Hello and welcome back to the show.

I'm Patrick and here as always with Ben.

We are joined today this week by Colin Fisher.

Colin is the author of a new book, The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power Groups.

He's here to talk to us about it.

Thank you so much, Colin.

How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks you so much, Colin. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Patrick. Of course, yeah. We're excited to have this conversation

with you. I thought, well, first, I have a note that you're a former jazz musician, but it's one of

those things that I feel like you can't be a former jazz musician. You're just like maybe a jazz

musician who does it slightly less. But we're going to go with a former jazz musician turned researcher at the University College of London. So again, thank you for being here. I want to set the stage a little bit for what we talk about here on the show and where I think this conversation is going to go. So obviously, Ben, you know this. Folks who have listened know this, but this is mostly just for Colin.

But we talk about three big ideas here on the show, talk about health, happiness, and living with our hearts on fire. And one of the main frameworks that we have to pursue those things is something we call the five factors of health, which is just how we train, how we eat, how we think, how we sleep. And the last one, the one that is important for our conversation this week is how we connect,

how we connect with ourselves and how we connect with how we sleep. And the last one, the one that is important for our conversation this week is how we connect, how we connect with ourselves and how we connect with others and nature. And so I think connection is one of those things that we think just kind of happens. You know, you send a text message, you make a phone call, you make a friend, whatever it might be. But I think one of the things your book does is it makes us realize that we're embedded inside of groups all of the time, work groups, families, friend circles.

And these groups are really in many ways shaping our lives.

And so it's not really something that we do accidentally because we're already inside of it.

And so that's really what I want to talk to you about or what we want to talk to you about is how these invisible forces of groups are shaping our daily lives. Cool.

Absolutely. That's my whole jam. That's your jam. Cool. You wrote a whole book on it. All right. So I want to start with this place. We actually start early in the book.

Talk about the lone genius myth. You write this. We're living in an age of unprecedented individualism,

the decline of collectivism, the belief that we are all part of a larger whole, has rendered

the world nearly unrecognizable to our ancestors from a century ago. So can we start there?

And what do you mean by an individualism trap? I think it's important to recognize how social we are as, you know, animals and

beings, that we evolve to be part of groups. And that because of that, our brains are looking

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