Can't

wait to talk to you about the book. I was just mentioning a few moments ago, you did a fantastic job. It's quite an accomplishment and you should be very proud. I'm excited for the world to enjoy what you've created. That means a lot to me. Yeah, plenty of ideas to explore in that. But I wanna understand your personal story a little bit better. There are certain facets of your backstory that are very similar to mine and many that are very different. But essentially, I want to start at the beginning, but the sort of thumbnail or cliff notes of the whole thing is you were an NCAA baseball player, went into finance, became this private equity guy. And around the time of the pandemic, had a little bit of a sort of reawakening of self and did this pivot, this life pivot, this career shift away from what you were doing into a more public-facing sort of service oriented occupation of your own creation in which you started sharing wisdom and helpful advice that quickly escalated and put you in a position to be this sort of influential authority on a variety of topics around well-being that led to this book and you sitting across from me today.

Yeah, I mean, it's been a crazy journey, the last few years in particular, but I feel like all of it started a long, long time ago. And for me in particular, I feel like the common thread through my entire life has been this seed of this idea around the rejection of common convention and rejecting these kind of cultural defaults that we so often just find ourselves accepting and embracing in our own lives. And I reflected a lot on that in the context of the writing process here and more just in the context of my own sort of inner work that I think that part of my DNA, if you will, really came from my parents and this experience that I think they had in choosing their relationship over the cultural conventions that would have said not to do that and how that has kind of led to this entire lineage and this trickle down effect through my own life, through my sister's life and through the family and the creation of all of that that's followed. Well,

explain that a little bit more because the story around like your mother and your father's relationship is pretty extraordinary. You know, her coming from India and how they met and the kind of high stakes that were involved in them being together. Yeah.

So my mom, as you said, my mom was born in Bangalore, India, born and raised. She in, let's see, 1978 applied in secret to come to college in the United States. She was the youngest daughter and really everything about her life had sort of been planned out for her. She was gonna have an arranged marriage in India to a man and live the life that followed. And for whatever reason, she rebelled against that, decided to apply to school, got a scholarship to come to Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts. And it seems like my father kind of lived this like very similar parallel track in his own life. His whole life had been planned out for him. He was from a Jewish family in the Bronx, New York, other side of the world. And his whole life had been planned out for him by a rather domineering father. He was going to go into academia, get a nice stable job, marry a nice Jewish girl and live his whole life. And for whatever reason, my parents had their paths cross in a rather unlikely twist of fate. They crossed paths for only two weeks at Princeton University. My dad was finishing his dissertation there for his PhD. And my mother was working in the library to pay her way through a master's program she was just starting. And my mom was the bold one, went up to him and asked him if he wanted to go out and get ice cream. And about an hour later, they were on their date. And it's so funny hearing my mom tell this story because my father said to her, my family, my father will never accept us. And my mom was so blinded by his use of the word us that she completely missed the message, the underlying message of what he had said. And unfortunately, my dad was right. And his father was not accepting of this courtship and told my father that he had to choose between my mom or his family. And he made what I imagine was the most challenging decision of his life, which was to leave his family and choose love, choose my mom. And to this day, I have never met either of my father's parents. His father passed away many years ago. His mother is still alive. I've never met her. My dad has four siblings. I've only met one of them. I have first cousins out there that I've never met. Just this one decision. It's pretty hardcore. I mean, it's

one thing to issue an ultimatum like that, but then to follow through on it for decade after decade, because those things tend to sort of come around with time, right? And the fact that it never did, and you've never met your grandparents on your father's side? Yeah, time, it's a funny thing,

right? Like I have the perspective that time doesn't heal anything when it comes to relationships. I think in a lot of other areas of life, time has an ability to heal, physical trauma, time has ability to heal. But with relationships, I have found that hard conversations avoided are like a debt. And when you take on that debt, you're going to have to repay it with interest at some point in the future. And the problem is when that interest builds so much over so many years, it just becomes overwhelming. With no installment payments,

right? Yeah, that is interesting. That's an interesting idea. Yeah, you think that, well, I think it also depends what stage of life you're in when the disagreement occurs. Like if it happens earlier in life, it sort of becomes this entrenched neural pathway. But there is this idea that with time, it'll just kind of fade into the background. And you're right, like that's actually not the case. There's that saying that sometimes there's just too much water under the bridge.

And I think with something as big as this, you know, the other thing I'm just aware of is there's two sides to every single story. And obviously, I accept and embrace my father's side of the story and the decision that he had to make and how challenging that was. But I'm sure the story that the rest of his family was told was a different one. I can't imagine that his father told the story the exact same way that my father did. And at the end of the day for me, people often ask me like, oh, have you ever wanted to go and meet your grandmother, meet your father's mother? To me, that would have to come from my dad. It would have to be that he wanted to go do that or that my mom wanted to go do that because my mom has experienced a lot of grief associated with being the reason that my father had that challenging decision to make and that breakup from the family. I have always taken the position that my mom is like the best person in the world to me. And anyone that wasn't okay with her is not okay in my book. I have never been the one to kind of push the issue. But if my father or if my mother came and said that they wanted to go see my grandmother, I'm sure I would go do that.

And her gambit, of course, was that she was so far away from home. And the fear with her family was that she would find an American to marry and never returned to India, which is exactly what happened.

So exactly what happened. So there was risk on both sides of this equation. Yeah. And when my mom introduced my dad to her parents, they were not okay with it. Right. The idea of her going and marrying an American man was not according to their plan. They got over it though. They got over it when they saw that my father had left his family for their daughter. And I mean, what greater sign of love and of that feeling of connection can you exhibit than that? And ultimately my grandfather and my grandmother on my mom's side ended up taking my dad in as a son, basically of the family. And so that feeling of connection to that Indian side, to the Indian culture grew much, much stronger as a result of this. And for my father, I mean, the feelings of connection that he had with my mom's parents were enormous. Well,

your relationship with your parents is kind of an extraordinary thing. And probably, you know, you're somewhat of an outlier in that regard, like the reverence and regard and respect that you have for both of them and the manner in which you demonstrate that through many of your bigger life decisions is like aspirational. And I think that to your point around social convention, like I kind of wanna return to this idea because this is sort of a, you know, kind of a core theme in the book and all the work that you do. Yes, like their relationship represents a transgression of social conventions. But then again, within that, there were a lot of social conventions that were adhered to and reinforced in your life, right? On some level, your mom is a very traditional, like Indian mother that comes with all of the kind of expectations around academic excellence and what kind of profession you're going to pursue. And your dad is a professor at Harvard, right? Like, so there's a, there's a traditional, you know, kind of sensibility around all of this. So I'm curious around like your relationship with social convention and what, what led to you trying to, know, kind of find ways or why did you feel compelled to break these? Because it seems to me that you were raised very much within the constraints of these social conventions, which were incentivized and reinforced.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. And, you know, I think in both of those cultures, right, like my mother on the Indian side, and then my dad coming from an academic background, academic performance and achievement was very much the standard in our household. And I don't know if that was as much about a cultural convention as it was about a standard of excellence that my parents held us to. My parents were big believers that there were sort of two key pillars to a strong relationship. One is high expectations and the other one is high support. And both my parents believed that, that they had high expectations for us all the time. They thought that we should achieve at an extremely high level, but they were also willing to raise us up on their shoulders with the support to go and meet those expectations. And if you just think about that, high expectations in the absence of high support is a big issue. That's a recipe for resentment when someone expects a whole lot from you, but they're not willing to actually support you to go reach that. My parents always managed that and provided both. I always felt like, yes, they had high standards, but also, yes, they were willing to help lift me to those standards. The unfortunate thing and how it manifests in my own life was from a young age, I have an older sister who's three and a half years older than me. And she was very, very academically oriented and high achieving. And what would happen over and over again was my sister would go through a school and have the best grades, do everything that my parents could possibly want from her. I would get to class the first day and the teacher would say, oh, you're Sonali's brother and have this like bright look in their eyes, you know, in for another star student. And within a week or two, they would inevitably be disappointed because I was kind of a, you know, I was a jerk off. Like I was a kid trying to find himself. I was more into sports and running around and not as academically oriented. And unfortunately, what ended up happening was I started telling myself this story that I was not the smart one and my sister was the smart one and I was the athletic one or I was something else. And when you tell yourself that story, what I have found in my own life is that like these original stories self-perpetuate. It's very easy to find evidence to confirm that story. It's very hard to do anything that conflicts with that story that you tell yourself. So at every stage of those early years of my life, I was just reinforcing this belief that I wasn't the smart one, that I was not as capable as my sister, that I was not capable of achieving on the level that would make my parents proud. And that internally bred a lot of insecurity in who I was and in what I was doing. And my parents at every turn tried to break that. They constantly told me how much I was capable of, that I was smarter than my sister, that I was capable of so much more than what I was doing. But when you tell yourself that story, it's very hard to hear the opposite. You need to learn it for yourself. You need to do the inner work in order to kind of break those early patterns.