0:00:05 “Happiness is a massive topic. Where do you even begin?”
0:00:10 “A popular podcast with more than 35 million downloads. Why are our young people so unhappy?”
0:00:13 If you look at very happy people, what are they doing differently?
0:00:15 What you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
0:00:17 They don’t spend a long time on screens.
0:00:20 They spend more time just proportionally in real life,
0:00:23 whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
0:00:23 “Touching grass.”
0:00:27 Yeah, all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
0:00:30 Boredom is our cue that, like, “Oh, I should go out and do something.”
0:00:32 Stimulating, “I should find something meaningful.”
0:00:35 Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band-aid on our boredom,
0:00:39 we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
0:00:41 Happiness tends to have to sort of U-shaped curve.
0:00:44 Starts off good when you’re young, and you’re a kid, you tend to be pretty happy,
0:00:46 and then you get to mid-life, and it kind of sucks.
0:00:50 There’s lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up since the 80s to now.
0:00:53 There are, like, 30 to 40% increases.
0:00:59 This level of depression right now nationally is more than 40% of students’ report being too depressed to function most days,
0:01:01 and that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
0:01:04 Similar things for anxiety right now, anxieties at like…
0:01:09 So it’s happened again.
0:01:11 Last week, I got a notice in the mail, another data breach.
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0:02:28 This week’s episode is brought to you by DRAM.
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0:03:49 Laurie, thank you so much for being on the show.
0:03:50 Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
0:03:53 Happiness is a massive topic.
0:03:58 Where do you even begin when you approach this?
0:04:00 If someone comes up to you at a party
0:04:02 and you say, hey, I study happiness,
0:04:06 how do you even start to talk about this topic?
0:04:07 You go way back, right?
0:04:09 I mean, Aristotle was talking about this step.
0:04:10 It’s in the Declaration of Independence.
0:04:13 So it’s not like a new thing when people are pursuing this stuff.
0:04:16 But usually start with the story of how I get interested in this stuff.
0:04:17 Yeah, let me hear that.
0:04:21 I was like a nerdy professor who studied animals for a long time.
0:04:22 And then switched and made this pivot
0:04:24 to studying happiness and mental health
0:04:27 because I was seeing the mental health crisis in my students.
0:04:30 I took on this weird role at Yale, which is called the head of college.
0:04:33 So you’re faculty who live on campus with students.
0:04:35 And I expected college life to be what it was like
0:04:36 when I was there in the 90s.
0:04:39 There was stress and stuff, but it was mostly fun.
0:04:42 And that was not what I was seeing in my community.
0:04:44 I was just seeing so much anxiety and depression
0:04:46 and students who were suicidal.
0:04:49 And it was just like jarring that the mental health crisis was so bad.
0:04:53 That took place over the course of a decade or so, that change, that shift?
0:04:55 Yeah, well, what’s interesting is you look at the data.
0:04:56 These things are skyrocketing, right?
0:04:58 So the level of depression right now nationally
0:05:03 is more than 40% of students report being too depressed to function most days.
0:05:06 And that number has doubled in the last eight to nine years.
0:05:07 Similar things for anxiety right now.
0:05:10 I think anxieties at like 67% of students
0:05:12 say they’re overwhelmingly anxious most days.
0:05:13 College students nationally.
0:05:15 Those rates just were not there.
0:05:18 My colleague who runs the mental health and counseling at Yale
0:05:21 was fond of saying the rates are skyrocketing enough
0:05:24 that we know they’ll level off, but that’s just because like 100% of people
0:05:27 need clinical care on college campuses.
0:05:28 And it was just in my community.
0:05:31 I was just seeing these students who are really struggling and realizing,
0:05:34 hang on, my field has some strategies we can use to do better,
0:05:38 to feel better, to feel less depressed and anxious.
0:05:40 And so I developed this class to like teach students these strategies,
0:05:44 retrained in the science of happiness and put together the class.
0:05:48 And that was when everything changed for me because the class went totally viral.
0:05:53 On campus, we had a quarter of the entire Yale student body signed up to take the class.
0:05:55 Well, and you did a Coursera thing too, right?
0:05:56 And then we put four million downloads or something?
0:05:59 Yeah, every time we put out content, people flock to it.
0:06:01 I think it’s because people want to be happy,
0:06:03 but also people are struggling right now.
0:06:08 There’s legit things in 2024 that are making us all feel overwhelmed
0:06:10 and burned out and scared.
0:06:11 And what’s the root?
0:06:14 Obviously, there’s band-aids and then there’s the root cause.
0:06:17 When you did your research, where did you begin?
0:06:20 And how did you start to assess out what’s causing all this and why now?
0:06:24 I wish there was like a silver bullet because it would make it so easy
0:06:27 because we could just get rid of whatever that thing was and make it.
0:06:32 Yeah, technology is probably part of the answer here.
0:06:36 And I should say it’s not just I think everybody points a finger at social media.
0:06:38 I actually think it’s deeper than that.
0:06:41 I think it’s these devices that we have that often steal our attention
0:06:43 away from real world things.
0:06:46 And if you plot those rates of depression, I was just mentioning,
0:06:51 and you plot a number of iPhones in teen pockets, like the line, they look perfectly.
0:06:55 I mean, correlation doesn’t equal causation, obviously, but it looks pretty bad.
0:06:56 Right? Yeah.
0:07:00 One of the things technology promised us, especially phones in our pockets,
0:07:03 was connecting with other people, being social in real life.
0:07:08 And I think what’s shocking is that how much we use it to not be social in real life.
0:07:11 We’re here having this conversation in Austin, it’s out by Southwest.
0:07:15 And if you walk around this conference where there’s so many interesting things to see and do,
0:07:18 you’ll see a bunch of people sitting around, scrolling like this on there.
0:07:20 They pay to come interact with these amazing people.
0:07:25 And like there’s this opportunity cost where we’re hanging out on this tiny screen all the time.
0:07:29 And that, I think, has real psychological consequences.
0:07:33 Liz Dunn, who’s a professor at UBC, does these studies where she just checks what happens
0:07:37 to people’s social interactions when they have their phones with them versus not with them.
0:07:40 She measures these subtle things like how often people smile at one another.
0:07:45 She finds that smiling decreases like 30 percent when your phone’s around,
0:07:47 because you’re not even looking at the people around you.
0:07:49 You’re just locked into your phone.
0:07:50 What’s causing that, though?
0:07:52 What do you think the phone provides?
0:07:57 Because if you’re having a real intimate friend conversation, someone’s struggling,
0:08:00 you’re sitting down with them, you’re grabbing a beer or something.
0:08:02 That’s meaningful to me.
0:08:04 It feels much deeper than a chat.
0:08:07 But what is it that’s pulling people south by, for example,
0:08:13 they have the ability to go and connect and laugh, have fun, hang out.
0:08:18 But yet they’re choosing the device over the humans, which in theory,
0:08:22 the human connection should be more powerful, but yet the phone is winning.
0:08:23 Yeah. Why?
0:08:25 So I think the phone wins for two reasons.
0:08:27 One is it’s just easier.
0:08:29 Right. If I’m at South by and I have to talk to someone, you’re standing up
0:08:32 and be like, Hey, how did you come to South by?
0:08:34 What are you doing? There’s like this teeny friction.
0:08:35 Whereas my phone, there’s no friction.
0:08:37 I just pull it out and there’ll be something interesting.
0:08:40 And I think we’re worse at the friction than we have been
0:08:41 because we’re out of practice at it.
0:08:44 I think older folks like us because of COVID, I think our young people
0:08:47 just never do it in the same way that we grew up doing it.
0:08:49 Right. If they go to pick their friend up at their house,
0:08:52 they don’t like go knock on the door and have to talk to mom.
0:08:55 I’m like, where’s Joey? They just text like, I’m outside, come.
0:08:57 I think younger individuals have less practice with that friction.
0:09:01 So I think friction is one thing, but I think we just forget how interesting
0:09:04 our phones are, like how much cool craps on it.
0:09:07 But your brain doesn’t forget your brain knows Liz Dunn, who I just mentioned.
0:09:10 She’s this analogy she uses, like imagine to this conversation
0:09:12 instead of bring my cell phone, which is in my pocket right now.
0:09:16 I brought this big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow is printouts
0:09:20 of every email I’ve had since 2005, like big DVDs with everything
0:09:24 that’s on YouTube from cat videos to porn printouts of everything.
0:09:28 Donald Trump and Biden has said in the last week, CDs of every song
0:09:31 that’s on Spotify as big wheelbarrow that went up into the sky.
0:09:33 You and I would want to have a conversation,
0:09:35 but you’re going to be like, oh, I just want to take a real quick
0:09:38 pick at that cat video or whatever. Your brain’s not stupid.
0:09:41 Your brain knows that full wheelbarrow and much, much more
0:09:44 that I don’t have time to say is on the other side of that phone.
0:09:46 You’re super interesting. It’s fun.
0:09:49 But I don’t know, you as interesting as every cat video out there, right?
0:09:54 And so I think we’ve created this enormous temptation for our attention
0:09:57 that’s in the pockets of billions of people around the world.
0:10:00 And we don’t know psychologically what that’s doing to us.
0:10:02 One question I have for you, Instagram, our TikTok Reels.
0:10:07 Reels, to me, are the most addicted thing because as the algorithm
0:10:11 fine tunes itself, it’s fine in the dumb stuff that I lack my ass off at.
0:10:14 Back in the day, I’m old enough now to remember before pre cell phone.
0:10:17 Pre cell phone, you would have one of these moments
0:10:21 once a week with your friends where someone would fall out of the chair,
0:10:23 something hilarious would happen and you would laugh your ass off.
0:10:27 And it was like, that was so awesome that we all experienced that.
0:10:29 And you laugh about it for years to come.
0:10:32 Now I’m having that moment every 30 seconds.
0:10:37 So the reward that I’m getting every 30 seconds is like those rewards
0:10:40 that I used to get once a week, and it’s just like nonstop.
0:10:46 And so here I am being entertained to the nth level like that I absolutely love.
0:10:49 And then when I don’t have that any longer,
0:10:53 now I’m I have to sit with my feelings and my emotions and everything else.
0:10:56 And the things that I don’t like, is that part of the issue?
0:10:59 Do you think there’s some evidence that things like boredom,
0:11:02 proneness is going up that when we have this moment where we can’t
0:11:07 whip out our phones and look at our reels, we feel this intense terrible boredom.
0:11:11 But also the stakes get higher because we have this being hit
0:11:13 on the funniness stuff every 30 seconds.
0:11:15 And these algorithms are making that even more frequent
0:11:18 and even more powerful a dopamine hit.
0:11:21 It means that like real life just hasn’t kind of caught up.
0:11:22 My husband’s a philosopher.
0:11:25 We have great dinner party conversations, but he doesn’t have an algorithm
0:11:29 in his brain that’s tracking what I find funny and super interesting
0:11:32 and updating every 30 seconds to give me content that I like.
0:11:35 And I think that means that temptation wise, we’re really pulled
0:11:37 to the screen world, the tick tock world.
0:11:42 If you think of like our psychological nutrition, actual psychological joy,
0:11:45 we get out of it, we get the sort of quick dopamine hit from the tick tock.
0:11:48 But as soon as you put it down, you feel gross and lonely
0:11:51 and maybe overwhelmed and a little dizzy or whatever.
0:11:53 Whereas you don’t get that from talking to people.
0:11:55 I think this is something that’s just neuroscientifically
0:11:58 like super fascinating, which is our reward systems are weird
0:12:02 and we don’t necessarily go for and crave the rewards
0:12:04 that are going to make us feel the best in life.
0:12:08 There’s this interesting neuroscientific disconnect between systems
0:12:11 that code for wanting versus liking.
0:12:14 So if it’s long dinner with my husband, we have this intense conversation.
0:12:16 I’ll like that. I’ll feel really connected to him afterwards.
0:12:18 That will feel really pleasurable for me.
0:12:21 But I don’t actually want that or crave that in the same way
0:12:24 I might for the next reel in like a tick tock series, right?
0:12:26 Like I crave, I really want.
0:12:28 But if you were to kind of measure in my pleasure centers,
0:12:32 whether or not I liked it, I might get that like quick hit off of liking it.
0:12:34 But it’s not a deeper liking.
0:12:37 And it turns out that this is just a feature of the brain that these circuits
0:12:42 that code for wanting and craving and going after stuff are just different than liking.
0:12:46 And I mean, there’s all this stuff we crave that we’ll spend money on.
0:12:47 We don’t end up liking in the end.
0:12:51 It also means there’s all this stuff we really probably will like
0:12:55 that we don’t have craving for, like deep social connection or a contemplative time
0:13:00 where you’re just kind of present or even to a certain extent exercise and moving your body.
0:13:03 I think some people get the craving for exercise, but like I’m just not one of those.
0:13:06 I have to work at it and force myself to do it all the time.
0:13:10 Yeah, yeah. So I feel like if we could just line up the brain systems
0:13:12 for wanting and liking, we’d be better off.
0:13:16 But what makes companies money is algorithms that just tap into the wanting.
0:13:17 They don’t really care about the liking.
0:13:19 In my mind, it’s not any one thing.
0:13:25 If I have to feel it has to be a composition of different aspects of life
0:13:31 and interactions and things that we do to create the perfect stew of happiness.
0:13:33 Is that accurate to say?
0:13:34 TikTok is not going to make me happy.
0:13:38 Deep conversations with my wife aren’t going to check every single box that I have.
0:13:40 What is that composition look like?
0:13:42 And how do you actually teach that to people?
0:13:45 Part of it’s just overcoming the misconceptions we have about the stuff
0:13:48 that we think is going to make us happy, but isn’t going to work, right?
0:13:51 So in our young people today, they think the main thing in that big composition pile is money.
0:13:54 If I get a money in fame, then I would be fine.
0:13:58 And it is true that if you don’t have any money, then getting some money is important.
0:13:59 You get your basic needs sorted.
0:14:03 But the evidence suggests that once you do that more and more infinitely,
0:14:05 it doesn’t have a kind of infinite slope on your happiness.
0:14:07 Kerry talks about this a lot. Yeah.
0:14:10 Fantastic. And that’s like the kind of money and fame, right?
0:14:11 Because I think we all put that up there.
0:14:13 And so that’s one that I think we kind of get wrong.
0:14:18 I think just even like selfish material pursuits, we think happiness is about me.
0:14:22 The evidence seems to suggest if you look at happy people are much more other oriented.
0:14:24 They do nice stuff for other people.
0:14:26 They’re really focused on other people’s happiness.
0:14:28 It seems like that’s kind of a path to doing it better.
0:14:33 And so a lot of what we do when we try to teach the composition is that you think this works,
0:14:36 but it’s not that and then come around to like, what is it really?
0:14:40 And it seems to be really based in other people like a path of service,
0:14:43 a path of service, but just being around other people.
0:14:47 If you look at very happy people and the way people do this is, you know,
0:14:51 we do these happiness surveys on these like well validated psychometric measures.
0:14:54 So you can say, OK, these subjects are self report being very happy.
0:14:56 What are they doing differently?
0:14:59 And what you find is they spend a lot of time with other people.
0:15:02 Their actions tend to be focused on other people.
0:15:04 So they’re kind of thinking about other people a lot.
0:15:06 They don’t spend a lot of time on screens.
0:15:09 They spend more time just proportionately in real life,
0:15:12 whether that’s being present, walking around outside or something.
0:15:14 Touching grass. Yeah, touching grass, moving around.
0:15:17 And they tend to have paths of purpose, right?
0:15:19 So they have a set of values that they’re moving towards.
0:15:21 So their actions when they’re not towards other people,
0:15:23 if they’re like at work or volunteer or whatever,
0:15:28 they’re really trying to do something that fits with their values that’s meaningful.
0:15:31 That’s a tough one because so many people
0:15:33 they’re stuck in a job that they don’t enjoy.
0:15:36 And this is, I think, of course, we need to take into account.
0:15:38 There’s real inequalities when it comes to the pursuit of happiness.
0:15:42 It’s way easier for some people than others to do things they find meaningful
0:15:44 and go after their values.
0:15:47 But one of the reasons I like the actual research on pursuing your values
0:15:51 is that it shows that many of us can get crafty about how we think of
0:15:57 doing things that match our values in all kinds of different jobs.
0:16:00 So one of my favorite lines of work on this is this Professor Amy Rizninski,
0:16:02 who’s at the University of Pennsylvania.
0:16:04 She does all this work on what she calls job crafting,
0:16:07 which is like you take your regular job description and you infuse
0:16:11 whatever your values and strengths are, whether that’s creativity or bravery
0:16:16 or their social connection or your persistence or learning or whatever it is.
0:16:20 She does most of her work in hospital janitorial staff workers.
0:16:24 So these are people who are like cleaning up the linen in a hospital room.
0:16:29 And what she finds is that between 20 to 30 percent of them say that their job is a calling.
0:16:30 They don’t hate their job. They love it.
0:16:32 They wouldn’t change it for anything.
0:16:34 And when she digs into what they’re doing,
0:16:38 they’re taking their normal job description and finding a way to add this meaningful thing in.
0:16:43 Is it a calling then or is it in addition of something that creates a calling?
0:16:48 One example she has is this guy who worked in a chemotherapy ward
0:16:51 and crappy thing about having cancer and having to get chemo as you get sick.
0:16:54 His main job was like cleaning up vomit because people throw up on the floor
0:16:56 and he said, yeah, I have to do that.
0:16:59 But like my main thing is I like humor and I like making people laugh.
0:17:02 These people have like such a crappy life right now.
0:17:04 And he had like his whole standard.
0:17:08 So his standard joke, I guess, was like, he makes fun of, oh, you vomit it again.
0:17:10 I’m going to get overtime. You keep throwing up this week.
0:17:11 Let’s work it out.
0:17:14 But then the person last, he’s like, that’s my job.
0:17:17 She talks about another staff member who worked in a coma ward.
0:17:20 She couldn’t talk to the patients because the patients are all in comas,
0:17:23 but she would move the art around or plants like this little plant
0:17:24 that were sitting near here.
0:17:27 She’d like move the succulents around the room to get creative.
0:17:29 That was how she found meaning in her work.
0:17:33 And so Rosnicki’s stuff basically says, look, even in the kind of
0:17:38 narrowest, perhaps crappiest job, you can find ways to bring in your values.
0:17:41 And what’s cool about her work is you might assume if you were a manager
0:17:44 of these people, you’d be mad at the chemo guys, you know, chat with the people
0:17:45 and not cleaning up.
0:17:48 But what she finds is that managers self report that these workers
0:17:52 are doing the best job at their real job description because they love their job.
0:17:53 They’re like in a good mood.
0:17:55 They’re not slacking off and trying to go to the break room.
0:17:57 They want to engage because they’ve figured out a way.
0:17:59 And that’s why I love her work.
0:18:01 It really suggests that, like, look, any of us could jobcraft.
0:18:05 We just have to get creative about ways to fit stuff in.
0:18:08 All right, it’s time to talk about Notion.
0:18:11 I am always on the hunt and always playing with the latest and greatest
0:18:13 productivity software.
0:18:15 Notion is one that I’ve used for many, many years now.
0:18:18 So I’m stoked to have them on as a sponsor.
0:18:20 Notion has been a tool that’s been taking my productivity
0:18:22 absolutely to the next level.
0:18:25 I love the way you can build it out to suit your specific needs.
0:18:29 Notion combines your notes, your docs and your projects all into one space
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0:18:35 And they have this new fully integrated Notion AI, which helps you work faster,
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0:18:49 If you haven’t tried Notion yet, obviously, you’ve heard about it.
0:18:52 If you haven’t tried it yet, you should definitely give it a shot.
0:18:55 You could try it for free when you go to Notion.com/KevinRose.
0:19:01 And when you use our link, you’ll be supporting the show that’s Notion.com/KevinRose.
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0:20:11 One question about that, how much shaming comes from employment?
0:20:12 Like I’ll give you an example.
0:20:16 When I travel to Japan, I always seek out small little artisans
0:20:18 that are the best at their craft.
0:20:24 And I met this guy one time in Tokyo that is known for aging coffee beans.
0:20:26 And so he has coffee beans that are 10, 15 years old.
0:20:30 It takes him about 20 minutes to make a single cup of coffee
0:20:35 because he does this insanely slow, poor process that just takes forever.
0:20:40 So he can probably do, I would say, maybe 20, 25 of them a day.
0:20:42 And you have to be lucky enough to get in.
0:20:46 And the price is about seven US dollars.
0:20:48 Was it good when he was fantastic.
0:20:52 And he wears a bow tie and he dresses up and he’s dressed to the nines.
0:20:57 And there is so much pride in what he does.
0:21:03 And not only pride in what he does, but pride from the community as well
0:21:08 and a respect for someone that just hones their craft.
0:21:11 I don’t think we have that here.
0:21:15 Yeah. Capitalism isn’t awesome about respecting those kinds of things.
0:21:18 She’s like, oh, my God, well, if we could train other people to do it
0:21:22 and then make a machine that we get really great and stuff will scale it.
0:21:23 So I think a couple of things.
0:21:27 One is I think Riznensky’s work shows that within the scope
0:21:30 of people’s typical job descriptions, you don’t have to have a job
0:21:31 like that guy to find meaning.
0:21:35 But if you are that guy and you have a craft that allows you to get meaning,
0:21:38 it is the case that adding these extrinsic rewards on top of it
0:21:41 winds up screwing up your feelings towards it.
0:21:44 And I think we don’t need to be a guy with that kind of level of talent
0:21:49 and specific skill to take the normal, enjoyable pursuits we have like running.
0:21:53 You get a Fitbit and now all of a sudden you get obsessive about it.
0:21:55 No longer the kind of internal reward you got from the running.
0:21:59 I watch this in my students who want to say like, oh, I’ll have my side hustle.
0:22:02 At first, the side hustle was just like you did some art or you designed it
0:22:03 because it was fun.
0:22:06 And now you have a due date at Thursday at 7 p.m.
0:22:08 and you hate it because you’ve got to rush to do it.
0:22:10 All the joy has been stolen from it.
0:22:14 So I think it is the case that as we add these extrinsic rewards
0:22:18 onto the stuff we care about, all of a sudden it feels yucky.
0:22:21 And I think this is one of the reasons we’re seeing so many increases
0:22:25 in depression and anxiety, particularly among our teens and our young people.
0:22:28 Because we’ve taken a lot of the fun stuff that kids did and turned it
0:22:32 into like a LinkedIn resume building or college application building process.
0:22:35 Kids usually just play soccer, but now it’s like, well, you got to be on the soccer team.
0:22:37 Oh, it’s an extracurricular.
0:22:38 Well, that’ll look good for a piece of it.
0:22:41 Totally. I think part is that they don’t have any time anymore.
0:22:44 This is another thing as we talk about the recipe for a happy life.
0:22:48 Free time and what the social scientists these days are calling time
0:22:51 affluence, the sort of fact that you’re wealthy in time.
0:22:55 You seem like you have a lot of time, such an important part of our wellbeing.
0:22:58 And that, you know, I mean, you younger kids, like the kids are just so busy.
0:23:01 They have a play date that has to happen at one o’clock
0:23:02 and we’ve got to drive in traffic to get there.
0:23:07 And so we’re kind of changing around what used to count as intrinsic rewards.
0:23:12 And it was just fun and we’re kind of turning it more extrinsic and more scheduled.
0:23:14 And those features make it less enjoyable.
0:23:16 Have you seen any old Mr.
0:23:20 Rogers quotes when he’s interviewed by Charlie Rose?
0:23:24 He says, one of the greatest gifts that he’s received is the gift of silence
0:23:27 where he has that decompression time.
0:23:29 And he’s very well known for I studied Mr.
0:23:31 Rogers quite a bit because I love a guy.
0:23:33 And I think he was enlightened.
0:23:34 I think he just did. Totally. Yeah.
0:23:36 And he used to swim every single morning.
0:23:40 And that was like his time, his silence, and he didn’t miss a beat.
0:23:41 He would go and swim for an hour.
0:23:48 I wonder how do we reintroduce silence into our everyday life?
0:23:53 My youngest, who’s five now, when I let her watch Daniel Tiger,
0:23:55 because it’s based on Mr. Rogers, which is a great show.
0:24:01 And so we do give them some iPad time, not for games, but more so for educational content.
0:24:02 She loves elephants.
0:24:06 So she watches elephants, like actual elephant documentaries and stuff.
0:24:08 One got attacked by a tiger the other day, and I was freaking out.
0:24:10 I was like, Danny Tiger is going to be destroyed.
0:24:13 Yeah. Well, this is a real elephant getting attacked by the hyena.
0:24:15 And I told my wife, did you check the rating on this before we put this on?
0:24:19 But anyway, when she is not doing something,
0:24:22 a common thing that comes out of her mouth is, what do I do?
0:24:26 The shows of her, what do I do?
0:24:27 Like, how do you handle that?
0:24:30 I mean, I think we’ve all, including our kids, including five year olds,
0:24:32 have gotten bad at being bored.
0:24:34 Right. There’s like a real irony to that,
0:24:38 given that you can handle a device with every year kids TV show
0:24:40 in the history of the world on it.
0:24:42 I think we should have thought when we got all these technologies
0:24:45 that what would happen is like boredom would be a thing in the past.
0:24:48 You hear this term bored, our kids should be like, what is boredom?
0:24:50 Dad, what is that like an ancient technology?
0:24:53 This ancient thing we used to sit silently and didn’t know what it felt like.
0:24:58 I think if anything, our kids are more bored than ever as soon as the stimulation stops.
0:25:00 And that’s, I think, the irony of it.
0:25:03 I grew up like bad 70s TV watching Mr. Rogers.
0:25:07 If you watch Mr. Rogers for the half hours on TV in the late 70s.
0:25:08 My kids can’t watch it.
0:25:09 Yeah, they need it to be faster.
0:25:11 They need it to be infinite.
0:25:14 And I think we’ve kind of developed this world where we never have to be bored.
0:25:20 But what boredom is, is so all negative emotions really have a good evolutionary purpose.
0:25:24 Natural selection when build this stuff in boredom, sadness, loneliness,
0:25:25 if it wasn’t for something.
0:25:29 And so I think boredom is our cue that like, oh, I should go out and do something
0:25:31 stimulating. I should find something meaningful.
0:25:32 I should find purpose.
0:25:36 Whereas when we can kind of slap the screen band aid on our boredom,
0:25:40 it means we never have to feel it long enough to find what we really want to do.
0:25:42 And I worry about this in kids.
0:25:43 I worry about this in adults, too.
0:25:47 I’ll watch myself when I have those spare moments and I’ll grab my phone.
0:25:48 Mine is an Instagram reel.
0:25:50 It’s actually just scrolling through Reddit, embarrassingly.
0:25:53 Yeah, just like, you know, there’s always a next page
0:25:55 and there might be something cool on it.
0:26:00 But that means I never have these moments where I sit quietly and have ideas
0:26:02 or think about things or have insights or the best.
0:26:05 Insights actually, those shower moments are real.
0:26:07 So the advice, actually, you mentioned Mr.
0:26:11 Rogers and swimming, the advice I get from a lot of these kind of experts
0:26:15 on sort of finding silence is actually to swim, to take a bath, take a shower.
0:26:17 Because when you’re in water, when I have my phones,
0:26:19 I’m terrified that like our phone technology is going to figure out
0:26:22 how to be in the shower. And then it’s funny.
0:26:25 I just got one of those cool plunges from my house, which I absolutely love
0:26:29 in terms of like just giving you a hit of just energy and peace.
0:26:31 Fantastic. Mine came with an iPhone adapter on the side.
0:26:34 I was like, oh, shit, it’s everywhere.
0:26:38 Well, I remember, I mean, again, I’m old enough to remember when we had the internet
0:26:40 and we had like a little Wi-Fi, but it wasn’t phones.
0:26:41 It wasn’t everywhere.
0:26:44 I remember being on trains before trains had Wi-Fi.
0:26:49 And it was such a good concentrated work time and thinking time.
0:26:51 And you just watch the world go by.
0:26:52 Now the Amtrak has Wi-Fi.
0:26:54 It’s great in the sense that I get work done
0:26:57 and I can connect with things and not be bored on the train.
0:26:59 But you’ve lost something important.
0:27:02 You’ve lost looking at the window and seeing all the beauty.
0:27:07 Exactly. We don’t notice how much of that time we’ve lost in the last 10 years.
0:27:10 One of my favorite indicators of how little time we spend not looking at our screens
0:27:14 is that apparently in the last 10 years, sales of gum, like grocery stores,
0:27:16 sales of chewing gum have gone down.
0:27:19 I forget what it is, but it’s like 200 or 300 percent.
0:27:21 And you’re like, why does that matter?
0:27:23 When do you usually buy chewing gum?
0:27:26 You’re in the line, you’re bored, you’re around, you’re like, oh, chewing gum.
0:27:27 I’ll grab it and buy it.
0:27:30 Impulse purchases of that form have gone down
0:27:33 because we’re not noticing this stuff anymore because our heads are very…
0:27:34 I don’t even pay attention to what’s around.
0:27:36 Checking out, you don’t even look anymore.
0:27:38 Like, again, I’m old enough to remember lines long.
0:27:40 You grab the magazine and kind of flip through the magazine.
0:27:42 Maybe I got like a little candy or whatever.
0:27:44 But like, that doesn’t exist anymore.
0:27:46 What else are we missing?
0:27:49 That’s also the time when I might smile at my neighbor in the line
0:27:50 or have a quick chat with someone.
0:27:54 A lot of the evidence suggests those little tiny things of little noticing.
0:27:57 I’ll notice the girls in line with, oh, she’s got such a cute dress.
0:28:01 These little hits of delight and joy in the real world
0:28:05 are psychologically much more nutritious than whatever hit I’m going to get
0:28:07 in that line in 40 seconds growing through Reddit.
0:28:10 What are your thoughts on perfection or perfect moments?
0:28:14 One of the things that drives me a little crazy is I see these Google ads
0:28:17 that talk about their camera capabilities with AI.
0:28:22 And it’s like, hey, if you don’t like that person that was behind the camera,
0:28:26 you use the magic eraser and circle them and they disappear.
0:28:30 And in my mind, I’m never going to do that because that wasn’t real.
0:28:32 That literally didn’t happen.
0:28:34 There was a person standing there.
0:28:36 You literally wiped out someone’s existence.
0:28:40 If you’re old enough to have old film like photographs when you were a kid
0:28:43 and you flip through them, some of the most interesting things for me
0:28:46 are always like, what was on my desk?
0:28:48 I have a couple of photos of me when I was younger, messing around with computers.
0:28:51 I have some CD ROM sitting on there. I was like, oh, what do they have on there?
0:28:54 Oh, there was a little smudge here. Let me remove that.
0:28:56 Is that having a negative impact on us?
0:29:03 Because it seems like there’s this projection of perfection, luxury, money.
0:29:08 That is just it’s everywhere we look and it creates these expectations
0:29:13 that in order to be happy, I have to have that lifestyle or look that way.
0:29:16 The quick scrolling of just random funny cat videos.
0:29:18 Yeah, maybe worse, right?
0:29:22 For all kinds of reasons, one metric that those kinds of technologies
0:29:27 are fueling perfectionism is lots of research showing that perfectionism is going up.
0:29:31 If you look since the 80s to now, there are like 30 to 40 percent increases
0:29:34 in the amount of perfectionism our young people experience.
0:29:37 But it’s not all forms of perfectionism.
0:29:39 So there’s like kind of three kinds of perfectionism.
0:29:40 One is I expect myself to be perfect.
0:29:42 So my standards apply to myself.
0:29:46 There’s a kind of other focus, perfectionism, which is I expect you to be perfect.
0:29:49 Think of the jerk boss who forces your kids, right?
0:29:50 They’re all going up.
0:29:53 But the one that’s going up most is what’s called socially prescribed
0:29:58 prescriptionism, which is I think everyone else wants me to be perfect.
0:30:01 I think everyone else wants me to be rich and have the perfect body
0:30:03 and never be off in a photo.
0:30:08 We kind of think the world is watching us and the world has expectations on us.
0:30:11 And it turns out that’s a form of perfectionism that’s most insidious
0:30:16 because it makes us feel like my worth depends on my looks and my job
0:30:18 and my wallet and all these things.
0:30:21 And I’m sure that’s even amplified when you’re younger
0:30:26 and you’re identifying who you are, what your belief systems are.
0:30:30 And then this is being shoved in your face as being like, hey, this could be value.
0:30:33 I remember again, like aging myself and all these domains.
0:30:36 But I remember like flipping through Seventeen Magazine.
0:30:38 I was like, wow, this is what teen girls like me are supposed to look like.
0:30:40 They should have this body and this amount of stuff.
0:30:42 But I like close a magazine and went out with my friends.
0:30:46 I didn’t have a thing in my pocket that was telling me these things.
0:30:50 And even the Photoshop tools that those Seventeen Magazine people had back in the day
0:30:53 are nothing like the tools that we have today.
0:30:56 And those tools are in the pockets of all my mean girl middle school friends
0:30:58 who are posting their pictures online.
0:31:03 And so I think the perfection that we see in the world has started to become embodied
0:31:06 in the perfectionism we think the world expects of us.
0:31:08 And then the data are kind of bearing this out.
0:31:11 I also think it’s just messing with our memories, right?
0:31:14 I think we want the perfect shot of what things look like.
0:31:19 But then those becomes the metrics by which we measure ourselves later on.
0:31:21 We’re having this conversation at South by and, you know, I did the thing
0:31:24 where you pose in front of the South by mural with my friends.
0:31:26 Somebody else took the picture for us who wasn’t a selfie.
0:31:29 And I looked at it and I was like, oh, kind of I don’t like the hair.
0:31:32 I was going to do it, but I was like, wait a minute, like that’s what I look like here.
0:31:35 If I perfect this photo, it’s just going to make me misremember what was happening.
0:31:38 And it’s going to make me feel like crap whenever I look at that photo.
0:31:41 Normally, my hair is not going to be, you know, distribution,
0:31:43 like two sigma perfect hair every day.
0:31:45 There’s going to be other kinds of hair.
0:31:47 I think that’s part of the reason why when you see people with selfie sticks
0:31:52 and you run into an influencer from afar and you watch them take the same photo
0:31:56 like 30 times and you’re like, whoa, something is dry of them to say,
0:32:00 this has to be absolutely perfect, which is insane.
0:32:02 This seems exhausting to me.
0:32:04 Totally. They also look like a jerk, right?
0:32:06 You’re looking at all these videos of the inflator.
0:32:07 I’m the main character.
0:32:08 They’re funny, by the way.
0:32:11 These are accounts dedicated to people taking photos of themselves,
0:32:13 which in a horrible way, I think it’s hilarious.
0:32:17 Yeah, but it is a sign that like we can’t just accept ourselves on like photo.
0:32:19 Number one, we have to make it perfect.
0:32:22 But when we do that, we’re really missing out on the memories
0:32:24 and what these things are going to look like later.
0:32:25 Absolutely.
0:32:28 I want to take it two directions, one with kids and one with adults.
0:32:32 When an adult comes to you and says, I’m having a hard time.
0:32:34 I don’t know what my future is.
0:32:36 Maybe I’m midlife crisis mode.
0:32:38 I’m having these issues.
0:32:40 I’m trying to find happiness.
0:32:43 What are your strategies if you were a therapist?
0:32:48 How do you unpack where they are and how do you get them to a better place?
0:32:49 Well, one is just to normalize it.
0:32:52 Just to be like, yes, you and literally everybody else.
0:32:54 One thing, especially for folks like us in midlife,
0:32:58 to remember is that happiness tends to have to serve U shaped curve.
0:33:01 So it’s like starts off good when you’re young and you’re a kid.
0:33:04 You tend to be pretty happy and then you get to midlife and it kind of sucks.
0:33:06 I think the nadir varies depending on the study.
0:33:08 But the best estimate I’ve seen is 48.6.
0:33:10 So where’s you’re going to be?
0:33:12 And then 48.6.
0:33:14 Yeah, that’s like I know I just passed it.
0:33:18 But then the good news is like it gets better as you get into older adulthood.
0:33:21 So I think one thing is just to be like, that’s just what happens.
0:33:22 It’s just how this goes.
0:33:25 I think the second thing is with the sciences is lots of strategies
0:33:27 you can engage in to feel better.
0:33:33 Oftentimes one of the reasons midlife is so unhappy is that people are really busy.
0:33:35 You might just need to focus on feeling less time
0:33:39 famished and find some time affluence, take stuff off your plate,
0:33:41 try to take time to just rest and be.
0:33:43 What are strategies for that, though?
0:33:46 For someone that says, hey, I have these conversations with my wife all the time
0:33:50 around this idea of work life balance or being able to do things
0:33:53 that they teach our kids this in school, that the things that fill your bucket.
0:33:56 Well, how do you get people to make that change?
0:33:57 One is to just get more time.
0:34:01 If you have some discretionary income, you can spend the money to get back time.
0:34:03 Research by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School.
0:34:04 She’s fabulous.
0:34:07 This whole book called Time Smart on all these strategies to get more time.
0:34:12 Her work shows that the more you spend money to get back time, the happier you are.
0:34:16 Like hire a cleaning service or you pay the neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn
0:34:17 or you get takeout.
0:34:20 We go to restaurants and get food a lot of the time, but we don’t realize.
0:34:22 We don’t think of it in terms of the time savings.
0:34:24 You go get Pad Thai that’s noodles.
0:34:26 You have to chop up and look at the recipe or whatever.
0:34:28 That’s an hour and a half.
0:34:28 What did you do with that?
0:34:31 But let me push back on that for a second, because I’m curious.
0:34:34 Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk, are you familiar with his work?
0:34:38 One of the things that he says is to wash the dishes is to wash the dishes.
0:34:39 That sounds weird to people.
0:34:44 But what it actually means is rather than have your mind be in a thousand other places,
0:34:51 you are dedicated fully in your being to being OK with being in this present moment
0:34:56 and spending your time washing the dishes and how peaceful that is.
0:34:59 But it becomes peaceful if you feel time affluent enough to wash the dishes.
0:35:01 The problem is most people are not doing that.
0:35:04 They’re washing the dishes while they’re taking a conference call.
0:35:07 Or the seat is a task that is just beneath them.
0:35:09 So the key is like with the time saving.
0:35:11 What you want to do is get rid of your unwanted tasks.
0:35:12 The Buddhist monks are right.
0:35:17 We could take any task and make it one that is mindful that we can enjoy and see the beauty in.
0:35:21 But when you are so overwhelmed, you look at your calendar and there’s a day like that.
0:35:24 You’re not even going to brush your teeth with that kind of moment of presence.
0:35:25 Everything’s like, ah.
0:35:28 And so the key is if you can get some of that off your plate,
0:35:32 especially the stuff that you really genuinely don’t like to do, like I like cooking.
0:35:35 I wouldn’t want to offer money to hire like a private chef or whatever.
0:35:37 But I wouldn’t want to offload that even if I could.
0:35:38 But I freaking hate the dishes.
0:35:41 If I could get somebody to unload the dishwasher, that’s great.
0:35:44 It’s not to get rid of all these tasks where you could be in the moment.
0:35:48 But if your schedule is so frantic that you can’t do that and you’re lucky enough
0:35:52 to have some discretionary income to do that, you can offload those tasks.
0:35:55 Actually, research is cool because she actually does it at different income levels.
0:35:59 And she finds if you have any discretionary income, however you spend
0:36:02 that to save time, whether it’s like hire the neighbor’s kid to clean up the yard
0:36:04 or something, that can actually be helpful.
0:36:08 An even better one, though, is to make good use of what’s called time confetti.
0:36:12 So journalist Bridget Schultz has this term time confetti, which is like
0:36:15 the five minutes in the grocery store at line or the 10 minutes
0:36:18 when your kid falls asleep early and you’ve got a little extra.
0:36:20 She suggests that you need to use that well.
0:36:21 The problem is we blow it off.
0:36:25 We look at TikTok, whereas if I use that to take a breath,
0:36:29 like text a friend, get my bearings, call a friend, call a friend.
0:36:32 Moving your body is a huge thing for happiness exercise.
0:36:34 You really do the seven minute in your time to work out.
0:36:38 If you get seven minutes, this way of using our time confetti well.
0:36:42 That’s what I was going to ask you, because it’s one thing to say, OK,
0:36:44 I’m going to hire someone to mow the lawn.
0:36:48 But if you just then go and sit down and do TikTok, exactly, there’s no upside there.
0:36:51 If someone says, hey, and we can take this to students as well.
0:36:52 They’re like, hey, I’m depressed.
0:36:54 I’m having a hard time here.
0:36:57 Obviously, depression is something to take very seriously.
0:37:01 So I mean, you want to seek out professional help ASAP.
0:37:06 But aside from that, in terms of tangible things that people can do,
0:37:10 if you had to stack rank them, maybe this is an impossible thing for you to do.
0:37:15 But like, would you say walks outdoors, social connection would be really high on the list.
0:37:17 How about nature, something for all that?
0:37:20 Nature, nature bathing is a thing not as much in this country,
0:37:22 but in other countries, forest bathing.
0:37:25 Yes, move your body exercise.
0:37:27 Honestly, for most young people, sleep.
0:37:29 I actually think we could solve most of the young people mental health crisis
0:37:32 if we could just get them to sleep a little bit more.
0:37:33 So those are all behaviors.
0:37:35 In terms of mindset, we can do a lot of hacks.
0:37:39 So scribble in a gratitude journal, take some time to be a little bit more present.
0:37:41 Screen away and just like, what does this room look like?
0:37:44 We’re in this beautiful space with these black walls.
0:37:47 I could look at them just that moment of I’m present.
0:37:49 I’m embodied and I’m here can be a lot.
0:37:51 Are you a meditator?
0:37:52 I’m supposed to be a meditator.
0:37:54 I do meditate sometimes.
0:37:56 I don’t meditate enough as I should.
0:37:57 I take a lot of walks.
0:37:58 I walk to work.
0:38:02 And even though I’m a podcast or a web podcast, I try not to listen to podcasts.
0:38:07 I try to have no music and just be present on my walks, which isn’t meditation per se,
0:38:11 but it’s my form of like being present and being with my thoughts and noticing.
0:38:12 But meditation is a huge one.
0:38:16 And again, one that is more by Hedy Cobra and others is showing that like,
0:38:19 you don’t have to do it Buddhist monk style like hours a day.
0:38:22 Five minutes can have these huge benefits,
0:38:25 especially even to novice meditators who’ve never done it before.
0:38:29 I have a friend, I would say she’s addicted to information.
0:38:33 Whereas like when she goes on a walk, she has to listen to audiobooks.
0:38:37 It’s almost always audiobooks where it’s like 10 a month, perfecting things.
0:38:39 Is that a thing as well?
0:38:40 Is that a bad habit?
0:38:42 They’re all opportunity cost, far be it from me.
0:38:44 I mean, there are probably people listening right now walking around.
0:38:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:38:46 Keep the podcast going.
0:38:47 Keep the podcast going.
0:38:47 At least this one.
0:38:50 That means you might not be noticing what’s on your walk
0:38:53 or having free time to kind of let your mind wander.
0:38:57 I think it becomes a problem when there’s anxiety and you can’t not have it.
0:38:58 I watched this happen.
0:39:00 We’re having this conversation a few weeks ago.
0:39:03 I remember there’s like this AT&T crash where the cell phone tower went out
0:39:04 and none of the Wi-Fi was working.
0:39:06 You couldn’t get on your in email.
0:39:07 You couldn’t get on anything.
0:39:10 And I was just watching people like the heroin Jones, man,
0:39:13 where they were like tapping of like, why is my iPhone not working?
0:39:14 Maybe I got to get on the network.
0:39:18 You couldn’t do the walk without some information.
0:39:20 It’s not so much that this stuff is bad.
0:39:23 It’s when this stuff becomes the only way you can interact.
0:39:26 And it’s important to ask yourself sort of, what else?
0:39:29 What am I missing out on because I’m doing this?
0:39:32 How much do hobbies play a role in happiness?
0:39:34 You know, I took a pottery class one time.
0:39:35 Beautiful.
0:39:36 Yeah, really present.
0:39:37 You’re kind of in it.
0:39:40 You have to pay a constantly paying attention to what’s going on,
0:39:41 especially if you’re using a wheel.
0:39:43 Are there habits that you see?
0:39:45 I mean, obviously, we talked about exercise and running.
0:39:47 That’s the huge one.
0:39:51 Are there other habits that people pick up that tend to lead to good outcomes?
0:39:54 One of the reasons the pottery is so powerful is that the presence part.
0:39:54 You’re there.
0:39:55 You’re not using your phone.
0:39:57 It’s forcing you to be mindful.
0:39:58 Another is that you’re learning.
0:39:59 You’re sort of bad at it.
0:40:01 So your growth curve is kind of high.
0:40:05 And that puts you in a state of what researchers like Mihai Cheeks at Mihai
0:40:08 call flow, right, where the challenge is kind of high,
0:40:12 but you’re getting skills that can do it and you have to fully pay attention.
0:40:16 And flow states wind up being incredible states for our well-being.
0:40:17 You don’t initially have to get it through pottery.
0:40:20 You can get it through making bread or skiing.
0:40:23 Or the key is that you’re doing something that like it’s hard, right?
0:40:27 You have to have your attention, but you kind of are building skills of the same
0:40:28 time to do it.
0:40:30 Those flow states feel great.
0:40:32 But I think another thing about the pottery is my guess is you aren’t doing it
0:40:35 as like a side hustle to sell your pots or something.
0:40:38 It was purely for the entertainment of it.
0:40:41 And I think these days, it’s hard for us to find these things that we do purely
0:40:43 for the entertainment of it.
0:40:47 It’s really easy to get competitive about it or to stick a number on it
0:40:49 or to want to monetize it somehow.
0:40:53 And every time we stick those extrinsic rewards on something,
0:40:55 it makes it less intrinsically enjoyable.
0:40:59 There’s this large psychological phenomenon that extrinsic rewards
0:41:01 crowd out intrinsic rewards.
0:41:05 So if you like give somebody a grade for something or you’re going to get paid
0:41:08 for your pottery or I’m going to rank it or rate it all of a sudden,
0:41:11 you’re not doing it because it was fun and you had flow and you’re enjoying it.
0:41:15 Especially when it comes to bringing friends into tasks,
0:41:19 like if you offer to pay a friend to help you move versus, you know,
0:41:21 actually, can you talk about that event?
0:41:24 Yeah, so we kind of don’t understand how rewards work.
0:41:26 It’s kind of the general feature of psychology.
0:41:28 We’re just like, there’s so much stuff we have misconceptions about
0:41:29 that we stick our feet in it.
0:41:31 When do we get it wrong?
0:41:34 And so you’d assume that like adding a reward to something would make it good.
0:41:36 If you like doing pottery, I’m like, let me pay you to do pottery.
0:41:39 Then you get the liking of the doing pottery plus you’re getting paid.
0:41:41 You know, your friend’s going to help you move.
0:41:43 They’re going to help me move and I’ll pay them and it’ll make it better.
0:41:46 But it turns out these extrinsic rewards undermine it.
0:41:49 Like your friend, if you tried to pay them like how much was that worth your time?
0:41:50 What’s your hourly rate?
0:41:53 Oh, I’ll give you $450 or whatever it is.
0:41:57 They’d be like, nah, I was doing it for what I wanted to do it for love.
0:41:59 And so these backfire effects are kind of clever.
0:42:03 There’s a very famous one of a daycare center that had the problem
0:42:05 where parents were kind of showing up a little late and the parents would feel
0:42:07 guilty, but it sucked for the daycare center.
0:42:08 And they’re like, you know what we’re going to do?
0:42:09 We’re going to charge parents.
0:42:13 Every time parents come in late, like $10 or something a hundred percent of the
0:42:14 parents are like, okay, I get it.
0:42:15 I can just pay.
0:42:18 So we’re in the transactional mode as opposed to you’re just helping me
0:42:20 and it’s out of your guilt and your enjoyability.
0:42:24 We have this interesting internalized capitalism and how we think motivation
0:42:27 works. We think, oh, I’ll pay people more or I’ll give someone a reward.
0:42:32 And what that does is it makes people’s normal reasons for doing something kind of go away.
0:42:35 I think this is part and parcel of why we’re having all these discussions
0:42:38 about things like quiet quitting and so on and why they’re sort of a
0:42:42 disconnect sometimes between the way young people think about work and old
0:42:47 people, whereas we’ve gotten so involved in thinking about the value of our
0:42:48 work as a monetary thing.
0:42:51 We’ve sort of missed out that sometimes the value of our work is like a
0:42:55 deep intrinsic reward thing or like the value we get out of doing a good job and
0:43:00 so on. But that goes away when you’re so focused on the monetary side of it.
0:43:04 We see this, I think, in our young people with grades where I think there was a time
0:43:07 when school was about learning, you know, it’s fun and because learning is fun,
0:43:10 right? We kind of like doing these things. You slap a grade on something all of a
0:43:12 sudden it becomes not enjoyable.
0:43:16 It was really old work in the 70s by the psychologist Susan Harder had kids doing
0:43:20 these like anagrams and puzzles. So they’re doing these kind of fun puzzles.
0:43:22 But then she has some kids get grades for them.
0:43:25 And what she finds is that when kids start getting graded for them, they don’t
0:43:28 enjoy them anymore. Before the grade, they’re smiling and having fun and
0:43:31 they’re enjoying it. Now with the grade, they think it sucks.
0:43:34 And when you give them choices of which puzzles to pick, the ones who are
0:43:37 getting graded pick the easiest ones because they’re like, Oh my God, I’m
0:43:40 just trying to get the best grade. Whereas if you don’t have grades, you pick
0:43:43 the hardest ones that you can do because you’re like, I’m only doing it because
0:43:46 it’s fun. Yeah, it’s challenging. And if you don’t win, who cares?
0:43:50 It was just like a good challenge. Yeah. And so I think our mistaken theories
0:43:54 of motivation sometimes wind up meaning that we take something that’s fun and
0:44:01 we give it something like a ding, a cost, a grade, a payment, a Christmas
0:44:05 bonus or whatever. And then we just make it less enjoyable and you make people
0:44:09 perform worse because they’re just trying to like do it the fastest possible
0:44:12 to get the grade. What do you think about I had heard this term a while ago
0:44:16 and I don’t know how it applies to your research, but there was this idea floated
0:44:22 of experience stretching. The frame to me was that you go out and you’re in
0:44:25 Hawaii, you’re in a beautiful place and you see this amazing sunset and you’re
0:44:29 like, God, that was just a beautiful sunset. Next day, same thing happens.
0:44:32 This time, somebody hands you a Mai Tai at the same time.
0:44:35 You’re like, oh, damn, this Mai Tai is good. The sunset’s great.
0:44:39 This is an even better experience. And the next day you can level up from there.
0:44:43 Someone hands you a cigar, whatever your poison is or doesn’t even have to be
0:44:47 a poison, but they add to the experience. And then all of a sudden, the next time
0:44:52 you’re presented with just a simple sunset, you go back to, well, it was better
0:44:57 if I only had those two extra, three extra things. You stretch that out.
0:45:00 Once you’re stretched, how do you pull that back in?
0:45:01 And is that a real thing?
0:45:04 Totally. This is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation.
0:45:08 You’re sort of on this hedonic treadmill and you just get used to stuff.
0:45:10 Hedonic, like hedonism?
0:45:13 Like hedonism, right? I mean, it’s a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff.
0:45:16 You see the sunset the first time, that’s great. You see it the next time.
0:45:19 It’s OK, but it’s not maybe as good as the first time.
0:45:21 You experience stress, you know, just get sunset.
0:45:23 You get sunset and Mai Tai.
0:45:25 Or if you just have a Mai Tai, you’re like, where’s my sunset?
0:45:29 And so this is the sad thing about great experiences in life
0:45:32 because we get used to them and they become the new standard.
0:45:36 Once you have an amazing experience, it like kind of ruins
0:45:39 experiences for you. So you can.
0:45:42 One of my favorite strategies is actually goes back to the ancient Stoics.
0:45:45 They had this idea they called negative visualization where they thought
0:45:49 every morning you should just take five minutes of the meditation
0:45:51 to think that all these terrible things are going to happen.
0:45:53 My wife is going to leave me. I’m going to lose my job.
0:45:55 I’m going to not be able to walk.
0:45:56 My car is going to get hit.
0:45:58 This isn’t like hours and hours of ruminating about.
0:46:00 This is just one moment about it.
0:46:01 My favorite one, the one that’s most effective.
0:46:04 I use this in talks sometime is you mentioned your kids.
0:46:07 Imagine right now, last time you saw your kids,
0:46:08 it’s the last time you’re going to see them.
0:46:09 Yeah, they’re gone.
0:46:11 That some terrible things happened.
0:46:12 She’s why you got to do this to me.
0:46:16 But I bet the next time you see them, you’re going to.
0:46:17 It seems like that’s an evil practice.
0:46:20 No, it causes you to notice all the good things.
0:46:21 The kids one is all terrible.
0:46:24 But like, let’s take my phone. I lost it, right?
0:46:25 Did I leave it in the car? Did I leave it at the restaurant?
0:46:27 Where is it? Found it in 10 minutes, 10 minutes.
0:46:29 I’m like, oh, my God, all my photos are in there.
0:46:30 Have I backed them up?
0:46:32 All my passwords are going to be such a pain in the ass.
0:46:32 And I get my phone back.
0:46:35 I’m like, oh, I wasn’t appreciating my phone at all.
0:46:38 I had no gratitude for my phone before I lost it.
0:46:39 But then you lose it.
0:46:40 And the negative visualization is good
0:46:42 because you don’t actually have to lose it.
0:46:44 You just have this moment of like, what is this?
0:46:45 What would this be like?
0:46:47 Do you think travel helps with that?
0:46:49 Travel to the countries where we don’t have as much?
0:46:53 Totally. If you’re in a kind of luxury situation a lot,
0:46:55 resetting the experience is good.
0:46:58 Sometimes for talks and things like fly first class.
0:47:00 I don’t want to always fly first class
0:47:00 because then you get used to it.
0:47:02 You got to go back and coach every once in a while
0:47:04 because it makes you can’t do anything.
0:47:06 You should try it. It’ll suck that time.
0:47:09 But you stopped experiencing the benefits of that.
0:47:10 No, but this…
0:47:12 I’m allowed one thing. You got to give me one thing.
0:47:13 Yeah, you can’t. First class for me is like…
0:47:14 They are small.
0:47:17 If it’s a short flight, fine.
0:47:18 But long flights, I can’t do it.
0:47:20 No, it’s good. The next time you go back, though,
0:47:23 you’re like, “Oh, I forgot they bring the stuff in the glass,
0:47:26 not the plastic. You don’t notice any of that now.”
0:47:28 If it’s too hard, you could do the negative visualization.
0:47:30 Then the next flight, I want to be in coach
0:47:33 and really think about it like, “Oh, it’s a plastic glass
0:47:34 and it’s really small.”
0:47:36 And then when you get like, “Oh, this is great.”
0:47:37 Yeah, we can use imagination
0:47:39 to kind of break out of Hedonic adaptation.
0:47:41 Another one that I find…
0:47:43 And this is, I think, why we get happiness so wrong.
0:47:45 We assume if I had all these pleasurable experiences,
0:47:47 it would continue to be pleasurable.
0:47:49 But because we get used to stuff,
0:47:51 the sunset with the Mai Tai, that experience stretch,
0:47:53 feels good the one time it’s stretched.
0:47:55 But we can’t. It’s unlikely that you’re going to be able
0:47:58 to have the privilege of stretching infinitely.
0:48:01 Sometimes these extraordinary experiences
0:48:02 make you feel worse.
0:48:04 Also, these extraordinary experiences
0:48:07 sometimes make you unable to connect with other people.
0:48:10 I just had this at South By in my podcast company
0:48:12 at this really cool private concert with folks
0:48:13 for just like 30 people.
0:48:15 And I got to see this amazing band
0:48:17 that last played at Madison Square Garden
0:48:20 privately, just standing there.
0:48:21 I both had a wonderful experience.
0:48:23 And then when I left, I was kind of like,
0:48:24 “This is going to literally ruin concert.
0:48:26 I’m never going to be able to go back.”
0:48:28 And be like, “Oh, you’re in row 20 now.”
0:48:30 You’re like, “Meh, it’s not as good.”
0:48:31 The other thing is, well, I’m going to go home
0:48:32 and people are going to be like, “How is South By?”
0:48:34 I’m like, “Oh, my God, I had this amazing.”
0:48:35 Then I feel like an asshole
0:48:36 because they don’t have that experience.
0:48:39 Well, that’s tough. And some people don’t have that filter.
0:48:40 And if you just drop that on a friend,
0:48:43 it’s like, that’s not a very thoughtful thing
0:48:44 that can crush somebody else.
0:48:48 There’s this evidence from Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth
0:48:50 that these so-called extraordinary experiences,
0:48:53 like you get to fly to the moon or like go in space
0:48:57 or have some amazing concert or Coachella private backstage.
0:48:59 You think it’s going to be amazing,
0:49:00 but actually it winds up doing two things.
0:49:03 It winds up ruining all the other experiences you have
0:49:05 because not everything’s going to be like Coachella backstage.
0:49:08 And then it winds up making you feel kind of lonely
0:49:10 because you can’t really share these experiences
0:49:12 with other people. You feel sort of isolated.
0:49:15 And this is the thing that happens to people
0:49:17 who get these quick, wealth windfalls,
0:49:21 to people who win the lottery, wind up feeling incredibly lonely
0:49:24 because it’s like nobody can share these experiences.
0:49:27 In one of my podcast episodes of my podcast, The Happiness Lab,
0:49:29 I interviewed this guy, Clay Cockrell,
0:49:30 who’s a mental health professional
0:49:33 who works with the .0001%
0:49:35 so these like super wealthy people.
0:49:38 And they complain about things like they can’t make any friends.
0:49:40 One of them joined that kind of like regular guide,
0:49:42 not super wealthy gym.
0:49:43 And he was like chatting with the guy, like,
0:49:44 “Oh, what’d you do this weekend?”
0:49:46 And the guy was like, “Oh, I tried out this new Mexican restaurant.
0:49:47 What did you do?”
0:49:48 And he couldn’t admit like,
0:49:50 “I flew with my wife and applied her plane to Paris
0:49:52 to try this new champagne.”
0:49:54 And here is like a very similar experience.
0:49:56 They both tried something, but he felt like,
0:49:57 “I can’t tell somebody that.”
0:50:01 And so one thing we don’t predict about becoming extremely famous
0:50:04 or extremely wealthy is like, you just can’t share that.
0:50:06 Not that many people can come along with you on the ride.
0:50:08 And so you feel so lonely.
0:50:10 One thing that I do, I love that I have you here
0:50:12 because I can throw out some curveballs your way
0:50:15 that I’m personally struggling with.
0:50:17 – We can do just Kevin therapy. – Thank you.
0:50:18 I would love that if you can get like a,
0:50:20 something I can really climb in
0:50:22 and we can just do a full therapy session.
0:50:23 I suck at a lot of things,
0:50:25 but one thing that I’m pretty good at
0:50:28 is seeing something and being grateful
0:50:29 that I’m having that experience.
0:50:31 I have this thing where
0:50:33 when something bad happens in our household
0:50:36 and it’s really not that big a deal,
0:50:40 I’ll say to my wife, “Well, at least we have warm running water.”
0:50:42 And she hates that.
0:50:45 She’s like, “That’s not helping the situation.”
0:50:47 And I’m like, “We live better than kings.”
0:50:50 Kings and queens did not have warm running water.
0:50:55 Sometimes if you can frame it back to those times,
0:50:56 you can just be like,
0:50:59 “Yeah, I missed my FedEx package that I was hoping to get
0:51:02 “because it was gonna be my weekend project, whatever,
0:51:04 “but I have warm water and it’s clean.”
0:51:05 – And I can drink it. – There are people who are dying.
0:51:07 – Does that help or am I just being an asshole?
0:51:10 – So it helps, but you have to be ready for it.
0:51:11 So I guess two things.
0:51:13 One is what we don’t wanna get into
0:51:14 is the kind of toxic positivity.
0:51:16 There are the FedEx packages that don’t come in.
0:51:17 There are bad days.
0:51:18 – But why is that crappy?
0:51:19 So it goes.
0:51:21 – I think you both wanna have a moment
0:51:24 to acknowledge that crappy, but then reframe it.
0:51:25 I think we don’t wanna get in a knee jerk
0:51:27 of any negative emotion is bad
0:51:29 because sometimes the negative emotions are normative.
0:51:31 Maybe not about the FedEx package.
0:51:32 That might not be it.
0:51:35 Sometimes my wife, my child, a friend, a colleague
0:51:37 will be having a negative emotion where I look at that
0:51:40 and I’m just like, “You’re just being ridiculous here.”
0:51:41 The world is not going to end
0:51:43 because of what you’re saying right now.
0:51:45 And I can’t relate.
0:51:48 And so I should have some empathy for how they are feeling.
0:51:49 Is that the way to do it?
0:51:51 – First of all, it’s part of the human condition.
0:51:52 Sometimes we’re gonna be frustrated.
0:51:54 And actually there’s some evidence
0:51:56 that one of the things we want for this recipe
0:51:58 of the happiest life is all the emotions.
0:52:00 We want what researchers call psychologically rich life.
0:52:01 You wouldn’t want a life
0:52:03 where you didn’t have the home of like a damn FedEx.
0:52:05 Sometimes our negative emotions are useful signals.
0:52:07 If you’re frustrated with the FedEx,
0:52:09 that might mean you need to like switch to a different company.
0:52:10 Again, that’s a kind of narrow example.
0:52:12 But if you’re looking at the news
0:52:13 and you’re feeling really anxious,
0:52:14 that’s telling you something
0:52:17 about how you might wanna get involved in the future.
0:52:19 If you’re kind of feeling lonely
0:52:21 or you’re feeling really overwhelmed is a huge one.
0:52:22 You come home and you use the example
0:52:23 of you talking to your wife,
0:52:26 she’s slamming things around and feeling really stressed out.
0:52:27 That’s not like, oh, we have running water.
0:52:29 That’s like, oh, this is a useful signal
0:52:31 that something’s off and we might need to rethink things.
0:52:33 – I say the running water thing and it does not land.
0:52:35 – I think compassion for the human condition
0:52:37 and the question of what is this negative emotion
0:52:38 trying to tell us?
0:52:40 And sometimes it’s not trying to tell me anything.
0:52:42 I could just reframe it and be fine.
0:52:44 This is actually helpful to sort of pay attention to.
0:52:46 Again, the ancients were so on top of this,
0:52:48 the Stoics got it where you can update
0:52:49 your negative emotions,
0:52:51 but first take a quick look to see
0:52:53 is it telling you something interesting?
0:52:56 ‘Cause I also watch the people who suppress every emotion
0:52:57 or just rewrite everything
0:53:00 and that gonna get you into toxic positivity landed.
0:53:03 – Yeah, that actually is my downfall as well.
0:53:06 ‘Cause sometimes if I’m feeling something like that,
0:53:08 I’ll say, well, I have running water,
0:53:11 but I’m really just pushing it down a little bit.
0:53:14 And then later it manifests when in aggregate,
0:53:16 they all add up and I’m like,
0:53:18 oh, shit, I didn’t actually let that go
0:53:20 the way I thought I was letting it go.
0:53:21 That’s a challenging thing.
0:53:23 – Sometimes you have to look at the emotion to figure out
0:53:27 what the Buddhist had this lovely analogy for this.
0:53:29 It comes with this parable that Buddha used to tell.
0:53:31 So the parable is Buddha’s telling to his followers,
0:53:32 he says, hey, if you’re walking down the street
0:53:34 and you get shot by an arrow, is that bad?
0:53:36 And the follower is like, yeah, it’s terrible.
0:53:38 On Buddha’s Day, you just get shot by arrows, you know what I mean?
0:53:40 But he’s like, well, if you’re walking down the street,
0:53:41 you don’t get shot just by one arrow,
0:53:43 but you also get shot by a second arrow.
0:53:44 Is that worse?
0:53:46 And the follower’s like, yeah,
0:53:48 much worse to get shot by two than one.
0:53:50 So Buddha says, the first arrow is life.
0:53:51 We can’t control it.
0:53:53 That’s the FedEx package that doesn’t show up.
0:53:54 That’s the bad thing.
0:53:56 But the second arrow is on us.
0:53:58 It’s how we react to it.
0:53:59 We control that second arrow.
0:54:02 The key is that sometimes the way you don’t stab yourself
0:54:05 with the second arrow is you regulate the emotion,
0:54:06 you think of a thing you’re grateful for,
0:54:09 you take a couple of deep breaths, you reframe it.
0:54:10 But sometimes the way you don’t hit yourself
0:54:12 with the second arrow is you don’t squish it down
0:54:14 and let it ruminate and like it flies out later
0:54:17 as many arrows that are gonna hit everybody around you.
0:54:20 – A lot of your work has the word happiness in it,
0:54:24 but would you say in reality, that’s not the goal?
0:54:25 – Oh, totally.
0:54:27 You gotta define happiness to figure out what I mean.
0:54:30 I’m thinking of happiness as someone like Aristotle
0:54:31 talked about you dying in the air, right?
0:54:34 The good life, the meaningful life, the purposeful life.
0:54:35 – A life well lived.
0:54:36 – A life well lived.
0:54:38 And for that moment, you might need to feel anxious
0:54:41 or frustrated or challenged or stressed.
0:54:42 – There’s no such thing as normal,
0:54:47 but like real happy, joyous life would be the roller coaster.
0:54:51 And in my mind, it would be the adaptability
0:54:55 of the individual to survive the ups and downs
0:54:57 rather than just be stuck totally down or way up
0:54:59 because neither of those things
0:55:01 are where you really wanna be long-term.
0:55:03 – Totally, I would always joke with my students,
0:55:05 you know that DJ Khaled song, all I do is win.
0:55:07 And I was like, that would be a terrible life.
0:55:09 If all you did is win, you just,
0:55:10 you wouldn’t notice the goodness of the wins anymore.
0:55:12 – Well, then there’s no more winning.
0:55:12 – And there’s no more winning.
0:55:15 And like you’d be absolutely anxious
0:55:17 that you could maybe just lose by one point or something.
0:55:19 – Well, and if everything was winning,
0:55:20 there’s no such thing as winning
0:55:21 because that’s just normal.
0:55:23 – This is what we forget is this is hedonic adaptation.
0:55:25 If everything is luxury jets,
0:55:26 then it’s not a luxury jet anymore
0:55:28 ’cause that’s just how you transport.
0:55:30 If everything is perfect champagne, perfect cigars,
0:55:32 you don’t notice anymore.
0:55:33 We need the ups and downs
0:55:35 and you can give you a thilse those ups and downs,
0:55:37 like you go back to coach,
0:55:39 you can negatively visualize what it’s like.
0:55:40 You can really try to remember
0:55:43 and reframe other people’s lives and things.
0:55:46 That’s the insidious thing about the good stuff in life
0:55:47 as we get used to it.
0:55:48 But it has a corollary, which is like,
0:55:50 that’s also true for the bad stuff.
0:55:52 Remember COVID when it was like that first week
0:55:53 and we’re like, we can’t do this,
0:55:55 we’ve done April, May, we’re just making some bread
0:55:57 and we’re like sorting it out.
0:55:58 – My wine consumption went up a lot.
0:56:00 At first I was like, okay, I’m not gonna drink
0:56:03 ’cause I want my immune system to be as healthy as possible.
0:56:05 And then I’m like, well, you know what, I’m gonna die.
0:56:06 – God, I don’t know what else to do.
0:56:08 – Yeah, I don’t know what else to do, I’m gonna drink, so.
0:56:09 – I remember thinking in March 15,
0:56:11 like this doesn’t go away in like a week.
0:56:16 – I was wiping down my egg cartons with like Clorex shit.
0:56:17 Were you doing that too?
0:56:18 – I remember going to the store
0:56:21 and putting all the like fruit with gloves on,
0:56:22 and like washing all the eggs.
0:56:24 – That was so scary.
0:56:26 – Yeah, but one of the things that the psychology work
0:56:29 teaches us, the worst possible thing
0:56:30 that you think could happen in your life could happen.
0:56:34 And it would be terrible, but you’d still be okay.
0:56:35 And it would still have good parts.
0:56:37 In my podcast, I talked to Dan Gilbert,
0:56:38 who’s done work with people, for example,
0:56:41 who’ve lost their kids, like a parent who’s a kid.
0:56:42 Can you imagine the more terrible thing?
0:56:43 – I can’t even imagine.
0:56:45 – And he says, obviously it was the most terrible thing,
0:56:47 but I learned from it.
0:56:48 I learned what matters.
0:56:50 I’ve learned not to take things for granted.
0:56:51 Even the worst possible thing,
0:56:53 it’s not like, oh, it comes with a silver lining.
0:56:54 It makes you stronger.
0:56:56 It kind of gives you this resilience.
0:56:58 The downs teach us something, right?
0:57:00 The downs allow us to get stronger.
0:57:03 And I do worry that sometimes we think that a good life,
0:57:05 a happy life, I think parents think this for kids is like,
0:57:08 no downs, no stress, no failure.
0:57:10 Those things are important.
0:57:10 – It’s challenging.
0:57:14 Some parents try to prevent failure
0:57:17 in a way that they’re just trying to help the kid
0:57:19 not hurt themselves or something.
0:57:20 And in my mind, I’m like,
0:57:22 on a one to 10, how bad are we talking here?
0:57:25 Because if it’s anything over a four,
0:57:26 I want to protect a little bit.
0:57:28 But if it’s going to be a little scuff knee
0:57:30 because you messed up in a way
0:57:32 that every other kid has messed up
0:57:35 and it cements that learning,
0:57:37 that to me is very important.
0:57:38 To try and get that perfection
0:57:41 and just try and take out all the failure from a child,
0:57:43 I think is a bad thing to do.
0:57:44 Would you agree with that?
0:57:45 – Yeah, totally, totally.
0:57:48 There’s this lovely book by Julie Lithcott-Hames
0:57:49 called “How to Raise an Adult”
0:57:50 where she walks through these strategies
0:57:53 and she says, parents are sometimes trying to parent
0:57:54 for the like, right now.
0:57:55 You left your lunchbox at home,
0:57:57 I’m just going to bring it to you.
0:57:58 Or we got to get out the door
0:57:59 and you haven’t totally learned to tie your shoes.
0:58:01 I’m just going to tie them for you.
0:58:02 No diss to parents.
0:58:03 Like parenting is freaking hard.
0:58:05 The modern day doesn’t make it easy.
0:58:07 Sometimes you do have to parent for right now.
0:58:09 But often we’re missing out
0:58:10 on learning opportunities for our kids.
0:58:12 Like you don’t bring them their lunch.
0:58:13 They don’t have their lunch that day.
0:58:15 So maybe they do spend six hours hungry,
0:58:17 but they’re going to freaking remember their lunch
0:58:20 the next time and every time you fast tie their shoes
0:58:22 for them ’cause you got to get out the door.
0:58:23 Those are the learning opportunities.
0:58:25 And so you might be five minutes late.
0:58:27 That’s not great, but parenting for right now
0:58:29 and just like solving in the moment,
0:58:32 we’re not allowing our kids to screw up and learn.
0:58:34 I think also sometimes too, parents have to reasonably
0:58:36 regulate their own distress about that.
0:58:38 You see the lunchbox on the table
0:58:40 and you’re like, I could intervene.
0:58:42 Ultimately the learning, you’re going to miss out
0:58:43 if you do that.
0:58:44 It’s so hard for parents.
0:58:46 It’s so hard to watch your kids suffer.
0:58:48 But that’s part of being a good parent.
0:58:49 – They’re not gonna die.
0:58:50 We’re coming up on time,
0:58:53 but I did want to ask you a couple more questions.
0:58:55 With the title of this podcast,
0:58:58 it’ll have something in happiness in the title.
0:59:00 There has to be a handful of people out there
0:59:01 that are tuning in and they’re saying,
0:59:02 I’m struggling right now.
0:59:05 I’m at that down point and I’ve been there for a while.
0:59:07 I know there’s the no-brainers.
0:59:09 If it’s an emergency, there are hotlines to call
0:59:10 if you’re suicidal.
0:59:12 There’s things of that nature.
0:59:14 But what are some tactics, some go-tos that said,
0:59:17 I’m having more bad days than good days.
0:59:20 How can I get myself out of this rut?
0:59:21 – If it’s really extreme,
0:59:23 you gotta go get a professional help.
0:59:24 I think of a lot of the strategies
0:59:25 we’ve been talking about here more
0:59:27 as like preventative medicine.
0:59:29 The analogy I use, if you walk into your doctor’s office
0:59:31 and you’re like, I’ve got some high blood pressure.
0:59:32 I’m not doing so well.
0:59:33 Your doctor might be like, hop on the treadmill
0:59:35 or eat this thing or whatever.
0:59:37 But if you walk into your doctor’s office clutching your heart
0:59:39 saying, I’m having an acute heart attack right now,
0:59:41 your doctor’s gonna be like, well, hop on the treadmill
0:59:43 and do, you know, like you need.
0:59:44 And so if someone’s struggling,
0:59:46 if you’re feeling acutely suicidal,
0:59:48 definitely reach out to somebody.
0:59:50 Even though your brain can’t see hope,
0:59:51 ’cause that’s what depression does.
0:59:53 It puts on these reverse rosy goggles
0:59:54 that everything looks terrible.
0:59:55 You will feel differently,
0:59:57 even if you don’t feel that way,
0:59:59 like reach out and get help.
1:00:01 But if you’re just, I’m feeling overwhelmed.
1:00:02 I’m feeling more burned out.
1:00:04 I don’t have a lot of pleasure in my life.
1:00:05 I think the first thing to know
1:00:07 is what the science shows
1:00:08 is it doesn’t have to be that way.
1:00:10 There are things you can do to do better
1:00:12 even if it doesn’t feel like it.
1:00:14 I think the first thing is even if you don’t feel like it,
1:00:15 reach out to a friend.
1:00:18 Just go through your phone and find someone.
1:00:20 Or if you don’t have anybody in your phone, no judgment,
1:00:23 just like go to a coffee shop, get out in the world,
1:00:25 and just try to have a conversation with a stranger,
1:00:27 even though it feels friction-y.
1:00:27 Get off your phone.
1:00:29 – I mean, you can literally walk into a Catholic church
1:00:31 and sit in a booth if you really needed to,
1:00:32 even if you’re not Catholic.
1:00:34 – There’s so much work by researchers like Nick Epley
1:00:37 and others that we assume people don’t wanna talk to us,
1:00:38 but people actually are fine to talk to us
1:00:39 much more than we think.
1:00:42 And it’s much more enjoyable for them than we predict.
1:00:44 – His data suggests that even if you’re an introvert,
1:00:47 the act of just having a calm conversation
1:00:49 with a stranger is gonna be better than you predict.
1:00:51 – There was this taboo around mental health,
1:00:52 and then there still is.
1:00:54 I’m uncomfortable with it ’cause I’ve finally broken down
1:00:57 those walls over a decade of therapy.
1:00:58 And so I can call a friend and say,
1:00:59 hey, I’m having a bad day.
1:01:02 How do you encourage someone that may say,
1:01:04 I don’t wanna show that vulnerability.
1:01:06 I don’t wanna show that weakness.
1:01:07 – Don’t start with that.
1:01:08 That’s not how you lead.
1:01:10 I would lead with asking other people questions.
1:01:12 Ask how their day is going.
1:01:13 How are your kids?
1:01:14 I was just thinking about you
1:01:15 and thinking about our old times.
1:01:18 So you start by just making a connection.
1:01:20 And my guess is so many things will happen physiologically.
1:01:22 Your body will just kind of calm down.
1:01:25 You’ll go and take sort of more less fight or flight
1:01:26 and more rest and digest mode.
1:01:28 You’ll kind of get the conversation going.
1:01:29 You’ll overcome that speed hump,
1:01:31 bump up the first part of the talk
1:01:32 where it kind of feels a little awkward.
1:01:33 And then you get things going
1:01:37 and then you ask other people to be vulnerable first.
1:01:38 Just like, how are things,
1:01:40 whatever, pick up on their questions.
1:01:41 And then you can insert your stuff,
1:01:43 research by their surgeon general,
1:01:44 Vick Murthy and others has found is,
1:01:45 one thing with loneliness is,
1:01:48 we don’t realize that we can reach out to other people.
1:01:49 We can ask them how they’re going.
1:01:51 We can give advice to them.
1:01:53 And that makes us feel so much better.
1:01:55 – It’s not about me saying like,
1:01:57 hey, I need some help right now.
1:01:58 That’s not the call.
1:01:59 It’s just starting the connection.
1:02:01 And there probably is gonna be a question about like,
1:02:02 hey, well, what’s up with you?
1:02:04 – And you’re like, I’m having a hard time.
1:02:05 – Yeah, exactly.
1:02:07 – Or you’ll just wind up feeling better
1:02:08 if you’re helping somebody else
1:02:10 and aging out to other people.
1:02:11 Honestly, we’re all struggling right now.
1:02:13 It’s 2024, everything’s falling apart.
1:02:15 Probably if you reach out to a friend,
1:02:16 they’re gonna wanna check in with you.
1:02:17 – Everybody’s got their shit.
1:02:19 – Right, yeah, exactly.
1:02:20 So that would be thing number one.
1:02:22 I think thing number two is just get out of the house,
1:02:23 move your body.
1:02:26 There’s never a time when I haven’t left the house
1:02:28 that I haven’t felt a little bit better
1:02:30 than like being my PJs on a screen, right?
1:02:32 So get out and move your body.
1:02:35 And the move your body doesn’t have to be run a marathon.
1:02:38 It can just be like, just take a walk, just be outside.
1:02:41 And if possible, even if it’s for 10, 15 minutes,
1:02:42 just get away from your phone.
1:02:45 Just be present in the world out there.
1:02:47 All of a sudden, things will start feeling
1:02:47 a little bit better.
1:02:50 Those are some of my emergency go-tos.
1:02:52 Get social, do for others, move your body.
1:02:53 Those can be powerful.
1:02:55 – That’s fantastic.
1:02:56 You have a podcast.
1:02:57 Is it weekly?
1:02:58 What’s your cadence on that?
1:03:00 – We’re like trying to get close to weekly,
1:03:01 but we’re not perfectly weekly.
1:03:03 – Tell us about that and what people can expect
1:03:04 when they tune in.
1:03:05 – Yeah, it’s called the Happiness Lab.
1:03:08 It’s all about strategies we can use to feel better.
1:03:09 – Is that the name of your actual lab?
1:03:10 Is it Happiness Lab or no?
1:03:12 – Kind of, but we haven’t like patented it,
1:03:14 but yeah, it’s Happiness Lab.
1:03:16 Yeah, and we talk about all these things.
1:03:18 We just finished a season on how to navigate
1:03:20 communicating better and love and with other people.
1:03:22 We have a season coming up that’s about
1:03:24 my happiness challenges that are like
1:03:25 the stuff I struggle with.
1:03:28 So things like stress and dealing with my time better,
1:03:31 perfectionism, which we spoke about is gonna be on there.
1:03:33 It’s really just evidence-based approaches
1:03:35 to handle all the stuff that comes up in life.
1:03:36 – Do you have a dedicated website
1:03:37 where people can go and subscribe?
1:03:38 – Or just anywhere.
1:03:41 Yeah, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
1:03:41 Happiness Lab. – Yeah, just trying
1:03:42 to have this lab.
1:03:43 Amazing.
1:03:44 I love that.
1:03:45 Thank you so much for being on the show.
1:03:46 – Yeah, thanks for having me.
1:03:46 This was fun.
1:03:47 – Yeah, this is absolutely fun.
1:03:50 It is the right time to be having these conversations.
1:03:52 I’m so glad you have a podcast around it.
1:03:54 We should mention your Coursera course.
1:03:56 Four million people, is that right?
1:03:57 Have you taken it?
1:04:00 – Yeah, the Science of Well-Being on Coursera.org.
1:04:02 It’s kind of like a very short, free version
1:04:03 of the Yale class I teach.
1:04:05 And because we’ve seen that a lot of young people
1:04:07 need this stuff, we also have a new one
1:04:08 called the Science of Well-Being for teens,
1:04:11 which is for middle school and high school students.
1:04:12 – Is that something that’s publicly available,
1:04:13 or do you have to be going to Yale
1:04:14 to actually get that?
1:04:16 – The Yale One Live, you go to enroll in Yale
1:04:17 and pay the Yale money and stuff.
1:04:19 But you get the free version on Coursera.
1:04:22 It’s a shorter, not like 26 week version,
1:04:24 but it covers all the relevant content
1:04:26 and you’ll learn exactly what the Yale students are.
1:04:28 – Any books in your future?
1:04:29 – I like the podcast because it’s so much
1:04:30 of the happiness stuff.
1:04:32 These tips that we’ve been talking about,
1:04:35 these short little narrative, short quick strategies,
1:04:36 that’s what I like.
1:04:37 That’s what people need in the moment.
1:04:39 It’s like, I’m feeling frustrated,
1:04:41 I’m feeling overwhelmed, I don’t have any time.
1:04:42 – You’re getting it out now
1:04:44 versus waiting a year and a half to publish something.
1:04:45 – Exactly, exactly.
1:04:47 – Amazing, well thank you for being on the show.
1:04:48 – Thanks so much for having me.

0:00:04 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of 16 Minutes, where we cover what’s going
0:00:08 on, what’s in the news from our vantage point in tech. In this episode, we’re going to
0:00:13 go deep on one topic, which is the coronavirus, and it’s a very fast-developing news cycle,
0:00:17 so we’re going to take a snapshot for where we are right now. And since this show is all
0:00:21 about teasing apart what’s hype, what’s real, given all the buzz and headlines out there,
0:00:24 we’re going to try to focus on what we know and what we don’t know. I’ve tried drawing
0:00:30 wherever possible from primary sources, so CDC reports, World Health Organization reports,
0:00:35 etc., instead of only looking at news headlines and derivative reports. And our ASICs and
0:00:38 the expert, who I’ll introduce in a moment, will be bringing in the vantage point coming
0:00:41 from bioengineering and that aspect as well.
0:00:45 So first of all, let me quickly summarize the news. People are referring to this outbreak
0:00:50 as the coronavirus, but it’s actually a new type of coronavirus because coronavirus is
0:00:55 actually the general term for a more common category of viruses. And this current strain
0:01:03 is called 2019-NCOV for 2019-N novel coronavirus. It’s a rapidly developing situation, but
0:01:10 as of January 26, according to the situation update on the World Health Organization website,
0:01:16 there’s a total of 2014 confirmed cases that have been reported globally. Of these, 98%
0:01:24 were reported from China, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taipei. 324 of 1,975 cases have
0:01:30 been reported as severely ill, with 56 deaths reported to that date. Finally, 29 confirmed
0:01:35 cases have been reported out of China in 10 countries, and in the table that the World
0:01:40 Health Organization provided, there’s two cases listed in the US, but there’s more.
0:01:43 Again, this is from the Six Situations Report, which comes out every few days, and this one
0:01:47 came out on Sunday, January 26. That’s a very high-level summary. Now, let me welcome Judy
0:01:52 Sovitzkaya on the A6nz BioDeal team. First of all, really quickly, what is it? What is
0:01:53 the coronavirus?
0:02:00 Yeah, so let’s discuss what even is a virus. So a virus is basically a bunch of DNA or
0:02:05 RNA, some sort of nucleic acid, surrounded by a protein shell called the capsid of the
0:02:09 virus. That is the entire organism. And a lot of people actually don’t even call this
0:02:13 an organism because it’s not quite alive and it’s not quite dead. It’s something in
0:02:14 between.
0:02:17 There’s kind of a debate in the scientific community and the philosophical community
0:02:22 about what is a living thing. And the place where most people have come down is that you
0:02:27 need two conditions to be alive. You need to metabolize, which means you’re taking some
0:02:31 chemicals, transforming them into other chemicals, and pulling out energy in the process and
0:02:37 using that energy for something. And the second requirement for a living thing is to multiply,
0:02:43 to reproduce. So viruses really only satisfy the second condition. They don’t do anything
0:02:47 on their own. They don’t… Outside of a human host, they are non-living.
0:02:52 So that’s why there’s such a debate. The bottom line is that they don’t metabolize, but they
0:02:53 do multiply.
0:02:54 Exactly.
0:02:58 So tell me now more about the coronavirus category.
0:03:04 So the reason it’s called coronavirus is because on electron microscopy images, it actually
0:03:09 looks like there’s a little crown around the virus. The capsid for the coronavirus has
0:03:14 these proteins on it that are spikes. And a lot of the ways that we’re developing vaccines
0:03:17 against this virus and a lot of the ways that we’re identifying different types of these
0:03:21 viruses is by characterizing those spike proteins.
0:03:26 And as with most things in biology, we use Greek symbols to denote different versions
0:03:30 of the coronavirus. So there’s the alpha, the beta, the delta, and the gamma, which
0:03:36 are kind of four of the main categories of coronavirus. A lot of the common viruses are
0:03:39 either alpha or beta types, but SARS and MERS, they’re all betas.
0:03:43 Okay. So that’s kind of scientifically what it is. Now let’s practically break down the
0:03:48 symptoms. According to the CDC, the symptoms can include fever, cough, shortness of breath,
0:03:53 or other respiratory symptoms. And they believe that at this time, that symptoms of this virus
0:04:00 may appear in as few as two days or as long as 14 days after exposure. And this is actually
0:04:04 similar to what’s been seen with the previous incubation period of MERS viruses. And I’ll
0:04:08 get to what that is in a minute. But unlike those viruses, this particular one rarely
0:04:13 produces obvious like runny noses or intestinal symptoms necessarily, just according to one
0:04:18 report and that was recently published in Lancet. So I guess the question is that all
0:04:21 of these things are on a continuum. It’s not very discreet. Like this is all symptoms that
0:04:24 can describe frankly, any common cold, right? It’s the WebMD problem.
0:04:28 Right. Basically, you can Google it and find, associate yourself with anything. So the question
0:04:34 I have is, how does this stack up against MERS and SARS? And just really quickly to
0:04:39 summarize, SARS was the acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome. There’s a big
0:04:44 outbreak of it in the early 2000s. And then MERS is Middle East respiratory syndrome.
0:04:49 And that is new as of 2012. So coronaviruses cause about 10 to 30% of colds, just your
0:04:54 common colds. And those are not nearly as serious as this disease. And some of the differences
0:05:00 between these epidemic causing coronaviruses versus your common cold is just the severity
0:05:04 of the infection, the likelihood that you are to die or to have really serious complications
0:05:10 from the infection. And in all of these cases, SARS, MERS, and this current coronavirus,
0:05:15 it’s because the coronavirus is infecting the lower part of the respiratory tract versus
0:05:17 just staying around your upper respiratory tract area.
0:05:21 Right. So not just your mouth, nose and sinuses, but by going into your lungs. So just like
0:05:26 a quick summary of where the fatality rates are, SARS apparently claimed about 10% of
0:05:32 people and MERS was much worse, claiming 30% of the people it infected. It’s also interesting
0:05:35 because I’ve been reading a lot of papers, but none of them are peer reviewed. In fact,
0:05:40 one of the papers between Friday and today was already updated with V2, but the authors
0:05:44 of the local institutes of virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, local hospitals and the
0:05:50 provincial CDCs in China within this area supposedly analyze full length genome sequences
0:05:54 from five patients at the early stage of the outbreak. And they found that almost all of
0:05:59 those were identical to each other. So it’s the same virus and B, that about 79.5%. And
0:06:05 again, this is the current paper still being updated, identify to SARS coronavirus.
0:06:08 So that’s actually the most interesting thing from a bioengineering perspective about this
0:06:14 particular epidemic is how incredibly quickly we have sequenced this virus for past epidemics.
0:06:19 It’s taken time for us to really understand the genome and the molecular nature of a given
0:06:23 virus that’s causing an epidemic. In this case, within two weeks, people had already
0:06:29 published draft versions of the genome sequence for this virus. And the science is happening
0:06:34 in the sort of really live way that doesn’t happen very often where people are commenting
0:06:36 literally in the GenBank on the GenBank website.
0:06:40 The CDC uploaded the entire genome of the virus from the first reported case in the
0:06:44 United States to GenBank. And it’s also interesting because in the age of social media, which
0:06:50 cuts both ways virally, it’s also spreading information much faster. Coronavirus was first
0:06:54 detected in Wuhan city in the Hubei province in China, beginning with 44 patients who had
0:07:00 quote, pneumonia of unknown etiology or unknown cause between New Year’s Eve and the first
0:07:05 couple of days of 2020. And then was identified as a new type of virus isolated by Chinese
0:07:10 authorities on January 7. And then on January 11 and 12, the World Health Organization received
0:07:14 detailed information from the National Health Commission in China that the outbreak is associated
0:07:21 with exposures in one seafood market in Wuhan city. And basically it’s showing the spread
0:07:26 of information. Whereas with the SARS crisis, journalist Helen Branswell at Stat News was
0:07:31 commenting because she had covered the SARS crisis in 2003, that one might be tempted
0:07:35 to say SARS start was worse, it spread faster, not sure that’s true. SARS was well underway
0:07:40 for at least 4.5 months before the world knew there was a new virus spreading. This current
0:07:44 coronavirus seems to have been spotted much, much sooner after its emergence. But what’s
0:07:47 really interesting is not just that it’s been spotted sooner, but that the genetic
0:07:53 information we have is moving much faster. So can you talk to me about what that tells
0:07:54 us and why that matters?
0:07:58 So there’s a couple of areas where you get benefits from having all this genetic information
0:08:03 so quickly. The first is just diagnosis. So if tomorrow somebody in San Francisco was
0:08:07 to go into an urgent care clinic and say that they have a cold, we could really quickly
0:08:12 identify whether or not that actually belongs to this epidemic.
0:08:16 Another advantage we have once we have the genome sequence is that in this age of genomic
0:08:20 medicine that we’re entering, where we’re actually creating vaccines that are based
0:08:26 on genome sequences. The third implication is for figuring out treatments and also predicting
0:08:30 some of the features of the epidemic. So we know in this example that this coronavirus
0:08:35 looks really similar to SARS. So we can look back at the SARS epidemic, understand how
0:08:39 quickly it’s spread, in which populations. And from the genomic information, you can
0:08:44 actually see, for example, the spikes on the corona, which are involved in getting into
0:08:49 cells, do those look similar to what the SARS spikes look like? And maybe the treatments
0:08:51 that work in this case as well.
0:08:54 So the high level summary is that having the genomic information, which we didn’t have
0:08:59 then when we do have now, by then I mean the SARS outbreak, which happened about 2002 to
0:09:05 2004, the peak was 2003, is that you can classify things much more easily, figure out where
0:09:10 it belongs, it doesn’t belong, kind of isolate that, that you can develop things faster based
0:09:14 on it, although there isn’t a vaccine yet, and that you can figure out treatment protocols
0:09:17 based on the similarities and differences.
0:09:21 Was there anything else on the connection between mayors and SARS from a genomics perspective?
0:09:26 Yeah. So because the science is happening live, you’re seeing a lot of pretty quick modifications
0:09:31 to what people have already said. So the first paper analyzing the genome of this virus that
0:09:38 I saw at least, described that the spike proteins that are used to enter into lung cells are
0:09:42 different enough between SARS and this new coronavirus, that they thought it wouldn’t
0:09:47 be as bad as SARS. And then within like literally two days, I think I saw a paper that corrected
0:09:51 that and said that actually the protein is quite similar at the protein level.
0:09:54 Are there any bioengineering implications of that? This goes to me that the eternal
0:09:58 question of how DNA expresses itself practically in the complexity of disease.
0:10:02 That’s a really good question. This mirrors everything in genomics where we thought that
0:10:05 once we have the sequence, we’ll know all the answers. And that’s definitely not the
0:10:09 case. We can know from the DNA what the difference is going to be in the protein. That’s one
0:10:13 to one, there’s no guessing there. But once we know what’s different about the protein,
0:10:18 we don’t yet know quite what that means for how it will behave. So we don’t know if that
0:10:23 difference means it’s stronger or it’s weaker or if it will infect different cells or what
0:10:24 that’s going to mean.
0:10:28 So now let’s move on to more of the details of how it spreads and the measurements of
0:10:33 that spread. So first note is that generally the coronavirus has spread through air. They’re
0:10:39 known as zoonotic in that they originate in animals and only sometimes leap to humans.
0:10:43 And there’s been some speculation that this one seemed to originate in bats, but it’s
0:10:48 usually indirect mechanisms. So in mayors, it went from bats to camels before going to
0:10:52 humans. And a couple of papers have commented on the similarity of this new virus to bat
0:10:58 DNA. Like one found that it’s 96% identical. Another journal of medical virology also
0:11:02 observed similar components, but suggested snakes and many other people are skeptical
0:11:06 of that. The long story short is no one really knows, despite having some genomic information
0:11:07 around it.
0:11:11 But it’s interesting to note that important epidemics come from animal sources and some
0:11:15 speculation about the reason for that is that the viruses have time to evolve in their animal
0:11:19 hosts and they’re evolving away from what human hosts have seen before and what their
0:11:21 immune system has been able to recognize before.
0:11:27 So then let’s talk about the spread. A lot of the articles are talking about R0 or R0.
0:11:28 What does it measure?
0:11:33 So R0 is essentially the number of people that you would expect to get infected from
0:11:34 any single case of infection.
0:11:37 So if the R0 is say five, what does that mean?
0:11:41 That means that you should expect that on average, five people will get sick from one
0:11:45 single person that they come into contact with. So for every person that has the disease,
0:11:47 five additional people get the disease.
0:11:52 And interestingly, these are reported as ranges. So like measles has an R0 of 12 to 18.
0:11:57 Yeah. So measles is super infectious. It’s known as sort of the highest or one of the
0:12:01 highest infectiousness variables, which is why it was so important to have vaccines and
0:12:03 herd immunity for measles specifically.
0:12:08 And the reason that it’s reported as ranges is because they depend on the particular population
0:12:10 and the particular moment in time.
0:12:15 So then let’s just talk about some of the facts of the spread. So the 29 exported cases reported
0:12:21 by the World Health Organization, 26 had a travel history from Wuhan city in China.
0:12:24 And then for two of the three cases that were identified in countries outside of China,
0:12:29 one in Australia had direct contact with the confirmed case from Wuhan while in China.
0:12:33 And one in Vietnam had no travel history, but was in contact with the confirmed case.
0:12:35 His father had a travel history to Wuhan.
0:12:39 So what we do know is that human to human transmission is occurring. The preliminary
0:12:42 are not estimate that was presented at the International Health Regulations Emergency
0:12:49 Committee was a range of 1.4 to 2.5, which relatively to the measles example is not as
0:12:54 crazy bad. SARS had an R not between two to five. So that kind of puts that those numbers
0:12:55 in perspective.
0:12:59 It might be a little premature to set these numbers just because the number of cases is
0:13:04 still been relatively low and they haven’t had time to play themselves out. So we don’t
0:13:08 know if there’s many, many cases out there who have not presented symptoms and therefore
0:13:12 we don’t have clear stats on those people.
0:13:17 The big question here is how bad is this epidemic? That’s the question with every epidemic. And
0:13:20 it’s actually so much more complicated than that because there’s a number of different
0:13:24 variables that go into determining how bad something is going to be. It’s very tempting
0:13:29 to put sort of a single number on how bad on a scale of one to 10, for example, but it
0:13:33 doesn’t really take into account all of the nuance in each particular epidemic.
0:13:38 So our not is calculated from the data is actually an aggregate measure. There’s a lot
0:13:41 of different variables that go into our not. So to break them all down into their individual
0:13:44 components and then we can build them back up into our not.
0:13:48 There’s a lot of variables that are going to matter here. One is how well does the virus
0:13:53 transmit itself? So if it’s airborne, it’s able to multiply or transmit itself substantially
0:13:54 more easily.
0:13:59 Right. Versus like exchanging bodily fluids and which requires a lot of specific contact.
0:14:03 Exactly. Another piece is how is it actually getting into the cells? Is it good at infecting
0:14:09 cells? Is it good at its job essentially? Another question is what is the population that it’s
0:14:15 occurring inside of? Is that population moving a lot? Are people coming into very close contact
0:14:20 with each other? So that’s also going to factor in particularly interesting feature of this
0:14:24 is that it happened during Chinese New Year, which is a period of time when a lot of people
0:14:26 in China travel.
0:14:29 So what I think is really interesting to this and having worked at the Gates Foundation and
0:14:35 seen how we think about epidemics on a global scale is that there’s different, there’s two
0:14:39 orthogonal ways to think about an epidemic, which is how much does it spread and then
0:14:41 how bad is it once you get it.
0:14:44 And you’re saying it’s orthogonal or contradictory or why?
0:14:49 So there’s a notion of case fatality, which is for each infection with what likelihood
0:14:53 will the person die from that infection or have like very serious complications. And that’s
0:14:57 actually completely orthogonal to all of the other variables that we talked about before.
0:15:03 One is that if the virus is actually not that deadly or if it expresses itself in a person
0:15:07 after a substantial incubation sign, it might end up creating a bigger epidemic because
0:15:13 that additional time will allow the patient to infect additional individuals. The are
0:15:19 not for that particular virus might be substantially higher, even though its fatality rate is lower.
0:15:23 So it’s an interesting paradox that you could actually have a virus that is less bad once
0:15:26 you get it, but is more bad on the population scale.
0:15:30 So you have to define the metric by which you’re saying whether or not an epidemic is
0:15:34 bad. Is it the number of people who die? Is it the number of people who are infected?
0:15:38 Is it the extent of the spread geographically? There’s a lot of different ways to think about
0:15:40 how bad an epidemic is.
0:15:44 Now let’s just talk about treatments and concrete things that are happening right now.
0:15:48 So just to quickly summarize what’s happening. The CDC is conducting entry skinnings at five
0:15:55 major airports Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, LAX, New York City, JFK and San Francisco.
0:15:58 Doctors are treating symptoms. There’s no vaccine yet. The CDC has developed a real-time
0:16:06 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction or RRT-PCR test that can diagnose this virus
0:16:08 in respiratory and serum samples.
0:16:15 So what that is is basically a way of seeing if the nucleic acids, if the patient sample
0:16:19 contains the same sequence as the sequence that we know to be involved with the virus
0:16:23 that we know as a part of the virus. So you don’t have to sequence every single patient.
0:16:28 Okay, and then on January 24th, just a few days ago, the CDC publicly posted the assay
0:16:32 protocol for this test and the quote they said, “Currently testing for this virus must
0:16:36 take place at the CDC, but in the coming days and weeks, they will share these tests with
0:16:40 domestic and international partners. And they’re also growing the virus and cell culture, which
0:16:44 is necessary for further studies, including for additional characterization.”
0:16:49 So concretely now from a practical technology point of view, because obviously this is the
0:16:53 serious crisis. There’s a lot to be done and a lot of different players. Where do you sort
0:16:56 of seeing some of the things that might happen that where tech can help?
0:17:01 What’s really interesting about this moment is that because we have this increase in genomic
0:17:08 medicine, just this past weekend, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, CEPI,
0:17:13 gave out grants to three different pharmaceutical companies of a total of $12.5 million, and
0:17:17 they’re currently engaged in a race. These companies are targeting dates for releasing
0:17:22 their vaccine of between four to 16 weeks from now, which is just totally unheard of.
0:17:27 For a company to spin up a vaccine for the SARS epidemic in 2003 would have taken months
0:17:32 to years for them to develop the new drug and actually get it approved. In this case,
0:17:36 two of these companies made these types of vaccines for other sequences. They’re able
0:17:40 to take what they’ve already built in-house for their other programs, and they can just
0:17:44 very quickly adapt it to this particular virus. All they have to do is create a drop-in replacement
0:17:49 of the sequence that they’ve already worked on with the sequence of this new coronavirus.
0:17:55 Is it fair to say that it’s not dissimilar to engineering in terms of semiconductor and
0:17:58 manufacturing lines? When you say drop-in sequence, does that mean that it’s basically
0:18:03 a matter of using existing scaling methods and you’re just changing the actual code,
0:18:04 quite literally the biological code?
0:18:09 I think that’s actually a really good way of describing it. It’s changing the code,
0:18:12 but you already have the manufacturing line set up. You already know exactly how you’re
0:18:17 going to make this thing. There may be differences, but they will be minimal compared to the differences
0:18:20 that would have existed with a completely different medicine.
0:18:22 Having to bespoke or custom-make it yourself.
0:18:23 Yeah, exactly.
0:18:28 Bottom-line it for me, Judy. How should we think about this news about the coronavirus
0:18:35 still developing? Just to be very clear. Specifically, this is for NCOV 2019. We’ve
0:18:39 covered the high level of what we know and what we don’t know. What would your bottom-line
0:18:42 be from the perspective of a bioengineer?
0:18:46 The bottom-line is that we really need to think about how we are interacting with people,
0:18:51 how we’re traveling, and how we are protecting ourselves from the virus. From my perspective
0:18:57 as a bioengineer, we’ve been talking about how sequencing and synthesis of DNA is becoming
0:19:02 faster and cheaper every single day. This is an example of that in action. This is not
0:19:06 something that would have been possible even a couple of years ago. I think that what we’re
0:19:10 seeing is the beginning of how quickly and how efficiently we’re going to be able to
0:19:16 get to vaccines in the future as we continue to decrease the cost of sequencing and synthesis.
0:19:20 This is a really interesting time because we’re able to figure out the diagnostics piece,
0:19:25 the vaccine piece, and the treatment piece. It’s still in progress, but we have a huge
0:19:26 head start.
0:19:33 Thank you, Judy. For those of you who would like more information, please visit www.cdc.gov/coronavirus.
0:19:38 I’ve also included the link sources for this episode in the show notes, which you can find
0:19:44 at a6nc.com/16minutes. As a reminder, if you haven’t already subscribed to this separate
0:19:48 show in your podcast feed, please do so now and thank you for listening.

0:00:06 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Zee podcast. I’m Sonal. Today’s episode was recorded at
0:00:10 our most recent annual Innovation Summit in our pop-up podcast booth with me and Kevin
0:00:15 Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine and author of several books.
0:00:19 In this quick, literally hallway-style chat, I ask him about two of his big ideas, the
0:00:24 notion of 1,000 true fans, which sometimes people misinterpret or miss the nuances of,
0:00:29 and two, the idea of being able to sell our own attention versus our attention being sold
0:00:33 for very little. And we try to connect the dots between these and other ideas, including
0:00:38 some new, never-been-heard-before ones in between. The second idea was also covered in his most
0:00:42 recent book, The Inevitable, which we did a podcast on with Chris Dixon, and his conversation
0:00:46 with Mark at this summit is also available in this feed as well.
0:00:47 Welcome, Kevin.
0:00:50 It’s a real delight to be here. Thanks for having me.
0:00:54 I think of you as one of the original thinkers of the future. We’re just coming off of summit.
0:00:59 One of the big themes was about the future of business models after advertising. This
0:01:02 is a talk Connie gave last year, and then today she went further on that, like what
0:01:07 happens when things become a super app. We had Kevin Chu from Forte talking about business
0:01:12 models for crypto-economics and gaming. And then we had Jonah Peretti and Chris Dixon talking
0:01:17 about the evolution of the web and how so much of the promise of the web in some ways
0:01:21 came about, but in other ways didn’t because of the sort of albatross around our neck of
0:01:27 advertising as a business model. So one idea I remember you talking about in your book
0:01:30 that just blew me out of the water. It was so interesting, like it was a Kevin Kelly
0:01:36 signature idea. Is this idea that you can actually, in the future, we may be able to
0:01:42 quote, reverse our attention economy? You should actually explain this idea.
0:01:51 So the idea is, in some ways, disimmediating attention. So advertising model is, let’s
0:01:58 say I am a company that I’m selling a widget. And I want people to know about the widget.
0:02:05 I want attention to the widget. So the normal way is I will hire advertising agencies. I
0:02:13 will make ads that will go out and people will see the ad. So I’m paying an advertising
0:02:18 company and they’re going to make an ad that will then take that attention from the consumer.
0:02:26 But you could actually short-circuit that rather than having a two-step. What if I paid
0:02:33 the audience directly for their attention? Exactly. And so let’s say I send a call out
0:02:40 and say I will pay you 25 cents to watch this ad. So you’re getting paid for your attention,
0:02:45 to give your attention to an ad. And it’s not just ad, it could even be something like
0:02:54 email. And so you could set up something saying I’ll charge 25 cents to read your email.
0:03:02 So you have to pay me for my attention. And so if it’s true that attention is the only
0:03:09 scarcity that we have in this world of abundance, how come you and I are giving our attention
0:03:13 away for free? I completely agree, which is why I’m so glad we’re finally talking about
0:03:17 this. So a couple of quick things. On the example you just gave about email, that’s
0:03:22 a great example that’s commonly cited for a way that we can fight the spam problem,
0:03:27 especially when you think about combining with crypto and blockchain economies where
0:03:31 you can actually do micro payments in a scalable way because right now it’s actually very cost-prohibitive
0:03:38 to charge someone 25 cents to read their email. And then if someone is a spammer, it’s pretty
0:03:41 unlikely that they’re going to do a spray and pray method to try to get your attention
0:03:46 or even a spearfisher, whoever, all the bad economic models of the web get broken to your
0:03:51 point with this perfect example of email because the bad actors are not incented to pay for
0:03:54 your attention. But I want to really dig a little deeper because your idea is a lot
0:03:59 more nuanced and I really want to pause the profound implications of what you’re saying.
0:04:05 So you’re putting the power back into the consumer. The power of the attention is with us who
0:04:10 have it. We’re surrendering it. We’re giving away for free when we should really be charging.
0:04:14 We want to have a technology that reverses that. So the power is back with us. And there’s
0:04:18 a second aspect of that. Oh, good. This is what I want to hear.
0:04:25 Which is that in media and publications, in that world, the publication, the magazine,
0:04:33 the newspaper, whatever that portal is, they don’t really have choice about what advertisements
0:04:43 they run. That is something that’s decided by the advertiser. But what if anybody could
0:04:49 run an ad and you would get the benefits of that ad if people clicked on it, if people
0:04:55 watched it. So what you have is you have an outsourced, crowd, decentralized version of
0:05:03 an ad network where anybody is making an ad and anybody can run the ad. And you have
0:05:07 the money flowing through the system, again, using crypto to kind of keep or blockchain
0:05:13 and keep track of things. But what that would mean is that you would have very, very creative
0:05:20 people making ads that worked and the sponsors have to pay up when people actually watch
0:05:28 them. And so what I’m trying to do is to imagine a decentralized advertising system that put
0:05:38 power back into the audience, but would require something like crypto or blockchain to maintain
0:05:42 the integrity and to have that financing. The provenance, economics, the alignment of
0:05:46 incentives, all the things, all the features. Sending the credit money through as it follows
0:05:51 these different things. So that’s a possibility that we haven’t really thought about before.
0:05:55 I love it. But less people think this is so far off because you repost this idea in your
0:05:59 book The Inevitable, which is about the future. And who knows if that’s five years, 10 years,
0:06:03 20 years, 100 years. Less people think that’s so far off. Let me give a concrete example
0:06:10 today. So TikTok, basically what people are already doing in a not necessarily decentralized,
0:06:15 but certainly a bottom up manner. The centralized platform is TikTok. They are essentially making
0:06:20 ads. And these are short viral clips where they are promoting some idea, a product. Because
0:06:23 if you think about an ad, it’s simply an ad for anything, whether it’s a product, an
0:06:28 idea, whatever. They’re short, they go viral. And the reason they go viral is unlike on
0:06:33 YouTube where the algorithm is very optimized for people who are mature creators, have an
0:06:38 established track record, et cetera. Because it’s all purely AI based, it’s not basing
0:06:44 things on specified intent, but learned intent. It can let anybody, any creator have a clip
0:06:48 go viral, even if they don’t have a huge following. And that’s hugely powerful. So it’s really
0:06:52 fascinating is what you’re basically describing is kind of already happening with TikTok.
0:06:56 And now I just need to put the economic of getting those creators paid. Because the other
0:07:00 thing that I think is super interesting about this is that when you have new models, business
0:07:05 models, it then in turn, this is when you and I both care about changes of creator economy
0:07:10 that feeds it. Not only unlocking creators who maybe didn’t come out before in the current
0:07:14 model, but more importantly, you don’t even have to get that big of a scale in order to
0:07:20 be successful. It actually ties to your original true idea of 1000 true fans. But that part
0:07:24 of your idea that people don’t talk about as much, they don’t get past 1000 true fans
0:07:29 is that not only do you get the 1000 true fans, but you get the nodes next to them. So I’d
0:07:33 love for you to explain that. And then maybe we can connect the dots between this attention
0:07:36 economy back to 1000 true fans.
0:07:42 Just to summarize the 1000 true fans theory very, very quickly, which is that in the world
0:07:46 in which you have direct contact with your audience, you’re and when you’re not going
0:07:52 through the intermediate of a publisher, the studio, a record label, but you actually
0:08:00 have your truth, you have your fans, you’re getting the money directly from that if you
0:08:04 could get a certain amount of money from them directly every year, that the number that you
0:08:10 would need to make a living is in the neighborhood of 1000s. So 1000 true fans, if you could
0:08:16 get $100 each from one of you for each of your fans for a year, then that’s $100,000.
0:08:22 So then that’s what I would call a true fan, someone who’s going to buy whatever you make,
0:08:26 you know, the hardcover, the softcover, the singles, the box set, they’re going to travel
0:08:32 200 miles to see you. That’s your true fan. But that’s just your true fans. And your true
0:08:38 fans become basically marketers for this other concentric circle around them, which is kind
0:08:42 of the casual fan. And so it’s your true fans who actually are doing the hard work
0:08:50 of publicizing and promoting you to this other larger, even larger one. So you get the income,
0:08:55 not just of your true fans, but you get the larger income of that concentric circle that’s
0:08:56 right next to it.
0:09:00 Central fans around you. And the other aspect of 1000 true fans is that in a world of a
0:09:05 billion, now that we are global and we have a global system, even if there’s only one
0:09:10 in a million people who are interested in your idea, you still have a thousand potential
0:09:16 people, you just have to find them. So there’s almost any idea you can come up with, anything
0:09:22 that you can imagine can probably find a thousand people on the planet to be true fans
0:09:29 of it. And so that process of finding your true fans is really the process that we want
0:09:33 to use and we want to have tools that enable us to do that easier and easier.
0:09:36 You wrote about 1000 true fans in what year was it again?
0:09:41 Gee, it was right before Kickstarter, it was probably like, I don’t know, 2007 or something.
0:09:45 It was very prescient as always. So it was very early. Then Chris Anderson, our mutual
0:09:50 friend wrote the long tail around either before or after them, forgetting when he wrote that,
0:09:51 2006.
0:09:53 I think he wrote before.
0:09:56 And the idea of the long tail is that the internet lets you find these niche communities.
0:09:59 So that goes to the discovery aspect and you can actually create communities around niches.
0:10:04 Then you wrote 1000 true fans and now today we’re talking about this idea of monetizing
0:10:08 and reversing the attention economy. What I’m hearing you say when we connect all those
0:10:14 dots is that we now finally have a business model for those 1000 true fans to monetize
0:10:18 because what readers are essentially doing, if you imagine a world where the reader is
0:10:24 at the center of a future media web, where there’s a million publications like this and
0:10:30 whatever form, podcast, newsletter, blog posts, doesn’t matter, you know, decks, whatever.
0:10:37 We now have a way and add crypto in for an economic internet that empowers creators of
0:10:43 all kinds to now empower readers to monetize their attention and essentially curate their
0:10:49 custom personalized, perfectly curated dream holy grail paper of their choice, but I’d
0:10:52 be printed on demand by selling their attention.
0:10:57 I even have another idea that I think was patentable. Patents don’t give you much. So I decided
0:11:02 to publish it instead of patenting it and it was called, I’ll pay you to read my book.
0:11:04 Tell me more about this. I’ve never heard this.
0:11:09 So the problem with books these days is I don’t care about selling books. I want people
0:11:15 to read my books and it’s so, attention is so, so scarce that I said, oh, look, I’ll
0:11:19 pay you to read my book and I’m going to make money doing it.
0:11:20 How?
0:11:29 So it’s an ebook and what it is, is I’ll sell the book for let’s say $4 and then I will
0:11:35 pay you $5 if you finish reading the book and we can tell, Amazon can tell whether you’ve
0:11:36 read the whole book or not.
0:11:38 Right, they already have that data.
0:11:42 And so most people probably won’t finish it. And so I think the total amount that they
0:11:46 would make would exceed the amount that I have to pay out. So there’d probably be fewer
0:11:49 people who are going to finish it.
0:11:50 Interesting.
0:11:53 I could, I could adjust those numbers. But I would sell it for very little and I would
0:11:57 pay you to actually finish reading it. So the idea is I’m paying for your attention.
0:12:01 Yes, you are. The completeness of the attention is what I love is that you’re not saying it’s
0:12:07 an either or a binary yes, no, it’s actually a degree. What I love about this is a very
0:12:13 much fits into a world we’re entering now where there is no discreet beginning and end.
0:12:16 Like Doug Roushkoff and I talked about narrative collapse, you know, like in one of Op-Ed’s
0:12:20 I did it for me at Wired in this world of Game of Thrones binge watching the everlasting
0:12:27 story gaming economies, gaming narratives. We just talked today about how gaming is bigger
0:12:32 than music and entertainment combined huge economies. And those narratives are endless
0:12:33 narratives.
0:12:38 So what I love about what you’re saying is essentially it’s a way to optimize for the
0:12:44 few rare completers while also making money off the people who are dipping in and out
0:12:47 and not going to complete the thing. So it puts it on a degree and kind of a continuum.
0:12:52 But the second thing that I love about it is that if you, this is a crazy counterintuitive
0:12:56 part of this, if your idea and your book is so damn good that people are going to read
0:13:00 the entire thing, you’re actually going to pay them a lot more because you’re putting
0:13:04 them a dollar extra to make this happen. And so tell me about that the flip side of it.
0:13:07 Does it actually make creators not want to, because one thing that Connie’s talked about
0:13:12 in China is that there’s actually apps that let people readers weigh in on books as they’re
0:13:16 being created. And that then in turn changes a narrative or how many chapters. This reminds
0:13:19 me the Charles Dickinson day of like paying my word.
0:13:24 So the reality is that very few people make real money from books. I don’t make my living
0:13:28 from books. I make my living from giving talks about the book.
0:13:33 So the book is like a vehicle for that and that’s true for more and more people. The
0:13:38 actual book itself is just a part of this network. And so you can still lose money on
0:13:43 a book and many authors do and still make overall. It’s particularly important when
0:13:48 you are talking about ideas. Maybe this doesn’t work if you’re just writing novels, but if
0:13:49 you’re trying to get ideas out.
0:13:51 This is what we both care about more than anything.
0:13:57 Then again, the battle for attention is so great that I am willing to pay you for your
0:13:58 attention.
0:13:59 Yes.
0:14:03 And by the way, one thing I also bet attention is I did these calculations of the total amount
0:14:10 of attention that are given to different media and I found out that on average, we surrender
0:14:13 our attention for about $3 an hour.
0:14:15 Wow. That’s so cheap.
0:14:16 That’s ridiculous.
0:14:20 So look at the total amount of time that you spend reading a book and how much you can
0:14:25 charge. How much you pay for the book, for a movie, for whatever it is. And it comes out
0:14:31 to very, very low pay that we are accepting for our attention.
0:14:32 It’s insane.
0:14:39 It’s just that we value our attention at. And so, and when TV, TV is, if you take all
0:14:43 the amount of hours that people watch TV and the total amount of revenue TV, that’s what
0:14:44 it’s come out to be.
0:14:45 Yeah.
0:14:49 It’s like we’re giving up our attention for such small wages. So we really want to be
0:14:50 charging more.
0:14:55 Well, what I love about this is it puts again people at the center. And what I love about
0:14:59 what you’re saying is this is a way to be optimistic about the future that readers and
0:15:05 creators can be empowered by putting better models in place that align incentives that
0:15:10 remove adverse selection and bad alignment of incentives that we can actually embrace
0:15:11 a better future.
0:15:12 Right, right.
0:15:14 So thank you for joining this episode of the A-60 podcast.
0:15:18 Well, yeah. And if we were really doing things, we would be paying you listener right now.
0:15:19 The listener.
0:15:20 Yes.
0:15:22 That’s fantastic listeners. We need to be paying you. Thank you so much for listening.
0:15:26 Kevin, thank you so much for joining the A-60 podcast live from the Andreessen Horowitz
0:15:29 annual innovation summit. The future is inevitable.
0:15:30 Great.
0:15:30 Good.
0:15:33 (audience laughing)