How to think yourself YOUNGER: Ellen Langer, Ph.D. | mbg Podcast

If you're told when you get older, your memory is going to get worse and you buy into that, then every time you don't remember something, you assume it's because you're old and, you know, you worry about it and it actually gets worse.

Ellen, welcome.

Thank you.

It's such an honor to have you. You are a legend. But for those unfamiliar, can you start by talking a bit about your background and the work you do at Harvard?

Oh gosh, I mean, I don't know where to start. I'm kind of old, so this could take the whole time of our interview. I've been a professor at Harvard for about 45 years, and much of that time I've been studying mindfulness. And the work keeps growing in importance, at least in my own mind. So I'm looking forward to sharing it with your audience today.

So mindfulness also, I would, I would call out a lot on mind-body unity.

Yeah, the book The Mindful Body is primarily, not exclusively, but primarily about mind-body unity. And essentially, I've thought about it for so many years. I'll tell you about the original study in a moment. And I realize mind, body, these are just words. And it occurred to me many years ago to put the two together and see what happens. And if we see, you know, people often now talk about mind-body connection. I'm not talking about a connection. I'm talking about it's one thing. And if it's one thing, then just imagine the control over we have over every aspect of our health and well-being. You put the mind and body together, wherever you put the mind, you're necessarily putting the body. And the first test of mind-body unity was conducted quite some time ago. It's called the Counterclockwise Study, and I'm allowed to say that it's famous because if you tune into The Simpsons Go to Havana, they actually discussed this study. They elaborate on it in ways that were not quite true, so it's important that people know the facts. But what we did was to retrofit a timeless retreat to 20 years earlier and we had old men live there for a week as if they were their younger selves. So they spoke about the past in the present tense. Everything was to lead them to go back in time. As a result of this, what happened was their hearing improved, their vision improved, their memory improved, their strength improved, and they looked noticeably younger. And this was all without any medical intervention. And so we followed this up with many new studies, and each one is more exciting to me than the last because it keeps making clear the bottom line that we have so much control over our health and our well-being that we've only begun to scratch the surface. I think we have.

And there are so many of your studies we want to touch on, but I want to spend a moment on Counterclockwise because this was kind of the big one that started it all, if you will. So essentially these men that they're— the control group spent time reminiscing about the past. Can you go into detail? I think they were looking at magazines. They were acting as if they were 20 years younger. This is what they— what did this look like on a daily basis?

That was the— the experimental group was not reminiscing. For them, it was as well as we could do it. It was 20 years earlier. And we had a control group that was reminiscing. So for them, it was now talking about the past. For the other group, they were essentially in the past. So they would be discussing the same events, but for one group it would be a current event. You know, they're discussing Khrushchev, for instance, in the present or past tense. Something had happened with the comparison group that was kind of funny. This was many years ago, and people need to realize that And we had people go to the retreat in a van where we played old music. Well, now it's so easy to do that. At that time, Google didn't exist. And so every aspect of this was labor-intensive anyway. And I was also a little sexist without realizing it. So I'm in the van with the comparison group. That's a lot of old men. And we're getting closer to the retreat and I realize there, none of my graduates, male graduate students or postdocs were with me. There I was with these old men, and that meant 8 large suitcases. We get off the van. There was no way I was going to carry them. And so I made an announcement, unscripted. They're responsible for getting their suitcases upstairs. I don't care if they move it, I told them, an inch at a time, or if they unpacked it here and took out a shirt at a time. Well, this was so monumentally different from the way they had been treated by their loving adult daughters and sons, you know, where they were cuddled to death. You know, the assumption is that old people are incompetent, are vulnerable and fragile at every turn. And so an announcement that now you're on your own, guys, was going to have very positive effects. And it did. The experimental group, the effects were slightly more, but both groups improved in ways that old people assume that you just can't improve. I mean, when's the last time you heard an older person's hearing improve without a hearing aid or their vision? So it was, it was very exciting. Now, I said that they looked noticeably younger at the end. People shouldn't think that now they now look 20 years younger, but it was still a noticeable difference. And remember, to me, the amazing thing is this all happened in a week or less.

So if I'm listening, you know, you mentioned music. I'm thinking, okay, how can I recreate this in my everyday life? Okay, maybe I'll listen to music I listened to 20 years ago. Maybe I'll start to— what else? Should someone do if they want to recreate this? Because the results seem pretty powerful.

I think that there's a different message here. I mean, if you wanted to recreate it, go to your high school reunions and things of this sort. But the message is that we're able to do many of the things we don't realize we can do. So we have the evidence from this study, but that doesn't mean that if you're 85 years old, and you want to play tennis, you should say, well, you know, I'm too old for the game. Why? You know, you may play it a little differently from when you were 40, but we can never know that we can't. And there's no research and no experiment that could ever show that we can't. All we can ever find out that if we've tried something and it didn't work, then it didn't work. It doesn't mean there isn't some other way of doing it. And the idea, you know, I've often thought of If I'm— I am 76 years old now. If I bought into all of the myths that so many older people buy into, which is as you get older, you just start to fall apart. And if I hurt my wrist with that mindset, what I'd assume is, well, what do you expect? You know, I'm getting old. I'm just going to fall apart. If you were 25 years old and you hurt your wrist or your wrist hurt in the same way, it wouldn't be natural. And so you do things to fix it. So at the end, a month later, of course, my wrist, where I haven't done anything to fix it and the 20-year-old has taken steps to fix their wrist, their wrist is going to be better, not because of age. You know, there are so many things that happen where we presume that it represents decrements for us. My favorite is memory. You know, that when I was young, I was an up-and-coming, and if I was going to meet people, it was important for me to learn their names. That's a nice thing, right? And I don't think this is very nice of me, but still it's true. At this point, I don't care, you know? And that if I meet you and you give me your name, I presume implicitly that if we're going to be friends or need each other in some meaningful way, I'll have opportunities to learn your name. Now, if later I don't remember your name, it's not a matter of memory. It's not that I've forgotten it. It's that I didn't learn it in the first place. All right. So that's some memory loss. It's also the case with our aches and pains that let's say you have arthritis. Now, the next morning, you wake up in the morning. And you're all achy. You just oftentimes mistakenly assume it's the arthritis, forgetting that you might have slept in a, in a bad position. The gardening you did the day before contributed to it. You know, so we, we leap to age explanations, attributions, I think too often, too frequently.

What does all this say about the role of mindset and, and how it affects the aging process?

I mean, you know, I have been studying mindlessness and mindset falls into that category since 1975. I mean, it says a lot. People are— everything we do is dictated by the rigid beliefs we have. And what I think the problem is that we shouldn't have learned them in this absolute way in the first place. Then we become victimized by them in the second place. So if you assume As you get— when you're young, if you're told when you get older, your memory is going to get worse and you buy into that, then every time you don't remember something, you assume it's because you're old and, you know, you worry about it and it actually gets worse. I teach Harvard students. These are the cream of the crop, many believe, and I give them an exam and nobody ever gets 100. You know, they've all forgotten the material they studied just the night before. To varying degrees. So young people are not infrequently forgetful. It's just that when they forget something, they jump to the conclusion that dementia in one form or the other is right around the corner and start worrying about it. And it's that worry that interferes with lots of our memory.

You also mentioned mindlessness, which I'm going to jump to another study, which I just absolutely loved, the Chambermaid Study.

The chambermaid study was the second study we did in the mind-body unity test. So here we go to chambermaids and we first asked them, how much exercise do you get? Now, these women seem to believe that the Surgeon General knows what exercise is, and he says it's what you do after work. And after work, they're just too tired. So in spite of the fact that they're exercising all day long doing their work, they see themselves as not getting any exercise. Right. So if we stop right there, one would expect that these women who are exercising all day long are going to be healthier than socioeconomically equivalent other people whose jobs don't require that they exercise. Well, it turns out that they're not. Okay. Now we randomly select half of them and we're going to teach them that their work is exercise. And we simply show them that on machines at the gym and making a bed, for example, is like this machine and so on. So in a short period of time, we persuade them that their work is exercise. So that's the only difference between the two groups. Now, we've taken— before we start this, all sorts of measures. The experiment is over. We find out, have you changed the way you're eating? We ask their spouses. Are they eating more or less? We— are you working any harder? Are you working any less hard or shorter hours, longer hours? We get as much information as we can that says there's no difference. Nobody has changed in any of these important ways. Nevertheless, by now seeing their work as exercise, there was a significant decrease in weight. They lost weight. There was a change in waist-to-hip ratio. Their body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. We assume all because of the change of this mindset.

Wow. So essentially, this, this idea that if you believed it, if you understood what you were doing was exercise, you reap the benefits. If you didn't have an understanding, you would not reap the benefit, right? So another one on the subject of physical activity, you, you've done a lot of work some interesting studies on running, and let's go there.

Well, let's talk more generally about fatigue. You know, that psychological construct. Yeah. I had an image a while ago of the person who is word processing all day long and he is just exhausted. That's enough. I just can't do this anymore. And then he goes home and for relaxation, he's playing the piano. You know, so you change the context and all of a sudden he has renewed energy. The first study we did, and this is the easiest one to explain to people, is we asked a group of people to do 100 jumping jacks and tell us when they get tired. And they tend to get tired around 67, two-thirds of the way. Then we asked a different group of people to do 200 jumping jacks. And tell us when they get tired. And they get tired at 2/3 of the way, which is many more jumping jacks. Okay, so that's what, 234, whatever it is. So the point is that we have a mindset that is we're gonna begin an activity and engage it, and at around 2/3 of the way through it, we're gonna start to experience fatigue. And if you intervene at that point, then, you know, it's the same thing as satiation. This may seem crazy to people, but let me just say, so I'm a big eater, so I go from an appetizer and I end with dessert. The theory is if I now start to eat the appetizer again, I'll be able to go through the whole meal. Okay, so being satiated, being fatigued, These tend to be mindsets. Now you might say, well, I'm saying that you can go on endlessly. I don't know, but I know that whatever we're doing, whenever we're tired, we have a lot more in us than meets the eye at that moment.

Well, you know, on the subject of fatigue and running, I can't help but think of Roger Bannister and breaking the 4-minute mile. No one can do it. Then Bannister does it. Then all of a sudden, Everyone can do it. Yeah.

Yeah. In fact, we did a study 40 years ago and I remember none of the details, but what we did was ask people to do something, whatever it was, and do as many as they can do. And then we asked the next group of people to do 5 more and then as many as you can do. Nobody could do more than that. And then we asked the next, you know, we just kept adding and, you know, people are, are able to do much, much more than they think. A version of this. Years ago, I was on this— the Committee on Aging at Harvard Medical School, and Jack Rowe, physician, was the chair. And I called Jack one day and I said, Jack, how long does it take for a broken finger to heal? And he said, let's say a week. I said, okay, what would you say if I said I could heal it By psychological means in 6 days. He said, all right, no big deal. I said, what about 5 days? He said, maybe. I said, what about 4 days? He said, oh, yeah, I don't think so. Okay. I said, what about 3 days? No. I said, okay, what about 3 days and 23 hours? You know, where is the breaking point? The minute where here you can and here you can't. And when we do almost anything, if we added just a little more, you know, it probably wouldn't be very hard for us to do it. I was talking years ago about what I called the reverse of Zeno's paradox with respect to distance. I think Zeno was a cynic. Zeno said, if you always go half the distance from where you are to where you wanna be, you're never gonna get there. So imagine we've gone all the distance. Now we have 1 inch left. You go half an inch, a quarter of an inch, an eighth of an inch, a sixteenth of an inch. You're never going to get there. Okay, but you can turn this around and it can be very positive and motivating. There's always a distance you can go from where you are to where you want to get. And, you know, cut it in halves and halves and halves. So let's say you wanted to stop eating the box of cookies you eat every night. So eat half a box. Uh, you can't eat half a box? Okay. Eat a quarter of a box. You can't stop eating a quarter of a box. And I get it down to a crumb. Everybody, you know, can eat a crumb less. And then we have a different starting point.

Well, on that note, on the subject of, of food and eating the cookies, you also did an interesting study on blood sugar.

Yeah. So, okay. So you wanna go through all of the mind-body studies?

Not all of 'em, but I only have a couple more. I think, I think, I think the ones on exercise.

These are very exciting.

Yeah.

Yeah, let me, um, before we do this, let me tell you about two personal experiences that led to all of the work on the mind-body unity theory and the different studies that you're talking about. So this is kind of fun. You know, the book, The Mindful Body, when I started writing it was a memoir and then I changed it, um, but kept many of the personal stories. So this is one of those stories. I was married when I was very young and we went to Paris on our honeymoon. And now, you know, I'm young, but I'm trying to be the woman of the world. And we're in this French restaurant and I ordered the mixed grill and on the plate was the pancreas. And I asked my then husband, which is the pancreas? He pointed to something. Well, you know, now that I'm a woman of the world, so I'm going to eat it, but I'm going to wait till later. So I eat with gusto everything else on the plate. Now is the moment of truth. Can I get myself to eat it? I start to eat it and I get literally sick. You know, it's just— I'm nauseous and it's terrible. Meanwhile, he then starts to laugh. I say, why are you laughing? He said, that's chicken. You ate the pancreas ages ago. So our, our minds can do terrible or wonderful things for us. So, um, the— which study did you ask me about? The blood sugar?

Yes.

Yeah. So we took, um, people who had type 2 diabetes and they come into the lab and we take all sorts of measures and then we sit them down next to a computer and all of the particulars about this will become clear in a moment to why we did it. We had them play computer games where we asked them to change the game they're playing every 15 minutes or so. That's just to ensure that they'll look at the clock. For a third of the people, we rigged that clock so it goes twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's going half as fast as real time. For a third of the people, it's real time. Well, it turns out that blood sugar level follows clock time, perceived time, not real time. I have several studies with clocks. Another one, we have people in a sleep lab. They wake up, they think they got 2 hours more sleep than they got, 2 hours fewer than they got. Biological and cognitive functioning follow perceived. The most recent of these, I'll tell you, because I know you're going to ask me, jump the gun. Is one about wound healing. So we inflict a wound. Now, it would have been very dramatic if we could do something really hurting people, but clearly I don't want to do that. And even if I wanted to, presumably the review board wouldn't let me. So it's a minor wound, but a wound nonetheless. And again, people are sitting in front of a clock and the clock is going twice as fast as real time. Half as fast as real time, or real time. And it turns out the wound heals again based on clock time, perceived time, not real time. The control we have over our health is, is enormous, enormous. If only we didn't accept limits that might have existed in the past, limits that other people teach us, or which the medical world, I think, tends to think are real. We're doing a study now. I don't have the results, but what we're doing is taking people who've broken their bones, and we see, you know, how long it typically takes for that bone to heal. And what we want to do is have the physician, a third of the physicians, tell people that some people can heal in as quickly as, and give the lowest quickest healing time, because now what you're given is usually the longest healing time. So whenever— I mean, advice for people— whenever you're told anything is going to take however long you're told, recognize that that's a guess, and you might be able to— I believe most of us can do it in far less, heal far quicker.

A lot to unpack here, and I think The core, one of the core questions I have with regards to our health and wellbeing is how do we manage our mindset so we can optimize our health and wellbeing, whatever that looks like for the individual. It's absolutely clear. And there's so many of your great studies there. I could get into, you know, the eye charts, the MIT Air Force pilot, which maybe we'll touch on later. I think they're so good, but they're just, you You are filled with so many studies which people are listening are just saying, wow, wow, wow. And it's clear there's a connection or the mind and body are one and there's a huge— but what can we do with this?

Okay, well, so the first thing is we go back to the beginning of all of this. And mindfulness, as I study it, is just noticing new things. When you're noticing new things, the neurons are firing and all of this research has shown that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. Now, when don't we notice, or why don't we notice? It's because we think we know. And that's what our parents taught us, our teachers. When you hear many speakers, when you're reading whatever newspapers you're reading, everything is given in absolute. So for example, let me ask you, Jason, how much is 1 and 1?

I've heard you— I know all the— I've heard you do this on another podcast. So let's do— so yes, 2, but it could also be 1.

I'll use different examples, but let's Let's finish with this.

No, but you should walk through this one. I think it's powerful.

So we're all taught 1 and 1 is 2. And if I in fact ask somebody seriously, how much is 1 and 1? I think I'd lose them, you know, would not feel any reason to have the conversation with me. It's such a silly question. Everybody says 2, but it's not always 2. If you add 1 cloud plus 1 cloud, 1 plus 1 is 1. If you add 1 pile of laundry plus 1 pile of laundry, 1 plus 1 is 1. In the real world, 1 1 probably doesn't equal 2 as often as it does. Now, the point is, so if you were, or anybody listening was asked now, how much is 1 1, you'd look to the context to figure out, well, you know, are they expecting that 2 is an answer? Or, you know, perhaps they've listened to a different podcast, Ellen Langer, and now they want me to say 1. The point is that Everything is always changing. Everything looks different from different perspectives. And when we form these mindsets or we accept something as true, like 1 and 1 is 2, and virtually, you know, as you get older, you fall apart, all of the things that we've expected, we no longer pay any attention. And it's interesting because we learn these things as absolutes to get control over the world. But in doing so, We're actually giving up control. What we need to recognize is that we don't know. And when we know we don't know, then we tune in and all sorts of possibilities open up to us. So let me tell you about something else you might have heard me say before.

Close the loop on the 1 and 1 does not equal 2, because I want to explain to our audience in case they're not familiar with the one that the example I use, let's just say it's 1 pile of socks plus 1 pile of socks. Actually, if you put them together, it's still 1 pile of socks.

And you think that's clearer than one pile of laundry and one pile of laundry?

Yes.

Okay. Be that as it may. So many years ago, I was at this horse event and this man asked me if I'd watch his horse because he wanted to go get his horse a hot dog. Well, I'm Harvard-Yale all the way through. Nobody knows better than I. Horses are herbivorous. They do not eat meat. Wonderful. He comes back with the hot dog and the horse ate it. And it was wonderful. I realized that everything I thought I knew could be wrong, which might upset some people, but for me, it opened up a world of possibility that anything I thought couldn't be perhaps could be. And, um, you know, and then I started to look at research and research only gives us probabilities. If you do an experiment, the findings are such that they say if you were to do the exact same thing again, which you can never do exactly the same thing, if you're doing it, you're at least, you know, a day older, an hour older. But assuming you were doing the exact same thing, you'd probably find whatever it is you found again. That's translated as absolute. Horses often don't eat meat. Not horses never eat meat. All right. So we learn in such a way that we think we know, then we're not interested in finding out anything else about it because we already know. And we tend to confuse— this is going to be a mouthful— but the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomenon. We're holding it still in our heads, but it's changing. And what we need to learn to do is exploit the power and uncertainty rather than run from it. And it's very easy to do interpersonally. Right now, lots of people— this happens less and less as we get older, thank goodness— but a lot of people pretend or they won't engage because they don't know. They're afraid of being found out. But what I'm trying to do is make everybody aware that nobody knows. And so not knowing then becomes an opportunity to become more mindful.

Well, how should we manage uncertainty and the ensuing stress and anxiety that many of us deal with on a daily basis?

Yeah, stress is a psychological concept, and I think actually is the major killer. I wanted to do a study but haven't been able to figure out how, and it was during the pandemic, which created other problems. But if we got people who are all just diagnosed with some dread, some kind of cancer, let's say, Now, no one is happy when they find out that they have cancer. So let's give them a few weeks to deal with it. And from that point forward, we find out, uh, we measure their stress level every few weeks or so, every month. I think that stress will predict the course of the disease over and above genetics, um, or anything else, or diet. Um, so stress. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned stress because everybody knows stress is psychological, and which means that we potentially can control it. So let's unpack it. What is stress? When, when are things stressful? Stress relies on two things. First, the assumption that an event is going to occur, and second, that when it occurs, it's going to be dreadful. So I suggest to people that they unpack both of that. First of all, people don't realize, but prediction is an illusion. We cannot predict. And, you know, to make that clear, you know, let's say Mercedes is a wonderful car. Okay. So we'll take anybody who's listening to this. We'll go to a Mercedes dealership and randomly give you a key, a key to any one of the cars. Would you bet your life your savings, that that particular car will start as soon as you turn the key in the ignition? You say, most of them are going to start, you know, so surely most will. But we can never predict the individual occurrence. And as individuals, that's really what we care about when we're talking about our own health and well-being. Okay, so now you're stressed and perhaps you accept that prediction is an illusion. Um, so if you take that event that you think is going to happen and just give yourself 3 reasons, 4, 2, whatever you can come up with, why it might not happen. Well, you're immediately less stressed because this thing was happening. Stress requires 2 things. One, you're predicting that something is going to happen, and when it happens, it's going to be awful. Prediction is an illusion. You ask yourself, um, give yourself 3 reasons why it might not happen. So you went from it's going to happen to maybe it won't happen. You immediately feel better. Now let's assume it does happen. What are the advantages? And there are always advantages. And, you know, so what we need to understand, events don't cause stress. What causes stress are our views of events. The more mindful we are, the more potential views we can consider. And hence, you know, end our stress. I very rarely experience stress. You know, there's, um, I almost never, and at my age I've experienced lots of things that for other people are, oh my gosh. Um, one day I came home, um, from a friend's house for dinner and all of my neighbors were outside because my house had just burnt. So 80% of what I owned was destroyed. Well, I must admit I was not gleeful, but I did learn something from this. The next day I called the insurance agent and he came over and he said in the 25 years he's been doing his job, this was the very first time that the damage was worse than the call. Most of the time people, oh my gosh. And then he sees it's not really so bad. But for me, I thought, well, I've already lost everything. What was the point in throwing my sanity away? But this gets better. I'm rushing to the end of this because I know you want to go back to your original question. I spent then time, because I didn't have my house, in the hotel. This was Christmas. Christmas Eve, I leave the hotel to go be with some friends. I come back to the hotel and my room is full of gifts, not from the owner of the hotel. Not from the management, but from the so-called little people, the chambermaids, the people who parked my car, the waiters and the waitresses. It's only recently that I'm able to tell that story without it bringing tears to my eyes. Now, I don't remember anything really that I lost in the fire. Every Christmas, I'm reminded of the potential, the way there are so many good people out there, and to be trusting. Of other people. It was beautiful. You get to speak.

It is. Thank you. It is beautiful. And, you know, in hearing you speak, I'm curious, do you think you have a superpower? You are an optimist, to say the least.

I'm on the edge of the optimism continuum. Yes.

Yeah. You have an abundance mindset. Can you talk about the role nature and nurture play here?

Well, yeah. So I'm as far over to the nurture end of the nature-nurture continuum as possible. You know, I believe that whatever you were born with, you can become very different from that. You know, some people are, are born with great athletic prowess. I think that most of this can be learned. I think that we can learn virtually everything. But, you know, the more mindful you get, the more you realize you don't have to be able to do everything. All you have to do to be happy is to take care of the moment. And if you make the moment meaningful and then the next moment, then at the end of the day, you've had a meaningful life.

So it sounds like there's a focus on the present and coming back to mindfulness.

Yeah. And interestingly, people used to say, or they still do, be in the moment. And that's sweet, but I think it's an empty instruction, Jason, because when you're not there, you're not there to know you're not there. So the way to be there in the present is this act of noticing of things you think you know. Notice new things about it to find out, gee, I didn't know it as well as I thought. Then your attention will naturally go to it.

So on one hand, you've talked about the illusion of control, and then You begin Chapter 4 with a quote from Emerson, quote, "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen," end quote.

Yeah, it's interesting that I found that. I developed the mindful theory of decision-making and only many years later found that quote. Yes, saying I think that for most wisdom, you know, that there are probably people throughout the ages who have had whatever thoughts we're having now. I'm lucky in that I can put these in everyday parlance. But the idea of decision-making, I think, is very important and important for our health because this is one of the things that's a major stressor for people. They're faced with a decision. They don't know how to make it. They're worried that they're not going to make the right decision and get themselves crazed and that has a physiological corollary as well. There are a few things to recognize about decision-making. The way people think they should make decisions is to do a cost-benefit analysis. Well, the first thing is that, as I told you a moment before, every benefit is a cost, every cost is a benefit. And when you recognize that, if you add it up, it's not going to tell you what to do. In fact, there are people who are ambivalent who have an advantage, you know, because should I do this? Should I do that? This for this? Oh, maybe that's better. And they go back and forth and they can't decide. It's sort of mindfulness gone wild because they think there's a best decision. If we realize that costs and benefits are not going to get us to where we want to go, and we add to that that prediction is an illusion. So what felt good yesterday might not even feel good tomorrow. So perhaps that's not the decision you want to make. And we realize that even if we wanted to do a cost-benefit analysis, the number of things that are costs are potentially endless. You know, it could be costs for me now, costs for my family, costs for my friends. You know, if I decide, should I move? Okay, so there's, there's costs for my pocketbook, my children, my grandchildren. You know, so on and so forth, because every penny I spend, there's less potentially for that. Should I include that in the decision about whether or not I should move? The point is there's no endpoint to the information we could continue. So when you put all of this together, there's no cost that doesn't have an equal but opposite benefit. You can add them up. There's no endpoint to the information you could bring in to make the decision, and all of these are based on predicting what would be a cost or a benefit, which changes over time for us, you end up in a very funny place. And the bottom line to all of this, and it's easier reading this, people can think about it. And, you know, I give lots of examples to make, to make the points. But the bottom line is, rather than spend our time trying to make the right decision, What we should be doing is make the decision right. Almost flip the coin.

Well, also, so what role do you think the gut plays here? But for the— use the house as an example.

Yeah. You know that if all your life you wanted a house that has high ceilings, but you think that, you know, people are going to think I'm crazy if I said I spent all this money and, you know, moved everybody in the family to this place because of high ceilings. But if you really think, and you know, you were led to believe that high ceilings mean you're a great success, as soon as you enter that house, you're going to want to buy it. And then what decision-making really becomes is gathering information to persuade other people that it was the right decision.

I'm going to segue to visualization and manifestation. We'll use the house as an example. I think it's a real example for many people where, you know, maybe there's a dream house that maybe they can't quite afford today, but maybe it's something they, they can in a couple years or go forward, or maybe it's just not in the cards today. But as you say, anything's possible. How should one approach that?

Yeah, well, there, there are so many ways. The, the first is we think we want the house, we think we want to, when we're younger, make a lot of money. We think we want to have all of the status. It's not the money, the status, or the house. It's what the money, the status, and the house actually bring to us. So, you know, if you had $1 billion, that's more than, you know, I can imagine having that. And you assume now you've made it, life is grand. There are lots and lots of billionaires who are very unhappy. It's not in the amount of money. It's in the way you live your life. And so the key is to— well, many people try to add more years to their life. And I argue that what we should be doing is adding more life to our years. If you're enjoying yourself, if you're feeling good about yourself and you're fully engaged in whatever you're doing, then you can't be more successful than that. You know, when I was young, I used to think, wouldn't it be romantic to spend a sabbatical in Paris? I don't know where I got that from. You know, maybe some movie I had seen. Okay. And, you know, but I never did. And then I said, well, wait a second. I don't speak French. I mean, I like my, you know, short vacations in Paris, but if I really wanted it, I would do it. And that as long as you're content with what you're doing, you don't long for these other things. I thought if we went to business people and we said to them, how much do you need a vacation? Which is different from want a vacation. The more they thought they needed a vacation, the more mindlessly they were doing their work. So what people don't understand and what you should ask me, well, isn't it hard to be mindful all the time? And then I get to answer you and say no. In fact, when you're having your best times, when you're at play, you're being mindful. You know, if you were to do a crossword puzzle and then you're going to do it a second time and you know the answers, that's no fun. I tell my students there's this wonderful video out there. It's called Piano Stairs. And I think it started in Scandinavia someplace where they went down to, to different train stations all over Scandinavia. And same here. And what you have is an escalator that's by stairs and everybody is taking the escalator. Okay, so now what they did was lay down piano keyboards on the stairs. So as you go up the stairs, doo doo doo, it's making noise. It's music. Now, in almost no time at all, everybody forgets the escalator And they're all taking the stairs because taking the stairs is now fun. So, and what I tell my students is, why wait for somebody to put down the keyboard on the stairs? You can do this in your head. You know, everything can be fun and, um, or enjoyable, or at the least interesting.

So I agree. And where I'm going to go with this is I think a lot of people are listening and they're nodding yes. And they're also thinking about a family member who may be going to struggle with the concept. And we often hear contagion in the negative sense, but how can we create positive contagion?

First of all, we have some almost woo-woo data on contagion, mindful contagion, that I report in the book, where when you are mindful, people around you are going to be more mindful in ways that are hard to explain, but also very straightforwardly because When you're mindful, you're in the present moment. You appear calm because you are calm. You're non-evaluative. That's what mindfulness does. You know, how does mindfulness make you non-evaluative? So let's say you don't like me because you think I'm inconsistent. If you were mindful, you'd realize from my perspective, that's because I'm flexible. I don't like you because you're impulsive. But from your perspective, you're spontaneous. Every single negative ascription you have for somebody has again an equally potent but oppositely balanced alternative. You hate me because I'm so gullible. Ah, you love me because I'm so trusting. All right. So the more mindful you are, the more you see this about people, the better your relationships are. So people find people who are mindful, authentic, and trustworthy, and then want to experience life in basically the same way. You know, that, um, yeah. And so, so mindfulness tends to be contagious. People who are mindful are, um, are more attractive. Uh, there's an energy that people have that others want. And if they're lucky enough to watch somebody who's mindful and see how frequently they say, gee, I don't know, or could be, maybe, rather than stand in a, uh, take a rigid stance, they too can adopt that way of being.

So what does this look like in a medical setting? The subtitle of the book is Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And look, we're going to need to interact with the medical establishment, you know, whether it's you go to a doctor or or a hospital or, and there's a diagnosis, how does one interact with their practitioner?

Okay. So I gave a talk several years ago. There were, uh, to 5,000 people and it was about cancer. And it was only after the talk that I, um, realized from some of the questions that many of the people in the audience were physicians. You know, so I, I was suggesting a very different way of healing. Than that proposed by the medical model. And they were very excited about it because they know they don't know. And so, you know, I think when interacting with anybody, if you just ask questions, how else might it be? What other medication might I take? What else might I do? You know, even for chronic illnesses, I show a slide in one of my talks It was about COVID where we have an Olympic athlete. So this strong woman jumping over hurdles. And I contrast that with somebody in their bathrobe eating, overeating, you know, surrounded by candy and watching television. So a couch potato. And I simply ask the question, if both of them were exposed to COVID and let's assume both of them got it, Do you think that their— the way their body would handle it would be the same? You know, so whatever happens to you, there are always— if you have a disease that is considered chronic, uncontrollable, all that really means is they don't yet know how to control it, that there are always things that we can do to make our bodies stronger. Secondly, that We have lots of research on a treatment that I call attention to variability. It's really attention to symptom variability, which is a fancy way of just saying mindfulness. You know, when you're mindful, you notice things changing. When you're mindless, you keep things still. All right. And what we do is, well, we take people who have these chronic illnesses and they think their symptoms are going to stay the same. Or just get worse. Nothing only moves in one direction. Sometimes you're a little better, sometimes a little worse. And so what we try to do is to get people to notice when are you a little better? And when you're a little better, ask, why am I a little better right now? Right? So we call people at various times of the day throughout the week, perhaps over 2 or 3 weeks, and ask them how they feel. And are they better or worse than the last time and why? 3 things happen. At least 3 things. The first is they see, gee, I don't always feel this terrible. No, I'm in pain, but not every minute of the day. So you feel a little better. Second, by asking why, why now are you a little better than before? You do a mindful search. And we have so much evidence, so many studies where we make people more mindful and they actually live longer. And third, when you believe you can control something, you're much more likely to find the solution than if you don't. So let's say you're stressed. You're so stressed, Jason, you think you're stressed all the time. No one is stressed all the time. The problem is when you're not stressed, you're not thinking about being stressed. So you're stressed, then you're not stressed, not thinking, then you're stressed again. And you forget that intervening activity. So we call you all the time. How are you now? Is it better or worse than before and why? And you find out, you know, when you're talking to Ellen Langer, you're maximally stressed. Okay. Well, the easiest thing then is don't talk to me. You know, there are always things that we can do. And we've done this now with very serious illnesses. We've done it with Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, and others as well, and found that we're able to alleviate almost all of the symptoms.

I'm going to assume that you think media and our consumption of media, most of it not the most upbeat, you know, there's the saying, if it bleeds, it leads, plays a role in our perceived chronic stress, if you will?

Yeah, I think there's nothing that we do or that anyone could tell us that necessitates that we're going to take it in mindlessly. And so people used to ask me, what about people being on their cell phones all the time? Be on your cell phone, do whatever you're doing. But if you do it mindfully, then you're not going to be victimized by it. Now, The problem for people is that there's all this information. Turns out there's not more information than there was in the past. You know, one could take a blade of grass and analyze it endlessly. Imagine how a cow sees a blade of grass, how an astronaut, a farmer, a cattle rancher, a grocery store person, you know, someone, you can take one thing and spend a lifetime or almost looking at it. So the same amount of information. The mistake people make is thinking that the more information they have, the better they're going to be and the better off. And I don't think there's any evidence for that.

So going to Dr. Google, probably not the best use of your time.

Well, no, no. What I'm saying is one way of spending your time is not better than another way. As long as you're spending it mindfully, you know, and if you're reading Dr. Google and you're taking what's told as absolute, then you're doing yourself a disservice. If you take it in, oh, that's an interesting possibility, then you're enhancing rather than hurting yourself.

So is this an area where practice makes perfect, if you will, where let's say, you know, let's start small. I stub my toe. And, and I'm going to acknowledge that I've stubbed my toe. This is what it feels like. But you know what? I'm going to be okay and it's going to heal faster. Like, is that, is that something we should, whether it's a stubbed toe or a cut or start, start to build those muscles?

Yeah. So that's good because whatever happens, our thoughts about it are going to control our body's reaction to it. And You know, if you stub your toe, well, you know, you stub your toe, even if you yell, ow, I mean, I don't think anybody, unless you've broken your toe, has stubbed it, is going to be incapacitated by this. But for most of the things that cause us difficulty, we tend to have these difficulties because we've bought into too many mindless assumptions about them. You know, most people are stressed because of failure, whether it's failure of an organ or failure at work, and think that wouldn't life be grand if everything worked perfectly? Did you ever hear of the Texas curse? I think it's a Texas curse. You say it to somebody you don't like. I wish you what you wish for yourself. Because what we wish for ourselves turns out, you know, not to be good for us most of the time. That, you know, if you've read golf—

there's another cliché. What? Thank God for unanswered prayers is another one.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That, um, the example I often use is golf. If you think, wouldn't it be great if I got a hole in one each time I swung that club? Well, no, there'd be no game there. And if you want to win whatever you're doing, uh, all the time, then play tic-tac-toe against a 4-year-old. You know, and we know that that's not right. So we know that not knowing is fun. That's the adventure. And we don't want— we can either be perfectly mindless or imperfectly mindful.

So how do you find that balance? I'll use me as an example. So, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. My wife and I run this business together, and we also have two little kids. And so there's, you know, we try to stay in the present, we try to be mindful, but planning is, is real for our, for our two little children and for our business. So we have to, there's a balance there. We try to be mindful, we try to be flexible, we try to be, you know, live in the moment, but at the same time, like, we need to plan, we need to plan contingency plans often. Like, we, there, there are lots we have. So use us as an example. What, how do, how do people find that balance?

You know, the balance between work and life. I don't know. I think—

No, not work and life, but this idea of I'm trying to be mindful and present, but at the same time I need to plan for the future.

Yeah, but how far out in the future are you planning? You know, that it wouldn't be terrible if all of a sudden your wife had to go someplace and you had to take care of the kids and they were sitting next to you right now. That was something that I felt was very humanizing during the pandemic. When everybody is Zooming, when I'm teaching my courses Zooming, and, you know, my dog would start barking. It's a— it could be nice to make things more human. I think that if you assume when you're making a plan for something, again, you're predicting this is the way to do it and these are the consequences that will unfold. And haven't you ever had plans that went awry? You did exactly what you thought you wanted to do and things got screwed up or it didn't work out. I think these are hidden opportunities. I think that you're talking about mind-body, mind-body green, and you have two little kids that have minds and bodies. I think it would be fun to include them rather than try to, as you're saying, work around them.

Oh, we definitely include them, maybe a little too much. But so you mentioned vacation. You know, there's this there's— I think, I believe there's research on this, this idea that much of the happiness comes in planning the lead-up to the vacation, not the vacation itself, right?

And yeah, so, and so that's our thinking, uh, that's making us happy. So, you know, why ever stop? You know, so that you'll be planning a trip and you're, you're loving all the, you know, you're gathering the booklets and you're trying to figure out what restaurants to go, you know, you'll go to and all of this is in your mind and you're having a wonderful time with it. If that makes you happy, then do it when you haven't bought the plane tickets, you know, which means that thinking about other places, other things you might do, other ways of doing things you've already done is exciting.

And so I'm going to come back to the big idea of this idea of thinking ourselves to chronic health. We want to feel good. We want to look good. I think a lot of people would sign up for that. And in summary, it sounds like we need to be mindful. We need to really be, be present in the moment. Sounds like we need to adopt more of an abundance mindset.

Yeah, I think that I don't like to tell people, you know, to be present because again, everybody thinks they are present because when they're not present, they're not there, to know they're not there. I think the way to summarize a lot of this is to talk about just the importance of uncertainty and exploit the power in uncertainty. And when you know you don't know and nobody knows, then finding out is potentially exciting. You know, some people think about, you know, living each day as if it's their last. One could also live each day as if it's their first. The point is that everything is new and to focus on, hold still, the part you already know is sort of sad to me. And the good thing is that all this active noticing with the neurons firing feels good and is good for you. And other people find you more appealing when you're in that mode and Everything you do bears the imprint of that mindfulness, and it's easy, and it's the essence of what you're doing when you have a good time. It's beyond me why anybody, when made aware of how often they're sealed in unlived lives, would choose to continue to live that way.

So I'm curious, is there anything you've changed in your personal life while doing research where you've walked away and said, wow, that's, that's really interesting study. I need to make a change in my everyday life.

I've been asked that before. I don't remember my other answer to it, but, you know, that much of my research comes from my noticing things around me and experiences that I've had. And so then I do the study to see if it— if I'm the only one or this is a more general phenomenon. So I'm not surprised in the way you're suggesting, you know, so I see my mother's cancer goes away. There's no medical explanation. That tells me that, you know, there's a possibility that it's all psychological. My getting sick when I ate that pancreas. Those lead up to the studies, the mind-body studies, the studies that we discussed. I'm sure that my thinking has changed, but I see it more as incremental rather than, oh my gosh, you know, look at that. I was right and now I'm going to live a different life. The one, one of the things that is so simple that I think has had the biggest effect on me and answering your question, I just realized this is something I said to you before, which is behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else he or she wouldn't do it. And that means every time you're annoying me. That I'm being mindless. Every time I'm the slightest bit judgmental, I'm being mindless. And so I catch myself and try to understand from your perspective. I mean, I live with somebody who has a different view of neatness than I have. And for me, if something is out of place, fix it right away. But the other alternative, which I had never realized, is Fix it all and then wait till it all falls apart again, then fix it again and wait till it all falls apart. It's very different, you know, but it's a respectable position. Again, now I'm an antiprocrastinator. I do everything early. Is that good, bad? It's neither good nor bad. I live with somebody who's a procrastinator. So what does that mean? I've seen over all these years the advantage, you know, I will never not be able to get the plane ticket or the concert seats, 'cause I do everything immediately. On the other hand, oftentimes if you wait, um, you get discounted seats, discounted fares. You know, there are advantages to, uh, to both. The procrastinators basically are not so sure that this thing will need to get done. And oftentimes they're right, you know, so we describe people in such a way that some of us win and some of us lose. And I'm suggesting that we need to look differently at those people who so-called are losers.

So where do you think the scientific or more specifically medical community is today in recognizing the mind-body connection or mind-body unity?

Unity. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So not that many years ago, a couple of decades, the medical model which most physicians were taught and believe suggested that the only way you were going to get sick was by the introduction of an antigen, a virus, something. Okay. You know, and that psychology essentially ran in parallel. Now people recognize, I think virtually all people recognize that stress, for example, is real and stress can exacerbate whatever illness. My work takes it further, suggesting that we might, through psychological means, be able to control it all. Now, I am not suggesting you get in a car accident and you spend 10 minutes with me and boom, everything's going to be healed and so on. But I don't yet know what the limits are to this mind-body unity. I just know that studies by my lab and others, I mean, there's some wonderful research on sham surgery. What they did was to take people in Parkinson's and they Actually, I, and on my review board would never let me do this, but they're able to cut open their heads. And so people think they're having real surgery. And then the surgeon would tap your head or whatever, and then sew you back up. And because it's so persuasive that you just had the surgery, the Parkinson's is healed. Right. And we found healing of all these diseases with our attention to symptom variability. So I think, you know, the question is, is there blowback pushback from the medical world? That probably, but less and less each passing year.

Do you think in 5 years, 10 years, or maybe never that we'll get to a place where science can actually explain why that is, why that person just believed, just, you know, had that radical remission or had that that surgery?

Sure. No, I mean, I think that mind-body unity explains spontaneous remissions. You know, for the medical world, the assumption is these are rare events. I think that they're probably not rare at all. You know, you think of all the people who never get to the medical world, who are out, you know, not conveniently located near hospitals and whatever, um, or even those of us who are in big cities with lots of medical care. Where we might have tumors and then all of a sudden the tumor is gone. We never knew it was there in the first place. You know, if you go to a hospital and you have a tumor and you decide you're going to go home to die, if in fact the tumor goes away, I don't think many people think to call their doctor, you know, call the hospital and say, ha ha, you were wrong. You know, they're just happy about it. So, so the first thing is, I think It's not as rare, so people should try to produce their own spontaneous remissions. Second, I think that the mind-body unity idea says that if we're able to put our minds in these positive places, not just, you know, and you have to be able to fool yourself, you can't, which is very hard. You can't say, you know, I'm going to die, but I'm going to think positively. That doesn't work at all. So if we do, and we've planned to do this, I don't know why it takes so long to get these studies done, but we wanted to do, um, the counterclockwise study with people who have, um, tumors and who have, let's say, breast cancer and take them back in time. And I, I do believe that if they've spent that time and we're able to assess the tumor, that for many people, the tumor will be gone. If they are fully engaged as their younger selves. Well, but you don't need to be a younger self. You just need to be your healthy self. How do you get to be your healthy self? In part, to remember that everything you're told from the doctor is a guess. It's a maybe, not a definite.

On that note, I think we're big believers of routines and rituals. We know that how you immediately start your day and how you end your day before bedtime are powerful. Do you have any tips for people, the practices or protocols they should incorporate?

Yeah, no, I don't think mindfulness, as I studied, isn't a practice. It's not like meditation, you know, it's, it's basically once you adopt the notion that you don't know and it's okay not to know, then you're going to want to find out and that all of your certainties need to be questioned. So I don't, I think whatever you do that's fun for you to do before you go to sleep or, you know, solve some problem you need to solve and then go to sleep, there's no reason why you shouldn't wake up welcoming the new day. I've been irritating to people I've been involved with in the past. You know, I wake up singing, which wouldn't be as irritating if I had a good voice, but I don't. You know, so what kind of practice are you thinking of?

So for example, what I've done for as long as I can remember is I wake up and the moment I put my feet on the ground is I say, you know, I repeat, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yeah. I don't live in that world. You know, who are you thanking and what are you thanking them for?

Grateful for being alive.

No, but that suggests to me that you had an expectation for it to be otherwise. I just expect that I'm going to be healthy. You know, it's the example that I put in the book about the difference between doing and trying, that when you say you're trying something, you have built into that the expectation that you're going to fail. You don't try to eat the ice cream cone, you just eat it. You know, when I gave one of these talks and it was cancer-related, I remember this man saying that, you know, that his wife fought cancer the whole way. And am I saying You know, basically he thought I was blaming the victim. So the first thing I said was that, you know, I'm not blaming the victim because the culture hasn't taught us yet the control we have over our health. So there's no reason why she should have known it. Second, that if you look at the metaphor fighting her cancer, you know, if, if a little kid— let's make the child 2 years old— is pulling on your trousers and irritating. Do you see yourself as fighting the kid? No. The whole idea of fighting suggests that the adversary is very large, powerful, and the chance of failure is great. So I spend a lot of time listening to language that reveals lots of our thoughts, ways people feel.

In your opinion, would I be better served instead of saying thank you be focusing on a feeling of feeling energetic and strong and youthful?

No, I think you should just wake up and welcome the day. You know, that you wake up and I wake up and I can't wait to have coffee. And we have different kinds of coffee. So, you know, I'm thinking, well, which one do I think I want right now? Because it's a guess because who knows? And whatever kind I get, I'm actually going to be happy with. And then just go about being. I mean, it's fine if you want to be grateful, but again, that still seems to me that you're entertaining the possibility that maybe, you know, it could easily be other. And, you know, I think that that's that built-in stress that so many people have. I think there are lots of people— there are two different strategies. I talk about this in the book. One is, defensive pessimism versus a mindful optimism. And defensive pessimism, which sounds like you're waking up and, thank God I'm still alive. And defensive pessimism is, in some sense, expect the worst but hope for the best. But the problem is, and that hopefully I've made it clear in some ways during our conversation now, that you get what you expect. You know, things are neither good, bad, stressful, not stressful. It all depends on the way we view them. So if you're expecting the worst, you're going to be in some ways creating the worst. So I say just presume everything is fine. You don't need to tell yourself that every morning. You just wake up and enjoy the day, which may seem facile to some people, but—

No, I think it's important. And I think people are always I think working parents, and I'll maybe I'll, I'll generalize here. I think in the morning, people try to focus on setting themselves up for success because if you don't, it can, things can run away from you very quickly. So I think this sort of advice is helpful for people.

Yeah. And I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't make plans. I'm suggesting that we shouldn't be mindless about the plans that we're making. You know, I've often used the example that, you know, people are going to come to a class and if on the way, let's say they run into Michelle Obama and she takes a liking to them and just, why don't we go have coffee or tea? That they should not say, I can't because I'm going to miss Ellen Langer's class. Right. Okay. You know, so that what we want to do is have a general sense of what we're going to do. Recognize that we made those decisions at one point, and now it's a different point in time. We're somewhat different people, even in the course of you waking up to the end of your day. And we need to do what feels worth doing right now, not based on what we thought yesterday.

So is it fair to say that children are probably a lot more open to infinite possibility, if you will, and then life gets to us and then we're We're right, children, right?

Exactly. You know, I mean, I have grandkids, these, uh, twins, and I'm endlessly amazed at things that they say and do and think that much of our understanding about kids, to my mind, is just, just wrong. An example: I have a hot tub, and so I said to them the other day, you know, take the goojers out of the hot tub. What is a goojer? Well, they know— they don't know what a goojer is, so anything that's in that hot tub that they don't recognize, they'll assume is a They realize it's still leaves, acorns, whatever's fallen in the hot tub. Okay, good. The next day they come, a few days later they come back. Grandma Ellen, can we take the goojers out of the hot tub? So what this means to me, you can be sure they didn't go home and memorize it, right? Googer, googer, googer. The point being that our whole understanding of memory, I think, is likely to be wrong. You remember what makes sense to you, what is meaningful to you. And what most of us have been taught to do in schools is to memorize things that are basically irrelevant, like to go back to horses don't eat meat. And yeah, I think kids are— they haven't been taught to be mindless yet. They haven't been taught that things— to hold things still.

So how do we keep— as parents or grandparents listening, how do we try to keep the magic alive with our kids?

Once we become more mindful, we become more lighthearted and more fun because, you know, everything is not that important. You know, as I said, one of the most important things for people is to recognize the difference between a tragedy and an inconvenience. And most of the things that get us crazy are really only inconveniences. Oh my God, he spilled the cereal all over the floor. All right, so he spilled the cereal on the floor. It's not a tragedy. I missed the bus. I didn't get to work on time. I lost the report. Whatever it is, rarely are these tragedies. So you just say to yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? You realize it's an inconvenience and you come back to yourself and you make it fun. So rather than if my grandkids spilled the cereal all over the floor, rather than just immediately clean it up, I think, okay, which of these 3 ways would be the best way to clean it up and why? To make it a game. I'd forgotten the question, but I'm having so much fun answering my version.

Keeping the magic alive with kids.

I think the magic would stay alive if we didn't impose all these mindless beliefs on them. If we didn't assume that, you know, The kids are doing something and they're having a really good time. But you got in your plan, you would take them to the zoo now. Well, you know that if they don't want to go to the zoo now because they're enjoying their Legos, let them enjoy their Legos. You know, you have to remember that you can't be sure that going to the zoo is a good thing right now or at any particular time. You know, things happen.

So we've covered a lot today. Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd like to share?

There's a lot we haven't touched on, but I think You know, there's probably a lot to digest. I think for me, what I'd like to ask your listeners is, you know, some of this is work I've been doing for over 40 years. And for some of these things, it's easy for me to talk about them without recognizing that to understand it fully requires some time, you know, and so anything that anybody thought was interesting that didn't quite make sense to them, you know, I invite them to do, you know, to read some of my work where it'll all be clear.

I'll hold up the book. There it is, The Mindful Body. I encourage everyone to go buy it.

You know, one of the things that I had an experience with Hell's Angels that I talk about, a very scary experience I talk about in the book. And one of the things I do As I'm telling the story, I stop and I say, so what should I do? What would you do? To realize that going forward, it's hard to know. It's hard to make these decisions because there are so many possibilities. And that's why we can't predict. Although looking back, it's very easy. You know, the Monday morning quarterback making it all make sense.

So my last question, let's suppose you have a billboard on a highway somewhere and you can say anything you want on that billboard to get your message out. What's on your billboard? I'll listen to Jason's podcast. Okay. That, that's a great answer.

You like that?

Okay. Well, we'll stick with that. That's the final answer.

That's good.

Okay. Well, we'll close there. Well, Ellen, thank you so much. You're a treasure. I love the book. I encourage everyone to pick it up.

Thank you so much, Jason. This was great fun.