in your bloodstream. People think, oh, that's the stress hormone. No, it's not. It's a hormone that is secreted in what we call stress. But basically, what cortisol does is it gets glucose into your blood really fast so that cells can use it really fast.

So when you get up in the morning, you have a cortisol surge. When you're running on the treadmill, you have a cortisol surge. It basically means your brain is preparing to make a big expenditure. And when you do that,

And you don't, and as a consequence, you know, there are sensory changes in your body. Your heart is pounding, you're starting to sweat, whatever it is. And you feel that as emotion. You feel that as emotion. And if the expenditure doesn't come,

and the reward doesn't come, you don't replenish, that's actually really bad. So if you're continually getting stressed over and over and over, you're getting mad over and over and over, or you're getting afraid over and over and over, and that expenditure isn't paid back,

you're not sleeping enough, you don't eat healthfully, you're not getting hugs from your loved ones, you know, whatever kind of, you know, you're not exercising sufficiently, you will start to run a deficit. And that what that translates into is illness, it translates into depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, they're all metabolic illnesses that come from a debt running a deficit in your body budget.

What are the actions that we can take that might build up some of that account balance or prevent the deficit from accumulating? You sort of said sleep, exercise, sex. What else? Yeah. So, you know, I think usually what I say when I talk like this, you know, I don't sound like a neuroscientist. I sound like someone's mother and I am someone's mother. But I think one of the really big changes in neuroscience in the last decade is the realization of just how important sleep is.

So literally, if there was only one thing that you could do in your life, only one, it would be sleep a decent amount every day, whatever that means for you. It's usually somewhere between seven and eight hours for most adults, and it's longer for kids and adolescents. So for example,

One reason that the rate of adolescent depression is so high in this country is because adolescents go to bed late. They're on their computers and their devices, which has light at a particular frequency that stimulates their retinas to keep them awake. So it's disrupting their circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that helps your sleep-wake cycle. So they can't get to sleep.

And then they have to get up at a really early time in the morning to get to school. So whereas an adolescent brain might need 10 hours a night, most kids are getting five, six hours. That's really bad. Like, it's not just bad because they won't learn well. I mean, they won't learn well. It's not just bad because they'll be more impulsive. It's not just bad because there'll be a complete pain in the ass, you know, if you're their parent. It's also bad because there's this

small metabolic tax that's being charged every single time. And those kids, when they become adults, middle-aged will be more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, you know, metabolic illnesses, which by the way, are also at record numbers in this country. Of course, that's not the only reason why.

But it's one reason. So I think the issue isn't whether you express your emotions or not. The issue is don't get riled up with any emotion without paying the bill. And part of paying the bill means getting enough sleep. So are some people actually more emotional than other people? Is that a thing? Or do they just have a bigger deficit than other people?

Yes, both. So here's the thing, I sort of skipped over one piece, because I'm already giving you all this complicated science stuff. But I'll just complicate things further and give you one other piece. So when your brain is regulating your body, your body is sending sense data back to your brain that your brain needs in order to keep that regulation going. And you don't experience those sensations typically, in a very precise way.

So when your heart is beating and your lungs are expanding and, you know, everything else that's going on in that little internal drama, that's like right now, for example, you're sitting there, you look like you're sitting quietly, but you have a whole, you know, symphony of physical changes going on in your body and your body is sending that sense data to your brain. Can you sense your liver functioning? Can you sense your heart beating? Yeah.

No. Even now? No, you can't exactly. And we're not wired to be able to do that. And there's a good reason why. And that is, if you could, you would never pay attention to anything outside your own skin ever again. It's a big drama going on right now. For example, if you've ever been in a like a one of those deprivation tanks, you know, like a soaking tank where they block out all the

external sense data. So it's completely dark. You can't, you have earphones that you can't hear anything. You're floating in, in, you know, salted water. So there's, you can't feel any touch. And then it's like this symphony of internal sounds just emerges. You can hear all this stuff going on inside your own body, but you can't feel it because we're not wired to feel it. So instead what we feel is, is, is a simple, um,

physical feeling that scientists call affect or we call mood. So you feel good or bad or pleasant or unpleasant or worked up or calm. It's like a general barometer for how your body budget is doing. And we make sense of those sensations as emotions sometimes.

but only when they get really intense. But they're with us all the time because your brain is always regulating your body. Your body's always sending sense data to your brain. So you're always, affect is a property of consciousness. It's not emotion, but it's an ingredient. It's a feature in emotion. It's also there when you're having thoughts or perceptions, right? So you're driving on the highway, somebody kicks you off and you're like, your reaction is like, that guy's an asshole.

Well, that's a very affective perception. You know, if you ask people, they'll be like, well, no, I'm not mad. That guy's an asshole. Like assholeness is a property of that guy who just cut me off. And you might say, well, you're just angry. You don't know it.

Well, how can you tell? There's no objective marker for anger. Who's right? And the answer is, that's a bad question. You're perceiving anger, and that person is experiencing assholeness in that driver. And they're both actually valid perceptions. So my point is that, do people differ in emotionality? Sure.

Why? Because first of all, some people just differ in mood. And they differ in mood because some people, their brains prepare them to expend energy just more frequently than other people. It's something that in babies we call temperament.

You know, it's called arousability in babies. Some babies are perturbed by every little thing, you know, and others not so much. So there are some people who react to, you know, they sort of swim in a sea of drama. Every little thing is meaningful to them. Every little thing their brain is reacting to preparing the body for some expenditure. And for other people, you know, that's one end of the continuum and the other end of the continuum.

People are kind of like floating in a calm sea of tranquility. And occasionally they might get perturbed, but mostly they're just sailing along. And then there's everybody in between. For example, my husband is one of these people who floats in a sea of tranquility. Mostly I admire it. Occasionally it irritates the shit out of me, but mostly I admire it.

And I'm more, I don't react to every little thing, but my nervous system is a little on the, more on the other, you know, somewhere on the other end where I react to more things. The thing is that you can take anybody, deprive them of sleep. Maybe they get five or six hours a night instead of eight for a couple of nights.

and they just become more reactive. It's just the nature of the system for that to be true. If you take a person and you add some testosterone to their bloodstream, they become more reactive. And here's a contentious thing, but I will say it. If you take a woman who's still fertile and you start to withdraw estrogen and add progesterone

she will also be more reactive. So it's not just women, men have it too. For men, it runs on a daily cycle. Your testosterone goes up and down on the daily cycle. It might not be extreme enough that you can tell, but it is observable by careful scientific means.

And, you know, do women, do they get, you know, uncontrollably emotional, you know, right before they get their period? No, that's a myth. You know, are women, you know, unable to make good sound decisions right before they get their period? No, that's a myth.

But is it the case that they are even in a minuscule way, their brains are more likely to prepare them to do something for a challenge for more things than when they're at some other point in their cycle? Yeah, on average, that is true. In my data, at least, it's true. Yeah.

I want to go back to something you said. So is the brain just constantly interpreting the outside world and that is the process of sort of like how we construct emotions?

The brain is constantly interpreting the meaning of internal sensations and external sensations. And it's making meaning. It's a meaning-making machine. It's a meaning-making machine. And sometimes it makes meaning as a thought. And sometimes it makes meaning as a perception. And sometimes it makes meaning...

as an emotion. And I should say, that's our understanding in this culture, because we have events that we experience as thoughts and feelings, or as physical symptoms, right? But like a stomachache. But in other cultures, some cultures don't make a distinction between thoughts and feelings. It's all one thing to them. And it's not that they're

they're wrong and we're right. It's that their brains have learned a way to make sense of their sense data in relation to what's going on around them in their world in a fundamentally different way than we do. And neither way is right or wrong. They're just different. Right. And so let me give you an example of one way that we make sense of things that's really not helpful for us. And that is the idea of there being mental and physical illness.

You have a mental illness, you see a psychiatrist. You have a physical illness, you see an internist. There's actually no fundamental difference biologically between a mental illness and a physical illness. In depression, you have a metabolic problem and you also feel bad. And those two things are related. In heart disease, you have a metabolic problem and you feel bad. And those two things are related.

So sometimes you'll hear people say, well, the comorbidity of depression and heart disease is about 70%, meaning 70% of people who have heart disease also develop depression. And they talk about depression causing heart disease or heart disease causing depression. But actually, there's probably a common metabolic problem that's causing both.

both a problem with your heart and a problem with your mood, because they're related. Or Alzheimer's disease, for example. Alzheimer's disease also is the result of a pervasive, persistent metabolic problem. I mean, I made this conjecture probably, I don't know, 15 years ago, and now there's actually starting to be evidence for about what I'm about to say, which is

The most expensive organ you own is your brain. Your brain costs you 20% of your metabolic budget. There's no other organ that comes close to being that expensive. So neurons are really expensive little cells to keep alive.

And there are certain cells in your brain, certain neurons that are much more expensive than others. And so when you are running a deficit in your budget, in your bank budget, what do you do? You stop spending.

So what does a brain do when it's running a deficit? It's also stopped spending. So what does that mean? Well, it might mean you're too tired and you don't move as much. It might mean that you stop learning about what's going on around you in the world because it turns out learning is expensive, metabolically speaking. And so let's say you do that. You slow the body down. You make the body tired. You stop moving so much. You stop...

really paying a lot of attention to what's going on around you in the world. You sort of just use what you've learned before to help you make sense of everything. And that's not enough. What do you do? Well, you start getting rid of some of the really expensive parts. You start killing off neurons. And that's where these things start cropping up? Yeah. So neurodegeneration that happens in Alzheimer's disease or even normal aging,

is really about trimming your metabolic budget, basically. That's super interesting. And so just to recap, the things that we can do to sort of like make sure we have the money to spend is sleep is number one, sex, exercise. What are the other things that we can do to sort of like recharge? Well, there are lots of things you can do. You can, I mean, having sex is good.

Who doesn't like that? But even just a hug. Physical connection. Physical connection is good. Any kind of social connection can help. It can also hurt. But one thing we can do is you can be kind to someone.

Actually, that actually helps you, metabolic budget. It actually is helpful when you are kind to someone. It also, thankfully, increases the likelihood that that person will be kind to you. And that also...

it diminishes the burden on your budget. I mean, the degree of animosity and casual brutality that we see in the media and so on, people think of it as like this sort of decrease in civility as a social problem, but it's actually a public health problem too. I mean, I'm not saying become like milquetoast and let people walk all over you. I am saying though that

Treating other people with a certain degree of human dignity and kindness and having them, you know, treat you in the same way is actually really helpful.

physically, biologically helpful to you. And I'm not saying this because I'm like a bleeding heart liberal academic. I'm saying it because I'm a neuroscientist and it just that's what the data show. If you exercise and you expend a lot of energy, you have to recuperate. You have to drink enough water. You have to eat something. You have to rest. You have to let your muscles rest. You

So you have to recuperate. And so, you know, a big argument with someone is sort of the same thing. It's not even sort of the same thing. I mean, it's like pretty much the same thing from a metabolic standpoint. I mean, your heart rate will go up higher if you're running and probably and, you know, it'll...

expenditure will last for longer, but it's in principle, the dynamics are the same. So you have to replenish yourself. And if you don't, and you're just sort of swimming in this sea of like icky conflict all the time, it's actually not good for your physical health. One thing we can do is we can,

We can sleep, we can eat healthfully, we can, you know, make good social connections to other people where who we like and who we trust and, and, and who we value and who value us. And, you know, we can generally just be kinder to each other.

What do we do when our partner or our friends are feeling something, when they have anxiety or anger? What are the ways that we can be helpful in our response? Or what are the most helpful ways, I guess, to respond in those situations? So I think the first thing that you have to do, which is actually a really, really hard thing to do, is to figure out what they want. So sometimes what someone wants is just empathy, right?

And sometimes what they want is help. They want you to help them instrumentally help them figure out how to solve a problem. If you offer your advice for how to solve a problem to someone who in that moment really just wants a pat on the back or a hug, do you know what happens?

Not good things. Not good things, right? Anyone who's ever been in a relationship or had a kid knows exactly what we're talking about here. So the first thing I do, the first thing that we do in my house is we say, do you want empathy or do you want a solution? What do you want?

And how does that skew? Is it 50-50 between empathy and solution, or is it mostly empathy? It depends on the person. If you ask my daughter, who's 21 now, she will tell you almost 100% of the time, I want empathy. And if you asked her, she would say, and my mother is constantly trying to solve problems, and all I really want is just a little empathy. Yeah.

But if you ask my husband, he would almost always say, I want a solution. I want you to help me find a solution to this. I want instrumental help is what we would call it as a scientist. And I think I probably am more like him in that sense. I certainly want to feel understood, but usually what I want is help with a solution that actually makes me feel better. I don't need someone to just give me a hug and pat me on the back.

But occasionally that's very welcome. I think it really varies from person to person, which is why it's really helpful to ask. What's the next step? If that's the first step in your house, what is the next sort of walk me through that whole tree?

Yeah, I think it really, it really depends. So for example, I mean, it's, it's a little hard in this culture at this particular moment in time to say, walk up and give somebody a hug because that can land you in jail. But you know,

Sometimes for someone who you're close to and you have permission to do it, what empathy can mean is really just giving someone a hug or patting their arm. Just being there with them in that moment. Just being with them in the moment and sitting with it. That's really hard. I agree with you. It's really hard. It's really hard. Sometimes it means letting them talk.

But then you have to reflect back what they said and not add anything, right? Just really let them know they've been heard and that they're understood. And that, again, that may sound like, you know, psychological mumbo jumbo, but there's like a real biological consequence to doing that. Sometimes, literally, it means in my house, it means, you know,

doing some breathing exercises because breathing is really the only way that we know of, biologically speaking, that it's the only way that you can kind of deliberately get a handle on your nervous system. You've got this

nervous system in your body called the autonomic nervous system. You have the sympathetic side and the parasympathetic side, and they work together in a complicated kind of dance. It's called the autonomic nervous system because it's automatic and you have no control over it.

But the only, there is one way to get control, a little bit of control. And if you practice more than a little bit is, or a little bit more, I would say is, is, is breathing. For some people it's a seven, seven, six seconds or seven second breath. For some people it's eight, eight seconds. But if you breathe regularly and deeply diaphragmatic breathing,

After a couple of minutes, you can slow your heart rate. You can basically it sort of calms your system down. Well, let's do that right now. Let's walk me through how we try this. I mean, a lot of people know how to do this. They just don't realize it. So, for example, you know how when you cry, like, you know, you have a big cry and then there are times when you just take a big breath.

and you let it out. And then, you know, crying feels cathartic because like everything is calming down. It's those breaths actually that are calming you down. Or in yoga, for example, you know, when you're doing a yoga class, even in something like hot yoga where, you know, you're just, you know, drenched in sweat, you're pacing your breathing. So I think people intuitively know

how to do it. What I should say is for some people doing this causes them to hyperventilate. So. Okay. You've been warned if you're listening to this or watching. Yeah. So, but basically, so put your hand on your torso, on your tummy. So you're not going to be breathing from your chest. You're going to be breathing from your diaphragms. When you breathe in, you don't want your chest to expand. What you want is your stomach kind of to expand. So breathe in and have your stomach expand.

Yeah, so what's happening is you're actually taking in breath down to the bottom of your lungs instead of just the top. Right. And then so you breathe in on a count of like, say, three or four and out on a count of three or four. So let's do that one breath. Okay. Okay. Okay. Ready? Yeah. You try to push all the air out. Feels different, like to breathe that low in your, is that how we're supposed to be breathing all the time? Yeah. Yeah.

So why don't we breathe that way all the time? It's like we're lazy breathing almost. If I could answer that question, I think there are lots of reasons. Here's one. I can't actually see how you're sitting right now because you have a black T-shirt on and I can only see you from here. But are you sitting straight up or are you slouched over? I'm pretty close to straight up.

I mean, this is like fully straight. Right. Okay. So for me, I'm sitting fully straight right now. Right. This is how I normally sit. So I'm like pretty crunched up. If I tried to expand my diaphragm right now, I wouldn't get very far because I'm kind of hunched over.

I'm not supposed to sit like that. It's very bad for you to sit like that. But a lot of us do a lot of the time. I actually really admire people who have great posture all the time. Yeah, me too. I also hate them in some way. I know, I do too. Right, exactly.

So that's one reason. I think another reason is that to be able to breathe like that for most of us requires a lot of mind. Like we have to really pay attention. I mean, we can practice and practice and practice and then eventually we can breathe more like that. But that's a really kind of a, for lack of a better word, mindful breathing. It really requires a lot of attention.

And most of us have other things to do in the day. It turns out that there is research which shows that if you breathe that way, say for five or five, five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night, you know, like so you take a period and you kind of do it, you know, a couple of times a day.

Over months, your resting heart rate will go down. You'll be able to calm yourself faster when you get really worked up. It's a really useful strategy. And so that's something we do in our house. We call it a yoga breath. You know, let's do some yoga breaths.

And just because when my daughter was a little girl, that's what I would, that's what I would call it when I wanted her to just to calm down and, and breathe a bit. It's a, it's a really, really helpful strategy. Yeah. Breath is really interesting when it comes to emotion and feeling too, right? It helps you center and helps you focus and sort of like, not only that, there's the physiological like response of just breathing in a deeper, more connected way. It also though helps you learn better. Yeah.

I mean, because if all of your brain's energy isn't tied up here, there's a lot more left over for learning stuff. Taking some breaths actually affects even how you learn in the moment. What are the core emotions? Are there universal emotions? How many emotions are there? Are there millions? Are there four? Are there five? Some scientists will tell you that there are

six, and some will tell you that there are 22 or 24. I mean, I think if you look at the evidence, there's not really good evidence for either of those answers. In fact, there's evidence against both of those answers. I would say there are no core emotions, and there is no set of universal emotions. What's universal is affect.

Your brain regulates your body. Your body sends data to your brain and you feel it as affect because that's how you're wired. That's how everybody's wired. You know, affect is like this kind of like general barometer that lets you know how your body budget's doing. And that's true for everybody. As far as we can tell from all the cultures that have ever been studied,

That's universal. But more than that, how you make sense of, you know, for example, there's one culture where the prescription for what you're supposed to do when you're afraid is go to sleep. Interesting. Yeah, that's way different than what we do. Right. If we were to translate that into a Western culture.

meaning making, the analogy would be play dead, you know, so the threat doesn't, doesn't take any interest in you go to sleep, whereas that's not that's not typically what we think of as the modal response to fear, the stereotypic response to fear in our culture. So and if you don't understand that, that just means that you don't have that kind of mind that was pickled in that kind of culture. You have a different kind of mind that was pickled in a different kind of culture.

In a neurotypical brain, everyone is equipped to run. But when you run, how you run, that's not universal. Is love an emotion? Oh, I just... You know, here's the thing. To people who believe that there are different mechanisms for emotion and for cognition, for thinking, and for perceptions, for seeing, and for thinking, and whatever...

That's a really meaningful question to me. Not meaningful at all. Not meaningful. It's all the mechanisms are all the same. It doesn't matter whether you're thinking or feeling or seeing or hearing or whatever. It's all the same mechanisms. Your brain is taking in sense data from the body and from the world, and it's using past experiences to make sense of what that means. So is love an emotion? I don't.

We're labeling it that through our brain almost. Sometimes when people ask that question, they're asking because they're looking for evidence of something. So for example, sometimes people ask that question, I'm guessing, because...

there's this belief that we are less in control of our emotions than we are of our thoughts, which is really false, actually. So this is something I talk about in How Emotions Are Made, my book that is in print now, and my new book. This is something I talk about in both books, although in a bit of a different way. The idea that

You know, you're not in control of your emotions, the moments of emotion, and therefore you're less responsible for them. You're less culpable for them. And so if we say that love is an emotion, then it means that you're sort of less responsible for what you do. Well, no, can't love be an emotion, but you're still responsible for what you do? You can, but I'm saying when people ask that question, that's usually why they're asking. It's like, you can't help who you love.

Well, okay, sure. But you can help who you put yourself in proximity to. You know, if I don't want to eat potato chips, I don't put potato chips in my cupboard and then try really hard not to eat them. I just don't have them in my cupboard. You can't help who you love. You can't help who you become attached to.

is sort of not true. But what it means to be in control is different than what people usually think. They think about overcoming something in the moment, as opposed to making good decisions to architect your environment in such a way as to not let certain things happen. Right. I like the architecting environment angle. How do we work to overcome or

Or, you know, we still have to function, right? How do we make good decisions when we're feeling emotional? How do we architect an environment? Those are sort of like three separate questions. Yeah, well, I think the first thing I would say is that when you're in an emotional episode, people often do make really good decisions.

The idea that emotions are foibles, that they kind of trip you up is a really old view. It's not supported by the evidence. Do emotions sometimes trip you up? Yeah. Does thinking sometimes trip you up? Absolutely. Right. So there are just times when you're making good decisions and times when you're not. But it's not really aligned with reality.

whether or not you're emotional or whether or not you're being, you know, rational or thinking. I mean, even the whole idea that, you know, your brain is a battleground between emotion and reason, you know, battling it out for control of your behavior is a very old story. It's,

But it's a myth. That's not how your brain works. Your brain didn't evolve that way. It doesn't work that way. It's not structured that way. Talk to me about that because we tend to think there's this continuum when we're making decisions between emotional brain and rational brain. And you sort of like want to know where you are on that continuum. And society sort of seems to nudge us towards more rational and less emotional as if they're sort of like less valuable in some way. You have one brain.

You don't have two brains or three brains. You don't have an emotional brain. You don't have a rational brain. There's no part of your brain that's devoted to emotion.

that isn't used when also in moments when you are being rational. So that's the first thing to understand. There are certainly there are times when you feel more in control of your behavior and times when you feel less in control of your behavior, meaning there are times when it when your behavior feels more automatic. And there are times when it feels more effortful, your actions feel more effortful. There are times when affect is very, you're feeling it very strongly, and

Those are moments where the brain would typically be making emotions. But that can trip you up. It also occurs in great moments of heroism and great moments of valor. We tend to think about emotional moments as hot and intense and rational moments as

uh, cool and not intense, but that really just has more to do with how much affect you're feeling in that moment. And in fact, you can have very rational decision-making when there's a lot of affect going on. Are there certain things that we can do to make better decisions when we are feeling emotional? This is what I say to my students too, actually, whenever you hear something or you see something and you,

have this intense reaction of, I love it. This is awesome.

or a really negative reaction, intense, intense, negative reaction. Like I hate this, that's stupid. Or this is, you know, I hate that person or whatever. Those are the moments to just stop and, you know, use the intensity of your affect as a cue to stop and interrogate what's going on. If you love something, you're reading something or you're hearing something and, you know, on the news maybe, or you're watching a YouTube thing or whatever, and you love it,

That whatever was just said validates some deeply held belief that you have. And whenever you hear something that you hate, that just violated probably some deeply held belief that you just had. So stop and take a moment and think about it and try to try to observe what's going on. You know, if you take a moment before the heat of the moment has you in its grip, you

you will make better decisions. But that's not about really being emotional or being rational. That's about using your affect as a cue, using it as a barometer, the way what it was designed by evolution to be as a cue that this might be a moment where you want to slow down for a minute and take stock.

What are the things that we can do environmentally? You mentioned sort of like not having the chips around. Are there other things that you've learned that we can increase our environment to nudge us toward or put us on the path to success? A lot of things that we know of that help to put us on the path to success are things that are only easy for people to do who have enough privilege to have control over their environments.

So things like, you know, getting enough sleep. I mean, you know, I said, well, that's the, that's the one, if you could only pick one thing, that would be the thing, but not everyone actually has that luxury. You know, ambient noise is, is, um, uh, Rick random kind of loud, you know, bangs and, and kind of loud noises. You know, what happens, for example, if you live in New York or whatever, you know, you eventually your brain stops hearing that noise.

It just becomes background. But every time I go there, it's like, holy cow, what is going on? Right. It's really hard on your nervous system because your brain is trying to figure out what is signal and what is noise. What do I need to pay attention to and learn and make sense of and spend on? And what can I ignore? That in and of itself, the amount of uncertainty is actually really hard on the nervous system.

It's so weird. Like there'll be a fire truck that'll go by my bedroom with, you know, at night and I won't notice a thing. The window could even be open. But if my kids cough, I'm like alerted right away to like, what's going on? And, you know, I often can't even go back to sleep because if they if I wake up, I'm like on high alert. It's not even like I wake up in this. It's like, what happened? Oh, they need me. And

They don't need me at all. They're like back asleep and I'm wide awake and wired. And yeah, this is the reason why when my daughter was like six weeks old, I told my husband she cannot sleep. She cannot continue to sleep in our room. I will never get another night's sleep ever in my life while this kid is in my room. Like because every little thing I would hear every little thing. And now we have a puppy and it's exactly the same thing.

Talk to me more about sort of like the brain interpreting things. And it's almost like a reality distortion. No, it's not a reality. It's a reality creator. Reality creator. Okay. So what can we do? Understanding that, like I'm thinking, is there anything that we can do to get closer to truth or reality? Like understanding that our brain is sort of like stimulating and interpreting and sort of like making meaning. Is there anything we can do to make sense?

to get closer to what's actually happening or closer to some sort of like objective truth, if you will. Like when that person cuts you off or you're going to make meaning out of it and make sense of it. Is there anything that we can do to, to get closer to the reality of the world versus the reality of our head? Well, the reality of your head was wired by the reality of the world. That's of some world that you grew up in. So oftentimes people,

What happens is that the microwiring of your brain is shaped by one kind of world and then you move to a different kind of world. And then it's really expensive to retool. And some brains do it well and others don't. And then mistakes are made and things become very expensive and expensive.

in various ways. I'm going to answer your question assuming that your question is valid, which is that we want to be closer to reality, whatever that means, because sometimes I don't know that that's always really the right thing to do. So here's an example. So somebody cuts me off and I'm really rushing to get someplace and someone cuts me off. But the initial meaning my brain is going to make is from my own personal perspective, because of course, that's how we all see things. You can...

practice trying to see something from another person's point of view. So maybe that person just didn't see me. Maybe that person's rushing somewhere. Maybe that person has a kid who's in the hospital. Maybe that person has a really important meeting to be at or something really important to take care of. There's this saying that comes from contemplative philosophy, which is that anger is a form of ignorance.

And what that means is when you only see something from your own perspective and you fail to acknowledge that there's another perspective, you are ignorant of something. And what you're ignorant of is the fact that, you know, you exist in a complicated network of connections to other people.

You just can't see something and therefore you're ignorant and angry. Yeah, but you can try. You can practice. You can before what it means to have control is not to then really try hard to take that person's perspective in that moment because that's really hard. What it means to have control is that you practice taking other people's perspective before that moment so that when that moment comes, you can do it very automatically.

You know, it's like if you need to build a skill, you don't wait until the exact second that you need the skill and then try it. No. What you do is you practice the skill in advance until you get really practiced at it, really automatic at it. And then you can kind of do it without a lot of effort. For example, taking somebody else's perspective is one way to get closer to reality.

because it dislodges you from the illusion that your way of seeing things is the only way. And in fact, in science,

There's a wonderful book by this historian of science. Her name is Naomi Oreskes. And the title of the book is called Why Trust Science? And her argument, which is a really intriguing argument, is that the way that we know that something is true in science, true with, you know, scare quotes, is that a group of scientists are

who come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse beliefs and diverse values all come to consensus about what the evidence says, then you can have much more confidence to call that finding a scientific fact. I mean, scientists don't like to use the word fact and they don't like to use the word reality usually very much, but fact is a real no-no. It's an F word we just don't use in science because it's

It's, you know, it's always conditional. It's always probabilistic. You know, really, you know, there's a wonderful phrase by Henry Gee, who is a paleontologist who works for the journal Nature. And he wrote, science is the quantification of doubt. It's not about finding facts. It's about how likely is this doubt?

observation to be true in these circumstances. And if you get a group of scientists who all have different backgrounds and different assumptions, and they come together in consensus, you can be much more sure that what you're observing is very likely to be the case in this circumstance.

Right. However, you have no diversity in science and you have really, you know, a bunch of people with the same background and the same history and the same assumptions. And they come together over consensus in consensus. What you're likely there to have is bias, usually bias that upholds whatever advantage those people who are making the decision actually have. And so but the same principle is useful in your own life, I think.

And that is that you can choose to try to take somebody else's perspective. Like right now, you can look around the room, you can listen. If you pay attention to your body, there are some things that you can

focus on that you weren't focusing on a moment ago and you can change your experience. Like right now, what I'm about to say, there's something that we're, that you and I are both doing right now that our brains were not tracking. Well, our brains were tracking, but we weren't, we weren't, we weren't really aware. It wasn't in the forefront of awareness. Um,

But the minute I say it, it will be in the forefront of your awareness. And that is your legs pressing against the seat of your chair or your back pressing against the back of your chair. That sense state is always there.

But you mostly don't pay attention to it unless you're in discomfort in some way. Your focus determines where your attention goes. Yeah. So here's an example of something that's similar that I do almost every day. I'm just trying to build a skill, like build a muscle, you know? Every day...

I, you know, as I'm walking on the sidewalk, say, I look for a weed. I look for a moment where I can feel awe over the power of nature that is just, will not be, you know, repressed, will not be contained by humans' need to try to control it. And for me, the perfect example is a weed. When I see a weed popping up through the crack of a sidewalk,

I almost always now practice trying to see that as a really wondrous, beautiful thing, because it's a symbol of the fact that, you know, nature is irrepressible. And there are many things in life which are much bigger than you.

And when you cultivate those moments where you realize that the world, that the natural world is much bigger than you, well, at least for me anyways, I don't experience that as an existential crisis. I experience that as an existential break. Like, okay, something's bigger than me. Many things are bigger than me. That means my problems in the moment are really small and conditional.

And that gives my nervous system a break for a minute. You know, I really try to cultivate every day at least one moment where I feel like a speck. Because it puts everything into perspective. Yeah, exactly. And

I try to do this whether I'm feeling, you know, stressed or not, whether my brain has been busy trying to prepare me for expenditures or not, because I'm trying to build a muscle and keep it fit for when I need it. That's an excellent place to end this conversation, Lisa. I really want to thank you for your time. This has been phenomenal. Oh, it's my pleasure. It was so much fun talking to you. Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye.

The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnham Street. I want to make this the best podcast you've listened to, and I'd love to get your feedback. If you have comments, ideas for future shows or topics, or just feedback in general, you can email me at shanefs.blog or follow me on Twitter at shaneaperish. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast.

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