Thank you. I appreciate your words.

Well, when I was in college, I was a philosophy major. I would have majored in physics. But I realized I wasn't smart enough. My roommate is a major in physics, and I was so far beyond my own. But I did have an aptitude for philosophy. So, I majored in philosophy and thought I would go to philosophy graduate school. But one of my roommates in my senior year said, "You should read this book by Ludwig Wittgenstein called Philosophical Investigations." The downside is, it's rumored that only seven people in the world can understand it. But on the upside, he said, "Some people claim it contains the solution to all the problems of philosophy." I thought that was pretty fascinating. I was fascinated by problems like the free will problem. How can humans have free will if we are following the laws of the universe, things like that. So, I started reading this book, but I couldn't understand it. I could see why people couldn't understand it. It was just about simple things, like a piece of string or a bricklayer laying bricks on a wall and he has an apprentice. Then when he shouts out Brackley, an apprentice brings them new stones to put on the wall. He'll just say something like that and say, "Now, do you see where Aristotle missed the boat?" And I would say, no, not really, I don't understand what you're talking about. It sounds nonsensical.

I kept reading that book. Then in the spring of my senior year, I was walking across the Amherst campus and it kind of came to me in a flash what he was trying to say. At that moment, I saw the solution to all the problems of philosophy that had intrigued me. I thought, gosh, I don't need to go on with a philosophy that was very consigns hope for all of his students. He saw philosophy as a kind of mental illness, and he saw his book as a treatment for it. It really worked. It was incredible. So, I went to my supervisor and said, "I don't think I'm going to go to philosophy graduate school, maybe I'll try psychology, that seems more practical." And then he said, "No, you've got to go to medical school." I said, "I'm not a premedical student. I haven't had any of the prerequisites. Why would I want to do that?" He says, "Oh, well, if you go to medical school, you can prescribe drugs. That's what psychiatrists do. Psychologists can't do that. And they're going to be so important in the future." I said, "How would I ever get into medical school?" He says, "Oh, you can talk your way into anything." So I got into Stanford Medical School and I was one of the worst medical students I think they ever had. I skipped most of my classes. I never should have been there. I had nothing in common with pre-medical students and I had never had a desire to be a doctor, but that was how I ended up going to medical school and ending up in psychiatry.

There were three things. All I ever wanted to do was to treat people and see people get cured from despair to joy. After my residency at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, I did three years of research and everything was on brain chemistry. We were told that and people are still being told that depression is due to some chemical imbalance in the brain and so I was doing research on brain serotonin, the so-called happy chemical that's lacking in people who were depressed. I reviewed the entire world literature, and I couldn't figure out where this theory came from because I couldn't see any evidence for that theory. Then we began to test it directly. One of those studies, just the one I won the A. E. Bennett award for, was on brain serotonin metabolism. But we did a very simple study.

We had a research unit at the VA hospital in Philadelphia, and we gave half of the veterans' massive daily doses of L-tryptophan that goes directly from the stomach into the blood and then it diffuses in the brain and it's quickly manufactured into serotonin. That is the thing that's supposedly lacking in depression. Half of the veterans didn't get any of this L-tryptophan. They got milkshakes without the L-tryptophan, half of them got milkshakes with L-tryptophan. So, no one could tell who got what. The nurses didn't know. The psychiatrist didn't know. The patients didn't know. Then we collected data on changes in depression for three or four weeks. And then wrote the code to see how much improvement there was from the massive boost in brain serotonin. There was absolutely no change in either group. There was not a shred of evidence that this massive increase in brain serotonin, that didn't help anybody whatsoever. We published that in the top psychiatry journal, and said that this isn't consistent with this theory, there's no evidence for it.

Then I got frustrated and said, "Well, maybe we didn't give them enough L-tryptophan. So, I bought with my research grant two pounds of L-tryptophan from the Ajinomoto company of New York, Inc. and went to the hospital. They taught me how to create sterile intravenous infusions with unbelievable amounts of L-tryptophan, the most biochemically possible to get into a human being. And I started injecting this into the veins of the veterans. Such massive doses, their brain serotonin was probably going up by a thousand times. All it did was put them to sleep. It didn't help anybody's mood, and I said, "This theory sucks." And I told my supervisor, "I don't know if I want to spend my life doing research on this because I had not got a grant from the federal government to create a brain serotonin laboratory." I told my supervisor, who was one of the original biological psychiatrists. I said, "Why are we studying serotonin? There's no evidence that it has anything to do with anything." And he says, "Well, we've got a good deal going here. I can show you how to test these serotonin drugs for drug companies so you can make millions. You are already just out of your residency. You already have a worldwide reputation and research. Don't shake the boat."

I thought, I don't care about shaking boats or not shaking boats. I want to help people. I want to cure people. Then the other thing was I was giving all kinds of antidepressants to people and doing conventional talk therapy. I was not seeing this mythical 85% cure rate the drug companies were claiming. I hardly ever had anyone who recovered. Some did a little, many didn't change at all. Some got worse. This whole approach, it just, it just isn't working. That's when I heard about Aaron Beck's development of this new theory, a drug free treatment for depression that sounded goofy, cognitive therapy, that your depression results from your thoughts, your cognitions.

When people are depressed, they think negatively. I am no good. I'm a loser. Or if they're anxious, something terrible is going to happen. When I get up and get to my car, my mind will go blank. I'll make a fool of myself. People will judge me. I knew my patients had these thoughts, but it seemed ridiculous that you could train people to change the way they think and change the way they feel. But I decided to try it out because I was just desperate to find something to help my patients. I was shocked that I went to his weekly seminar and started trying the techniques on my patients. Almost all of whom were really recovering. All of a sudden, they started recovering and I said, this is really interesting. I was wrong to be so cynical about it, but it just sounded so silly and simplistic that you could treat depression by changing negative thoughts.

But I couldn't deny that my patients were recovering and they wanted more. I finally decided just to send my grant back to the federal government and said I don't want this money. I can't stand the idea of spending my life studying brain serotonin because it's never going to amount to anything. It's a fraudulent, false theory. It's a waste of time. And I want to cure people.

So, I left the university. I had a full-time academic appointment, a tenure track, and went into private practice and stayed on the faculty as a voluntary faculty member. Just as now, I'm on the voluntary faculty at Stanford. But I decided I wanted to help develop this and other new approaches and psychotherapy. I'm just so glad I did it. But it was the hardest decision of my life, because they put tremendous pressure on me to stay on the faculty. They said, "Oh, you're throwing your life away. You're going to do all this great research. You can't do research when you're in private practice." And that didn't turn out to be true. I collected data on all my patients when I was in private practice, but I focused on how psychotherapy works rather than brain chemistry. I published articles in the top psychology journals and developed radical new insights about causes and cures for depression and anxiety. That eventually morphed into the new team cognitive therapy that I developed at Stanford, which is incredibly powerful. I never would have dreamed at the beginning of my career that a form of psychotherapy could be developed that is this powerful.

But now when I work with people, I generally see a complete elimination of symptoms the first time I meet with them. It has to be a 2-hour session. But I now see psychotherapy as a procedure, more like open heart surgery that you do all at one time in a single day or a half a day or just a couple of hours. The most exciting time of my career is when my patients go from despair to joy. The Buddha said we're all one. I don't know what it means but it's really true because when my patients go into a state of euphoria, it thrust me into a state of euphoria.

I treat everybody for free. The idea of charging for health care or battle health care, is just disturbing to me. It's the most rewarding thing I do and in the world is treating people and seeing them recover so fast. It's like participating in a miracle over and over again.

Thanks for the great question. The times are indeed very threatening right now from many different perspectives for folks. But one of the great ideas that's at the core of cognitive therapy and the new team therapy that I've developed since I've been at Stanford goes back 2,000 years to the time of Epictetus, a Greek stoic philosopher and really beyond before that to the Buddha who said the same thing, that human beings are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them. In other words, it's not the events of our lives that make us unhappy, but the thoughts that we have. This is such a basic idea, it's almost a little like Wittgenstein, what he was saying was so basic, people couldn't understand it. This is really saying that all of your emotions, even at this minute while you're watching the show, are not created by what Hitendra is saying, or what David is saying, but by your thoughts about it. This is tremendously liberating in theory and a practical reality, because we often can't change the circumstances of our lives, but we can change the way we think about it. That's the first huge idea.

By the way, on my second podcast each week for seven weeks or so called the Corona Cast. I actually treated people live on the Corona Cast who were upset by things related to Corona. One, was a beautiful psychologist whose husband is an emergency room and ICU doctor in New York. He's working all day long with Covid patients. He's afraid 2 of his colleagues died who he worked with, and he's horrified that he's going to get the Covid and die. So, he has moved out from his wife and three children to protect them. And she's worried that he's going to die. She asked for a session to help with her moods.

She said at the start of the session that she cries herself to sleep every night and is my husband going to die. This is unfair, that he should have to be out in the battlefield fighting. I mean, I can earn enough money for our family to survive, why can't he come home and be with me. And so, I had her write down her thoughts, just as I do in every session. What are you telling yourself? And then what you find is even when there's an actual crisis, each person's upset is not caused by the crisis, but by their own thoughts. And those thoughts are typically distorted. When you challenge those thoughts and look at things in a more positive and realistic way, your feelings can change. Actually, the thought that was upsetting her was, I should be strong, I shouldn't be upset, and I shouldn't share my feelings with my husband, because that will be too much of a burden for him and I shouldn't feel the way I do. So, she was kind of beating up on herself with all of these unrealistic statements and high expectations for herself. Then once she identified all the distortions in their thought, like I shouldn't be upset, I shouldn't share my feelings with my husband. She saw that it's like all or nothing thinking, a should statements, it is self-blame. It's emotional reasoning and it's mind reading. And then when we began to examine the evidence for that, she realized, well, maybe it's OK to share some of my thoughts and maybe sharing my thoughts with him will bring us closer together.

When we've done that in the past, it's led to a more loving, a loving relationship. It may have taken an hour and a half to complete the whole treatment, which you can actually hear live happening if you want to look up that recent podcast of mine. She just smashed the thought and once she smashed the first thought and saw how unrealistic it was and she said to herself, it's OK to share my feelings with my husband and it's OK to be upset. I don't have to be in control all the time. She felt such joy, then she was able to blow all of her other thoughts away and she felt great. Then the oddest thing happened a couple of days after we completed the podcast, her worst fear came to pass. Her husband developed a fever and was diagnosed with Covid. Then I like to ask people. What do you think happened when her worst fear came to pass or what happened? Obviously, she's going to be all upset. But remember, reality never causes our feelings. It's only our thoughts. What happened is she said, "Well, gosh, he's got a mild case, he's not going to die." And she went on to a state of euphoria and she just emailed me recently that she and her husband are now reunited. They rented a little house out in the country just to have some beautiful time to be together. And she just got on top of the world.

But that's her story. Every person listening right now has their own negative thoughts. One of the beautiful things about this approach is I don't have general advice to give to people. I always say to people, when you're upset, write down your thoughts on a piece of paper, see what you're telling yourself. You'll often see that those thoughts are just stored in with the 10 distortions from my book, Feeling Good. When you challenge those thoughts, you can change the way you feel, and it can happen rapidly. This is so different from the way people are trained, the way I was trained as a psychiatrist. Even the Stanford psychiatrist today are trained to think that depression builds up over years and takes years of treatment to make it go away. But that's not my experience with it. Usually, people recover from depression in maybe about 60 seconds or 90 seconds. It takes a little while to build up to that moment, but the very moment they start believing these distorted thoughts, in that instant, your feelings will change.

This is fantastic. On the one hand, because it's true, it's a powerful tool. But at the same time, when I say these things, it creates a certain antagonism among some mental health professionals and the general public who are used to thinking this way and are kind of committed to therapy or some long term thing that happens over a course of years where change is slow and gradual. I found that change can be rapid. For me, that's a blessing. If my daughter were depressed and she went to a therapist who calls her to recover in one single 2-hour therapy session, I would kiss that person's feet and say thank you. That's how we treat pneumonia with intravenous penicillin. The idea isn't to have pneumonia for years, that there's something wonderful or honorable about that. The idea is to have a curative intervention. That's how I think psychiatry and psychology could be. The field is beginning to evolve and change, but it is going slowly and against quite a bit of resistance. There are so many things in this new therapy model that are radically different from the way most mental health professionals treat people.

Yeah, that's true on so many levels. The Buddha said we drift in and out of enlightenment. When I first heard that, I didn't know what it meant. You hear these goofy Buddha statements that seem nonsensical and then suddenly it comes to you what they actually mean. What it means is, that probably no one is allowed to be happy all the time. I often say we're entitled to five happy days per week and two miserable days. And if you don't have your five happy days, you need a little mental tune-up. If you don't have your two miserable days, you're getting a little too happy then maybe we need to put you on lithium, which is not meant to be disrespectful, but a joke. There's wisdom in it, because I'm a pretty happy person. I'm so thrilled with life and so grateful for my life and my colleagues, having a chance to hang out with you right now is like a miracle, really to me. It's amazing. You're so talented and so skillful and you've done such a beautiful job with your colleagues in creating this show today. Things happen to me and all of us that really demoralize us. We can go in an instant from joy to feelings of shame or guilt, anger, rage, depression, panic, or hopelessness and discouragement. So, what I do is, give a person tools that work for them.

I've developed over a hundred tools for crushing depression, crushing anxiety. But once you find the tool that works for you, it'll work for the rest of your life. So that once I've worked with someone and they've recovered and they're enlightened and euphoric, I just do relapse prevention training, which takes maybe 25 minutes and let them know that these negative thoughts, these insecurities, these inadequacies will return over and over again throughout your life. That's mandatory. It's a part of the human condition. But I want you to know what tools to use when that happens, because it's OK to be upset for an hour or it's OK to be upset for a day or even a few days. But if you've got the tools to pop out of that and then drift back into enlightenment, that's the whole secret.

Another dimension on what you said of states versus traits, the American Psychiatric Association views negative moods as mental disorders. They have this DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and they try to change all negative emotions into different mental disorders. Now, if I could see a show of hands from the people listening and say how many of you sometimes get anxious in social situations or have public speaking anxiety and fear, judgment of others or feel insecure in groups of people, nearly all the hands would go up. That's just the way human beings feel, I used to have what the psychiatrist would say, five different forms of social anxiety myself. I have public speaking anxiety, social anxiety, and I had a phobia of cameras. I can smile now for my camera; I could not do that for 50 years. But these are just feelings that people have and they're easily treatable and they're easily changeable. But they would say, "Oh, you aren't shy. You have social anxiety disorder," like you have a brain disorder. They do that with everything. You're not sad and down. You have major depressive disorder. "Oh, you worry a lot. Well, you have a generalized anxiety disorder." They're trying to disrupt everything. There's a dichotomous yes or no thing. But these are just feelings that human beings have.

But when you view it as a disorder or a state, rather than just a trait or a feeling that you have, then you think, "Oh, I'm defective," you're ashamed. Then they say it's because of a chemical imbalance in your brain or a bad childhood or some personality defect. One of the things that makes the new team therapy so powerful is we've come to see that these symptoms, as well as people's resistance to change, do not result from a chemical imbalance in your brain or that you have a brain disorder or some kind of mental defect. Your symptoms, your negative feelings result from what's most beautiful and awesome about you. They're not expressions of brokenness. They are expressions of your deepest core values as a human being. The moment you see that your negative feelings are not bad, but good, really beautiful things. I really try to talk my patients into preserving them, not getting rid of them. I do that in a very gentle and positive and respectful way. The moment the patient sees this paradoxically, the resistance to change disappears and generally, recovery is just 10 or 15 minutes away.

It takes a little while to do that procedure of melting away the resistance. It might take 45 minutes of a session. But it's a pretty remarkable thing, and it's a radically different way of viewing negative feelings from this illness model.

Now, there are 3 or 4 true mental disorders. Schizophrenia is one, bipolar is one, the full-blown manic-depressive illness. These are due to some abnormalities of brain tissue, a real mental disorder. But 90-95% of what causes happiness for the people watching the show right now is not mental disorders, but just negative feelings that are a part of life. But there are things you can do to pinpoint those negative thoughts, the distorted thoughts that are causing those feelings and to transform them. That's not to say we should never be unhappy. Some negative feelings are healthy. If a loved one dies or a pet that you love dies, it's natural to cry, to have grief, to be sad, because your sadness is an expression of your love for life. But when you get depression or excessive anxiety or telling yourself things that aren't true, like I am a loser, I'm no good and I'll be hopeless, things will never change and that's what can be changed now in many cases very rapidly.

Well, yes. I first read about these studies in The New York Times. I didn't know that they were going on. A psychologist at the University of Alabama named Forrest Scogin, began doing research on my book, Feeling Good because he was trying to say what is the cheapest and most effective way to treat people with depression? He said, "What would happen if we took people who were coming to the medical center for treatment for moderate to severe depression and told them they had to be on a waiting list for four weeks before they could see their doctor. But in the meantime, read this book, Feeling Good." And half the patients they just put on the waiting list, half of them for four weeks and the other half was a random outcome study, half of them, they gave the book Feeling Good. Then they studied their moods every week for the four weeks and they found that the people on the waiting list haven't changed. But 2/3 of the patients who they gave the book Feeling Good to improve so much were recovered to the extent that they no longer wanted or needed therapy.

That was fantastic, because I didn't think of the book as a self-help book. I was excited about how it might help people in therapy recover faster. But I didn't think it would itself have an anti-depression effect. Then they took the ones who hadn't improved, who were on the waiting list, and they said, "Oh, you have to wait four more weeks. But in the meanwhile, read this book." Then in the next four weeks, 2/3 of them also improved or recovered to the extent that they no longer needed treatment. They've also done follow-up studies on those patients for up to three years and they have the feeling that they have gotten improved even more and did not have any relapses needing treatment. They often got upset, just as I do, and just as you do. But they said when they got upset, they just pulled the book off the shelf and read those pages again.

Then there have been multiple independent studies with different teenagers, older people, different ethnicities and seems to have that effect that has been replicated over and over again.

My new book, Feeling Right, will address, how about the 1/3 of people who didn't improve when they read Feeling Good? And how about the 50% of patients in all these psychotherapy or studies of depression or antidepressant studies who don't improve in those studies. What's the difference with the ones who don't improve or why do they stop? I think my research led me to the discovery of why some people get stuck in depression. And that's what led to the new team therapy that has even new and more amazing tools. All the original cognitive therapy stuff I had in Feeling Good, all that stuff is still pure gold. But we now have new innovative techniques to reduce this therapeutic resistance that keeps some of us who get stuck or sucked in by depression. These new techniques are the secret of the ultra-rapid recovery I'm now seeing in the vast majority of people I treat.

Well, there's certainly a tendency that varies among people toward negative thinking and getting sucked in by negative thinking. We don't know the cause of that. There could be genetic factors or environmental factors, but certainly everything is on a bell-shaped curve. But what is really cool is that with the new techniques, we can help almost anybody who is feeling depressed or anxious.

At my hospital in Philadelphia at Presbyterian Medical Center, we developed a huge cognitive therapy program for the people in our area, we treated mainly homeless people, and quarter of our patients couldn't read or write. They were from all ethnicities and we treated them with cognitive therapy groups based on my book, 10 Days to Self-esteem. The groups were just led by people in the neighborhood who were taught and trained by a clinical psychologist. That program was very inexpensive. So, our Department of Psychiatry grew from two employees when I started the department to over 200 full time employees within a year. We ran thousands of patients through that program and most of them were symptom free within three days. It was just an entirely new model, a new way of treating people. But we had people from all walks of life and all orientations.

The compassion of the people in the program in helping these individuals. We didn't treat them like one group a week. We treated people all day long, every day. You come into the program and you're going to be in cognitive therapy groups from early morning to late at night every day until you are recovered and ready to get discharged. I think it can be helpful for virtually anyone. But another thing I learned in my research and something you alluded to was that the act of practice is absolutely mandatory. You can't just read my book Feeling Good and expect to recover. You have to do the written exercises, write down your thoughts, identify the distortions like all or nothing thinking, overgeneralization, emotional reasoning, should statements and self-blame and things like that and then practice, how am I going to challenge that thought. There is something about that written exercise that seems important.

At my clinic in Philadelphia, I did research on hundreds of patients who came to us and what I discovered was that virtually every patient who did a little bit of psychotherapy homework consistently throughout the therapy improved or recovered completely in the first 12 weeks of treatment. Virtually every patient who refused to do the homework assignments failed to improve. Many of them deteriorated and just dropped out of therapy. I published that in the top psychology journals. That variable, which I call willingness, is still, I think, the only variable in world literature that has been shown to have a massive causal effect on changes in depression. That's what actually led to the team therapy, because I always thought, "Well, since some people are unwilling to do this, what techniques could we do to melt away their resistance?" And that's been the feature of the new team therapy that'll be in the new book, Feeling Great, all those new techniques, as well as the original cognitive therapy techniques.

Well, you've done a beautiful job, not only in translating a lot of these concepts into the business world and for people in general to make them understandable. But you've also done your own personal work, your meditation, your own spiritual effort. This has had a powerful transforming effect on you, which is beautiful to see.

The kinds of things I'm doing from a secular perspective, from a research perspective, from practical tools, are really accomplishing the same kinds of goals to get people to the state of self-acceptance. I have often said self-acceptance is the greatest change a human being can make to get to a stage of what you might call spiritual enlightenment. Because to me, I'm no longer treating people's defects to try to make them less depressed or less broken. That was the model when I was a psychiatric resident. But my goal now is to bring people not only to a complete abolishment of their feelings of depression and anxiety, but also to thrust them into a state of joy, of enlightenment, of inner peace, something that's a little difficult to explain in words.

If you see it happening, like in a live therapy session, you can see the moment when the person gets it. If you have experienced it yourself, then you grasp it. But at first, it's a little hard to grasp and a lot of people just believe it's not even possible. They just think it's a lot of B.S. But it's something very real and something very beautiful.

Yeah, that's why I wrote Feeling Great, although I've written spinoffs from Feeling Good. This is the first true sequel because it will have massive new technology for change while preserving all the great stuff that was in Feeling Good. All that stuff is still great, but there's a whole second technology that is as powerful but radically different from that. When you put those two together, it's like one plus one equals three types of thing.

Essentially, the new book is not only working on cognition, but also on motivation and resistance and also transforming the field from a field that's based on viewing people as broken to quite the opposite, that our suffering is revealing things about us not that are broken and shameful, but that are beautiful and awesome. The moment a person sees the beauty of depression, the beating up on yourself, the self-criticism, I'm not good enough. And instead of seeing those things as shameful defects that you shouldn't do, to see those as expressing truly remarkable, beautiful, mind blowing things about you, suddenly your shame disappears and you become proud of your symptoms rather than ashamed of that.

The moment you do, you don't need the symptoms anymore and it is really easy then to cause people to recover. It is so easy now for me to treat people. It almost feels shameful, like it's supposed to be way harder. But I think we have something that's truly remarkable and truly a breakthrough. It'll take a while to catch on, just like cognitive therapy when I wrote it. There were only 12 or 15 cognitive therapists in the world. Most people consider us Quacks. Now, it's kind of the same thing. After Feeling Good came out, cognitive therapy has now become the most popular form of psychotherapy in the world and the most researched form of psychotherapy in human history.

Now I have to do the same thing with the new book Feeling Great, and the new ideas, which I believe represent a potential major advance beyond cognitive therapy, which was huge. It deserves to be honored. The techniques are still effective, but there's something even more powerful now.

Well, just to go a full circle, comes back to what we started out on the show. The decision I made not to stay in a field that I knew was not valid and wasn't really going to bear fruit and to do what I loved and what I believed in. That decision has really paid off for me because I absolutely love what I'm doing. I have this fantastic new database on how psychotherapy works, I have got data over 9,000 psychotherapy sessions. I'm building a mathematical model that's creating amazing new insights that are radically different from the way the field thinks psychotherapy works.

Well, this morning I slept down. I slept until 6. Usually, I'm so excited I'll wake up at 4 and come down and start analyzing that data. It's like being in a candy store, discoveries come out. There are several. I'm just lucky to be doing what I love doing. Then when I work with people for free, my training group at Stanford is free for therapists in the Bay Area that they can come and get unlimited training and unlimited therapy for the rest of their life for free every week, 2 hours on Tuesday nights, and then before the Covid, we also did have a 6-hour hike on Sundays. People are grateful and they want to give back. So that has created a whole community of people, a community of creativity.

Now I'm working with Jeremy Karmel on a Feeling Great app and we're put in a tremendous time on that. We'll be recording today the idea of developing an electronic flavor that I think can be as good or better than the real David, because when I got the data on my book Feeling Good and saw that 65% people read it were cured in four weeks, I said, "Oh, that's better than I'm doing." My book is better than mine because I can get irritable. But the persona I created in that book is always loving and wonderful. But I'm hopeful that the app we're working on can have some of those same effects, too, so that people all over the world, people listening to the show now can participate. If anyone wants to be a beta tester, just go to my website feelinggood.com/app and you can sign up there and you can help us develop this app by telling us what turned you off? Turn you on. What do you like? What do you not like?

You were the one who told me to do it. Remember, you brought me into the Appstore 5 or 8 years ago. I still don't even have a cell phone, but it finally dawned on me that what you were saying was right. I have to thank you for that.

No, but the guy I'm working on the app will say, I've got to get one. So, I think I'll get an iPhone 11 or something like that. They say use the app you're creating and see how it looks. So, I will probably get one. But it just never appealed to me to have a cell phone.

Well, I just love her tremendously. I am so grateful to have Melanie as my wife. She's really the brains in our family. When I met her, she was just a high school dropout and kind of a hippie. We were hippies. I offered her a ride on my motorcycle and she accepted. And we fell on a great journey ever since. Then she went ahead and went to college after the kids were born. She got her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Penn. She's just incredibly brilliant. I'll struggle for something for six months that I don't understand, trying to figure it out, then I'll mention it to her and in 15 seconds, she'll blurt out the answer. She always knows how I'm thinking. She knows how I'm feeling. She's kind of my guide and she supports me and makes it possible to do what I'm doing.

It's kind of hard for her now with the Covid thing. It's not hard for me, because I'm like with you now, having fun and I do Zoom and stuff with my colleagues all day long. But, she can't play tennis now with her friends and she's feeling a little sad and down. We met last Saturday with our son Eric and his new girlfriend Sammy. She's just awesome. He's on top of the world. We went on a distant hike and then ate in a dining room, but it's like 8 feet from each other. So, we had a little family contact there, which means so much to her. I'm just really lucky to have Melanie.

Sure. I would love that. It's fun to shoot the breeze with you. I'm just so proud of what you've accomplished personally and professionally. I'm just honored to be on your show and to interact with you today. Thank you so much.