Brave Men S2E18: Dr. B.J. Fogg - Change Your Habits, Increase Productivity and Live a Healthier Life

This is the Brave Men podcast. I'm co-host Brian Boyden. I'm starting today because Paul is in a very interesting place in the world. Paul, where are you today? Yeah, I'm actually looking out over the balcony of a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. And I found kind of a quiet little spot. And then as I was sitting here, I realized it wasn't quiet at all. It's just that the rest of the city is just so loud. Wow. That when you get to a place you think is quiet, it's still noisy. That's correct. But it's a fascinating thing and we've got some great work we're doing here. So I'm excited about it. We had a meeting today with some key leaders. What's the, I've got to ask what, what'd you have for dinner today? What was the food over there? I had fish. There's a lot of things you don't order. Okay. And I was in the market today and they had, as I was walking through this little market today, a fish, like a big fish about, you know, 18 inches long, jumped out of a little container. It was in, and it's flopping on the ground in front of me. So a lady comes running out, picks up the fish, throws it back in the container. I look in there and there's a whole bunch of live eels in there with it. Huh. I'm not sure that you actually eat it right then. It wasn't the restaurant, but still it was not something that happens in for worth. And do you, uh, do you feel safe walking around? What's that? It's like just walking around the city. How do you feel? Is it similar to Tokyo or downtown L.A.? For those of us that never been to Vietnam, what would, how would we? Oh, no, it's a lot safer. Well, it's, it would be safer than downtown L.A. Sorry, L.A. You know, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's a very, very, well, I love L.A. It's extremely busy. Something always going on 24 hours a day. I mean, it is like it, you know, a large bustling Asian metropolis because Ho Chi Minh City was died, was what do you call it? It was designated as a, as a place for economic resource center for the nation of Vietnam. They, they decided that they would have their own little Hong Kong. And it has become that. And so their economic, uh, their gross national product has just gone crazy in Vietnam. But with that has come every kind of problem you could think of that would happen in Las Vegas or Detroit or Atlantic City or anyplace else that. You know, there's everything, every kind of, uh, vice, every kind of issue. I mean, every, every place you walk on the street, somebody's trying to sell you something. It is, uh, and I appreciate the industriousness. Sure. But it's crazy. And what, what is CMN done in Vietnam? Can you share anything about, about, you know, the past and what CMN's done in Vietnam? We've been working here about eight years. And this place, in fact, one of the things we got today from a lady was, please talk to the men about how to treat a woman. So we've been building, slowly building a library of materials. We now have seven of our titles in Vietnamese. We have six of the workbooks in Vietnamese. We met today with the leaders of one of the largest denominations. With our executive team spent the whole afternoon walking through how to do it, how to build a men's ministry. So we've had great inroads. And I'm looking forward to actually have tremendous new momentum here after this visit. And then the one coming up later this year. It's awesome. Well, we're always glad to bring this podcast every week. And we've seen some great response. And so please feel free to reach out to Paul, uh, Paul at cmn.bin. And, uh, and Paul will, uh, and there's a horn, there's a horn in the background. Paul will read. Yeah, well, that's, I did not get hit. So that's a good thing. That's good. So anyway, we're, we're, we're going to almost get hit today. Come on. I was on a one way street. I was on one way street. Apparently one way streets don't mean one way. Yeah. So I looked to the right because that's the way all the traffic's coming. And, you know, there's more motorcycles here than anywhere in the world per capita. And so there's this huge flow of motorcycles in and cars and stuff. And so I step out because it looks like a gap. Well, to my left, all of a sudden, they yell at me. One of our team yells at me. Yo, and it was two motorcycles coming the wrong way. And they're just swimming upstream and people coming against them are just kind of going around them and they're going up into it. It's crazy. Wow. But, uh, hey, I will tell you what I want to share with everybody today is this amazing conversation I had on behavior. And behavior modification with the head of the Stanford University of behavior research lab. In fact, he was the founder of the Stanford University behavioral research lab. It's a Dr. BJ fog. Talk to him last week. And, and I thought, man, this is a great time in the midst of everything we're trying to do here. To hear this download, Brian, and he wrote this book called Tiny Steps. Tiny Habits. Sorry. I was thinking of Bill Murray, baby steps. Sorry. It's a random access. But, uh, Tiny Habits wrote a book called Tiny Habits, Dr. BJ fog. And, uh, absolutely, uh, fascinating with the discovered about our behavior, how we can shift and modify and change things. And, and we also talked about the digital world and how that's shifting and changing who we are as people. It's Brave Man with Paul Lewis Cole, wisdom and courage for the journey. So, Dr. BJ fog, thank you for being with us on Brave Man. And I'm fascinated by the work you do. I want to thank you for the work you do in behavioral sciences. You're there with the behavioral sciences department of Stanford and it actually helps set up the lab that you now are part of. It's a fascinating and then you wrote this book that has just blown up called Tiny Habits. And, and so I, I just, uh, I'm knocked out by it. I thank you for taking the time. And for the men that that in particular we're dealing with men in our podcast. And we're talking to men, uh, our footprint is in 134 countries. We'll just talk to the ones that speak English. Hopefully that's what we'll stay. Even if I don't understand what you're saying, we're going to put them in Spanish. You'll see this. There you go. But the beauty of beauty of what you've done and looking at your TED talk and TEDx and that is you've taken larger psychological concepts. And you've made them applicable to my life as just a guy. Can you give me sort of the elevator pitch, if you will, of what is tiny habits? So, yeah, it's a new method for creating habits that I developed in 2010 and I started teaching in 2011 and it goes like this. You take any new habits that you want. You scale it back to be super, super small, tiny. So, let's say, for example, instead of reading an entire chapter in my book, you would read one paragraph. So you make it tiny. Instead of doing 20 push-ups, you do your focus on two or even one or even one wall push-up. Then you find where it fits naturally in your existing routine and specifically, what is it come after? So, this is the design, another part of the design is like, where does this fit naturally in my life? And reading a paragraph may fit naturally as soon as you take right after you sit down for lunch and you open the book. Doing push-ups in my life fits beautifully after I key when I go home. And then, once you do those sequence of behaviors, you do one more thing to hack your brain and wire in the habit and that is what tiny habits is called celebration. You do something to fire off a positive emotion. For me, one thing is like a fist pump, like tiger woods and go awesome or way to go BJ or maybe a little dance or something like that. And so those three things together make it super tiny, find where it fits and then celebrate to wire the habit into your brain. Those are three hacks that come together in the tiny habits method and it makes it really easy to form habits that way. Wow, so now I've read and you're the expert, but I've read from yourself and others that approximately 40% of what we do every day in our lives is just by habit. It's a lot. It's certainly a lot. I don't know how to put a number on that because even the definition of a habit is not fully agree on. But certainly, certainly it's true that there are so many things we do from how we pronounce words to how we write letters. I mean, how we are handwriting to which hand we use for the mouse on and on and on. Those things are habits. Those things are automated. And and that's part of, you know, from what I've read from I forget who the writer was talking about how our brain tries to keep enough energy inside it for protection security safety. So repeatable habits become something that doesn't take much energy. So yeah, it certainly can make you more efficient and so what on one hand more productive and number two open up time where you need to be flexible and spontaneous and then actively solve problems that aren't related to habits. So now you're talking about doing let's say two push ups after you, you know, Pete. Is there what's the scale, but how does that scale? Well, the tiny habits. First of all, the only way to make make big changes is to start small and a lot of people don't believe that despite the fact that they've tried over and over to make big changes and it hasn't worked. But the fact of the matter is you can reliably change and reach the outcomes by starting small and it works is by starting with just two push ups. You can do more over time. The tiny habits method you can do more whenever you want, but you always keep the bar loads just to push ups. What you will find is you feel successful in doing those two push ups or reading the one paragraph is that you will naturally naturally start doing other behaviors that are related to either strengths training or reading or if it's snap, you know, healthy snacking or whatever. So change needs to change. So number one, the habit that you start tiny will naturally grow number two, it will propagate naturally other related behaviors. And this happens and I'll just fast forward to why this happens. I didn't understand this and till about 2014. At that point, I'd probably coached 15 or 20,000 people personally and habits to email because I started two, 200, 300 people a week starting in 2011 and I saw these, these ripple effects. When I say I saw them, they showed up in my data week after week, it's like, okay, people are doing other habits that are big things. And the mechanism is somebody does a behavior like two push ups and they feel successful. You start thinking of yourself differently. I'm the kind of person who, you know, does strength training. I'm the kind of person that works out and then in other opportunities like taking stairs or doing squats while you're waiting for somebody to check you out in the line or whatever other behaviors naturally and words that are consistent with that new identity. So you're reframing a person's identity. Ultimately, yes, yeah, that's, that's what tiny habits can do and it does it quickly. So in the free five day program that I've taught for eight, nine years, even within five days. People are reporting that substantial shifts in identity, including a broader identity of, oh, I now see I'm the kind of person who can change where before doing it, they feel like they're the kind of person who is stuck or who always fails a change. And that broader shift and how we see ourselves is really important. So then, so now it, it sounds like this is fascinating to me because, you know, what we have it, what we teach in the global fatherhood initiative is you change the heart and that changes what the hands do. Yeah. So what you're doing is you're saying you begin to change your hands, which also then begins to change your heart. Yes, and then that ripples out again. Yeah. So in tiny habits, because sometimes it's hard as you've probably found in your work to get that inner shift to happen simply by you can do it or watch this video or read the scripture or what have you. And some people can do it that way. I haven't measured what percent, but certainly people who do a behavior and see success or see results, then they're seeing evidence they can change their seeing themselves, flossing or working out or reading more and it's like, oh, I'm the kind of person who reads so it's not a matter of persuading them. They're seeing evidence that yeah, I'm the kind of person who reads now. You know, my I wrote a little book and in it talked about identity and I talked about it being the story, you tell yourself about yourself. And I love that. And so what you're doing is helping a person change the framing of their story by repeatable actions. Yeah, that's one great way to put it. I've never put it in those words, but I really like how you how you put that in the language. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, because because we're all motivated by sorry. Now you've got a formula. And I noticed you actually changed it before from your TED Talk to the book, which was B equals MAP or MAT. I think is what you had. Yeah, tell me how that operates. Yeah, so the cornerstone and in some ways, the breakthrough, at least I consider to break through in my work is coming up for the model that describes all human behavior. Any behavior you see from any person maps to this model and it goes like this behavior happens when it's going to be any type of behavior. When there's motivation to do the behavior ability to do the behavior and they prompt. So those three things motivation ability and prompt all right it up here. And when those come together at the same moment the behavior happens. One of those elements is missing the behavior doesn't happen and it turns out that is a fundamental model that helps us understand our design for any type of behavior. So so in other words, for some of us, we have this motivation, perhaps we've read a book or seen a movie or and then we have this moment we wake up and we go, I'm going to do this, but if we haven't built the ability. Then it falls apart. Is that right? Right, right. And you know, there's so many ways you can understand behavior better with this model. Let me go further with the example. Yeah, you're bringing up. There are times when our motivation surges, which means we can do harder things. So the more motivated you are, the harder the behavior you can do, you can spend more time, more money, more effort, more thinking. If your motivation's high, but what happens is human motivation fluctuates over time because of the narrative. So like if today I wake up and say, man, I am so motivated, I just, you know, read this podcast about Rosemary and the effect of Rosemary, this herb on my life and I'm so motivated. I run out and buy a Rosemary plant and plant it, you know, two hard things. And then when my enthusiasm or motivation for Rosemary, you drops down, oh, maybe I stopped watering it. I never really used it and so on. So in the moment that I, you know, read the article about Rosemary, I was so excited and motivated. So I'm going to start for us in that moment to predict what's going to happen to our future state of motivation because we, not only believe it, I'm always going to be motivated to eat, read or what have you. So with tiny habits, you get around that by making it so simple and so tiny, like, I don't know why I picked Rosemary as an herb probably because I do think it's very good for you. So maybe the tiny habit is every day you just pick a little sprig of Rosemary and put it on the kitchen counter. It's all you do. You don't have to use it or do anything with it. You just connect with the Rosemary and you wired that in as a habit. And then because it's so simple, you can be consistent in doing that and Rosemary or reading or push ups or whatever it is as long as it's tiny enough can be readily a new part of your life. Yeah, so, you know, to me, what that means in to me as a layman is, don't try to do something that's way beyond me to put myself in a place of disappointment. You know, the way I define disappointment is it's, it's, it's, I'm sure of where I expected to be. Right, expected. Yeah, disappointment from my perspective, the same thing you have a hope that was not fulfilled. Right. I know. Yeah, so I was at Victor, Frankl, meaning of man, he talked about disappointment. I know what it was. It was Christmas Christmas. And more people died around Christmas during the war. And Frankl said that it was because the disappointment of hope. Yeah, really call it tragic something. And so what happens is we actually can put ourselves in a place of disappointment, which then because we've set ourselves up to try to be an Instagram guy. Right. I mean, yeah, that's like what's that's real in the streets right now, right? You know, more and more, the timing of my book, I wish, you know, I would have written it years ago. I mean, you know, I coach thousands and thousands of people in the method. I know the word. And then like I share in the last chapter of Tiny Habits, I had this dream one night that just rearranged my priorities so dramatically. And here's the book. Our culture, the fear, the frustration, the negative self-talk, the discouragement is just, it's, it's, it's, it's overwhelming in some ways. And I really do see Tiny Habits as a way to help people address that in their own lives with their family, with their colleagues and so on. And so just so grateful to be able to share this at this point because it's a method where you change by feeling good, not by feeling bad. And then you can help shame, self-trash talk has no role in Tiny Habits or lasting change, you can change your electrometically without those negative emotions. That's, you do it more effectively through positive, through hope, through feeling successful by helping other people feel successful. Yeah, now that's, that's a picture right there that we, that we talk a lot about and that is helping others is a, is an aspect of love because love gives. And some, some chapter 20 in my framework. Some chapter 20 says, somewhere along the lines a little bit ways in it says, and we celebrate what's happened to you. And that celebrating of others sounds like this is part of that B equals MAP, there, there is, if you will, internally within that framework. Right, there is, there has to be an aspect of love of others and, and then, if you will, building, beginning, building us a love of yourself. Yeah, you know, and I look, that's a great point. One thing I haven't yet published, and maybe somebody else has published this. I mean, it's probably not a new thought is that through gratitude, we create hope. And the reason I think that's true is by, by recognizing and embracing and expressing gratitude, we are acknowledging the positive things that have happened to us. And I believe that then sets our expectation or helps us feel like other positive things can happen. So in my framework, hope is the expectation of something good happening. That, you know, if I do ask this good thing will happen. And I believe my gratitude by recognizing things in the past and the current moment that have been positive that helps us have a stronger feeling of hope of what will happen in the future. So a practice of gratitude, creating habits around gratitude, I think is really important. There's a whole bunch of, you know, I haven't done the science on this, but others have, there's so many reasons, but I see a clear connection to hope. And I think that is one of the things that's so important in our lives and so needed in our world today. Yeah, you know, Indianers and places like that to deal with, you know, terminal illnesses, tell us that gratitude is part of a healing process that if a person begins to look at, and it's not as simple like you said, there's, it's not as simple as look on the bright side. In fact, you know, the stock, the whole stockdale paradox was based on when stockdale came, Commander Stockdale, when he came back from Hanoi after being in prison for eight years. And they asked him, well, you must have been optimistic about getting out and he said, no, the optimists died. And the issue then is optimism was a feeling, but what he had was faith. In other words, what you're talking about is hope is actually a substance. And behavior, there has to be a sense of gratitude and hope that begins to help shift these behavior patterns. You know, and that is such an important, you're, you're making me regret a little bit of something I did not include in my book, tiny habits, okay. So in one, one of my intentions in the back of the book was to have a thousand recipes for tiny habits. In other words, here's a thousand new habits you can bring into your life and you've already designed them. My publisher said that's like 60 or 70 pages. We're not doing that. I'll give you 300. So in the back of tiny habits, I have tiny habits for caregivers, tiny habits for active older adults, tiny habits for working moms, tiny habits for dads who work from home. And so I have 15 categories of 20 habits in each one. And I wish I had done one tiny habits for creating hope or tiny habits for feeling and expressing gratitude because those certainly exist. And let me give you one example. Yeah, I'm looking at it. I'm looking at them right now. Yeah. Yeah. So these in the back. So if I have that list of 20 habits for for being grateful or expressing gratitude, I would have thought a little bit about the wording. One of them that a lot of people have done, people who do tiny habits, we call them habitiers. So what the habitiers have done is after I put my head on the pillow at night, I will think of one thing that I'm grateful for that day. So notice it's really small. You just think of one thing. It comes after you put your head on the pillow. So that's where it fits naturally for a lot of people. And that works powerfully and the reason it works. And I haven't done scientific work on this. I mean, the book is based on data and on research. This is just a sense of things that people talking to me. The reason that works is if your brain knows that at the end of the day, you're going to have to identify something from that day for which you're grateful during your day, you are processing the world around you and what's going on differently. You're on alert. You're looking for things to be grateful for. And that's a whole different way of looking at your day than what most people are doing unfortunately today looking for things to be upset about or to be afraid about to react to. And so just having, and that's an example of just a very tiny change in your life can lead to a much bigger impact than people expect. That's huge. And the way, you know, there was a book that came out was two years ago called Rest. Forget the doctor's name. It's a fantastic book and somewhat deep and all the stuff. But he said that your brain is using 95% of its energy while you're sleeping. In other words, it's still a 95% energy level because it's sorting out your day. So if you, if you do that, what you're talking about, the prompt, the trigger, if you prompt it with faith, if you will, with gratitude, then you're actually prompting the activity to have more sleep. And so the subtitle of my book, I mean, that's what we're talking about here. So the subtitle is the small changes and change everything. Right. That doesn't mean do 200 tiny habits and it changes everything. Find the right new habits that are so simple that then have a transformative effect on your life. And this is one of them. I want to hit two other things and thank you for your time. I really appreciate all the time you're, you said early in the book and I have not read the entire book yet, but I will finish it on my flight to Vietnam in a couple days. You said that we are not, we are not the problem. You are not the problem. And immediately I thought of that famous pogo quote, you know, alcaps, who said, I have found the enemy and the enemy is us. Right. And I thought of that because that if you will, you what you did was totally in that one little line refrained how you were walking into this whole book. And that seems like, you know, everything I'm hearing from you, that seems like that's part of if you will, your ethos. Oh, yeah, for sure. It's just, you know, both I think as a person, I'm wearing that way, but also then as a social scientist and behavior scientist, looking at human nature and the reality of who we are. And then, you know, people trying so hard to change and they're giving these programs that set them up to fail. And for 10 years now, I was really a little shy about denouncing this, but about 10 years ago at Stanford Conference, I started and I said, look, when you create a change program for somebody and they fail on it, that is not a neutral event. That is not a positive. You've set them up. Ammaged that person. And that's an ethical behavior. So stop setting people up for failure. And that's what the first two pages of the book, hopefully, I think you, hopefully it establishes that. It's not you just weren't given the right way to change yet. You yourself about willpower or motivation or somehow you're fundamentally flawed, you're not, you're totally sufficient to be able to make it to make these changes. And bam, here's tiny habits and. Let me, oh, I'm getting chills because I wasn't going to say this, but I will. I feel like what's in this book was given to me by higher power to share. And that's why I had the dream because I hadn't shared it yet. I'm going to make it through this. I knew it helped people, you know, what's in the book yet to break through its new. It's totally different than what people have seen. That's not because I'm such a smart guy. I believe that was given to me. And I was raised in a culture where much is given, much is expected. Yeah, a lot was given to me. And I wasn't sharing it sufficiently yet. I was the wake up call. And so I see myself as a channel for sharing this. And why me, I have no idea why me. But that is really, really important in my work is. The compassion to the hopefully the humility is like, it's not that I'm so great. It's I'm bringing this to you and I'm doing the best job that I can. And part of it, part of it, the understanding is to have compassion for yourself. Just like you would have compassion for a good friend of your child. Give yourself that same benefit. Yeah. You want one other thing. When we talk about all this, the proverb, I read, uh, proverbs from the Bible every day. And because I'm a man, I read the day of the month, the chapter. So today was the six. What a great idea. So chapter six. And so this is what I teach all our mental. We've got 986,000 men going through our curriculum right now every month. That's awesome. So I'll be an Indonesian two weeks and we'll graduate our one millionth graduate just an Indonesian. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So but what he's not today is the seventh three proverbs something. Well, today's proverbs six was listen to your dad. Because you won't make the mistakes he made if you'll just listen to him and you'll have wisdom. So when we talk about tiny habits, how important. And you're a, you're a man who studies all this. Uh, Dr. BJ, how important is the family unit, the father, the, the mentor, if you will. For somebody, how important is that in this process? It's really important. I'm going to make a quick comment about my own dad who's the most Christian person. I know hands down. For years, he said, you know, this is important. You need to get your workout, get your workout and so on. And he's been a huge fan of. And supporter of this. And so that's very helpful. Not everybody has that. I realize what the men listening to this can be that for their sons or other people in their lives. When it comes to change and habit change, I am a huge advocate of the household as the unit of change. Whether the family or roommates are the people that live together. Because as you change together, you make it easier and you can sustain motivation and support each other. And it's especially important in areas like how you eat, how you consume media. How you sleep and so on. And those in other areas, if you're doing one thing with how you eat, everybody else is doing another thing. It's just your environment really does influence your behavior to a massive degree and a big part of making it easy to create habits and lots of habits is to redesign your environment. So the good behaviors are easy to do and the bad behaviors are hard to do. And so the household or the social group, like a family, you know, in my own life. Going back, we talked that I'm from Fresno, California, I grew up there. My little sister was diagnosed early on with some sort of learning disability. It wasn't clear what that was. And one of the guidelines to my mom was like, you got to change how she eats, no refined sugar, no refined flour. And so we massively, as a family, changed our diet, which I did not love. But as a family, we did it. And so I didn't have personal motivation to change, but to support my sister, I did. And so we changed as a household. It would have been so much harder if it was just only my sister, my younger sister, Kim, who had to eat differently, but my mom was like, no, we're all going to eat this way. And that was, it was big. It was hard. Now, if you need to do a hard behavior, tiny habits is about making it really easy. But in this case, we had to do something hard and having social support and changing your environment is the way to do hard changes for the long term. Now, we can't always do that. And for most things, you would just use the tiny habits method. But in this case, it was a radical change. You know, we, it's one of the things we talk about a lot with brave men and with the global fatherhood initiative around the world is brotherhood. And that as an example, in the Old Testament, the first covenant, there's a picture of a man named Abraham. And it says Abraham's nephew got ripped off and taken and he had to go get him. And it says in his household. So it's interesting. You would use that phrase. It says from his household, he had 318 trained men. So these are guys that had his, if you will, his spiritual DNA, his, his mindset. And it says those 318 went out together. It's almost the gladiator thing as one defeated a larger army and brought his nephew a lot back. So Sebastian Younger is a, is a one of my favorite authors of general market author, but he wrote a book on tribe. You know, he wrote the perfect storm. And then after that went ballistic, he quit his job at the newspaper and had embedded himself in Afghanistan. And he's written two books out of that one is called war and the other one's called tribe. And in tribes, Younger talks about what it is to be a brotherhood. He talks about, you know, you're not at that moment when you're holding on to that guy and, you know, the enemy's coming after you. It's not about the flag. It's not about the national anthem. It's about that guy. And, and really that's what you're speaking of. If we're going to change one of the things we talk about is, is if we transform the heart of man with touch the soul of a nation. And the only way I think we changed the way forward is what you're talking about is that there has to be, we so often want the big hit. You know, if you're a Democrat, you believe that one of your key guys is a big hit. If you're Republican, you believe your guy is the big. And we're always looking for that in cricket. It's a six run hit. You know, we're always looking for that. And yet, and yet perhaps what it's really about is me as a person as a man, because we're focused on man, but women too. In my daily life, when going back to your original deal, Dr. Fogg, when I get up the pee and do push ups. You know, and then your Ted talk. It was you're awesome. You know, you know, those little things actually, it's, it's if we, if you will, what's it called the guy effect, the butterfly effect. Yeah, the fact that that one little thing right there that I did actually can have an impact. Yeah, not only on my legacy, but in the context of the world around me. And let me, let me build on that. That's right on. Yeah. So often people think, oh, I need big changes. Tiny is not going to work for me. Well, right. It takes courage to go tiny. I want to put that out there. It takes courage to say, I did a good job. You know, there's a method here that's really easy. And it's going to feel really different. But that's how you get to big things. I have a really clear example of this is in 2007. One of my students in the class, I was teaching about simplicity and simplicity and how simplicity changes the behavior. So this is 2007. And one of the students about four years later started this thing called Instagram. So the co founder of Instagram and the reason Instagram at the early days one was because it was so simple. And to my point is he had the courage to make it radically simple. I mean, people thought of stupid people thought Twitter was stupid. But when it launched people at the Google search box, they were so simple. They took courage to do a simple thing. And that's what I want to put out there. Yeah, it's probably especially for men. It's not big and showy. It's tiny. It's like a mustard seed. Have the courage, have the hope. And that's what you do. And that's what works. Yeah, the mustard seed, the picture of faith. And when faith is planted, you can grow into a large tree up. We often say that small doors can lead to large rooms. I like that. Yeah. So this has actually been absolutely fascinating. And so I want to encourage everybody to get tiny habits. And you say it's a sub sub line, but it's actually written all over the cover, which is that small changes can change the small changes that change everything. Yeah. And I love your cover. I don't know who did that for you. It's fantastic. I worked pretty hard to get the happy face on them. Like people didn't want to do it. And I said, no, this is what this is about. It's about you change best by feeling good. Yeah. And you help change others by not by negative ways to these positive ways. Is it this? You know, and this is so fundamental. Yeah. I'm going to be in 20 languages, the smile, the human smile, that is universal. That does not need to be translated. Yeah. Well, what you really worked hard on was those three letters PhD. You know, the book was harder than that. I'll be honest. The book was harder. And the book will have more in the back. It'll be there. You know, what we talk about is that what a man does in life becomes history. But what he puts in the motion, it becomes his legacy. Wow. So you've put something in the motion here, BJ. And I thank you for the pain that it took to do this because nothing good happens without overcoming obstacles. I have a great friend who just passed away. He said, if you're on the path of life, and there's no obstacles, you're on the wrong path. So thank you for making the effort and working through this and you and your sister Linda working with the tiny habits, things that you're doing. And I love it. I recommend this to everyone who's listening to us. I want to recommend this to people and you know, someday when I'm out on the west coast, I'd love to just sit and I like asking questions. I like knowing smart people and asking questions of them because it expands me. I'm taking a class right now at Oxford University in philosophy. Wow. And so it's like, they're like, is this really a class or are we actually think we're taking a class? You know, it's the. Anyway, thank you so much for this. Hey, one quick question and we'll have chopped the thing off. Do you know my friend Ron Kraft? Ron is the president of Napa Valley College. Oh, I don't Hillsburg. And so Sonoma County and Napa County are separated by a tiny mountain, but it's a deep separation. Is Hillsburg where the market restaurant is? The markets right downtown. I don't think so. Hillsburg is it's on the Russian river. It's on the river. Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. I've got it totally confused. You're right. I know exactly where you are. My grandfather and law had a ranch at freestyle in freestyle. Oh, what a great place. That hasn't been spoiled yet. Hillsburg's been taken over by tourism. I know. No, I know where you're at now. Sorry. I was thinking the other side. I was thinking, yeah, over in Napa. Anyway, so fascinating stuff, man. And if I get ever just pull on you some time, love to have a glass of wine and just talk about this stuff. Yeah, he's right. Absolutely amazing what you're doing. And I pray the blessing of God over you. And we have a saying, you know, that's living in the fog, which is the FOG, the favor of God. Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, you taught me a surprising number of things today. Well, it's just, just stuff we do. You know, I just, you know, we're trying to change the world one man at a time. And I tell you my, my motivation, what's in my mind every day when I wake up and want to go to bed is a picture. I was in Mongolia about 18 months ago with some of our team and a man walked up and had a little three year old girl in his arms. And I see that girl. And when I was in media, I did a lot of nonprofit stuff, farm aid and Ethiopia stuff and whatever. And I just remember the kids. So my motivation is that if I can touch a heart of a man, it changes the future of a child. And that's my whole deal. And yeah. So that's my thing. So God bless you there on, you know, rough in it there in Maui, man. I work. I'm here. I work instead of in the morning. I work hard all day. And I do have a ritual in getting in the water. That is about tapping into a higher power and the lining of my purpose. And when I get out, I resolve and I come here and I work like crazy trying to help. Yeah. The most positive impact in the world I can. Yeah. I do say why we're wired this way. I don't know. It's just it's important to me to do this. And it's what I think I believe that the ocean, the circadian rhythms of the ocean are the heartbeat of God. I like that. That's just my little thing. So every time I see it, feel it sense it, you know, the wind and the pine trees. It's like the Ruak, the Hebrew word for breath is Ruak, the Ruak of God, the breath, you know, where we came from eternal purpose of mankind, that kind of thing. And I just, I love the ocean because it's his. This is heartbeat. And every wave you take is the only time that wave will ever break in the history of the world. Well, it is, it is super fun and physical, but most of us out there every morning, see a spiritual component. Absolutely. Yeah, I know some North Shore guys and I was just actually at a church in called Inspire Church, which is in a Wahoo. A friend of mine, Mike Kai, who he was a flight attendant, started doing a Bible study and it blew up to a church. And I think he's got 12, 13,000 people that go to it now. Wow. Yeah, great guy. Anyway, great stuff. Hey, listen, great spending time with you. Thank you for all the time, doctor. God bless you, man. Thanks so much, Paul. Great talking to you. This has been the Brave Men podcast. Thanks for joining us on this episode. As always, you can reach Paul by email. Write him at Paul at cmn.man. That's Paul at cmn.man. And for more information, resources about cmn, Christian Men's Network, please go to cmn.man. So for Paul Cole, I'm Brian Boyd and we'll see you next time on the Brave Men podcast. You've just experienced Brave Men with Paul Lewis Cole. Paul is president of the Christian Men's Network. Connect with Paul at cmn.man or write to him at Paul at cmn.man.