Psychiatrist and founder Jacqueline Olds on her startup and her mission to fight loneliness in America. Words of wisdom and lots of laughs in this interview that could actually make your life better.
Image credit: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces, Jacqueline Olds, M.D., Psychiatrist and Founder.
Jacqueline and Her Husband, Founded GoodLux Technologies to Help Treat Depression without Drugs
They Created a Device and an App to Help People with Bright Light Therapy
“We thought this would be a wearable that would remind people that there was a way to treat their depression without using medication. “
Sal Used the GoodLux Sunsprite to Help His Newborn Grandson Sleep Through the Night
“The people who lived in places with an abundance of sun sometimes got seasonal depression, because they couldn't stand going outside in the summer, and they were inside like moles.”
Overcoming Loneliness, Practical Strategies for Finding Connection
“...a huge percentage of our patients were lonely but they were all embarrassed to admit it, and were thinking that they were the only ones who felt lonely and left out...”
Marriage in Motion: “...what lasting marriages look like.”
The Lonely American: Why Americans in Particular Experience so Much Social Isolation
“There's that undercurrent of American culture that essentially says you're going to be okay if you're on your own...”
“Fewer people are getting married and fewer people are living with other people and everybody acts like that's a reasonable thing to do...when it's bad for your health mentally and physiologically.”
“Part of the reason psychotherapy can be helpful, is that you bring out these secrets that you felt terrible about and they sound positively measly when you talk them over with an actual human being...”
Americans Are Confiding in Fewer and Fewer People
Opportunities for Human Interaction Are Disappearing Due to Technology and Other Factors
The Down Side of Interacting with People Only When You Feel Like It
“To live in an environment where you have so many ties means you have very few choices...”
The Thickly Connected Social Environment of Sal’s Home Town in Brazil
Social Life of Grad Students in Boston in the Mid-1960s
The Town of Roseto and Its Notable Cardiac Health and Longevity Outcomes
The Secret of Longevity Was the Close Social Bonds of the Community
The Down Side of Close-Knit Communities
The Paradox of Choice: How Too Many Options Keep Us from Deciding
“...COVID has given us all a chance to reset and try to achieve balance in a new way because we were forced to calm down and give up some of our favorite enjoyments like going to restaurants or going to plays or going to concerts.”
Psychiatrist Jacqueline Olds’ Suggestion for Connecting Younger People Working Remotely
“Lots of slightly anxious, lonely, depressed people decide, "I don't want anyone to know how needy I feel, so I'm just going to take my light down.’”
The Value of Witnesses in Marriage
“...making sure those three o'clock thoughts are just that, nonsense. At eight o'clock in the morning, with coffee in front of you, just, "It's nothing. It was just a nightmare."”
Love, Shopping & Cocaine
“When a college student comes in and they're looking all miserable and cold and unhappy with their studies, and then they find somebody that they're starting to fall in love with and suddenly they're full of smiles. You can just see the dopamine practically showing on their face.”
Parting Thoughts from Jacqueline Olds, M.D., the Wise Psychiatrist
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of, “Love, Shopping & Cocaine”
Guest: Jacqueline Olds, M.D. and Founder
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invests Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship, and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson.
Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty that's top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry. out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces, Jacqueline Olds, M.D., Psychiatrist and Founder
Welcome to Angel invest Boston conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we have the great privilege of having with us Jacqueline Olds, MD, psychiatrist, and founder. Welcome, Jacqueline.
Jacqueline Olds: Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted.
Sal Daher: It's great. It's not every day that you're going to find a psychiatrist who has started a startup. My friend Jacqueline is a neighbor who had started a company in which I invested, was it back in 2015, 2014?
Jacqueline Olds: 14.
Sal Daher: 2014. It wasn’t a success in terms of investment and that sort of thing. It's a company that built a device, was on the iTunes store, had an app in the iTunes store that actually worked and it actually did a lot of good. I think it's a huge success from that metric. It also allowed me to meet Jacquie, who was the founder that connected with then CEO of the company, Ed Likovich, and became friends with him as well. This has been a wonderful introduction to Jacqueline Olds.
Now, Jacqueline Olds isn't just a founder, she's a practicing psychiatrist, a psychiatrist with a very strong focus on human relationships, marriage, children, and so forth. She and her husband have written a book together, called a Lonely American. They've also written a book together about long-lasting marriages. We'll touch on that later on but first, I'd like to start talking to Jacquie, as a founder. Jacquie, tell us about GoodLux Technology and what problem it was addressing.
Jacqueline and Her Husband, Founded GoodLux Technologies to Help Treat Depression without Drugs
Jacqueline Olds: Both Richard, my husband, who is also a practicing psychiatrist, and myself, had many patients who became depressed. Some of them had seasonal depression, which happened more in the dark season of the winter. Some of them had depression all year round, but many of them wanted to avoid taking medications. One of the main ways we can treat depression, even without medications is bright light first thing in the morning, they've done about 30 studies on this phenomenon. If you get light that's much brighter than any lamp in your house, it has to be a special lamp or it has to be being outdoors in the sunshine.
They Created a Device and an App to Help People with Bright Light Therapy
If you get that for about half an hour first thing in the day, really, within an hour and a half of waking up, that sets your circadian rhythm and actually produces serotonin, and does all sorts of things that really improve your mood. But many people found- they'd known about bright light before we came up with the idea of this little device called Sunsprite. Many people didn't really know how to operate their bright lights when they bought them. They couldn't sit still for half an hour at the breakfast table.
Sal Daher: It's not trivial. I can tell you from someone who's used the device, who has tried to use a bright light. My mother had one, she had one of the big honky ones with a stand, a big thing. It has to be 18 inches from your face and it's not easy to get enough light.
Jacqueline Olds: It's really not easy. My husband and I, who had been treating people for years who did not want to take medicines, but wanted to do something substantial for the depression. If they used a device that helped them to know when they got the gold standard amount of bright light, they could get it either from an artificial light or from the sun if they did a walk in the morning.
Sal Daher: That's right, my favorite.
Jacqueline Olds: That was a huge deal, because we know exercise is good for depression. We know bright light first thing in the day is good for depression and this device we wanted to invent and did invent, told you when you got the right amount so that you actually could dose bright light instead of wondering if you were doing it right. If you happen to walk with a friend and you got your bright light dose, you then had three forces that were fighting your depression. You had a socialization moment, you had exercise, and you had bright light, and that was pretty effective for many people when we could get them to do it. We thought this would be a wearable that would remind people that there was a way to treat their depression without using medication.
“We thought this would be a wearable that would remind people that there was a way to treat their depression without using medication. “
Sal Daher: This is tremendous. It is a remarkable thing, so you brought in a friend of your son-in-law as a CEO who had done a PhD in physics at Harvard, and so they set about getting this device built the Sunsprite, getting it produced in quantity not massive quantities, but thousands. Developing the app, they hired Raiz Labs. Greg Raiz actually has been on this podcast.
Jacqueline Olds: I see.
Sal Daher: The founder of Raiz Labs, and they hired Raiz Labs to design the app, and to get the app on the App Store.
Jacqueline Olds: I wanted to tell you that originally when Richard and I conceived of the idea, we had a very good friend named Tom Hayes who was a lawyer and an electronics maven, who helped us to know that this was something that he thought was eminently inventible. That it wasn't going to be so complicated, that we would be able to make it. He thought that it would be possible to make it quite small, so people could easily clip it on their jackets.
Sal Daher: It was a very elegant device.
Jacqueline Olds: He was very instrumental. Then Casey Russell my son-in-law, and Ed Likovich his good friend were the ones who implemented it in bulk, but Tom Hayes was extremely important in the inventing of it.
Sal Daher: The inventing of it, yes. I can tell you I had several of the devices, I wore them. I found them really very charming and very useful. I'm not someone who has a problem with depression, but I used it to great effect, because just around that time my first grandson arrived, and I used it to reset his circadian rhythms, program him to sleep on time. I would take the kid out in the cold, he was born in September and in October I would bundle him up, and take him to-- early in the morning, exposing his face to the rising sun. That kid was sleeping through the night in just a matter of weeks. Amazing.
Jacqueline Olds: That is incredible. You never told me that. That is a great story.
Sal Used the GoodLux Sunsprite to Help His Newborn Grandson Sleep Through the Night
Sal Daher: Yes. I used to go out with the Sunsprite, and this is amazing thing. You can program, I mean, human beings, amazing aspects. It's just so much stuff that we don't know, but the stuff that we do know is just astonishing. As it turned out, at the time that I was considering investing in GoodLux Technology. My angel investing buddies all passed on the deal, they said, "No, no, no, no, no, this is really hard." First strike against you. The fact that you're building a device and you have to build the software. Devices are hard why? Because devices can't function without software, and then you have two points of failure. The device doesn't work, you can't get the software to work properly, Ed Likovich and Casey, and your friend the original designer of the device, they managed to overcome all these headaches and to have a very elegant device that worked, and a very beautiful app that worked, but it just wasn't-
Jacqueline Olds: The moment.
Sal Daher: Yes, it just wasn't the moment. You know I wonder if perhaps it would have been a feature. Maybe it could be an app in an iPhone-
Jacqueline Olds: Fitbit.
Sal Daher: On a Fitbit or something like that, who knows, because it is a problem. People who live in Northern latitudes or extreme Southern latitudes, I'm sure there are places in the globe. I'm trying to think maybe Southern Australia there might be a problem with that.
“The people who lived in places with an abundance of sun sometimes got seasonal depression, because they couldn't stand going outside in the summer, and they were inside like moles.”
Jacqueline Olds: Even Californians told us that the problem was even though they had plenty of sun, that it was so hot they wouldn't go outside, so they weren't getting enough light. The people who lived in places with an abundance of sun sometimes got seasonal depression, because they couldn't stand going outside in the summer, and they were inside like moles.
Sal Daher: Yes, and this device also told you how much ultraviolet radiation you're getting. You could tell that you are early in the morning when UV is low and you have a lot of blue light, which is what you need, so if you're out early in the morning that's what you need to do.
What are your thoughts now, after starting that company, what did you conclude from that? What did you get from that experience?
Jacqueline Olds: Well, it was an incredibly exciting experience, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, it was really great. I think there were a couple of crucial errors. One is that we were operating on a slim enough budget that we couldn't really afford to do a study that proved that people who knew the amount of light they were getting did better. We didn't really have a proof study that we could hand out to places like Fitbit who might have been a little more trusting that it worked. That was one problem.
I think Ed and Casey felt that it was such a wonderful device, somebody ought to want to do a study for free, but really you have to pay for getting a study and we were working on a slim budget.
Sal Daher: You didn't have the validation to convince people that. Because if you have the validation, then you can argue that this thing really works. The premise, it makes sense. There are 30 papers that tell you that bright light early in the morning is good for you. If you have a device that facilitates people getting bright light early in the morning and tells you how much you've got, it stands to reason that it should change your mood, but that step is difficult.
Jacqueline Olds: Then I think there was the fact that Richard and I were so contented with being psychiatrists, that we were unwilling to give up our day job. I think when the founders, even if they hire superb CEOs and COOs, that there's a way in which if you really want your startup to succeed, you have to go full force. We were not willing to give up the day job because we love being psychiatrists.
Sal Daher: You have to burn your boats, as they say.
Jacqueline Olds: Exactly. We didn't quite burn our boats. I think that might have been a mistake too.
Sal Daher: That was a really interesting experience. Now let's talk a bit about, what's even more interesting. My wife and I have been diving into your second book, The Lonely American and you also had a prior book about Long Lasting Marriages.
Jacqueline Olds: One before that also on loneliness, called Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life in 96.
Sal Daher: Let's do this. Let's talk about-- just give a quick premise of Overcoming Loneliness, Long Lasting Marriage [actually Marriage in Motion] Then let's get into depth with The Lonely American because that's a book that actually I've read and my wife has read and we've discussed it and so forth. I think it could be interesting. I found that it's just full of moments where don over marble. Oh, that makes sense. Oh geez. Makes a lot of sense. Anyway, tell me about Overcoming Loneliness.
Overcoming Loneliness, Practical Strategies for Finding Connection
Jacqueline Olds: That was way back before 2000. It was 1996 that it came out. I think both of us, Richard and I noticed that I'd say a huge percentage of our patients were lonely but they were all embarrassed to admit it, and were thinking that they were the only ones who felt lonely and left out and that meant that there was something wrong with them. Rather than it was universal problem. Maybe, especially in our prosperous country where people live so separately. That they didn't know how to solve the problem because they were unwilling to call it by its name.
“...a huge percentage of our patients were lonely but they were all embarrassed to admit it, and were thinking that they were the only ones who felt lonely and left out...”
They would say that I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I have this diagnosis, I think I have that diagnosis, but they never said, and I'm lonesome too. We wrote that book to bring loneliness out of the closet, so to speak in 96. It was a down to earth book about how to solve the problem and how to essentially weave mutual projects into your life, so that you got to work with a lot of people. That young people who were both having full-time jobs and children could have mutual projects with other people in their neighborhood, other families so that they weren't so isolated. Even if they didn't have their grandparents and their aunts and uncles in the same neighborhood, at least they could have other families that they did things with. It was a both a self-help book and a book to reassure people that everybody encounters loneliness somewhere in their lives.
Marriage in Motion: “...what lasting marriages look like.”
Then we didn't write another book until about 2000-2001, which was called Marriage in Motion. That was essentially to talk about what lasting marriages look like. We thought of writing it because there were so many people in our practice who'd had parents who got divorced when they were kids and they never got to see what a long-term marriage looked like. We really wanted to talk about what perfectly wonderful regular marriages look like and how they looked over the decades. That people wouldn't be so expecting perfect marriages and dreaming of fantasies when real life doesn't really look like a fantasy, it's actually better, but it doesn't look like the movies.
Sal Daher: That's right. [chuckles]
Jacqueline Olds: That was a great book to write. It was hard to write it as a married couple, because every now and then when you have arguments, while you're writing a book about marriage, you think we better-
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Started out writing a book about marriage then we got divorced, a long-lasting marriage and then it killed the marriage.
Jacqueline Olds: That was our worry, but we managed to get through it and it was kind of fun. We wrote it for Perseus Publishing. It's still out too. It's out through Hachette now. It's still out there in print.
Sal Daher: Awesome. We'll have to look that up.
The Lonely American: Why Americans in Particular Experience so Much Social Isolation
Jacqueline Olds: Then that book that you mentioned, The Lonely American came out about in 2009, 2010. That one is still in print, and by that time we were not the only people talking about this, other people had started talking about it too. Beacon Press came to us and said, essentially, "Can you tell us why Americans in particular, have such a high level of loneliness and social isolation?" That was a fantastically interesting problem that we didn't automatically know the answer to. We had to do a huge amount of research and a lot of putting our heads together, but I can summarize for you if you want.
Sal Daher: Please do.
Jacqueline Olds: Basically, if you think of America as a country that people come to and often have to break some ties in order to come to it. Then it's not so surprising that there's this sort of rugged individualism philosophy, where you're supposed to be able to make it on your own and you shouldn't be too dependent on other people, because you had to actually leave other people to get here.
Sal Daher: This is a country of people who broke ties in their old country to come over here.
“There's that undercurrent of American culture that essentially says you're going to be okay if you're on your own...”
Jacqueline Olds: Exactly. There's that undercurrent of American culture that essentially says you're going to be okay if you're on your own, and some of our greatest heroes in the Westerns were solo heroes, and you don't ever need to lean on other people because that would be dependency like the old country. Instead, we're going to be independent and free to do whatever we want our way. That’s a little bit under the skin of every American, even though they don't think that way every day.
Sal Daher: No, they don't
Jacqueline Olds: Plenty of college students when they come to therapy, essentially when you ask them, "What do you see in your future?" They say, "I want to live on my own. Learn to be self-sufficient." My heart breaks for them because it's so hard to live on your own. I always think to myself, "Oh dear, how am I going to persuade them that they shouldn't want to live on their own so much? They're not ready." Basically, there's that which makes America prone to a little bit more social isolation because there's that cultural philosophy.
Then there's the fact that we have so much prosperity that people can afford to live on their own. You would think that would be a great thing, but it's not, because if you live on your own, you have to work so much harder to have enough relationships in your life. It's a constant battle. I think the very fact that so many people think of that as a goal and think that they have to learn to live on their own in order to ever be able to be happy with other people. That’s just not a proven fact at all. It's a folk notion, which is wrongheaded.
Sal Daher: A romantic notion, but it doesn't work practically.
Jacqueline Olds: Exactly. It’s not even conducive to romance when you come right down to it.
Sal Daher: No, no. Romantic in a sense of imagination, not in a sense of connecting with another human being. The German romance.
Jacqueline Olds: I know.
Sal Daher: I remember in your book, it mentioned that for example, that New York City, 48% of people live on their own.
Jacqueline Olds: In single-person households as they put it on the census.
Sal Daher: That there has been a trend in the direction of single-person households across the country, everywhere.
“Fewer people are getting married and fewer people are living with other people and everybody acts like that's a reasonable thing to do...when it's bad for your health mentally and physiologically.”
Jacqueline Olds: Fewer people are getting married and fewer people are living with other people and everybody acts like that's a reasonable thing to do in a culture, when it's bad for your health mentally and physiologically.
Sal Daher: And uses up a lot of resources.
Jacqueline Olds: Totally. Terrible for the climate too.
Sal Daher: My living circumstance is very much the opposite of that. I live in a house that has a 1,300 square-foot footprint. Three stories on top of each other. The first two stories is my wife and I, and second and third stories is my daughter and her husband and three grandchildren.
Jacqueline Olds: That's fantastic.
Sal Daher: I can tell you, there's not a dull moment around here, loneliness--
Jacqueline Olds: You long for loneliness.
Sal Daher: Sometimes yes, the solitude. Sometimes it's difficult to achieve. Actually, when they go visit the other grandparents, I miss them.
Jacqueline Olds: I know exactly what you mean.
Sal Daher: I'm missing them. "Oh, they are away for the weekend. Oh, it's a long weekend. It's so long. I can't [crosstalk] see them for three days.
Jacqueline Olds: I know just what you mean.
Sal Daher: The reality is that number one in terms of use of the space, okay? We use the space very efficiently. Our house, the yard itself is probably less than 1300 square feet. It's 1890s zoning. We are 18 inches. The back wall of our house is 18 inches from the property line kind of thing that only--
Jacqueline Olds: You could get away with back then.
Sal Daher: No longer now, but it makes it for a very intimate, very wonderful place. We are in constant contact with our neighbors who we like very much. All three of our abutters all very nice people, wonderful people. We have this tremendous connection and this is so-- Family upstairs, neighbors right next to you. This is tremendous, and I highly recommend it. The neighbors across the street are really nice.
Living by yourself is hugely overrated. I have lived by myself, well mostly when I was in college. Yes, for a brief period after school. This trend towards single person households is alarming. This is one of the nuggets that I got from your book, this whole movement in the direction of people being by themselves. I think we forget sometimes the extent to which human beings need social interaction to maintain their sanity. You want to talk a little bit about that? About we check each other's crazy ideas to become a little batty.
Jacqueline Olds: Well, that's exactly what I think, too, that there's a way in which we all get carried away in our own thoughts. When people talk about the middle of the night crazies, what they mean is that they get completely carried away in their own thinking in the middle of the night, because there's no one to be a check and balance. Then the next morning when they talk about it at the breakfast table with somebody, if somebody is there at the breakfast table, it all gets cut down to size. Part of the reason psychotherapy can be helpful, is that you bring out these secrets that you felt terrible about and they sound positively measly when you talk them over with an actual human being who says, "Well, what's the big deal about that?" To some extent, talking to each other, and comparing notes is what keeps us sane and I totally agree with you about that.
“Part of the reason psychotherapy can be helpful, is that you bring out these secrets that you felt terrible about and they sound positively measly when you talk them over with an actual human being...”
Sal Daher: It's so funny, because-- I mean, other things I want to touch on, the importance of talking to other people. I think one of the things that comes out of your book, The Lonely American is what is it? Confidants. The client and peoples, having someone in whom they can confide.
Americans Are Confiding in Fewer and Fewer People
Jacqueline Olds: Right, it went between, I guess, in the 1980s, and 1990s, that used to be three on average, somebody had three confidants. Then by the time they measured it again in 2005 or something, 2006, it went down to two. Nobody could believe it, because that is kind of a big change, but it turned out on one of those general social surveys, that when you asked people, "With whom have you talked about matters of importance in the last six months?" A rather large percentage, I think 24% said, nobody. Then they corrected and they said, "Well, how about on the telephone or email or something?" And they still said, "No one." That was really a kind of shocker because before it had been way down in the 10 percents.
Sal Daher: That is remarkable. Funny, because reading your book, I was thinking of Walker Percy, I don't know, are you familiar with the writer, Walker Percy?
Jacqueline Olds: Yes, The Moviegoer.
Sal Daher: The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, I'm looking for a passage in which he talks about just how-- I think it's in The Moviegoer, in there he says, "It's so hard to get someone to listen to you, to find someone who'll really listen. That when somebody is willing to listen to you and cares about your business, why that bowls you over." It was written in the early '60s, that was his inaugural novel. It's a novel about this guy living in Louisiana. The Big Easy, the Big Easy.
Jacqueline Olds: The Big Easy, New Orleans.
Sal Daher: New Orleans. He's living in New Orleans, the Old South is dying away, the old New Orleans is dying away and he's from an old family. He's always talking about despair and suicide and so forth, and he's a stockbroker and he goes to movies a lot, and he finds his entertainment in movies. Sort of Walker Percy's perception of the old world that existed in New Orleans and sort of just gone away. Is a little bit the way we're mourning the kind of world that existed before all the technological revolution that has happened in the last decades of the 20th century, that have changed the ways that human beings interact.
Opportunities for Human Interaction Are Disappearing Due to Technology and Other Factors
Some of the technological, some of them as mundane as the example that you give in your book that people don't clear snow off their sidewalks anymore. They have professionals who come and do that and so there's less social interaction. While we're talking about Walker Percy, let's talk about the paradox of choice. The paradox of choice in your book, what you mentioned about people being offered too many choices and not being able to make up their minds about things in a social context.
Jacqueline Olds: That is an interesting passage, and I'm trying to remember exactly what we said back then.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Let me prime it a little bit for you, in the sense that people they like the optionality if you invite someone over, people don't RSVP anymore, okay and why is that? Because they kind of waiting, they like the optionality.
Jacqueline Olds: Right of waiting for a better deal.
Sal Daher: Options trader mentality. You want the free option, you have a free option. You want to see if a better offer is going to come up, and then they end up not committing to anything their social ties fray.
Jacqueline Olds: Yes. Now I remember the whole section. Thank you for refreshing my memory.
Sal Daher: Well, thank you for reminding me New Orleans. I'd forgotten [laugh].
Jacqueline Olds: The Big Easy, well it's a good time, yesterday was Fat Tuesday, I think.
Sal Daher: Yes, well today is Ash Wednesday.
The Down Side of Interacting with people Only When You Want To
Jacqueline Olds: You're right. What I was going to I say was that one of the things we tried to shed light on in that book, is the way people used to say, "I don't want to have to see so and so because I just feel obligated to see her or him. I want to see them because I really want to see them." We tried to point out that when you have a web of obligations, it's like a hammock that keeps you from going to ground.
Basically, that web of obligations is the glue that holds society together. It doesn't just hold society together, it means that even when you're not in the mood to socialize and you're in a big grumpy state, and you think that nobody would like you and you wouldn't like anybody. There's that obligation to go and see so and so and the next thing you know, you remember why you like them and they like you.
Sal Daher: It gets you out of your navel gazing, introspection, self-pitying cycle.
Jacqueline Olds: Exactly. The more obligations you have often, the better off you are if they're obligations with various friends and relatives. It doesn't mean you have to love every single one of them, but each of them has its place in that hammock that keeps you from dropping to the ground. It keeps you afloat. I'm so sorry when people have given obligations such a bad rep, because it really is an incredibly important part of our social being. It's how we as human beings flourished and survived, because of that sense that you were part of a small group and you had to be there for the others and they would be there for you.
“To live in an environment where you have so many ties means you have very few choices...”
Sal Daher: That's true. To live in an environment where you have so many ties means you have very few choices; it’s implied. Let me describe for you the social existence of my parents when we were living in Brazil, this is before we came to America. Things when we came to America changed entirely.
The Thickly Connected Social Environment of Sal’s Home Town in Brazil
My father is of Lebanese ancestry in Brazil, Lebanese immigrants in Brazil, and they in the city that's a provincial capital in the interior of Brazil. My mother is not a Lebanese she's of old Portuguese stock, but my father is Lebanese. The Lebanese, they were all Greek Orthodox, so they attended the Greek Orthodox church of St. Nicholas.
It's so funny, at the time it seemed like a big church. I went back to see it and it's tiny, it's just like a big house. It looks like a church, but it's tiny.
Talk about tightly knit community. During the week, my father's social obligations. This is before television as well, this is just when television came in this is interesting. When TV came in it changed everything, the soap operas and everything, I remember the time before television. Visiting, you had twice a week during the weekdays, you had to go and visit an uncle. Not every uncle or every aunt, but one uncle or one aunt.
It would be sometime around 7:00, between 7:00 and 8:00 is the visiting time. You would just show up and say hi, have a cup of coffee and just say how everything is going and you might be there half an hour or 45 minutes and that's it and then you go back home.
Then Sunday, Sunday there was the Orthodox liturgy which just went on forever ever. It's incense, it's song and it's just beautiful, timeless. People come in, they come out, there are babies crying, because it just goes on and on and on and on. The Catholic mass is one hour. I don't know the Orthodox liturgy. I don't know if it's ever been timed. It is huge, huge.
I grew up Catholic, but I used to attend the Orthodox because my dad is Orthodox. After the Orthodox liturgy was finally over, the priest would invite the people over to his house next to the church and the priest of course was married, the Orthodox priests typically are married in a small town. He would offer everybody tea or coffee and they would pass the hat around to support, he needed a tire for his car, his kids needed braces or whatever, or the church needed a new roof or something. There's always something like that. At first you visited with a priest and then the rest of Sunday you visited relatives. You went from house to house, and the senior relatives received visits and the more junior, the younger relatives had to visit.
Jacqueline Olds: Had to be the ones to go around?
Sal Daher: It's just like every-- You start at one o'clock in the afternoon, uncle Assad's house, and then Uncle Fouad's house, and Uncle Said's house and you have to go through the whole thing, the whole course. By eight o'clock at night, you're exhausted. Then you saw your cousins, some cousin might throw you into the swimming pool or step on your toes, and so on. You got all these--
Jacqueline Olds: Wonderful anecdotes [crosstalk] the whole day.
Sal Daher: Let me tell you, you had no choice that that was your life. You're never lonely and you have all these. It's very thickly connected. Then we came to America, things are completely different, totally astonishing. My life before America and after coming to America is just a huge change. Of course, my parents replicated that. My mom brought her brothers and so forth.
Social Life of Grad Students in the Mid-1960s
Jacqueline Olds: Where did you grow up in America? What town?
Sal Daher: In the Town of Belmont?
Jacqueline Olds: Our Belmont?
Sal Daher: Our Belmont, yes, the one town over. Ovah
Jacqueline Olds: How do you feel about Belmont after the glory of Brazil?
Sal Daher: Loved Belmont. I missed Brazil, saudade [means longing or nostalgia for another place or time in Portuguese]. It was lonely here in a sense that we didn't have connections as much as we had there. People were much more organized about their social events. It was remarkable. My dad who was a grad student at MIT and my mom got involved. There were these ladies, they were the faculty wives, and they would invite the wives of the students. My dad was a professor so he was called professor. He was a professor Brazil so that was by courtesy, called professor here, even though he was a grad student.
Jacqueline Olds: That's nice.
Sal Daher: They had these very formal, very wonderful social events. American society still worked in those days. It was very amazing. We've lost a lot of that.
Jacqueline Olds: That's true.
Sal Daher: This is like the middle 1960s. It was amazingly rich, very different from the-- almost claustrophobic.
Jacqueline Olds: Tiny little town.
Sal Daher: Tiny little town and everybody's a relative. Everybody knows everything about your life. I suspect 150 years, 200 years ago, maybe the generation before the Nathaniel Hawthorne, Salem would have been a lot like that.
Jacqueline Olds: Maybe.
Sal Daher: Closer to where my hometown.
Jacqueline Olds: I don't know whether you read about the Roseto study in our book.
Sal Daher: No.
The Town of Roseto and Its Amazing Cardiac Health and Longevity Outcomes
Jacqueline Olds: I guess we wrote about it in the first loneliness book back in '96. Basically, there were immigrants from a town in Italy called Roseto and they founded a new Roseto in Pennsylvania which was mostly Italian and everybody lived like your town in Brazil. They all knew each other. The grandparents and the parents and the children were all in three decors and they all knew each other. They all saw each other all the time.
Somebody mentioned at some medical congress that they found an astonishing fact that people who grew up in Roseto and lived in Roseto, had far fewer heart attacks and lived about a decade longer than people in the neighboring towns, and nobody understood that. The cardiologists were so astonished by it that they came and did studies on these Roseto people, and corrected for the water supply and the food, and the exercise.
Sal Daher: [laughs]
The Secret of Longevity Was the Close Social Bonds of the Community
Jacqueline Olds: They found that that was not the crucial factor. The crucial factor was that everybody was so intertwined and so socially active with each other that they all seem to flourish and live longer lives and have less heart attacks, compared to the neighboring towns, which they weren't quite so homogeneous. They certainly weren't all Italian like this.
Sal Daher: Exactly. Tightly [crosstalk]
The Down Side of Close-Knit Communities
Jacqueline Olds: Then they found that the young people wanted to get out of town because it was claustrophobic. They predicted that as the young people went and lived in other towns, they would start having cardiac events earlier and it happened. It turned out that they became just like all the rest of the Americans who started having heart problems in their 50s and 60s, and all of that good health that it started out in Roseto vanished as they blended into the American landscape.
Sal Daher: Reversion towards the mean. It's a constant with immigrants. They go to the American mean. The American society is very good at absorbing people in that way. Let's not look at Roseto with rose-colored glasses because I can tell you that coming from a background, it was a very tightly knit community, the Lebanese community that I was in it was a very small portion of the City of Goiania where I grew up. It was very tightly knit, very closely knit.
The thing is when there's a fight in the family, let me tell you, those fights are ugly. They could go on for generations. It's like one daughter of so and so will not talk to the daughter of so and so because the parents were on the outs. The Sicilians learned about vendetta from the Arabs [laughs].
Jacqueline Olds: I never thought of that. I thought they made--
Sal Daher: Oh, yes, the vengeance, oh, yes. Those very tightly knit societies can also create tremendous tensions.
Jacqueline Olds: I agree.
Sal Daher: There's a negative side to it as well. I think that is why a lot of the young people who say, "Oh, this is so claustrophobic. Oh, my gosh. [groans] My nana, this and this. Oh, it's endless. She's always repeating the same thing, blah, blah, blah. Then they go to the big city. They live on their own and then they rue the day that they're not around their nana anymore.
Jacqueline Olds: It's true.
Sal Daher: That's the sad reality of humanity because we never know what we've lost until we've lost it.
Jacqueline Olds: That is the sad thing.
The Paradox of Choice: How Too Many Options Keep Us from Deciding
Sal Daher: Now, you're talking about the whole Paradox of Choice. This is interesting because it brings me back to Walker Percy. It's funny, there's a passage from The Last Gentleman. He says, "Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course."
Jacqueline Olds: Oh, that's a brilliant passage. That's really good.
Sal Daher: The idea is that the immigrant has this focus because the immigrant, they come to America and they're like, "[groans] The old country was so tough, and here-
Jacqueline Olds: Now, I can do anything right. Now, I can--
Sal Daher: -I'm going to focus. I'm going to become a dentist, blah, blah, blah." It's very easy, but if you're someone from the old school, there are so many things you can do. No matter what you do, it's always going to be disappointing because you're from an old family, and so forth. It's very hard to top having your ancestors were the founders of this, the founders of that town or whatever. It's really rough. I think it's tied also with his saying that "Lucky is the man who does not secretly suspect that all things are possible to him." Or "All possibilities are open to him." Or something like that. I think that that is an extremely powerful thought.
This is the language of the 60s "lucky is the person". You could rephrase it in today's language. Everyone, it's not just men that feel that, women feel that too. Women feel that particularly.
Jacqueline Olds: I think particularly. Actually, I have a whole way of thinking about that which is that so many of the women I know who get depressed, it's because once you accept that you can be a mother and to have a full-time job, then you start thinking you can do everything. Pretty soon, you've loaded so many things in that everything-- if you have too much going on all the time, then even the most pleasurable things lose their pleasure. It's very easy for women nowadays for whom all seems to be possible to sometimes have so much on their plate that it has stopped being fun.
Sal Daher: Yes, that is very true which brings us back to two old thinkers, a very old one, Aristotle, the idea of the golden mean that there is a certain level of business, a certain level of ambition that is fruitful and good, but that too much of it, it becomes-- The idea of prudence that, I guess the Romans used to call it the auriga virtutus, the charioteer of virtues in a sense that tells you how much-- are you being excessively diligent if you become neurotic or if you're too relaxed, you might become lax.
The idea of finding that golden mean. Also, funnily enough, the Paracelsus, the idea of poison, nothing is a poison, everything is a poison, the dose makes the poison so trying to find the right dose for things.
Jacqueline Olds: It's true. What an arc. It doesn't matter how old you are, you're always still trying to figure out the balance.
Sal Daher: The balance, it's always constantly, constantly trying to balance.
Jacqueline Olds: Now COVID, I want to say one little sentence about COVID. One is that COVID made the problem of social isolation 100 times worse. Although, every now and then there was somebody who felt so isolated and alone before COVID that felt a little relieved that everybody was in the same boat.
Sal Daher: I have company; the lonely have company!
[laughter]
Sal Daher: The isolated finally have company in a neurotic way.
“...COVID has given us all a chance to reset and try to achieve balance in a new way because we were forced to calm down and give up some of our favorite enjoyments like going to restaurants or going to plays or going to concerts.”
Jacqueline Olds: There was some of that. Some people felt like they'd been practicing for COVID all their life. The other thing I was going to say was that COVID has given us all a chance to reset and try to achieve balance in a new way because we were forced to calm down and give up some of our favorite enjoyments like going to restaurants or going to plays or going to concerts. We all had much more time at home and much less stress in a way as long as we weren't sick and as long as we had food on the table.
I have to say that that doesn't excuse how guilty we all felt for the people who didn't have food on the table and did have sick people. If we were lucky enough to have both those things, then in a way, it gave you a chance to think about what does give your life meaning, and what really matters. I wanted very much for people to stop right before the end of COVID if there is an end, and think about what they learned about themselves and what matters to them, and what they could prune back on. Because you don't very often get a natural experiment of that magnitude to reset your life.
Sal Daher: Consequences of this are going to be felt for decades. In 2006, my wife and I, and our two daughters, we have two daughters, walked part of the Camino Santiago in the North of Spain. I would recommend that to anyone. You don't have to walk the whole thing. That can be a whole month. We walked for 13 days, about 12, 13 miles a day. By the way, I advise wear extremely comfortable shoes, pack really light and use Vaseline on your feet several times a day so you don't get blisters. Okay?
Jacqueline Olds: Okay.
Sal Daher: Pack light. Anyway, we got to know each other-- believe it or not, we got to know each other better doing that.
Jacqueline Olds: That's wonderful.
Sal Daher: There are no distractions, you have to talk to each other. You are walking for six hours a day, and you are confronting minor inconveniences, a bush to go to relieve yourself in or you have a blister, you have this, you didn't listen to dad, you didn't put enough Vaseline on your feet, you have a blister. One of our daughters ended up walking in her Teva flip-flops because her boots hurt her.
Jacqueline Olds: Oh, poor honey.
Sal Daher: Actually, it was just fine. Take your arch support; 13 miles a day, you're going to need it. You got to know each other better.
Then in COVID, it was a remarkable experiment also, that I've mentioned in the podcast before, that our seven-year-old grandson and our four-year-old granddaughter became buddies because they were interacting with-- before, they used to play-- each had their own friends, they used play apart [inaudible 00:42:04] play. Now they played together all the time.
Jacqueline Olds: Oh, that is so great.
Sal Daher: The downside is that there are a lot of people. If you're someone who's not as well off as we are, someone who didn't have a lot of choice, imagine if you're a 50 something-year-old mother, who is maybe diabetic, and you have to work. Your job as a cashier at a supermarket, you have to be there and you're a person who's at risk.
There were a lot of people. There were young people, suicidal ideation, and all this. It's been extremely hard on a lot of people.
I think that if anything like this ever happens again, I think we need to really think very, very seriously about targeting the people who are affected. Like the 55-year-old, diabetic cashier in the supermarket, that person should be furloughed. They should be put into a situation where they can be protected from a respiratory virus to the ratio of the thing. Furloughed totally and then with some support, social support, and all that stuff until they can get-- and then the groups that are not affected, they can just go on about their lives. That was very painful.
Jacqueline Olds’ Suggestion for Connecting Younger People Working Remotely
Now, actually, my interview with Steve Shapiro, which we'll launch before this one, we talked about this, and we made a note to ask you the question. One of the group of people who are most affected in COVID because of remote work are the younger people in workplaces. The older people, they can Zoom because they know each other, they have a very thick social network and Steve had some thoughts about this. I was just wondering what your thoughts would be. What advice would you give to managers in helping their younger workers become more socially integrated in a remote workspace?
Jacqueline Olds: If you're asking the question that way, I would say that I would build in Zoom social hours in the evening and even something I think it's sometimes called a Zoom Room. Where people during the day can leave their computers open with a Zoom going and then, in a way, even though they're working, they can talk to their neighbor who is on the Zoom screen also or they can say, "Hey, Tommy, what do you get for last Thursday's project? What have you got?"
Basically, because the Zoom is left on, you can-- they did this for some of the medical residents at Mass General where essentially, you could talk to each other, even though you were each in your own little apartments, but you had your Zoom on.
Sal Daher: Wow, this brings me back to my thesis of the trading floor where you have the squawk box, and let's say you traded one particular instrument. The person who traded the instrument that was most closely tied to that, you were listening to all their conversations on this little squawk box. It was on your desk. That person was also listening to your conversations on the other side. Then once in a while, you got some snatch. “Brazil, 25s are trading at this...” That is so cool. Zoom Rooms, that is so cool.
Jacqueline Olds: Well, I think that really is something that Zoom has taught us about that we haven't used to its full depth yet. If I were a manager and I had twelve young people who never saw each other anymore but they needed some camaraderie for their work to have some zing, that would be one method. Even if you only did it for two hours a day, that would be progress.
Sal Daher: Basically, tell everybody whatever work they're doing to be on the Zoom screen and they can just go about their work. They just go about their work but on the Zoom screen.
Jacqueline Olds: So that they have the feeling that there are other people working alongside of them even if they're not in the same room.
Sal Daher: This touches me on another topic. Another one of the nuggets that I got from your book, The Lonely American, witnesses, we'll get into that in a minute. That will also improve productivity because you're a little bit accountable to people. Not even zoning so much... yeah, so you have a little bit of accountability as well.
“Lots of slightly anxious, lonely, depressed people decide, "I don't want anyone to know how needy I feel, so I'm just going to take my light down.’”
Jacqueline Olds: The other thing I say to young people, I have this foolish metaphor but it works for people, I say, "We're all like beacon towers with little lights on at the top and that, essentially, we're all looking at everybody else's beacon towers to see who might be beaming a message at us with the little light flashing." Lots of slightly anxious, lonely, depressed people decide, "I don't want anyone to know how needy I feel, so I'm just going to take my light down. I'm not going to be flashing it to anybody." The flashes are the times we text somebody or say hi or smile at somebody or send them a little email.
It's basically us reaching out to say hi. Once you stop doing that, everybody who's looking around at the beacon towers says, "Oh, well, Jacque, her beacon towers stopped flashing about a week ago. I guess she's moved on. She doesn't like me anymore." It never occurs to the needy person who is trying very hard not to show that they're terribly lonely. It never occurs to them that they have to keep sending out the signals to let other people know that they're still there and that they still care about the people they like.
Often, as a therapist or a manager, I say, "Keep pinging the people you like, whether they're your relatives or friends or lovers or whatever. Let them know that you miss them and that you want to talk to them because they won't just know that on their own."
The Value of Witnesses in Marriage
Sal Daher: That is so valuable that this is in your book, The Lonely American. I have a list of cool things that I picked up from the book. Coming to the end of our hour here, I just want to cover quick hits on these. Let's talk about witnesses in marriage. That thing just blew my mind. It was so true. It's something that I knew, but I hadn't realized the full significance of it. We always have a witness at your wedding ceremony and blah, blah, blah. Can you talk about witnesses to marriage?
Jacqueline Olds: If you think about it, the fact that most people would not clean up their houses very well if nobody ever came and visited.
Sal Daher: [laughter]
Jacqueline Olds: Marriages are a little bit like that. You have to occasionally have somebody who cares about your relationship and sees you regularly in order to keep it up and keep it orderly and in good shape. Not only do we have marriages themselves in front of a group of the people that we want to care about our relationship, but those witnesses, essentially what the marriage ceremony says is everybody in this room should understand that they're there because this young couple wants to promise in front of witnesses who they care about so that that community will help us through the hard times in the many decades of marriage we plan to have.
Similarly, when you are in a marriage, you do have to see other families and couples and people in order to continue to have that sense of there's a community that cares that we're together and that we need to continue to try to do an excellent job of being in a relationship to please those people who care about us. The witnesses have everything to do with taking good care of your relationship. If you don't have any friends, couple friends, or family friends, you're a little bit out there swinging in the breeze feeling like, "Who cares whether we do get along? We might as well just argue."
Sal Daher: I think there's some pretty hard data on marriages where the spouses have close friendships with other people and are set in a social environment, extended family, friends, and so forth, those marriages tend to be longer lasting than when they are cocooned off on their own, very intensely connected. There are some internal dynamics also because expectations get out of hand, you don't have contact with friends who can say, "Geez."
Jacqueline Olds: I have the same trouble.
Sal Daher: I've had the same trouble; I've had the same problem. I know what you're going through and that kind of thing helps. It's just part of human beings resetting each other, making sure those three o'clock thoughts are just that, nonsense. At eight o'clock in the morning, with coffee in front of you, just, "It's nothing. It was just a nightmare."
“...making sure those three o'clock thoughts are just that, nonsense. At eight o'clock in the morning, with coffee in front of you, just, "It's nothing. It was just a nightmare."”
Jacqueline Olds: You're right.
Love, Shopping & Cocaine
Sal Daher: It just opened my eyes. That's one of the nuggets. Another one of the nuggets that I just think was just cool, is the whole thing about dopaminergic system, what activates a dopamine response or dopamine reward system? It blew my mind that it's love, shopping, and cocaine. It sounds like a good title for a book. Love, shopping, and cocaine.
“When a college student comes in and they're looking all miserable and cold and unhappy with their studies, and then they find somebody that they're starting to fall in love with and suddenly they're full of smiles. You can just see the dopamine practically showing on their face.”
Jacqueline Olds: It's a great title. Well, it is true that joy-- I've worked with lots and lots of college students. When a college student comes in and they're looking all miserable and cold and unhappy with their studies, and then they find somebody that they're starting to fall in love with and suddenly they're full of smiles. You can just see the dopamine practically showing on their face. They look, all of a sudden like the world has turned rosy in the old-fashioned way and they can't remember what they were so miserable about last week. There's this wonderful sense of hope.
We should also remember that human touch is one of the most soothing to anxiety forces there are. In other words, human touch makes all the difference in terms of calming somebody's anxiety level down. It's not so surprising that love makes a huge difference in people's being much more able to tolerate the blows of regular life.
Sal Daher: The Californians were on to something in the business of the hug circle.
Jacqueline Olds: [laughs] They were [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Sal Daher: [crosstalk] New Englanders are like, "These Californians with all their hugging." I guess there's something to it.
Jacqueline Olds: I bet there is.
Sal Daher: The last point that I wanted to raise is I've always found psychiatrists; strange people. What is it about them that makes them unusual? This is one of the offhanded comments in your book. It is the fact that they are capable of standing outside human relationships and looking at them analytically that it's distressing to people who don't normally do that because they are people who grew up thinking a lot about their relationships and about other people's relationships. That's why they ended up in the profession. It's distressing for people who don't. I'm a person of action, and I'm up doing stuff and I'm very rarely thinking about--
Jacqueline Olds: From above.
Sal Daher: Yes. It's like for me, it was a real [unintelligible 00:53:20] oh, yes. Now I understand. That's what's disconcerting about them.
Jacqueline Olds: First of all, being a psychiatrist, I hate to give us too bad a name. I also want to say that it's a little bit like the discomfort of being a spy too, because I love my patients and I love talking to them, and I love helping them but I'm not allowed to tell a single person what they say to me. It's like sometimes I'm sick of being such a good secret keeper. [laughs]
Sal Daher: You have all the secrets and you can't tell them.
Jacqueline Olds: It's terrible. I have to say that's one of the only downsides to being a psychiatrist. There's another one that's—[how I wish I had not cut off Jacquie at this point!- Sal]
Sal Daher: I lied, I said that was the last point. I have another cool thing that I learned in your book. Is it Dunbar who thinks that the reason that human beings developed speech is so they can gossip?
Jacqueline Olds: Isn't that terrific? [laughs] The animals developed communication so they could pull little bugs from each other's fur and we developed communication so we could gossip. It's very cute.
Sal Daher: Is that the Dunbar number 150? It's 150 people you can have relationships with?
Jacqueline Olds: That's how many people you can have relationships with and that's a very big number. Malcolm Gladwell says that the people who have 150 are the connectors.
Sal Daher: The connectors. [laughs]
Jacqueline Olds: Most of us have far fewer than that, but the really good connectors have 150, and that's you, Sal, you're a connector.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: I love this stuff. I just love it. I run into the people in the streets, my wife gets very impatient and says, "What are you going on with somebody about?" It's telling them, "I just love talking to people. I'm a curious person. I love finding out what makes them tick and [crosstalk] My mom was like that.
Jacqueline Olds: You're bringing a little bit of that fabulous small-town life of Brazil right here to Cambridge.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: I love it. Jackie, as we wrap this up, I would love to think about doing a project with you, with your book, where we could do maybe a series of podcasts and we talk about particular aspects. We can bring in some people that can talk about some aspects that you touch on and discuss and so on. I just find this book so rich and then all the experiences that you've had, this is tremendous, really wonderful.
Jacqueline Olds: Well, you're very kind. Thank you.
Sal Daher: Before we wrap up, is there anything that you want to tell our audience? Our audience skew's young, they are about 2/3 male, 1/3 female. The average person here I would say is somewhere in their 30s or 40s. Probably it means they have a family. An oldster like me, talking to younger people, but they are founders. Then there's a small segment which is angels, that's grey-haired like me. Take a moment, think about it. What would you like to communicate to this audience of founders and angel investors or people thinking of starting companies, as a founder, and as a psychiatrist?
Parting Thoughts from Jacqueline Olds, M.D., the Wise Psychiatrist
Jacqueline Olds: Here's what I'd like to say. I'd like to say that having a mutual project with simpatico people is one of the most rewarding things you can possibly do. Because it knits your life in with the other people you're working with. It means that instead of getting yourself freaked out about how unlikely it is that something will work, you have the pleasure of the process of working with other people on a regular basis. You have the project that knits you all together. If you can find it gives such a sense of purpose to life. It gives a automatic way of socializing with people because you've got this project you all care about.
The project can be anything from beautification of your block in the neighborhood to making a new gizmo that's going to make people's lives much better. There are many kinds of mutual projects. Having your hand in several mutual projects with other people that you like is really a great way to enhance life.
Sal Daher: That's our barn raising.
Jacqueline Olds: Yes, exactly.
Sal Daher: You touch on two things that are very important for founders. One of the most heavily supported results from the study of entrepreneurship is that more founders better up to four, strong data that teams of two, three founders do much better than solo founders. I have seen many teams start working together and get along very well and they go on to found company after company after company. It's a remarkable thing, they work really well together and they develop this tight bond and they're able to work really well and they know each other's strengths and weaknesses. It's a beautiful thing to watch.
There are several founders have been on the podcast, that have that Gil Syswerda and Gary [Jeff] his co-founder and some of these other people who have been on the podcast. This is so valuable. This is wonderful. I'm very grateful to you Jacqueline for making time out of your very busy time, for somebody who gets paid by the hour. [laughs] I hate to think it. I'm in communication with some founders of startups, someone who's founded seven startups and basically has invented something that clears malaria in 48 hours in 88% of people.
When I talk to him, I feel like I cannot talk to him for more than five minutes because otherwise, there are lives that are being lost because this guy's wasting time talking to me.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Someone is being made unhappy because you're talking to me instead of to him or her.
Jacqueline Olds: I wouldn't say that. I think that your podcast is fantastic. I'm very proud to be on it. Thank you.
[music]
Sal Daher: Jacqueline Olds, MD, psychiatrist, and founder, thanks for being on the Angel Invest Boston podcast and talking about your books, about the company that you founded, GoodLux Technology, about The Lonely American, about Overcoming Loneliness, and the other book about long-lasting marriages.
Jacqueline Olds: Marriage in Motion.
Sal Daher: Marriage in Motion Jacqueline Olds, Richard Schwartz, her better half. Thank you very much.
Jacqueline Olds: Such a pleasure. Thank you, Sal, for hosting me.
Sal Daher: This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.