Intangibles

Selflessness - Richard Lui 062

2021-10-17 · 22:45 UTC ·Intangibles ·33 min read

Brief

This podcast explores the counterintuitive finding that selflessness, rather than being a sacrifice, actually provides measurable personal and professional benefits. Lui's book synthesizes research showing that selfless behavior operates on a spectrum rather than as a binary choice, with even marginally selfless decisions (51% selfless vs. selfish) creating positive momentum. The conversation addresses the paradox of wanting selflessness benefits - Lui argues it's acceptable to start with self-interested motivations, as the practice itself can evolve into genuine selflessness over time. Key practical elements include developing daily habits that build 'selfless muscle tone,' such as consciously reconsidering decisions from others' perspectives every 15 minutes, having lunch with people you normally avoid, and using less self-focused language. The discussion connects selflessness to broader societal issues, positioning it as an antidote to political polarization and 'intractable conflicts' where threatened parties stop processing new information. Lui emphasizes that small, consistent actions - like healthcare workers repeatedly entering dangerous situations during COVID - build the capacity for larger selfless acts when needed. The conversation also explores gratitude as a 'cousin' to selflessness, with research showing that handwritten gratitude letters produce month-long improvements in stress hormones and overall well-being.

Why it matters

NBC journalist Richard Lui discusses his research-backed book on selflessness as a practical leadership and life skill:

Key details

  • [research] Selfless leaders increase team efficiency by 50% and double personal income over 14 years
  • [health] Living selflessly adds 4 years to lifespan, while faking selflessness reduces it by 2 years
  • [practice] Optimal selflessness operates on a spectrum - even 51% selfless decisions move things forward
  • [method] Building 'selfless muscle tone' through small daily habits like asking 'how can I help?' every 15 minutes
Source evidence

title: Selflessness - Richard Lui 062
author: Intangibles
contenttype: podcast
publication: Intangibles
published: 2021-10-17T22:45:02
sourceurl: http://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1143507550-intangibles-selflessness-richard-lui-062.mp3

word_count: 7393

Welcome to Intangible's podcast. I'm Steve Berg, your host. Success is driven by how, as much as by what? How we communicate, how we lead, how we relate to our environment, are all vitally important. Intangible is a podcast that explores the underlying traits, qualities, and behaviors that improve the how. This is accomplished by finding the people who have studied and been successful practice in these soft skills and having informed conversations with them to get into what is learnable. Let's begin. The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity, Leo Tolstoy. Selflessness seems noble in fulfilling, but also genuinely very difficult. Of course, I would like to serve humanity, but I've also got to worry about eating on occasion and who's going to pay my son's orthodontist bills. The good news, as I hope we will find out today, is that selflessness does not have to be an all or nothing proposition. It doesn't take much to enjoy the benefits. Richard Louis is a journalist and news anchor for MSNBC and NBC News. He was formerly at CNN Worldwide. Louis is a columnist contributing to publications, including USA Today, Politico, the Seattle Times, Detroit Repress, and San Francisco Chronicle. In 2020, Louis directed the documentary Sky Blossom, which profiles five families, each with a student providing care for a veteran parent or grandparent with disabilities. This is where today's topic, selflessness, comes into play. Seven years ago, Richard walked into a supervisor's office, prepared to give up his dream job at NBC, having just learned of his father's Alzheimer diagnosis. As in the documentary, Richard was compelled to care for his father. Turns out there was a compromise to be reached with NBC. It also turns out that what Richard learned from that time in his life became the basis for his book enough about me, the unexpected power of selflessness. And with a little luck, we're going to get the benefit of that learning in our conversation today. Richard, welcome to Intangible's podcast. Steve's great to be here. So as his customary, I always ask, is there anything I failed to mention about your background that you'd like to emphasize or is germane to the discussion we're about to have? No, that was great. You should follow me around and do this all the time. You're not the first person to say that. It does help that people write these things down about you. So I cannot take much credit. Okay, so let's do this. According to the Oxford dictionary, being selfless, it means to be more concerned with the wishes and needs of others than with your own. Is that how you see things or would you amend that? Yeah, I mean, I'd add gradations on a spectrum in an arc. I think sometimes when we look at definitions out of the dictionary, they are really great beginnings for discussions to find the nuances and the reality. So yeah, I would add a bunch in there only to say that it's not a binary definition. That is a perfect setup because I'm going to ask you, because what I'll tell you is that I think scholars argue that humans are not naturally selfless because it's antithetical to self-preservation, right? And we've got thousands of years of trying to preserve ourselves. But yet among us, there are those people who are compelled to run into burning buildings. So my question is, are selfless people somehow genetically different? And I mean, in a good way, are they kind of flawed, relative to the rest of us who are trying to make sure that we continue to live on a daily basis? Yeah, you know, in the book, what we did is we, on the team, there was a scientist, Steve, and there was a researcher, and we really dug into the science behind that what is our nature? What is it that we would do in extreme situations? And we can clearly see that it is not that we will not be selfless and that we will not be selfish. Instead, we do these things in between. And I think one of the things that really stands out just in our modern day, because we can quote just about any of the scientists that prove that point out in the book that we dug into. And of course, we bring up Dawkins and Darwin, and of course, we have to. And we also look at examples in nature where we see those species that care for others. Dolphins have been known to guide humans to safety, to steer them into the, away from danger and into safe harbors. One of the things that we stands and we, Steve, is just, you know, within the last two years, is, you know, as a journalist, I was interviewing several doctors and nurses, and you know, they talked to us with their phone, you know, in the car. No PPE, they didn't know what the disease was. It was absolutely nerve-shattering for them to see so many families be separated by death without being with them at that time. And they put down the phone, and they get out of the car, and they go walk right back into that building. And, you know, is that perfectly selfless? Well, it certainly does look like it to me. And there's a lot of examples out there. But during the same time, we've also seen the opposite of those who have not cared for others because of the virus that they may carry. And we've seen it through many epidemics and pandemics over time. So, you know, there's examples on both sides of the ledger. So it goes back to the way you started with our discussion in that, you know, there is no one or zero. It's sort of this really fat middle. So what does the spectrum of selflessness look like then? I mean, what constitutes minimally selfless or maximally selfless? What's kind of optimal selflessness? And by the way, kind of embedded in that is the question, how can selflessness be less than 100% and still considered to be selfless? Right, right, right. You know, it depends on clearly your threshold for paying on either side of that spectrum. We have a bell curve very early in the book that is what in business, we see all the time in terms of the distribution of most likely outcomes of just about everything we do. And on either end is where you don't have efficiency, to be honest, is the argument in at least when it comes to this bell curve because you all have some become overly selfless. In other words, you give to a point where it is detrimental to your own health. And I've seen that. And on the flip side is where you are so selfish, obviously, you are hurting other people. So that's the bell curve that we lay out very early on. Optimal? A optimal is moving the ball forward. And I'm not trying to fudge the answer here. But, you know, if you are making a decision, and this is something my mentor taught me who was an ex on oil guy. And he said, you know, Richard, if we are moving, if we're at 51% on that sale, we're okay. If we are, if our cost is 49 of that transaction and our revenue is 51, we're okay. Because we're moving it forward. And so the idea that we describe in the book, we can call it the 51% so long as it's selfless. You're doing something because you're moving the ball. There's another chapter called 10 stones. And and the 10 stones in the book just says, you got two buckets. Need to give money or you don't. And if six stones go in the yes and four go in the no, then you give the money. Because you in your you've made this, it's not a perfect decision. In other words, but you your gut tells you, that's the right thing to do. I think when it comes to selfless things, basically, Steve, we often will overly analyze it to the point where we don't act on it. Yeah. As a processed driven person, certainly studying this and what you put out there, yeah, I was I was challenged, right? Because I I do look for a fixed or a finite answer or a concrete answer. And then there's not many instances. Like you said, it's an imperfect answer. So there are others who have the perception that the price of selflessness is is too high. I think you say 82% of Americans say that they'd like to volunteer, but typically only 18% make it from the I'd like to volunteer to actually volunteering. I suppose you'd argue that the price is not too high. Well, we get to that, you know, Preddo's rule in a fact, right? And we see that because we do think the cost is too high. We do have the analysis paralysis. And the the data is actually opposite of that. If you want to look at the cost or the benefit on the benefit side, it's shown that well, if you you're a selfless leader in your organization, the efficiency of your teams go up by 50%. It's shown that if you're a selfless in your business practices, personally, the way you operate in the organization over a 14 year span in one of the studies that we dug into, that you will double your your income over that same period of time. So there's a costume much in money. It doesn't appear to like it does. And look, it's a we called us an anti self self help book because I love self help business books. I'm just drawn to them. And I've always liked reading them. So the objective was to try to look at those typical self help book, sort of, I need the staples of them. Do you make more money? Are you happier? Do you live longer? Do you look better? And you know, because you've read the book, yes, are according to the studies we quoted and cited and dug into, you do live four years longer, living in a selfless way. And if you live in a selfless way, but you're faking it, you actually die two years younger than the average. Do you look better? Yeah, you do. What we did, Steve, was we looked at one study where there were a group of college students who were on an archaeological dig, and they were asked to raid each other. And one of the women in the group came in at like a three six. And at the end, she was like a seven. Now why? She happened to be a very selfless person. And it's not about necessarily what the absolute numbers are, but how it is very relative. So we did that for myself too. We did a selfless return and self-issue return. And I asked the scientist to go on do what she normally does. I think she got like a thousand or two thousand count. And you know that you don't need that many, but she did it anyway. And it came out that self-ish return was like a six to and a selfless return was a seven one. So even on my best days, I'm only a seven. But I'll take it. And the whole idea is we can see that yeah, you do look better when you're selfless. You live longer and you do make more money. Now again, you know, that's not what we're positing here's the driver, but you kind of have to, you know, address that. Yeah, I want to ask about that because it's a conundrum. But I so I mean, when I when I thought about that, again, this stupid analyst and me just so the difference between seven and one and six two is, you know, that's point nine, right? So essentially, what we're saying in this particular instance is the gift that you gave, what you would put out into the world as selflessness was worth, you know, let's call it 10% increase in the you in the value of a you, right? That's a lot. That's that's actually shockingly a lot, right? You don't think of that that much, but that just noticeable difference on that is is really gigantic. Yeah. And so, you know, there's something cosmic about it. And I'm going to ask a question that I know you can't answer. Why does the universe smile on selflessness in the way that it does? Why is there so much leverage available to the selfless? Meaning that the people who are selfless without being without really trying, right? That they are genuinely selfless. The world provides all sorts of goodness and benefit to them. I think almost cosmically, right? In a yin yang fashion and is then like way almost, you know, you've stated the outcomes, you know, stress, aging, well, you have any ideas about why it is that the world just becomes so warm for those types of people. I mean, it seems like a multiplier almost. It does. You would think it would be what some would call a self-licking ice cream cone, right? But yeah, that is above my pay grade. I would only say that we're not quite there. I would really love to be answering that question. But the question that I was trying to answer was more of what is the little thing I can do to be part of the argument you just posited in your y? Yeah. I think it's perfectly okay to say, hey, look, man, the benefits are statistically obvious. And you're careful to write them down. So you're just going to have to live with that as the good enough answer for now. Okay, I'm calling this next question, Steve's conundrum. So people do seem to understand that if you're truly selfless, that the world does in fact open up to you, right? And so then they think, at least I think they might think, yeah, that would be great to get all the perks and benefits that accrue to those are truly selfless. I would like that. But then once you want that, then it's not selfless anymore, right? You're doing it for the for the act of getting the thing, the benefits. So the question is, how do we avoid coveting the benefits of selflessness? Yeah. I would only say these are French benefits. Why not? Do it for the reason you know it's right. And if these other things happen, why not? You know, if that cake has two or three cherries on it, I'll take it. You know, I'm not going to throw it away. So if we stay focused on why we're doing it at the get. Okay, let's take that aside of the argument. You do want those. That's why you're going to do it. Okay. Who might argue that that's not good either, Steve? You know, they say that when we read out loud, at least for journalists, that we get to know the story better. So if I take a script and I read it out loud two or three times, I know it better. I feel it better. So the book was not, you know, put together to say, do those things. I was like, Hey, this is great. Why not? I think actually, I think the answer is really good. And here's what I interpret the answer to be like, okay, start out saying fine. I'm after the benefits. Just take a couple of steps in that direction. You may eventually get to the point where you're not, you legitimately don't care anymore. You're like, Hey, I get the value of being selfless and I enjoy that value. And I don't really care about the rest of the stuff. It's good. Fine. Yeah. So get started. And that world, that cosmic world will suck you into it to the point where you're doing it for the right reasons. Yeah, we hope so, Steve. We do. And you can tell by the very way I mentioned where I wrote it was, hey, a little bit counts. Yeah. A little bit counts because we often put these big ideas into they have to be big moves. Yeah. Yeah. Got to take a first step. So, okay, let's try and deconstruct selflessness a little bit. What do you think as you've done your work or the kind of innate drivers of selflessness? Is it is it compassion? Is it honesty? Is it goodness? What if we break down selflessness? What are the qualities that you know, I might have fought for the five that I can then work on the fifth and ultimately kind of round out my ability to be selfless. It's a muscle set muscle tone. And the thing is going back to the example I brought up earlier, why were these everyday people doing things that were heroic? They were never trained to do that. The hypocritical says that they would, but you know, there are things that we sign to that we don't often fully understand or have the capability to fulfill. But it's because every day they would go into a hospital or a healthcare facility to help people full well knowing. And for the most of their career that they were exposing themselves, they probably even think about it after a while. Why are firefighters running up into the hill? Hills of California right now, it's a Dixie fire, risking their lives and getting, you know, I was talking to one of my friends who's a firefighter. Yeah, but two close calls last three days. Why are you doing this? You know, you got two kids. What one's it? Both them are in college right now. You know, why are you doing this? And so I would say that muscle set allows us to make those big leaps when they happen. And so you've seen it written many times before here, Steve, about your daily ritual and your habit and what brings you to your great spaces. And it is doing those little things every day because, you know, if we make a conscious choice or a relevant, conscious choice depends on what scientists you look at. We picked one that said once every 15 minutes. If we can just reconsider that decision in a selfless way every 15 minutes, we're starting to build at even once a day. And then twice a day, we're building a new muscle set in our synapses to say, hey, let me think of the other person for a moment. Let me think of asking of Steve with like a coffee, as I'm since I'm going anyway. Or, you know, as I'm, as I'm walking down that road that we talked about earlier and I see somebody who needs a smile like, oh, you know that person needs it. And I know it sounds very small, but this builds to the big things. So I would say, okay, so how do we make it practical? Because this is, this is great. And how do I make it practical and not rocket science? And, you know, one of the things that we bring up is a study out of Stanford that looked at hundreds of pairings of people that didn't like each other because of race. And at the end of three meetings, the measures of, you know, they were measuring cortisol and dopamine. And they're also doing qualitative questionnaire along the way that the measurements of prejudism that were this high went down to like this high at the end just above zero. So that says, at least to me, that when we do reach out to others in simple ways, it doesn't always have to be some rocket science that we do it and it works. So the outcome for that in our organizations to be as selfless individual as we may not like that person or a certain type of person, we've got to admit that, is to add them to the list, I call out the, I never have a lunch with person. And then I would go and have a lunch with that type of person or that person. I'm forced to do that in my business. Like, I, there's no choice. Like, the story's happening. And I, in the beginning of I would say, why am I here? Why am I talking to this person? This is just not, why am I talking to a killer? Why am I talking to a suspect? So these sorts of, I think, interactions that are every day build a muscle tone so that we can leap. All right. So I'm listening to you. And I hear the firefighters that are running in. I hear the small steps I hear, you know, the doctors who after a while stop thinking about it. And I'm thinking back to the question about, all right, what are the, what are the pieces parts? Here's what I, here's what I think I hear. I think I hear empathy or EQ. I think I hear courage in some instances. I think I hear kind of faith in the greater good, the greater good of man. And I hear will that, that, that willingness to just keep going and even in little steps and little increments to make the beginning of a change happen. Do I, do you think I've got a right? Discipline. Discipline is that would be another quality and a lover of good habits. Yeah. Which is really interesting because selflessness is often thought of as a very touchy feeling subject. Habit is not, right? Habit is a repetition of a practice. So it's really great when you can take the thing that's particular and more kind of nuclear in its unit and apply it to something that people perceive, whether it is or it's not as something that's softer. And that's like Mother Teresa, as I write about Desmond Tutu and MLK for that matter. I mean, they did how many years of little things in their towns and in their spaces and their neighborhoods and their streets and then one day. Yeah. So if I think about right now in the world, there's certainly some kind of societal trends and you were hinting at it earlier, that selflessness could be the antidote for, could counter. Psychologist Peter Coleman calls the charge discussions that people are having about politics, intractable conflicts, intractable because each side feels threatened. And when they feel threatened, they don't process new information. And they don't feel curious. They don't want to know what is the other side think and why do they think that? So it becomes an attack and defend, right? Laying that thought process out and kind of hearing what you were saying about cortisol levels, I wonder if you could contribute your opinion on the nature of discourse and how selflessness can can in fact be that antidote. Yeah, I know. I've seen it certainly in my profession of that intractable difference, right? Of that. I'm not giving in. If you're not saying what I'm saying, then you're just wrong and actually you're potentially immoral. Immoral, excuse me, at the same and same term. And I think that what we are seeing, which I'm calling simply the selfish pandemic, is something that has become way too easy. And one of the things, Steve, that really, I had no answer and still don't, but became closer to why I wanted to do this very small effort for this book was the number of mass shootings that I and killings I had to cover over the last 10 years. And I was the guy that often was on air for two, three, four, five, six hours trying to find out the answer answers. But the big answer, obviously, always is why. And the fact that I became very exercised in covering the epitome of selfishness, which is to take another's life, good at covering that was really a double-edged sword because I didn't want to become good at that. And it really became depressing. You know, when I sat there during Newtown and it was sort of the beginning, I'd say the first third of the number of mass shootings I had to cover because I'd done Georgia Tech, excuse me, Virginia Tech years before at CNN. And then when I was sitting there in the anchor chair and they whispered into my ear, we'd already been on hour for two or three hours just saying there were a bunch of elementary school children that were facing a shooter. They whispered in my ear about 20 or 30 minutes to noon and said, Richard, you're done at noon, but I want to let you know we're watching because we're now getting reports of deaths. And those sorts of emotions that come into all of us, whether it's our profession to get the information across or not, is what really is that super big, sometimes gray space and sometimes not. And I think to answer your question about that, an intractable difference of, hey, if you're not, we're not going to see eye to eye, there's some things that really test our ability to continue to understand that those are some of those examples from me that push me to one side or the other. But that's personal. My job is to talk about what is, what are the facts? And so the idea that we can reach across and say, either I forgive you or I understand, I don't agree with you, but I understand, which is totally fine. Me being a rhetoric major, I learned that pretty early on that, you know, the beauty of this in these very extreme sides, there's a lot of great truth that comes out of those discussions. But the news has really pushed me into this space of, I got to go deeper than differences of opinion, help us get to better truth. Because it's not only that, it is the the amount of bad language, the amount of hate that is so cheap, so cheaply used right now. So the idea of selflessness for these hardened sides that you're talking about very specifically is really going back to have that lunch, have that beer, do those things, and it feels really uncomfortable. But like anything else we do, do a little homework. You know, when I get asked, hey, Richard, what's it like to be in the middle of all this anti-Asian hate, you know, and to be a little glib for a moment, you know, there's some equation in that question to me of what is it like, because that's clearly one side and another, right? That's one side that says you're not worth it. The other side is saying, well, you are worth it to be treated like a human. But the way we can cross over and have that lunch is not to go in cold, but do a little bit of homework. Just like you are always with your podcast, you dig in. Like, you don't come in like, oh, I'm just going to talk to Richard. That's all I'm going to do. And I think in our day-to-day interactions, hey, what's it like to be, you know, Asian American during this time? Well, maybe read something from, you know, Neck Sharper, NBC Asian America or something else, you know, something in a new space to figure it out first. And then you can ask that question. So I think the way we can get through that polarity that Ian and Yang that you were alluding to earlier, is like that. And we've kind of gone through a whole bunch of different ways that we could get through that. What works? Yeah. Yeah. I do see selflessness as kind of hand-in-hand tolerance. Yeah. And I think that I think tolerance is a first step to at least having the willingness to understand or having the willingness to be curious about what the other side, why they are, where they are. You know, I think if you're curious, you have less chance of falling creative confirmation bias, which I think is part of the problem, right? The echo chamber that we find ourselves in. You know, I actually did the preparation for this talk. I think it was around the time of the Oscars. And Tyler Perry won an Oscar, I don't know, achievement Oscar. And he said out, right, I refuse hate. I refuse hate. And I personally think that, you know, that that is the antidote, right? If you are in fact selfless, you can refuse hate. You can refuse hate. And in addition to that, as opposed to the potential idea of a double negative, right, is that you would understand what you're grateful for. Because it is a strong indication of the positive side to the refuse hate, which I agree with you, obviously, here, Steve. But on the flip side of it, it is to figure out what is it that you are grateful for? What is it that makes you stand up strong and tall, right? What are those things that really give you that boost of, hey, I'm really grateful for, you know, my mom for putting up with me, you know, when I was, you know, in high school and got kicked out and almost flunked in my second high school, right? Patience is all get up. But there's a lot of gratitude, I mean, gratitude, as you know, from the book is an important cousin to selflessness. It's sort of the, the advanced, it's like, it's the one B to the one A. And that, I think, is in concert with refuse hate, ways that we can get to that core of selflessness. So gratitude, I think, I agree, intuitively is an outcome of selflessness. Why don't you dig it on that? How does that work specifically if you can opine? The approach to why we had chapter, I think chapter 17, that's gratitude was also a late addition. And as we were talking as a team, there's about 10 of us that worked together on the book. We realized that this is really an important, as I said, cousin to selflessness. Because when we do have gratitude and can exercise that muscle, that is part of us operating in a selfless notion, in a selfless way. If I show gratitude towards youth Steve, I am showing that I needed something. And then I appreciate something in a way. Not all in most times. And what we found when it came to gratitude is the very effect of the interlocutors going through the process. There's something called a gratitude letter, which we describe in the chapter. And the gratitude letter, for those of you who have done it, you know what I'm talking about, it's first of all feels really strange. But number two, it can be used in personal and professional spaces. You write a letter with your hand please and with a pen or pencil. And you write to somebody that you've not expressed why you're grateful to them. It could be a mentor, it could be your parent, it could be whom have you. And it has been found that all of those, you know, happy chemicals that I've brought up a couple times in all of the unhappy chemicals, the stress chemicals, those go down and it stays before a month. The high from writing a gratitude letter lasts a month. And I was like, last month, that says a lot about why selflessness increases health and longevity then. It makes a lot of sense. And one of the things I wanted to try based on that idea here of daily habits and muscle tone was a gratitude app. They are really simple. Have you ever seen them Steve? They were really hot for, you know, like two years ago? Yes, I kind of liking them, believe it or not, to like a mind space or something like that. It's just yeah, yeah. These are things that you kind of know how to do, but their goodness is in just just a gentle nudge in that direction, right? And, you know, whatever the lever is for you to start, that thing is, you know, that that could be it. That could be fine. Sometimes people, you know, the reason I think that you're hinting that they might as popular now is because after you've been hinted a little while, first of all, those who want it are seeking it out. And then after you've been hinted a little while, you don't need to nudge anymore. And that's the idea. Did you use it by the way? Yeah, sure. I've done, you know, just in my profession, I try all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah, I mean, because what I found was that the day changed what I was grateful for. You know, as I looked back, every day had somewhat of a theme generally, you know, because I would do, I would time snack on it. I'd, you know, maybe do it for five minutes. And it could be, you know, grateful for my brother, my sister, and my mom for taking care of my dad, or it could be, I'm grateful for water and heat and all these other things. It could be because of what somebody did at work. It could be somebody that I told a story about who did something really amazing and selfless. But it just sort of expressed to me when I looked back on the log, how there were a lot of things I was really grateful for. And I, but I'd never set it, right? And that's that act of typing it in. There's some things that you're grateful for that you just don't even realize that you're grateful for until you put a couple of brain cycles into it and go, oh, yeah, that's right. Sometimes we don't realize unless we have sad and thought things out. Okay, look, I've got one more question. So selflessness, I think we've defined it as a state of being. Interestingly enough, it's one of those things where the value is more felt by others perhaps than felt by yourself. But in that state of being, there's behaviors that it presents. If you would kind of explain as you view it, the state of being that is selflessness. I think the first of all, it is a state of being, but I would never fathom to understand the actions and what they might indicate of one state of being. But I would say some of the actions we can do that might affect that might be the way we use language. And in the book, we analyze a number of eyes, for instance, that have been used by presidents during their state of the union address. And they're all guilty of it. There's only one who really manifested his selflessness. And that's a president card or not about politics here, just about who he is as a, you know, as an activist and a philanthropist. Is he not only used I and we the least number of times? He also had the shortest speech of all those we were looking at because he didn't want to talk too long. He really did sort of exhibit that. And again, not talking about his politics or whether it was successful or not. That is one example of what we can do every day. It's to listen to the eyes that we're using. Don't use him so much. Another thing that when it's to language specifically, the scientists that was working with me have looked at the language in books going back hundreds of years. And the way that we're using language in books has moved even to if all things being equal because clearly the way words are used in their syntax over time. We know that always changes and definitions do too. But with that in consideration, which she did do, but I'm not going to say, you know, I understand whether it was brought to the n-teenth degree where we could actually to a certain surety level agree with her was that we were using more selfish words and less, self less words. And you know what it takes to write a book. You got all these editors. And if there's any sort of indicator benchmark where a language is going, even in its most edited and and cultivated way, it's in the books that we publish, all things been equal. And so that is, I think, another thing we can think about as a practice. How are we writing our emails? How are we writing the things that are showing up and that will be there forever? And so language for me is a big opportunity to watch and to affect. And if your state of being includes being self less, those might be some of the indicators that you would manifest it and or affect that very state of being. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if it is a chicken or the egg in this case. But yes, if you're language over time does not expose your humanity, then you're not going to be perceived as selfless and you're not going to begin to act as selfless. If your language does not show your affinity to people, your sameness with people, then you're choosing by virtue of that to hold yourself that is different. And if you're different, then then there's skepticism, right? There's all of those things. And so I think that's what you mean by language, right? All of those things have changed very slowly and very subtly over time to be more ego driven, I'm sorry, more id driven and less super ego driven. And to your point about the very ways that we have been using language over time, I would say that the difference versus sameness, they can exist together quite nicely. And it's not if we're different, we're different, and therefore we're not the same. And much of my work, I absolutely dig down and drill down on the difference to find out the difference, but it's to find the sameness because as you dig into the difference, you almost always find sameness. It's true when I'm doing stories about race or class, regionality, all of these things, as you know, I've been digging into the stories and you talk to, to try to identify the differences, you're like, Oh, wait, hang on a second, there's actually more the same. Yeah. Okay. Look, that was the last prepared question, but there's always a couple here that I asked kind of like giving you a little bit of op-ed space here. The first is, is there anything about the topic, which you find important, but we haven't really addressed that we really should. No, I think, I mean, you've really dug in in a way that is uniquely Steve Burke, which I really enjoy. And I think of the one other thing, which I tried dog on hard and you can tell me if you didn't think it worked here, Steve, is, you know, look at it in a very accessible way, not in an ivory tower way. And that's why I brought on to consultants who write for late night shows because I did not want to approach this topic as though it's, it's like going in to get your blood drawn. This can be a fun and entertaining process. It's a very, it's an important topic. It's an important issue and value, but I don't want it to appear that, you know, the mistakes we make are, I mean, it's, it's our inability. In fact, I laugh about a lot of my mistakes, the reason why it's part memoirs because I, if there's anybody you can tear apart at yourself and, and that's what I needed to do, it's my exploration. So I do think that, I mean, clear, there was clearly a element of humor and self-effacing humor. And I, I could see the reason for that was your attempt to say, look, people perceive this as a holier than bow type of a topic. And, and, and, and let's, let's not get caught up in that. And let's understand it in a more kind of practical day to day way to consume this topic. Okay. So, obviously, people will see you on television all the time. But if they want to connect with you, empathize with you, share stories with you, where, where would they find you? Yeah, I mean, you can, all the social platforms I am active in. And we love to hear stories about it. We share stories. I've had, we look through through the news to find what we call Eames, which are enough about me stories and examples. And there's a lot to Eames. And that's what's just so gratifying. We don't always get to it, Steve, when we're out in the field and doing these stories about, you know, not happy topics. But there are a lot of folks around that represent this idea in the book that inspired, inspired me to actually move forward with it. And there's some examples in the book of just amazing everyday selfless people that you just sit there. I'm sitting there going, where did this person come from? Where did they, why are they doing this? And that, I think, is a big part of the inspiration and a reason to push forward with the idea. Because they don't, people don't talk about it. You have to do these amazing things. Yeah. Great. And then finally, did you have a particular source or resource when you started trying to take the things that were practical to you and, and put them, you know, either figure out the science behind them or the behavioral psychology. Was there any particular resource that you liked more than others that you would recommend people to kind of seek out? Yeah. So I went to Michigan. And we, we have a center at the Ross School of Business that's, that's focused on good selfless business. And it's, it's the center there, which is most led by, she just retired. Jane Dutton was a great inspiration to me. She's lived selfless business for a long time before people would even, before that other guy grant dog on him started to get out there. Professor Dutton was a great resource. And that center in overall has a lot of, and they're not the only one out there. The University of Wisconsin also has a, a great center focusing on the idea of otherness and happiness. I know these do sound a bit much. And when I first started to be interested in the topic, there's also Stanford also has a center. I forget the exact name, it's basically the center of happiness. There's a woman from Yale who teaches a course on happiness as well. There he goes. Yeah. So when you have a center, I'm just like, wow, you've really got, I mean, I didn't know they existed, but it that way. Yeah. Richard, this is the end. All right. So, so thank you. You know, your experience, particularly, and your thought on the topic are, I'd say extremely helpful to people. And so I appreciate you being generous with your time. And I appreciate you talking to me. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. This has been Intangibles. You can find this podcast on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, and many other podcast platforms. You can also find it at its home on the web, which is www.intangiblespodcast.com. I'm Steve Bird. Thank you. Keep an eye out for the next episode.