Mind Your PQ with Shirzad Chamine
50:58 Share

You know that feeling when someone shows up for you just when you need it most? That's what Uber is all about. Not just a ride or dinner at your door. It's how Uber helps you show up for the moments that matter. Because showing up can turn a tough day around or make a good one even better. Whatever it is, big or small, Uber is on the way. So you can be on yours. Uber, on our way.

This week, I'm thrilled to welcome back a Rule Breaker favorite, Shirzad Shamin, bestselling author of the book Positive Intelligence. Shirzad's work has taught us how to quiet our inner saboteurs and strengthen our inner sage. And if those words don't mean much to you right now, they will about 45 minutes from now. It's transformed how we think, how we lead, and for me, yeah, this too, how we invest.

This week, we'll dive even deeper, exploring how mental fitness can supercharge our resilience, creativity, and joy, not just in investing, but in every corner of our lives. It's time to reconnect with Shirzad Shamim. Let's build some positive intelligence, shall we? Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing. It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool co-founder, David Gardner. David Gardner.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Yep, the sound of rules being broken. It's June 2025. I hope the stock market is as good as it was in May of 2025, although I don't think anybody should expect that. Welcome to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you with me, whether you're a longtime listener who may have heard our special guest this week,

We'll be right back.

and one-third talking about life. And I think we're going to touch each of those bases this particular week. I do want to mention coming up this June, it's our game show in a couple of weeks. The Market Cap Game Show makes its return to Rule Breaker Investing. That'll be a couple of weeks from now.

All right, as I shared at the start of the year, my 2025 book, Rule Breaker Investing, is available for pre-order now. After 30 years of stock picking, this is my magnum opus, a lifetime of lessons distilled into one definitive guide. It's the playbook for anyone who dreams of beating the market, living richly, and having a laugh along the way. Each week until the book launches on September 16th,

I'm sharing a random excerpt. We just break open the book to a random page and I read a few sentences. So let's do it. Here's this week's page breaker preview. A couple of sentences setting up a key section. And I quote, last chapter in discussing when to sell, I noted that it's not always as simple as trimming a position back to your sleep number.

or dumping a loser to zero out a capital gain. Sometimes your quarterly review asks a tougher question. What will you sell to buy that new stock you're excited about or to fund a down payment on a home? Why we invest in the first place.

That's this week's Page Breaker preview to pre-order my final word on stock picking, shaped by three decades of market-crushing success. Just type Rule Breaker Investing into Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or wherever you shop for great books. You know, what might be most rule-breaking about this book is it teaches people something rarely taught in this world and yet so valuable. It teaches people how actually investing

to invest. And a tip of the jester cap to you, dear listener, if you've already pre-ordered one or more copies for yourself and your loved ones, thanks. That means a lot to me. Shirzad Shamim is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Positive Intelligence. He's lectured on it at Stanford University. He's trained faculty at Stanford and Yale Business Schools. Shirzad has been the CEO of the largest coach training organization in the world.

a preeminent C-suite advisor. Shirzad has coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams. His background includes a BA in psychology, an MS in electrical engineering, and an MBA from Stanford. Shirzad Shamim, welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing.

Delighted to be here. I've been so looking forward to it, David. I started talking about, I think it was last month, I said, we have to have Shirzad back on. And I'm so glad that here we are a month later and you are here. And I'm thinking back, Shirzad, to our first podcast together. We did it in October of 2020. You introduced us to positive intelligence, PQ. In fact, I had not yet read your book,

by that same name. I just knew that you were an interesting fellow and probably a fellow fool, maybe a fellow rule breaker too. So I wanted to have that conversation. We later did do one about your book in August of 2021, but I want to spend a little time just restating the eternal verities here and have you just share that framework

Shirzad, so you defined our saboteurs and our sage. So just briefly for new listeners, what do you mean by saboteurs and sage and why is distinguishing between them foundational to positive intelligence?

Yeah, David. So the premise of the work is, which is all research-based, neuroscience-based, is that every single day, every single one of us is sabotaging our well-being, performance, and relationship. So you're sabotaging your well-being, performance, and relationship.

And the voices in your head that do that, the patterns in your head that do that, we call those the saboteurs, the ones who sabotage you. And there are 10 of them. Our research have identified 10 of them based on factor analysis.

And their names are the judge, the avoider, the controller, the hyperachiever, the restless, the pleaser, the victim, the stickler. I won't go through all 10, but you get the point, right? These are, you probably think, oh yeah, my wife has that, my husband has

that. My brother has that. And hopefully you're saying, well, what do I have? And most people have a few of these that sabotage their wellbeing, performance, and relationship. They happen to all live in a part of the brain we call the survival part of the brain. And so when that part of the brain is energized and you are producing negative emotions and sabotaging yourself,

In a different part of your brain, we have what we call your sage. Your sage being the positive one inside of you who can, instead of sabotaging you, it serves your best interest. It has you optimize your wellbeing, performance and relationship.

My Stanford students call this work Jedi mind training. And they said, you know, what you're doing here is help us see the war inside of our head between our inner Darth Vader's, the saboteurs, and inner Jedi, the sage. So that's really what we are doing. We are wanting to quiet down

your inner Darth Vader's, your saboteurs and energize and activate your inner Jedi, inner sage. And the way we do that is through neuroscience based techniques that usually are like just 10 seconds long. So you're literally rewiring your brain. And as you do that, you become more mentally fit. You recover faster from setbacks. You convert problems into opportunities. You have more positive relationships. You perform better as an athlete. You perform better in business. You,

And your well-being, you sleep better and you feel less stress. So all of those changes come from the work of quieting your saboteurs and energizing your sage using 10-second techniques that everybody can do. And these things are universal. These things are timeless. We're hardwired into our biology and our psychology to do this. Shirzad, having read your wonderful book, Positive Intelligence, by the way, anybody can go to positiveintelligence.com and take the quiz.

and find out your own PQ, find out what are your saboteurs. And yeah, you should have all your family members do it because we did that in our family. It was hilarious to see, learn these things about my children and my wife and for them to learn these things about me. - Yeah, it's a really fun dinner conversation. Everybody do their saboteur assessment. It just takes five minutes.

The way to find a saboteur assessment is positiveintelligence.com slash assessment. And it's a really fun saboteur, you know, dinner conversation. You find out what irritates you about each other is that person's saboteurs. And kids have a lot of fun, you know, telling their parents, I'm so glad you finally have a name to

Too hard is that to irritate the heck out of me. And of course it's vice versa. So it's positiveintelligence.com/assessment is where you go to get your salvator assessment. It just takes five minutes.

And last time, Shirzad, you described your own dominant saboteurs as the hyper-rational, the controller, and the restless. I think I have that right. And you said these saboteurs rarely disappear entirely. They still show up, even if you recognize them and have called them out, they're still present.

But part of being positively intelligent is being able to recognize them faster, to call them out and take command of them by using our PQ brain, as you would say, the positive intelligence, not the IQ. That's another part of the brain or the EQ, which is very popular these days, emotional intelligence. But Shirzad, you have created a new category of understanding of human psychology, and it's the PQ, the positive intelligence. How has your own relationship with your saboteurs evolved over the years?

Well, I mean, I have profoundly changed my own life through this practice. I believe in walking the walk. I don't believe in teaching stuff that you don't do yourself. My family knows my saboteurs. My daughter holds me accountable for when I talk in a frustrated way, which is the voice of my judge saboteur. She says, Daddy, who's talking right now? And sure enough, it's my judge talking. So I stop and shift my brain activation down.

And change what I say. So, and you're right, these saboteurs don't go away. So in my brain still, every hour of every day, let's say one of my saboteurs, which actually is the universal saboteur that everybody has, is the judge saboteur.

And the judge is the one, is the commentator on your right hand shoulder that's constantly looking at what's wrong with you, constantly looking at the stupid mistakes you made, shame on you, what's wrong with you, why don't you ever learn, constantly looking at what might go wrong with you because you're going to screw up, aren't you?

and finding what's wrong with you, what's wrong with others, and what's wrong with your circumstances. The judge does that all the time, and that's where a lot of our stress and upset comes from, is that voice is still in my head? Absolutely it is.

What has changed is that he used to be a very loud voice and I used to trust him and really get hijacked by him all the time. Now I hear him and it's like, okay, here we go again. You're calling me an idiot. You're trying to beat me up over the mistake I made seven days ago. Leave me alone. I have better things to do. So the voice is still there, but I can't.

quickly shift from it and not let, not have it dominate me. Same with all the saboteurs. Everybody who does this work revires their brain. So these voices get a lot quieter and they don't dominate as much. And since you showed us yours, I'll show you mine. I'm a hyper achiever, avoider, pleaser kind of a person. Each of those are my dominant saboteurs that I need to keep in check. And again, now in my fifth year or so of, uh,

Really listening on a regular basis to you, Shirzad. You have an app that people can use. You have your website. You've got, well, this is the third podcast we've done together. So there's been a lot of opportunity for me to think about these things and try to be a better version of myself and try to share that work through this podcast so that so many others...

Some of my favorite moments, Shirzad, and I know you hear this all the time, but some of my favorite moments have been when listeners of this podcast drop me notes later and say, you have changed their lives through my podcast because they discovered your work and realized all the negative self-talk that predominated in their life. And it was all self-generated.

And we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but it's been just a fantastic experience to have been following you and learning from you for some years now.

And let me say one more thing, Shirzad. That is, I intend this conversation to fit with the first two we had together. So we just spent about five or 10 minutes laying down those foundational elements. So many new listeners who didn't hear us five years ago, who may not yet have read your book, now kind of get what we're talking about. But I really want this conversation to stand on its own and fit with the two previous in the ways that Star Wars movies were supposed to, right? The third one was

was supposed to speak back to the second and first, even though sometimes they all ran together, especially across different Star Wars series. Anyway, but the world has changed since our first two conversations. We've lived through global events and transformations that were unthinkable five years ago. COVID-19, its lasting impact,

AI and its mainstream adoption, social divisions intensifying in some cases. Shirzad, how has your understanding or application of positive intelligence shifted or evolved in response to some profound global changes? Actually, David, the work that we do has become more and more critical. And the reason for it is that change creates stress. Even positive change creates stress.

And, uh, saboteurs are a stress response, but so basically a lot of what happens with saboteurs is under stress. We use our saboteur, uh,

go-to strategies to deal with challenges. And as we do that, it generates more negative emotions and actually more stress. So it feeds on itself. So if you have a controller saboteur under intensified stress and change, you become more controlling. And as you become more controlling, you become more rigid. You generate more negative emotions around you and it ricochets right back on you.

You mentioned you have the avoider saboteur. As change intensifies and your stress goes up, you become more and more avoiding. If you have the pleaser saboteur, you do more pleasing. If you have the restless, you become more restless. If you have the victim, you become more victimized, feeling victimized.

So basically what's happening is that I believe the level of saboteur orientation and the negativity that that generates has increased steadily over the last several years. I think that we are almost at epidemic levels. I was talking to the head of wellness in a well-known university in this country who was saying 49% of students

the pre-med students in this well-known university now are in need of psychological intervention. And he said the number used to be less than 10%. So we are at an epidemic level in terms of level of stress and how much, how activated these saboteurs are and people really needing help for exactly the kind of work that we do. Because you can rewire your brain.

You certainly can. And I'm also thinking, because I can now reflect on our conversations that we had a few years ago, Shirzad, I'm reflecting on our August 2021 conversation when you emphasize that pain is actually good.

Pain is how we learn and grow. So given that escalating mental health challenge you referred to, and the awareness, I would say, there's more awareness today of mental health challenges than probably a generation ago, which in part, I think, has more people reporting it because we're just more aware of anxiety, isolation, and burnout today. But since that conversation almost four years ago now, Shirzad, how do we constructively process pain?

collective pain at, this is a big question, at a societal level? What role can PQ play in fostering collective resilience? Yeah, pain is a really great analogy for the work that we do. So I asked the question, is pain good for you to feel as a human being, physical pain? And the answer is, of course it is. Why? Because

If you put your hand on a stove that's accidentally left on, if you don't feel any pain, you'll keep your hand on the hot stove and you'll burn to the bone. Therefore, it's really, really, really important for you to feel pain. However, the million-dollar question is,

How long would you like to feel the pain of your hand on the hot stove before you get the message and before you do something about it? And hopefully the answer is, well, split second. The job of pain is to give you an alert that something needs your attention. Once that alert is delivered, then the pain is no longer helpful. It just hurts you. The same exact thing with negative emotions. So is stress...

over what's happening in the world helpful? Of course it is. Is anger, disappointment, rage, upset, all of those helpful? Of course they are. Without them, you will not have conscience. However, if you stay angry, if you stay upset, if you stay stressed, if you stay outraged,

Then all you're doing is you're going into the world and generating and spewing more negativity in a world that desperately needs positivity. So when you wake up in outrage about what's happening, great. That first second gives you your conscious. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Then what we want you to do is those negative emotions will have you then, if you stay in them, they're going to have you go to your judge, go to your controller, go to your avoider, go to your victim, all of that stuff.

which generates more negativity in the world. Instead, what we want you to do is after that initial second of useful negative emotion, we want you to say, oops,

I am in Salvador world. Let me shift my brain activation and practice these 10 second techniques that we teach you so that you shift your brain activation and go to the sage mind. And then in sage mind, you can choose to be empathic. You can choose to be curious. You can choose to be creative, to figure out what to do with this. You can choose to take clear head action. There are five say superpowers, but you choose something positive that,

in reaction to what's happening so that you become a force of good in the world rather than a victim of what's happening and then spew more negativity in the world that needs more positivity. So you said, David, what can we do collectively? Well, collective action comes from individual actions adding up. And so what I want to say is that you are on any given day either a generator of more negativity

or an interceptor of negativity and converting that into positive contagion on your end. If you are in positive contagion, then the person coming in front of you

is almost unconsciously going to be shifted more to their own positive self. So the question I want everybody to ask is, are you a generator of more negativity in the world today in the way you respond to life's challenges? Or are you a generator of positivity becoming a part of the solution rather than a continuing part of the problem? You really have a choice. And it starts with intercepting your response to things. And that is beautifully explained by the person who

whose own life story we don't have time to capture today, but it was there in our first conversation. And you, more than anyone I know, have taken what was a very hard lot early in life and converted it into so much

Good. And Shuzad, I want to spot you up with some of my favorite catchphrases of yours so that you can maybe give us a mini sermon on the topic, which you're very good at doing. And I've got three in mind. You ready? I love it. Go for it. First one up is you'll be happy when. Ah.

Yeah, so that's a lie most of us live most of our life on. There is a judge voice in your head that says, right now you don't have what it takes to be happy, right? Now something is wrong with the circumstances of your life. You will be happy when...

Fill in the blanks. So when you were in high school, oh, you can't be happy. You're stuck with these damn parents. You'll be happy when you finally leave home and, you know, when you finally have that girlfriend or boyfriend, when you finally get into college, when you finally get that first job and you finally, you know, meet somebody and marry, when you finally have that child, when you finally have that house and on and on. You keep saying, I can't be happy quite yet. Oh,

I'll be happy when, and whatever is in the when gets renegotiated. When you get it, you'll be happy for a minute, for a day, if you're lucky. And then you say, okay, yeah, but I can't be happy yet. I'll be happy when. The question I want everybody to ask is, what are you waiting for right now to still be happy?

You have absolutely everything you need to be extraordinarily happy right now. If you can energize a sage part of your brain where you feel happiness and joy and peace and love and all those good stuff, it's in your brain if you energize that part of your brain. If you're not feeling happiness right now, it's not because of the circumstance of your life.

It's because your saboteurs, the negative part of your brain is activated and you can be in paradise and still complain why, you know, you don't have as much as your neighbor. So whatever you're waiting for in order to be happy one day is a lie of your saboteur. You may want to intercept that.

Wonderful. You'll be happy when. That was the first. Here's the second. There are a lot of these, by the way, and part of my experience of your program is getting to hear these from time to time and sometimes getting to hear them repeated, and that's why it's a delight to have you share them on this podcast. The second one that I picked almost at random, but there it was. Remember who you are. David, I love you're bringing some of my favorites back to me. I love it. Greatest hits. So...

I don't want to change you. You don't need to be changed. I want you to remember who you are, who you have always been, who you will always be, because here's the deal. Anybody who is a parent, and I'm a parent of two kids, knows that every child is born with a different essence self. My daughter and my son were born as incredibly different human beings.

One was a rose and one was a carnation, completely different, right? And each of them in beautiful essence being, and none of them has changed in that essence. So my 25-year-old son and my 21-year-old daughter are identical in the essence of who they were. That essence has never changed, will never change.

And the same is true with you. You were born as unique as your fingerprint. You were born as a unique, beautiful essence being. That is your sage. That's your true self. I don't, that will never change, will never change. I don't need you to change. I want you to remember who you already are, who you've always been. So some of the work that we do is really about you remembering.

You're looking at yourself in the mirror and looking into your eyes and seeing that unchanging, beautiful essence being that you are and falling in love with yourself, falling in love with yourself again, rather than allow the saboteurs to constantly look at what's not so right and what's not so perfect and what you have to change in yourself all the time.

And if you watch my Stanford TEDx talk, you'll see that I start my Stanford talk by saying, I want you to know that I'm absolutely, incredibly, and totally awesome.

And I do that with delight in my heart because I do love myself. I do think I'm absolutely incredibly beautiful human being. And this is not coming from my arrogance. This comes from me saying I am beautiful, lovable essence being. I adore myself. And oh, by the way, you are also gorgeous, beautiful, lovable human being. I want you to discover that about yourself.

We all are. We are all born as that. Fall in love with yourself again. And I really appreciate you saying that. I will say, as I have grown up, I'm 59 years old now. I have realized increasingly that the majority of us have pretty persistently negative self-talk. And I was not...

oriented that way. I was a joyful, cheerful kid. I won most cheerful at my summer camp, my Sleepaway summer camp in Maine. I'm on the Hall of Fame plaque there. I've always been a cheerful, positive person. And I assume most people are that way. And what I've learned is most people are talking themselves down on a constant basis. Of course, I do it some too. We have to guard against that. But I just did not realize that until becoming more mature. And that's why I think the

the work and what you're sharing is so important for so many people. Let me spot you up with the third one. David, before you go there, can I tell the story of, of with my son of how I made sure that he doesn't forget who he is. So, uh, so my son was into tickling and as he was growing up, I taught him a tickling game so that, and the job was to make sure that he has unconditional love for himself and never forgets who he is. So I would tickle him and say, Keon,

Tell me, why do I love you so much? And he had learned to say, I don't know, daddy, why do you love me so much? And I would say, well, is it because you're so handsome? My son is very handsome, goes after my wife. And he would say, no, daddy, it's not because I'm handsome. So I'll tickle him some more and say, well, is it because you're so good in sports? And he had learned to say and say, no, daddy, it's not because of that. I'll tickle him some more. Is it because you're so good in math and schoolwork? And he would say, no, that's not because of that.

Then I'll take on some more. Is it because you're so kind and generous? And you say, no, that is not because of that. So I would, at the end, you know, feign a great frustration and say, so why is it, Keanu, why do I love you so much? And he had learned to say, and he would say, that is because I am me. That is because I am me. And occasionally I would ask him, so what does it mean? And he would say, you know, that...

Me, I am the person you held in the hospital when I was born. That person has never changed, will never change, and you love that person, and that's who I am. So this is my way of making sure my son never forgets that he's unchanging, beautiful, essence, worthy of all the love in the world, regardless of whether he has a successful day or a bad day, regardless of whether, you know, he has, you know,

all sorts of accomplishments happen or not, doesn't matter. He's worthy of his own unconditional love and mine. Beautifully said. Beautifully said. Remember who you are. And the third one I wanted to spot you up with, there are many more we could do, but we'll run out of time if we do this all day. So the third one I want to give you, Shirzad, is tune in to the PQ channel. Ah, yes. So...

So anytime you're communicating with somebody, there are two channels of communication. One is the data channel. The data channel is a channel in which you're using words and communicating information and

That's helpful, right? But the PQ channel is the energetic channel in which more context, more emotion and energy is being communicated. And so between these two channels in communication, the PQ channel, which is the invisible channel where energy and emotion is communicated, is far more important in terms of the communication and how it lands.

For example, if I just say you with a big smile and say, get out of here, you're such a fool. Notice what I did is in the data channel, I said, you are a fool. But in the energetic channel, I said, basically, I was saying, I love you. I'm teasing you. I like you, right?

Which of these two channels impacted you? Did you believe that I really think you're a fool or did you believe I care about you enough so that I'm teasing you? I bet you the second is what you believe, which shows that the energy and emotion is more important than the words you use.

And so in our communication, what I suggest is pay attention to that invisible channel. It's more important, the energetic of what's coming through rather than figuring out the perfect word. And a lot of leaders miss out on that. A lot of people miss out on that in their relationship with each other.

Well said, and thank you for sharing that. And in fact, I was reminded in my reading recently, actually, I was reading the note of one of our listeners who wrote in and said he has a fascination as an English speaker with words from other languages that describe cultural constructs that we just don't have in English because we don't have a word for it. And as you talk about observing the PQ channel instead of just the data channel, Shirzad, I'm reminded of

Noon Chi, a deeply cultural Korean concept that refers to the subtle art of

of sensing others' moods, feelings, and social dynamics. So it's kind of the ability to read the room. It's a valued skill in Korean society. Our Korean listeners, I hope, are nodding their heads right now knowing nun-chi. But for the rest of us, isn't that awesome that there is a word for it, for navigating relationships with grace and awareness and

by observing others' moods and feelings from an early age. Beautifully said, David. I learned something. I appreciate that. That was wonderful.

The Hoover Dam wasn't built in a day. And the GMC Sierra lineup wasn't built overnight. Like every American achievement, building the Sierra 1500 heavy-duty and EV was the result of dedication. A dedication to mastering the art of engineering. That's what this country has done for 250 years.

and what GMC has done for over 100. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. Assembled in Flint and Hamtramck, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana of U.S. and globally sourced parts. All right. Well, if there are a few chapters of this conversation, we're turning the page right now. And the next chapter says something about PQ and the future, Shirzad Shamim. In our first interview, you described the SAGE perspective. You've mentioned it again. It's one of empathy, curiosity, creativity,

Clear-headed laser action. Artificial intelligence, that's where we're headed right now. Artificial intelligence can now convincingly simulate some aspects of empathy, of creativity, of decision-making. Shirzad, how do you view AI's role? Could it amplify our saboteurs? Could it enhance our sage or both? How should we navigate this new landscape positively and intelligently?

Yeah, the stage perspective that you refer to is that we bring to everything is that every challenge can be converted into a gift or opportunity. That every obstacle or problem or challenge can be converted into a gift and opportunity. So that's how we come at it all the time. And that includes AI. AI is something that can be used for good and it can be used for the opposite of that.

And the one in us that determines how we use AI is going to be our saboteur or our sage.

And I think more than ever in our planet now, because there are existential conversations about the misuse of AI, more than ever on the planet, we want to make sure humanity begins to tap more into its sage rather than its saboteur, because humanity is going to have access to tools that could be profoundly destructive if the saboteur is get hold of it. So the work that I do in the world has become even more urgent.

in wanting to make sure we create a sage contagion rather than a saboteur contagion. Now, the saboteur contagion may well be beginning to happen in that one thing we know with AI for sure is that it profoundly accelerates the pace of change. And what we know is that as human beings,

We are just not wired for this pace of change. This is far more than anything that our species has ever experienced, which means this is a recipe for a lot of stress. In unknown circumstances and in a pace of change, stress goes up, and as stress goes up, all saboteurs go on hyperdrive.

So we really need to get in front of that and making sure that we become much more resilient in embracing change in a way that we use it as a force of good rather than have our saboteurs react to change, which could create the opposite effect.

Do you use artificial intelligence yourself? Is it a part of your daily habit, work, ritual? Are you ignoring it, avoiding it? What is your take personally on AI? Oh, I'm incredibly excited about AI. I think that the promise of AI, there's of course potential misuse of AI, but the promise of AI is profound level of abundance in terms of what science is going to bring, what's going to happen in medicine, what's going to happen to our

producing energy and energy that becomes ubiquitously available, material production. I mean, on and on and on what AI enables is profound level of potential prosperity and abundance unheard of and never imagined in the history of humanity. So I'm incredibly excited about AI. And of course, there is a risk to AI that hopefully some of the work that I do will help diminish.

Thank you for that. I mentioned this chapter of our conversation is about the future. And so let's think briefly about younger generations. People like Jonathan Haidt have pointed out that a lot of the younger generation has been raised with a phone in its hand and not always creating positive psychological effects on our kids.

We didn't actually anticipate that, right? Technologies unleash themselves. We try to kind of make the best use of them, but we're not sometimes aware of the secondary effects or it takes 10 or 20 years to figure this out. I'm curious whether you generally agree with Jonathan Haidt in terms of what smartphones have done to younger people, but even more important than that, I'm wondering about Gen Z and younger audiences and PQ.

I mean, let's use our own app as an example. So the smartphone is what has enabled us to change

millions of lives because they are using our app and without the app technology there is no way that people like you david would be waking up every morning and say sure that's something for me to do and and there's this muscle that i want to strengthen and the app energizes you and excites you through gamification to want to keep building up that muscle we absolutely have used the uh

the app technology to enable personal transformation. So once again, the technology is what it is. It can absolutely be abused and it can be used for good. And there are a lot of kids of generation you're talking about that are really being victimized by the misuse of technology and

I believe social media is profoundly damaging to kids of this generation. I don't know what I would have done if I had grown up and when I was 18 or 20 or I would have just been aware of my popularity measured by how many followers I have, how many likes I have.

and constantly on a microscope of all these fake happy lives that people pretend to be living and comparing mine to it and saying, what's wrong with me? I'm not having as much fun or as much adventure. I mean, there's such a recipe for continuous judgment of ourselves because we live under the microscope of social media. I think that's profoundly harmful and that

That's one of the reasons that 49% of pre-med students in this university are in need of psychological intervention. So yes, and again, but we don't want to throw out that technology. We want to bring in uses of technology that helps remedy that.

Everything is a tool and it's all how we use those tools. And I really appreciate that point, Shirzad. We're about to move to our buy, sell or hold game. I've got a bunch queued up for you, which I'm looking forward to sharing, but I do want to cover a couple of bases before we get there. So let me just ask you for listeners who are inspired by this conversation.

Whether revisiting positive intelligence from having heard you four years ago on this podcast or following you in the past, or many encountering you for the first time, what is the simplest and best next step that you would recommend that they take after finishing this podcast?

Yeah, please spend five minutes, do your saboteur assessment so that you realize how you're self-sabotaging. Starting with that awareness is critical and then share it with your loved ones. Have a conversation with your loved ones, with your colleagues, so that you can begin to bring awareness into what's happening in your relationship with one another, because you're going to realize that saboteurs on both sides in a relationship are what irritants in relationship and this awareness is going to help

you move to a healthier element in those relationships. So start with this avatar assessment and from there you can hopefully get inspired to take additional action, including using our apps to begin to rewire your brain.

And I'm wondering, since so much of your work, Shirzad, has been research-based, and I know you've done a lot of that. You've also drawn on the work of other academics and researchers, as we all do. Are you creating any new research? Is there another book coming? Are you discovering the 11th saboteur that you missed the first time around or that has emerged because of society in the meantime? I'm curious, what's next for you?

So actually, David, one of the things that I'm most proud of is the work was based on factor analysis on how we sabotage ourselves or how we optimize our performance, well-being, and relationships. And so many years after that analysis was done, we now have trained more than 100,000 coaches around the globe. And now these coaches focus on an entire range of applications of this operating system.

You know, neurodiversity, working with people with ADHD, working with people with trauma, working with executives in high places, working with athletes, Olympic athletes, NFL athletes. I mean, you just name it. There are all these applications and all these coaches are coming back and saying, and it's happening in more than 100 countries.

Now, they are all coming back and saying this operating system absolutely applies. No, there has not been a need for an 11th saboteur. These 10 saboteurs are it in all these countries, in all these applications. And these five sage positive superpowers are the five superpowers.

And these 10-second techniques to shift brain activation are the techniques. So it's working. The work keeps being validated. So basically, all we are doing is now applying it to more and more things rather than change the foundational stuff because the foundational stuff has proven very resilient. More than 2 million people now have been involved with that first level of the saboteur technique.

you know, assessment research. So this has been very rigorous work. Congratulations. And just briefly to toot my own horn, I would like to say I can connect in with that insofar as the book I have coming out this fall, Rule Breaker Investing, I'm presenting the six traits I'm looking for in the great stocks of the next generation. And as it turns out, they're the exact same six that I presented 25 years ago in my book. So congratulations.

I also recognize the benefits not of finding some new, new thing, but simply reasserting the things that were true in the first place and then getting to sit there and with a sense of wonder, I hope, think about what that could mean for our minds or what that could mean for our investment portfolios. So thank you for being you and sticking to your knitting as I have as well.

David, I want to congratulate you for that. And what I believe you have done is what I have done to make the work sustainable, which is root cause analysis. So when you do root cause analysis and go to the very root of things, 10 years, 20 years later, those root causes are still the same. Nothing wants to change, which tells me what you did so many years ago was root cause analysis. So those six principles are root principles and they never want to change. They are timeless. So congratulations. That's awesome work.

Thank you. And thank you for a good concept and a new phrase I can use as well. All right, Shirzad. Well, you've graciously allowed me to close out our conversation here in 2025 with our traditional Rule Breaker Investing buy, sell, or hold game. Now, as you know, Shirzad, these are not stocks, but I'm asking you if they were stocks, would you be buying, selling, or holding? And a few sentences as to why. You ready?

Yes. Great. Let's kick it off with mindfulness apps like Calm or Headspace. These have become billion-dollar businesses, but is this trend built to last, or will people eventually crave more direct human connection? Shirzad, mindfulness apps, buy, sell, or hold? Hold. Mindfulness is one leg of a three-legged stool of mental fitness. I believe it's missing the two other legs, which is intercept your saboteurs.

and energize your sage. So hold because it provides one leg of the tree like legs of the stool. Well said. Let's go for something number two, much colder. Ice baths and cold plunges. They're everywhere from TikTok to your local gym. Shirzad, are you buying this chilly wellness craze or is your inner sage perfectly content staying warm and dry?

Buy. I know some people I respect a lot who swear by it. Excellent. I need to do it myself. Have you done it? No. Okay. Next up, let's go with the four-day workweek. Recent studies keep suggesting it's better for productivity, happiness, even profits in some cases. Shirzad Shamim, is the four-day workweek a buy, a sell, or a hold?

It's a hold, I believe, when you are in sage mode. It doesn't matter how many hours you work. You are always in joy of what you do.

Therefore, it's kind of in the middle for me. Yeah, that works. Let's shift gears. Let's talk, I don't know, pickleball. Easy to learn, highly social. It's taking over parks everywhere. Does this rapidly rising sport have staying power or will it eventually fade back into obscurity? Pickleball, Shirzad, buy, sell, or hold? Buy, I hear a lot of enthusiasm. Okay.

All right. So I haven't played pickleball the last few years and I haven't taken an ice bath or a cold plunge. So clearly I need to get out there and enjoy life a little bit more. Thank you for that. Let me throw a curveball at you next. Let's shift gears with the metaverse. So Mark Zuckerberg has bet big on virtual worlds. Public interest still seems, I don't know, lukewarm. Is it fair to say, Shirzad, are you buying, selling, or holding the metaverse? Buy. It's only a matter of time.

What do you expect as the metaverse shows up?

Well, I believe that's where AI taken us. And it's not just through meta, but through, I mean, that's a lot of the premise of AI. It's a bold, bold, bold re-imagining of what's possible in our future. A lot of exciting thing happening. And Mark just happens to be one of the first who publicized talking about it. Yeah. Thank you. Let me try a publishing twist out on you. Just a few more, by the way. I don't want to overstay my welcome, but let's try a publishing twist. AI generated science.

self-help books. So with ChatGBT, similar tools, authoring full chapters in some cases now, can artificial intelligence genuinely resonate and offer authentic wisdom, AI-generated self-help books, buy, sell, or hold? Buy. I believe AI will be fully capable of very empathic, quite insightful discourse.

I really appreciate that. And while I think that's a contrary opinion here in 2025, I think that will be the majority conclusion by 2035. Thank you for that. I also want to point out that the personalization is particularly interesting because most self-help books just read the same for all of us these days. And that's the way books have always worked. But the possibility and opportunity of having a self-help book personalized to you or to me based on maybe PQ insights seems potentially very powerful.

And I would say a book is not necessarily the format that's going to be delivered in. The book may be becoming more or less a modality of the communication relative to the modalities that are emerging. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Although I hope people will still go out and buy Positive Intelligence and give it to each other on birthdays. Absolutely. Let's step into the kitchen, second to last one here. Let's step into the kitchen.

Plant-based meats. Companies like Beyond Meat and others have enjoyed some hype here. They've also struggled a bit recently. Is there still room for plant-based foods to thrive or is the trend cooling down? Plant-based meats, Shurzad, buy, sell, or hold?

Bye. I believe it's just the beginning of how much they can improve and there is no end to the level they can achieve, especially with the help of AI innovation. Well said. Obviously, you're a huge believer in innovation, which means you are a Rule Breaker investor by default because that's what we do. We hunt the most innovative companies around.

industry by industry. And I can clearly see, I mean, you and I haven't really had a stock market talk and that's not what we did this time, but I can clearly see how future oriented you are. I appreciate that. I want to underline that. Last one, Shirzad, Marie Kondo sparked joy. Brene Brown spoke courage. Could positive intelligence be the next big Netflix series? Or do you think the PQ story is always better told face-to-face?

A positive intelligence Netflix series. Should I buy, sell, or hold? Absolute buy. We are heading that way without a question in my mind. The time is upon us. I can't wait. And I just hope to be invited to the launch party with the glam people and the red carpets and you dressed like a king.

That's great. All right. Final question for you. You've been gracious with your time this week. Shirzad, your positive intelligence work has touched countless lives. And as you look back on your journey so far and ahead to what's next, because it continues, what's one final reflection for us right now or a piece of wisdom that you'd like to leave with our foolish listeners today?

Well, look how much time we are spending on daily habits related to our physical body, whether it is physical exercise or even physical hygiene. How many minutes we spend brushing our teeth, flossing, taking shower and stuff like that. So we spend daily...

minutes on maintenance of our physical body and physical fitness. The one thing that is even more important is mental fitness. And I would love my mission in the world is to make mental fitness as ubiquitous as physical fitness is today.

And to have everybody realize that five, 10 minutes of building their mental fitness is just as critical for their happiness and well-being as physical fitnesses or physical hygiene might be. So hopefully this becomes a lifelong habit the way it is for me and for many people that we have reached.

Shuzad, Shamim, I am honored to have you back on this podcast, to have you share that message with all of our listeners. I feel badly. It's just the negative self-talk. The only negative self-talk I have today is that I let three or four years slip before having you back for a conversation. I will not make that mistake again, but I congratulate you on your work in this world. It's making for a better world. It certainly has for me and those connected to me. And there are a lot of people connected through The Motley Fool.

And being positively intelligent, by the way, is the best way to thrive with your investing as well as your day-to-day life. So thank you. And yeah, mental floss is something that we could all use a little bit more of. Shirzad Shamin, thank you for joining with me again and Fool on, my friend. Fool on, David. I have really enjoyed my time together. I would love to come back. Let's make this a habit. Thank you.

As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com.