The "Happy Life" Scientist: How To FINALLY Beat Stress, Worry & Uncertainty! Dacher Keltner | E219

Life expectancy's been declining in the last few years. How do we reverse that trend? These are the five safest things to do. Dr. Dacher Keltner. A renowned expert in the science of human emotion. Discovering ways on how we can improve our happiness. He's also the author of several books including The Power Paradox. I read just someone touching you can make you live longer and be less stressed. Is that true? Yeah. There are all kinds of findings that speak to this. You have premature babies, they used to just put them in these little units that warm them and they would die. And then they figured out they needed skin-to-skin contact like you need food and they live. They gain 47% weight gain. You know, the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. And if you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If I am kind to you, my act of kindness makes you more kind downstream. And then that person you've helped actually is kinder to another person. And they've proven that before? Yeah. So like karma is a very real thing. It's very real. That'll save 8-10 years of life. You've got to find a few moments just to be kind. Are we worse people the richer and more powerful we become? Yeah. So we've actually done experiments, right? You know, it's a movie about a child with cancer and poorer people show activation of vagus nerve which is part of compassion. Well-to-do people, less activation. The wealthier you are, the more you navigate it for serious economic policies that hurt the poor. Jesus. And this is where it gets really worrisome. I just want to start this episode with a message of thanks. A thank you to everybody that tunes in to listen to this podcast. By doing so, you've enabled me to live out my dream but also for many members of our team to live out their dreams too. It's one of the greatest privileges I could never have dreamed of or imagined in my life to get to do this, to get to learn from these people, to get to have these conversations, to get to interrogate them from a very selfish perspective trying to solve problems I have in my life. So I feel like I owe you a huge thank you for being here and for listening to these episodes and for making this platform what it is. Can I ask you a favor? I can't tell you how much um you can change the course of this podcast, the the course of the guests we're able to invite to the show, and to the course of everything that we do here just by doing one simple thing. And that simple thing is hitting that subscribe button. Helps this channel more than I could ever explain. The guests on this platform are incredible because so many of you have hit that button. And I know when we think about what we want to do together over the next year on this show, a lot of it is going to be fueled by the amount of you that are subscribed and that tune into this show every week. So, thank you. Let's keep doing this, and I can't wait to see what this year brings for this show, for us as a community, and for this platform. Dacher, could you start by giving me your professional academic resume? Uh well, well, that it begins early with my parents who were, you know, very important in my education and my formation. So, my dad is a visual artist and my mom taught literature and poetry and romanticism and got me interested in, you know, all ki- all kinds of things about the human mind. Um and then I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergraduate. Uh and then went to Stanford for PhD. Subsequent to that, worked with Paul Ekman as a postdoc, who's kind of a pioneer in the study of facial expression. Uh and inspiration for the show Lie to Me. Uh and then became a professor. Uh Wisconsin, uh and then UC Berkeley for 27 years and helped run the Greater Good Science Center, which is about disseminating kind of the new knowledge of meditation and compassion and stress to uh a broad audience. And um have taught at Berkeley, which I love, for 27 years. You referenced there the Greater Good Science Center. Yeah. What's the What's the mission of the Greater Good Science Center? Yeah, thanks for asking. You know, um 20 years ago uh post 9/11, um you know, we were in a world much like post-Trump and uh Boris Johnson and others, you know, like are we are we fragmented? What happened to humanity? Um what happened to community? Um why are um life expectancies in the United States dropping the last 2 years? What's going on, right? that. Yeah, striking, right? Really disturbing. Um and we had the conviction and there was this new science of things like if you have strong social ties, it adds 10 years of life expectancy to your life, right? If you practice kindness, um it quiets down the threat regions of the brain. And so we at Berkeley in partnership with the journalism school kind of had the sense early like if we can get this knowledge out, right? In actionable prose where you read it and you say, "Oh, I could teach breathing to my my medical team or I could teach an awe walk to my neighborhood friends. Uh that would be good for the world, you know? Um I'm I'm super compelled by that. Thank you. The Greater Good Science Center. Can you Let's talk about some of the things that you've you've given away in terms of knowledge. Yeah. And some of the sort of discoveries that I think would surprise most people. You mentioned some of them in passing there. Yeah. About breathing and awe walks and um how you can add 10 years to your life. Yeah. What Give me some of the top-line um more detail on some of those top-line findings. This really comes into focus for me, Stephen, when I speak to medical audiences. I do a lot of work with health care providers. Um you know, teaching medical doctors, residents, uh helping programmatically with kind of the spirit of hospitals and the like. Um I talk about uh awe, that the feeling of awe um reduces activation in the inflammation system in your immune system. Your immune system is all these cells distributed throughout your body that helps you protect against dangerous elements on the outside, viruses and bacteria. And the feeling of awe sort of reduces the activation of the cytokine system, which heats up your body. And if your body is always hot, that is bad news for your heart. It's bad news for your diabetes. And awe helps moderate that. I you know, I teach the work on compassion that, you know, 65-year-olds who practice altruism and compassion have greater life expectancy. Um, you know, and and you can go on. Each of these what used to be thought of as kind of new age soft things like awe or compassion or breathing um benefit us. You know, just simple breathing, if you breathe in and out counting to four as you breathe in, counting out to four, actually increases neural density in the this part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, which helps you handle stress. What is awe for someone Yeah, awe is just feeling an emotion you have when you encounter something big or vast that's outside of your frame of reference right, of reality, that you don't understand. That I I think I like the word mystery. Uh you know, wow, who I can't figure this out. And and then that emotion of awe stimulates wonder, right? Like, how do I why do peop- why do rainbows exist? What you know, how are they produced when water when light bends through water molecules? So, it's it's an emotion that drives wonder and creativity. What is the um positive net impact on humans of experiencing awe? Other than cuz when I think of war I think of going to like Machu Picchu and seeing those big mountains and going what the hell is this? This is insane. And I think of that as being like a memory. Oh, that's fun. That was amazing. I take the picture, yeah, put it on my Instagram, get the likes, go home. Yeah. But there's something deeper going on, right? In one's physiology. Yeah, thank you. You know, one of the fascinating things, Steven, when you're, you know, is when you study this complicated realm of emotion, is we have these words that we all use to talk about an emotion and they're much as we have words about, you know, ethnic categories or class categories. Oh, he's lower class or he's he's African-American. Those are just words and concepts that may not capture reality at all. And awe suffers from this, which is when people talk about awe or they share it on Instagram, they show they share the big moments of like, I was at the Grand Canyon or I was in the Lake District or by this cathedral. Um, but in point of fact, you know, there are a lot of ways in which we feel awe all the time, right? Uh, encountering somebody who's really kind in the streets. You're like, "Wow, that was really generous." So, yesterday on the train, the team were coming up to Manchester where I was speaking and an an elderly lady overheard them saying that they were going to climb a mountain for charity. The elderly lady got up, walked over, gave them £5 and said, "I climbed that once. Here's £5. Put it towards the the charity." Mhm. And for all of us, it went into our like company chat that that had happened. It was a real moment of like an affirmation of what it is to be a human and kindness, I guess. Yeah. And what's stunning to me, and this is a a digression, is your story just gave me the chills. And that's amazing. It's incredible, isn't it? It is incredible that I wasn't there. I've just got the chills myself. Just Just you saying you had the chills has just given me the chills. It's amazing. And that we don't understand scientifically the contagious power of chills and awe. but you know, awe it it it's not the stereotype that we are led to understand or think about with words, it's around us all the time, right? The generosity in the train, the beautiful clouds, a piece of music, a visual design, you know, driving here to your studio, all the incredible design of London, it's around us. Um and so it's there every day and you know, Stephen, I I'm not a I don't know why this happened to me, but I've taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people online and in classes and the like. I was a grouchy kid, stressed out most of my life, terrible meditator, but I was forced into this job, and you know, serving the science of happiness we've been talking about, man, 2 minutes of awe every other day is about as good for you as anything you can do, you know, it calms stress, calms stress regions of your brain, talked about inflammation, it reduces inflammation, activates the vagus nerve, which is this bundle of nerves that wanders all throughout your body and calms your heart rate, it's good for digestion, so you know, it's good news for the human psyche. And when we talk about giving a little stressed out 12-year-old, young 12-year-old some awe each moment in a classroom, we know that's really good for health and creativity. So, it it's good news in terms of what it can bring to us. Talk to me about some some science then and that supports that um assertion where Yeah. the science shows that everyday awe, so like accessible awe. Yeah. The awe that I could go get out in the street or that I could actively go practice after listening to this conversation has proven to have a positive physiological impact on humans or their emotions or their behavior. Yeah. Yeah, you know, this was one of the most exciting developments of the science of awe. Um when we started to get this picture of the health benefits of awe, less stress, a sense of time, reduce loneliness, right? Loneliness, 40% of people in globalized cultures feel lonely, right? That is hard on the body. We started to think about awe interventions. Um and, you know, one of my favorites uh that has compelling health data, if you will, is um a lot of people go for regular walks. The UK is famous for its its walking traditions, you know, it's one of the great cultural strengths, you know, just paths and, you know, and walks and, you know, and etc. and and uh so, we just added one element to people's regular walk uh and we called it the awe walk, which is when you go out, pause, take some breathing, deep breathing, get synced up with your footsteps. This is a classic kind of walking meditation approach. And then look for awe, right? Look Take a moment to look at small things, look at the reflection on this cool mug, then pan out and look at, you know, the vastness of where you are, city or nature, up at the sky. That was it, right? And that gets you into this awe mindset and our participants were 75 years old or older. Um at that age, a lot of data suggests you start getting more anxious and depressed, right? Your people you love are dying. Your body's falling apart. You are facing your mortality. And the awe walk over eight weeks, once a week, compared to a really rigorous control condition, led our 75-years-old participants to feel less distress, less pain, and more awe and joy in their lives. So, it's just this simple addition to a daily walk, right? Um listening to some music, do it more intentionally. And and a lot of the studies of awe are really simple, you know, just watch an awe video, share an awe story, which you shared to me that just gave me the goosebumps, you know? That goosebumps is a register, it's these little muscles around hair follicles that are part of what are called what are called your parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, which calm you down. So, share stories of awe. So, so there's a ton of ways in which you can build more everyday awe into your life. What's the evolutionary basis for this? Um the you know, in 1978, I think, Richard Dawkins published Selfish Gene. Mhm. Massive book, right? You know, if you read that, it's it the argument which is true, is that we we are the we have these genes that are replicating themselves through us. We are these machines that replicate genes, right? Uh and all of our characteristics are ways to do that. And and it's all the language is very aggressive and adversarial. These genes are competing with these genes. I'm competing with other people in the game of evolution. And there's been this massive shift in evolutionary thinking in the past 40 years, where you know, we're just starting to discover, you know, around the world, people share 40 to 50% of a resource with a stranger if asked, just like as a default. That's our intuition. Um we have neurophysiological systems like oxytocin parts of the brain and the vagus nerve, which help us sacrifice and give. Um we readily are contagious in our feelings. Your story gave me the chills. And then my chills bounced back to you and you got the chills. So, we're united and connected. And now, you know, it it the thinking is we're very cooperative alongside violent and rapacious and the like and and collective. We're hyper-collective. Um we synchronize with each other physiologically. We mimic each other. We collaborate unlike any other primate. We're We're That's just who we are. It's probably our big strength. Um I think because in part um hyper-vulnerable offspring needed a lot of care, right? To live. Food scarcity, warming in the face of cold. And we need emotions and social practices that make us feel like we're collective. And awe is it. When You know, it's It's so striking, Stephen. I don't know if you've had an awe experience in nature recently. Just being outdoors. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. So, I went to I went to Bali in Indonesia to write my book in Ubud. And that's one of the the places where I mean, you're in a a vast jungle. But also, when you whenever you get to the top of a mountain, you look out across the jungle. And I remember one particular moment looking out across the jungle, stood on this platform that was awe-inspiring. Yeah. Um but also, I It's quite weird that I My My awe-inspiring experiences in that country are always just being on the moped and going through the countryside. Yeah. Because there's because it's this It feels like the essence of nature. There's something about I don't know what it is. There's There's just realness to it that makes me feel like I'm at home. Mhm. It's hard to explain, but And that's feel like you're at home, right? And it's striking. Think about it conceptually like here I am on a a moped in nature with you know, the the ecosystem's kind of moving into my body and my brain. And out of that comes the concept I'm home. And that's what awe does is it says I'm part of this people, right? The other time was actually last week. I was at Soho Farmhouse, which is a sort of like a uh like a hotel village they've constructed where you can go on the weekends to be in nature. And it was actually walking back to my cabin. I looked up up for the first time. And obviously, when you're in the countryside, you get to see the stars. In London, you don't have that luxury. And I looked up and I saw the stars and I started talk like having a mental conversation about what that is, like what I'm looking at. That is a I mean, that one over there is a bigger than planet Earth and it's I'm basically this tiny little into seemingly insignificant piece of irrelevant dust. And that made me feel a sense of awe. The feeling is really because I am so small, I am part of this bigger thing. Like you know, when you don't look up and when you're looking down, let's say, figuratively, there's a sort of an individualism, whereas like it's it's me. I am I'm the center of the universe. When you look up, you realize that you are irrelevant, but therefore also part of this greater thing, I guess. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up, you know. And one of the simple actionable things that were we've been teaching at Greater Good, we we have a practice on this is look at the sky. Just like look up, take a minute. If you ask the average citizen in a city like London, when's the last time you looked at the sky? They're like Yeah, I don't see it. Yeah, and it's powerful. Yeah, the you know, one of the paradoxical qualities of awe and and is this shift, this transformation in sense of self that you're talking about and it's profound, which is, you know, in the in one of the early writing traditions around awe, which is spiritual journaling, a lot of people, early accounts of awe in the Bhagavad Gita and Julian of Norwich and you know, the great Christian writings, almost every spiritual tradition, the Buddha, uh it's this like, "God, I'm having this ecstatic awe mystical experience. What's it like?" And they write about the the self just like vanishing, you know. Um psychedelics has a rich tradition of ego death in it. Carl Sagan, you know, has this great statement about space like yours, like "Man, when I think about the universe look at me, I'm just this Yeah. I'm a little speck of dust, you know? But the self is huge in our minds. Yeah. And awe quiets it. It puts it into perspective. And what's striking, Stephen, which I you know, it took us a long time to figure this out scientifically, is it actually feels liberating, you know? Oh, it's the Do you know what? When I'm stressed, I I remind myself of how insignificant I am. Because stress is often the like the um the like the fatal decision to overestimate the significance of your your your problems. Like relative to you know, to whatever. But the other day I was I was a little bit um I was overthinking something a lot, and I could feel myself getting a little bit stressed. And I rem- I reminded myself of looking down on a plane Yeah. over a country, and just how irrelevant I am in the grand scheme of things. Because of Well, you know, I became a dragon on the on Dragon's Den, and the podcast became bigger. You know, it's it's easy sometimes to fall into the trap of when there's a lot of people talking about you or writing about you to to to think that this is the center of the universe in some respect. I'm leading a a movement of 2 million people. but whenever I go up in on a in a plane, and I look down, I go nothing that I do is really mat- matters in a good way. Yeah. It's funny cuz it's a paradox. It's like I want to be empowered, and I want to think that I matter. Yeah. But at the same time, I I I I like to realize that I absolutely don't matter in any respect. And I love saying this to people because it you can see ego square. Yeah. When you go When you put in context that we are as an an individual we absolutely don't matter. You know, in the in the millions of whatever billions of years that the universe has existed, we are just this blink. And I'm just this irrelevant speck of dust. And once I'm gone, you know, give it another million years, no one's even going to remember. Yeah. Or whatever. Probably couple the couple of years, but But that's what's great about art and the human mind, right? Is we we need the ego and the self, and we need to maximize our interests and desires and reproductive possibilities etc. status, you know, all that obsessive stuff. But man, we have this great realm of transcendence that awe is part of that, you know, and in our studies, you know, we we literally we took students up to this tower on the UC Berkeley campus. They got to look out at the and they no longer felt stressed about things. We had students look up into trees and just admire these We have a lot of tall trees on campus in I hope you visit it sometime that are beautiful and tall and make you feel like you know, there we have redwood trees that are a thousand years old, you know, that oh, this little moment of consciousness that is so self-critical or or stressed or or ego maniacal is just a moment in time of seven nine billion people. It's you know, for me personally it was liberating to find this in awe like like you're saying like this is all this is just one human's effort. So. Why did you write this book? Of all the things you could have written about, you're a very smart individual. You've studied so many things relating to sort of social sciences and how humans behave and why we why we do what we do, but to commit your life to writing a book about this subject matter Yeah. is writing books is not easy. Yeah. Takes a long time, a lot of effort. You have to promote them etc. Why this book? And why now? Yeah. Thank you for asking that. Um Yeah, you know, um it is hard to write books and we had done a lot of research on awe and you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book was um you know, I'm now at an age where I've been following how we're doing as cultures and and a lot of the things that have surfaced here, Stephen, are true. Like, you know, people feel lonely, they feel um um adrift. They're searching They're searching for something more meaningful than elevating a paycheck. And And I felt that awe was part of that story. That awe gets us to what is meaningful to us as individuals at a moment in history. Um and then uh my younger brother died. And he um he was He was born uh I'm 1 year older. We had this wild childhood, you know, of like born in Mexico and raised in the late '60s in Laurel Canyon, a very experimental place, wandering the foothills of the Sierras, and and uh he was my source of meaning in many ways in life. Um and he got colon cancer and died. And it was brutal and horrifying. And at the moment of his dying uh the last night he uh sitting by his bed and um and he he was my moral compass in life. You know, he really He was very courageous. Super kind. Uh really only cared about like devoted his career to the least uh resource kids in the country, these poor poor kids. And um when I was watching him die uh I had an awe experience. I was like you know, what is going on? He seems really calm. He's heading into a space I don't understand. I saw like pulsating light, you know, that was uniting everyone around him in this sense of reverence and the sacredness of of his life. And uh afterward um I was uh knocked into a really profound state of grief where um this is about 5 years ago. Uh I couldn't make sense of the world. You know, I could do my work. Um, but I just didn't I was lost cuz he was a very important voice to me. You know, and I was waking up, wasn't sleeping, panicky, and and I like a lot of people in grief, I was like, you know, hallucinating. Like I would see him, follow a guy in the streets, like, and it wasn't him. I'd wake up thinking he was there. I felt his hand on my back a couple times. And uh, it was weird. I was I I had this epiphany in this really bad state of mind. The worst I've ever felt, like, um, I got to find awe again, you know, I have to my brother, you know, he and I went dancing and did wild things and backpacking and, you know, just live this life of awe. He was my source and he was gone. Um, and so I wrote the book, you know, and I I dug in and just started writing about him. Uh, and he features prominently in the book, you know, what he meant to me and how I grieved his loss and then worked up the science too. So, in many ways, you know, what we're observing in our our globalized culture is is this the problems of capitalism, the search for meaning, the you know, rising the reduced life expectancy US, rising anxiety, depression. And I was kind of in that state. You know, suddenly like, "Wow, my career's good, but uh, you know." And so, um, knowing a little bit about the science, I was like, "I've got to do this myself and go get it." Did you find that awe again? I did. It it it it it took a lot of work, you know, I was in a really tough place and uh, you know, I um, I just was I just started anew, like, "Where do I find meaning? And I find meaning working with prisoners. I don't know why, you know, um but just, you know, being in prisons, volunteering, helping with a formerly incarcerated. I challenged myself to find awe in places I wouldn't ordinarily find it. Like just to open my mind, like, "Woah, I'm at a symphony, you know, I love African music and Sona Jobarteh and, you know, and here I was in the symphony not understanding it but starting to feel it. Um you know, nature's easy for me. I've always backpacked and gone into the mountains. I had a lot of spiritual conversations, you know, of like, "I'm not a religious person." And I was like, "What is this? You know, why why mystical awe?" So and what it gave me, I think, with respect to my brother's death, is an openness, like we don't know what life is. We don't know where it goes. We don't, you know? Uh and it opened my mind to a lot of new sources of awe. There's almost an injustice I heard in that story because of the way you characterized your your brother and his behavior. Yeah. For him then to have passed early from cancer Yeah. feels in many respects to me like the opposite of awe or you know, the universe being uh compassionate or fair or whatever. And that Yeah. Yeah. It hit me hard, you know, it was uh and that's well put. Like for the first year, you know, you you ask these questions, like, "Why would a guy who teaches speech therapy to the poorest kids in the United States go and is it with a teenage daughter and a young family? Come on, you know, come on." And Donald Trump is, you know, indestructible and you're like, "The world is [ __ ] you know." And and I grappled with that uh very hard. And then I was, as you well put, I was in this antithesis state of awe, I was like nothing meant anything. You know, it was all pointless. I could sense nothing bigger about life that mattered. And that's why you know, that's why I said, "All right. I have this career that allows me to do these investigations." And we're all investigating. We're all searching for these things in music or moral beauty or being in collectives or sports. And I just threw myself into it. And And uh And you know, frankly, um it, you know, the idea of everyday awe, which is very important in the book. We can find it anywhere. You know, on the train with the act of generosity. That is now it just feels alive all the time. What What's kind of the three lines of gratitude? Because when you were talking about the old walk Picked up the the this um mug, the silver mug we have in front of us. Yeah. And you started admiring it. It almost sounded a bit more like gratitude to me. Yeah. And even the the the study where you had the elderly um participants do the walk and then sort of self-report I'm guessing on how they felt. Yeah. It sounded like nature also gives us a sense of sort of gratitude for our lives, for the world we're living. Yeah. What's the distinction or difference if there is one? Yeah, what a terrific question. And there's a deep philosophical tradition um of David David Hume, Scottish philosopher, um Charles Darwin, uh Martha Nussbaum more recently, a Chicago philosopher that we and it really animates a lot of this conversation, the work I've done is like we have these amazing emotions that are like deep intuitions about the world that are good for us and good for the world. You know, compassion, take care of people who are vulnerable. Awe, you know, connect to others to face vast mysteries. And gratitude, uh Adam Smith, the great economist, felt like this is the emotion that holds societies together, gratitude. The feeling of reverence for things or like, "Wow, this is really important and sacred." of things that are given to you. And that is key. Like, "Oh, my friend helped me with my work. Um my work colleague brought me lunch. Um you know, my my child did the dishes tonight." You know, "Whoa. Um I feel grateful." Gratitude, really close to awe as as you intuit, but it tends to be different in that awe tends to be about vaster things. Like, you know, uh you almost get into a car crash or you get into a car crash, you almost die, and you're like, "Ah, I'm just I feel awestruck that I'm alive, you know." And then awe has more mystery to it. You can't understand it. Like music or Right. Like music Yeah, exactly. You know, music rushes into you and you start crying, right? And you're like, "Oh my god." So, what's a recent experience of that for you? Of music? Yeah. Um it would be Where you just start sobbing and, you know, or not sobbing. Oh, sobbing. Or chills. It would be We do this live show for It's called the Driver Seat of Life, and we toured the country last year. We did three nights at the Palladium, then we took it to all these theaters. And I'm stood and there's a house gospel choir of about 40 people behind me for the whole 2 hours while I'm speaking. Yeah. And I mean, Jesus. Yeah. They sing a lot of like religious songs as part of the the message that I'm conveying. And I mean, every night I'm you know, I'm crying. It's funny cuz I rehearsed it. I rehearsed it. I practiced I practiced it. But then with the people there, the audience of 2,500 people and the choir there, I would cry every night. Yeah. Which is bizarre which is strange, right? Isn't it striking? It's a it's sense of connectedness, maybe. I wonder why in the live show, when there's thousands of people there, then I feel the most intense emotions Yeah. versus when we're in rehearsals. Yeah. That's a complicated question. But your examples tell us, you know, that you the vastness of that experience of like, "Wow, there are sound waves that I'm producing and that are moving bodies. I see this pattern of movement, and I am part of that." And as the poet Ross Gay says, these boundaries between self and other become very porous. You're like, "Whoa, we're all one organism." That's awe, vast, and and I don't understand why. Gratitude is more, you know, you're at the show and you know, somebody looks you in the eye and smiles and and you feel like they're grateful for you. It has this more readily understood economy to it almost or um and why, you know, in writing about awe, um the you know, there are some things that are intuitive like, "Oh, nature makes us feel awe." And people's moral beauty and kindness, your story on the train. But how in the world music sound waves hits our ear, produces a a neurochemistry in the brain, and the next thing you know, you're crying, you know, and feeling one. That's amazing to me. And we still I don't know if science will ever answer it, you know, it's it's just the transcendent power of music, and you're lucky to share it. Do you have any insight into the positive impact that gratitude has on us based on any sort of studies that have been done? It's huge. And you know, Stephen, like when I following and teaching the science of happiness literature for 25 years, you know, at UC Berkeley, I started teaching a happiness course. I think it was Harvard and us were the first 25 years ago in tracking like, "What are the What are the things you can count on?" You know, and when I go out and teach happiness, um it's very humbling. Like you asked me in some sense um a related question to have a parent come up to me and say, "You know, my son is massively depressed and suicidal. What do I do?" You know, and obviously you go see a therapist and you've considered medication, but the happiness literature can point to like these are the five safest things to do. Social connection, uh develop some way to use your body to calm down, breathing, yoga, sports, whatever. Uh and gratitude is a winner. And I think awe is up there now, too, but you know, gratitude, um practicing gratitude uh benefits the cardiovascular system. It helps people who have heart heart vulnerabilities. Patients, they do better. Uh it is uh very good for your place in social networks. Like, I join a group. I'm I'm worried. I'm socially anxious. What do I do? Practice some gratitude, you know, say thank you and uh show a little appreciation to people. You will have stronger social ties. Uh we did research showing it's good for romantic bonds, you know, the if partners simply say on occasion, like, "Hey, thanks for doing the dishes." or "I appreciate how you the jokes you tell." or "I love your music selection." it helps, right? So, it's it's a safe bet for a happier life. You know, this I've come to learn that there's so many forces in our day-to-day lives that act against gratitude and um stifle its presence. But in the context you've given there, whether it's in a social group or at work or in a relationship or even with yourself, I've come to learn how important it is to not rely on gratitude just showing up, but to try and create a system for frequent gratitude. Now, one of the things that's been a real unlock for me, my companies over the last couple of years, is in every company that I run, we have a gratitude chat. Yeah. So, it's just a channel Yeah. And it's open. There's really no instruction, but it's funny that we we we created the channel first at Social Chain and then in my current companies and when you just create the channel, what happens is gratitude pours in. Yeah. So, today there'll be I I can guarantee at some point today there'll be a message in there that says, "Thank you so much, Ross, for going and getting me that cup of coffee um that I didn't ask for, but you knew that I needed it or whatever." Or, "Thank you, Jack, for helping me lift that box upstairs." And it pours in and and it's such a simple thing to do, yeah, but it creates this insane um um hard to understand amount of like connectiveness and appreciation. And I imagine for the individual on the receiving end of the gratitude um a sense of like worthiness or or respect respect or Come on, yeah. And it's such a small thing to do It is. that I think every company should consider, which is having a a system to move gratitude friction free across your organization. Yeah. To back bind it together. But in your personal in your relationship, the same thing. Yeah. Like you can rely on it being a you know, your partner helping you with the bags or helping you with your packing or whatever. But it would it's great to also in a relationship have a a system for Yeah. gratitude. And what I love about your system, Steven, you know, I've taught gratitude in a lot of organizational contexts and sometimes people force it like, you know, "Okay, let's see what we're grateful to for each person in the in this you know, this meeting." And it's like, "Oh god, you know, that's tricky." But to allow it to be spontaneous and intuitive like you did, right? And let it flow. That's that's the strong source and and manifestation of gratitude. And it reminds us, you know, in Western European thinking, probably largely Western European male thinking has been so hostile to emotion. Uh this is what I was saying when I said there's so many forces acting against it. Yeah, and it's just like why would you ever say thank you? It makes you weak. It makes you vulnerable and the like, etc. Um but there are a lot of great thinkers from David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, you know, early a lot of the East Asian, you know, contemplative philosophies like our best human tendencies come out of emotions of gratitude and express them. Um, and and I think that your example speaks to sort of a a big shift culturally and what do we do with these emotions at work? They're really vital to our sense of connectivity and community. Makes me think a lot about relationships. And I know this is something you've written about extensively. The the role that romantic relationship plays in health outcomes, etc., etc. But then I also was I was pondering this idea of monogamy broadly. Yeah. Whether So, my kind of question is kind of two-fold is are we meant to be monogamous? Yeah. And also this I'm thinking a lot about how the relationship dynamics in monogamy is changing in some in some ways eroding. Yeah. I was reading some stats around marriage and how people are getting married less and you know, having less kids and all these kinds of things. So, what's your thoughts on all of that? Are we meant to be monogamous? You've done a lot of research on apes and you've talked a lot about them in your in your work. But are we meant to be monogamous? And if so how does that relate to the fact that being in a relationship extends our life? What a terrific question. Well, you know, anytime that you pose these questions, right, you have to remember um, you know, and I always approach things from an evolutionary framework. You know, which is humans are many different kinds of individuals, right? There's massive individual variation. And when I, um, you know, and there's cultural variation. So, some cultures will be less monogamous, others more. Um, yeah, I think that I think that, um, the the safest answer we can offer and it and it's dispiriting and I teach it to my young students at Berkeley is, you know, I hate to tell you this, but you're in love right now, but odds are very good that that's not going to be the last relationship you're in. And so we tend to move from one semi-committed relationship to another. Mhm. Um so serial monogamy or uh is is is what many believe to be kind of our default orientation. There's variation around that. Some are more polyamorous, others are really fiercely monogamous given genetic makeup and cultural makeup. Um my belief is um and and your generation is really bringing this to the fore, which is that the old model of single monogamous relationship for 60 years uh probably is not working. When you look at divorce rates, 50%. Those people who stay together, half of those marriages are really pretty unhappy. So it's it's not working. You look at certain cultures, I I was struck, Stephen, recently I was you know, the Scandinavians always do really well in happiness measures, right? And I was like and I just Google like you know, what is the um is sort of living configuration, romantic relationship configuration in Sweden. Sweden has really high rates of people co-parenting but not living with the parent, right? And that may be a model to be moved not not living with the partner, sorry. Mhm. Um and so I think that we have many kinds of love. Uh one of them being a monogamous love. Um it it puts a lot of pressure to uh with this old kind of romantic, chivalrous, Victorian ideal of like that's the only person. I don't think that works, right? And so we're we're moving towards more flexible arrangements where we express many kinds of love and and it comes with a lot of complexity. So I when I teach love I say there are all these kinds of love, right? Walt Whitman loved friendship, You know, I I mean, friendship love and in a lot of the data, friends give you more happiness than any kind of relationship, right? Oh, I shouldn't say. I shouldn't say I agree. My girlfriend is somewhere upstairs. You're young, man. You got You got time. I'm You know, I understand. I understand. So, the I think this this model of like, you know, singular devoted all-consuming romantic love has misled us. And we need varieties of romantic love, which your generation is creating, which is exciting. And then we need to remember the other forms to to have the rich life. And then you get at that, you know, I got the right social configuration to give me those 10 years of life expectancy. I've always been going back and forth about marriage because I understand that some people say marriage is a a system that allows for the rearing of kids. Um, it's a it's a form of commitment, which changes things in the relationship. But the But I have always wondered if there's another way. Yeah. That's more, you know, where which kind of I don't know. It's a controversial topic. Is there another way? Like, I'm not even sure me and my partner would get married, but I'm sure we'd make some kind of commitment to each other, but you know, I'm not sure involving the law and church and all these things in the in the process is necessarily conducive with a productive outcome. I know. And not only that, but just think about like, you know, I'm going to be Wait, I'm going to do everything from physical exercise to streaming movies to cooking food with one person, right? Um, you know, it's interesting, Stephen. Um the there's this really striking literature. You know, one of the raw facts of our evolution is our offspring are very vulnerable. They're the most vulnerable offspring of any mammal on the face of the earth. They take 7 to 8 to 20 years just to I even say like 55 years to, you know, to even be semi-functioning as an individual. But what that meant is love in our our hominid evolution was distributed in communities, right? And there's this concept called allo-parenting, which is we all kind of take care of young ones, even if they're not our own. We're all affectionately related to each other in that work. We're all There's much more sexual fluidity in that dynamic that probably reflects the truth of today that we don't face with this Victorian ideal of singular romantic love. And and maybe your generation is moving us toward that that sort of more communal approach to love uh of And it's complicated, right? It involves different ideas about sexuality and different ideas of caregiving, um but probably healthier. And I hope it happens. Why why won't it work? And why doesn't it work? Cuz I you know, when we think about polygamy or um pop being polyamorous. I don't know the difference, I've got to be honest. Yeah. They sound similar. Polygamy, multiple wives. Polyamorous, multiple people you love. Okay. Yeah. So, when we think about those polys Yeah. um it it seems impossible in the modern world to to execute a poly situation without jealousy and all the other [ __ ] Yeah. And you know, I grew up raised around hippies. You know, my parents were counterculture. I grew up in Laurel Canyon in the late '60s, very wild place. And I saw a lot of this as a young kid, and it was comical. You know, it's like, who You're fighting over the dishes and I don't get to sleep with my wife tonight? That's He gets my my roommate does? Ah, you know. It's hard, you know. Um yeah, uh you know, and a lot of things get in the way. I think that, you know, I I forgive me, but you know, I think of the US and how much of United States culture is designed around, you know, the nuclear monogamous family Mhm. of, you know, single homes, suburbs, driving in a car, um you know, really structured around that and and maybe that's poor design. It doesn't seem to fit our evolutionary past of being in these, you know, these collectives that are sharing in the raising of offspring and um and sharing in to a certain extent in romantic partnership, so Are you married? Yes. You've been married for a long time? Yeah, through uh 90 I think it's 33 years, something like Wow, dude. Yeah. Important context. Yeah. So, you know, cuz some people might, you know, think that um you were like anti-marriage or anything like that, but you're clearly I can see from the ring on your finger. No, but yeah, but I grew up around a mom who, you know, she taught women's literature and feminism in the '70s and, you know, that early feminist critique of marriage is right. Mhm. You know, early on it women did a lot of the work. It constrained them. It cost them in terms of job uh mobility, and so I've always questioned it. And then I think the evolutionary literature we talked about is like, "Wait a minute. Maybe love is more distributed. It comes in many varieties. Mhm. And that's how we get this love work done, so I'm glad you guys are questioning it, seriously. Yeah. luck. Yeah, we we The good thing is we're really like we're really open to new things as in we're open to like building new systems for our relationship in the modern world based on how we feel. We're We're very good at being um resistant to like social pressure to to follow a a conventional path. Yeah. So, even with Valentine's Days and things like that, we have a conversation about like does this make sense? Like why would we do this? And what's more important? Yeah. Which a lot of people don't. I've been in relationships before where you you you don't hit the perfect like social cue to show up or give flowers or whatever, and you get like a [ __ ] an essay and you're, you know, a bad guy for that day, but um Going back to one of the points you said, you were talking about how men in particular struggle to show express those emotions. Yeah. Um and you know, stereotypically we're not as uh affectionate and kind as as our female counterparts. One of the things that you talk about is the difference in social class. Yeah. Yeah. And how things change. Oh, man. Are are we worst people the richer and more powerful we become? Because your research seems to show that Yeah. I would say yes. Um and I'm sorry to say that, you know, it's it's uh you know, we um uh I got interested in social class um actually living in England. You know, I lived in England in 1978. Um and you the United States is very blind to social class. We're now more aware of it, Bernie Sanders, etc. Rightfully so, 1% critique. You know, '80s, '90s were just blind to it. It was a more egalitarian time, and I lived in Nottingham, England, very working-class town in a very tough time in England's history of, you know, coal strikes and the like, and it was tough. And and the English had this um just much more sophisticated understanding of class and differentiations between on the dole and working class and posh and, you know, all these categories. I was like, "Wow, class is everywhere. It affects how people speak and dress and eat and so forth." And so, we started to apply social class to what we've been talking about, like the compassion, awe, gratitude, and empathy, kindness, sharing, altruism, and just, you know, across um studies and and, you You largely in the United States, so I think you could question whether this applies to Holland or UK or Japan where there there's less inequality, I might add. Um, you know, as you rise in wealth and privilege, you share less, you feel less compassion to images of suffering. You know, you see an image. This was a striking study to me of, you know, it's a movie about a child who has cancer. And poorer people show activation the vagus nerve, which is part of compassion. You know, causes you to like want to help. Well-to-do people, less activation. Uh, they feel less awe. As you rise in the social class hierarchy in the United States, um, uh, are more impolite. And so, that was part of my power power paradox book was that story about class. I, you know, I I hesitate, I worry about like am I worse person? And I you I'd rather use your earlier language of like, what are the structural conditions that get in the way of this? And you think about, you know, rising in in wealth and privilege and class as introduced you you create a life that makes it harder to be kind. You know, that you're people are assisting you with things and um, you don't come into contact with suffering. You know, you're living in a neighborhood in the United States or probably UK where it's like, you don't see it, you know? And so, you it doesn't train those tendencies. And you know, frankly, um, Stephen, I, you know, I think this is increasingly true in the UK, but in the United States, uh, you know, with one in six people impoverished, uh, life expectancy is dropping, you know, 6 700,000 unhoused people in the United States. Where I live, Berkeley, California, everywhere you go, you're bumping into somebody who doesn't have a home. I I think it's our central failure it in the US is how privilege has short-circuited our our better human tendencies. How do we know that it's the increase in wealth and social class that is causing us to become less kind, um, less empathetic, less compassionate, or it's just [ __ ] go further. Yeah. Yeah. There's a distinction there. Like maybe these people were always [ __ ] and that's why they became successful or rich or wealthy or whatever or or in a higher social class. Yeah. I I mean, there are two And that's a critical question, right? And And people have long championed this idea that, well, maybe all of this, what it really tells us is you if you practice our compassion, you don't rise in the ranks, and you don't gain wealth and the like. And there are two rebuttals to that idea. The first, which I chart in the Power Paradox, which people still don't believe too much, but uh, on balance today, um, people who practice empathy, who listen and and share resources, practice gratitude, rise in the ranks. They they do better in social hierarchies. Um, and that replicates in a lot of contexts. And And really what happens is, this is why I call it the Power Paradox, is once I have everybody's respect and, you know, wealth and the like, then it I tend to misbehave, right? In the ways we've talked about through a lot of different, uh, uh, forms of unethical behavior. The other rebuttal is we've actually done experiments, right? And you can take a middle-class individual, and you can get them into the mindset like, "Hey, you're actually have a lot of advantage vis-à-vis most of society" through simple manipulations, right? Just think about how you compare to a lot of poor people, and they're like, "Oh, I'm doing really well." And that simple shift in mindset leads to reduced compassion, reduced empathy. So, you can you can actually move people around where you give them the sense that they're privileged and it tends to undermine these these tendencies. Jesus. I know. That's [ __ ] horrible. It is. And you know, um I worry about it. I worry about it a lot. What um you know, the the kind of poor distribution of privilege in the United States and increasingly UK and other countries is doing to the social fabric. It's it's a problematic. It's interesting cuz there is there's kind of a long um prevailing stereotype that rich people are like bad. Like they're like less compassionate, um less empathetic. And I and I always wondered whether that was just I don't know. Was it true? Was it um was it Was it people being jealous? Was it um just too much of a broad generalization? Was it, you know, based on the the acts of maybe a few? Yeah. But you're telling me that the science supports the fact that generally the more the richer you are and that the higher you are in terms of social class, um the less compassionate less less empathetic you are as a human. Yeah, and you know, and it is that I mean, that's the broad argument. I've given you a couple of findings here. There are all kinds of other findings that speak to this. Jesus. Um you know, one This is one of my favorites is, you know, in these um these epidemiologists who are studying broad trends in social behavior discovered this accidentally. They're interested in who shoplifts as a a teenager in the United States. You know, a basic unethical tendency, really costly for businesses in the United States. Is it the rich or the poor? Well, you know what who I who I would assume it would be, but I feel like I'm wrong. It's the rich. Rich high school kids in the United States are more likely to shoplift, right? Um and that's striking. They've got their parents' credit card. They can buy whatever they want and they violate that social rule. This is where it gets really worrisome. Uh my former student Michael Kraus did really nice work on US senators and US policy makers. You know, American politicians are rich. They increasingly so. And he was simply interested in does your degree of privilege or wealth predict regressive policy preferences like let's not give resources to schools for the poor. Let's not fund, you know, Medicare. Let's really move wealth through taxation policies to the well-to-do. And the wealthier you are, the more you you preferred and advocated for, you know, serious economic policies that hurt the poor and benefit the well-to-do who already have, you know, in the US the 1% they have enough. They have more than enough, right? Why not share a little? So, it's deep. And I think And then you look across history, European aristocracies and you know, the Popes and so forth and it's it's I think it's one of the you know, frankly, Steven, and I hate to say it, you know, Lord Acton, uh you know, power leads to abuse and absolute power absolute corruption. Our power is corrupting. Um it's a pretty safe law in human behavior. I hate to say it. Mhm. It's because you're rising in prominence and facing a new life and you better watch out. I was thinking most of the time you're talking, which is like, how do you avoid that? How do you avoid Yeah. How do you avoid the uh that scientifically supported tendency to become an [ __ ] with with the more wealth and power you accrue? Um I guess my my assumption was just being conscious of the fact. Yeah. The first thing. But also just like there's probably act things you could do actively to remain uh aware of your own insignificance to maybe not the word, but like the fact that everybody is exactly the same. Yeah. That's like the the way I describe it. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's an awareness dimension to this that you've suggested. There's an ethical practice of like, how do I create more gratitude in an organization if that's what we care about, etc. Um How do I counteract my own biases then as well? So, how do I put you people around me who represent and we're thinking here I'm thinking here about governments that represent the entirety of the population, not just the rich private school right colleagues that I might surround myself with, which has often been the case in government. And that is hard to work against, right? That is a deep sociological process that like, you appoint the cabinet member from Oxford or whatever and and you're in trouble. Yeah, you know, it's it's uh It is uh you know, a lot of economists, a lot of the work coming out of uh you know, spirit level UK, this is a central challenge of of the structure of our societies today is this this increasingly unequal distribution of privilege and wealth and all that goes with it. Do people that are wealthy and in a higher social class live longer? Because I say that because the the attributes of becoming less empathetic and rude or all these things seem to be the antithesis of social connectedness and all of these things. And you even said earlier that, you know, wealthier people experience less awe. Yeah. And all of those things are um uh are associated with living longer. Yeah. So, one would assume that if you become rich and powerful, you're then there's also then also a risk to your life expectancy. Yeah, that's terrific. That's a really striking question and we don't know. Um and I think your reasoning is right on the point, which is wow, you have less friends, you have Right, privilege knocks out these these these important tendencies that help with inflammation and vagal tone and the like. Um rich people do live longer. That's robust. Yeah, yeah, and food you eat and so forth. You know, opportunity for health, you know, yoga, all the things that benefit us. Rich people, this is interesting, surprised me, rich people are less likely to experience anxiety and depression in the United States. Yeah, interesting, isn't it? We think so lonely and anxiety producing to be at the top. No, mental health issues are really concentrated in the poor for obvious reasons. Working two jobs, riding the bus, you know, schools are under-resourced, etc. But to your point, and it's interesting, the effect of wealth on happiness is much smaller than people think. People think, you know, in particular in a country like the United Kingdom or you know, Great Britain or US, like oh, once I make a lot of money, it'll be bliss and happiness and contentment. That turns out not to be true. It's a weak relationship. And I think part of the reason is, you know, when you you gain in resources, you don't have these raw feelings of compassion as often or God, I'm grateful for that gift, right, that you gave me or this is awesome, this person's courage or how they overcome overcame obstacles. And so that diminishes how wealth could make you happier. So I think it's at play in some of these phenomena and maybe in others. As some of you will know, Intel have been sponsoring this podcast for a little while now. And this makes the search for high-spec laptops super easy because all you have to do is look for the Intel Evo badge and you'll have everything you need. 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So much so that I ended up investing in the company um and I play a role on the board of the company, but they also very kindly sponsor this podcast. And to be honest, I've never said this before, but Huel believed in this podcast before anybody else. The CEO, Julian, um told me before we even launched the podcast how successful it would be and that Huel would back it. And I absolutely have a huge amount of gratitude for them for that support. But, an even greater sense of gratitude for the fact that they've helped me stay nutritionally complete throughout the chaos and hecticness of my tremendously busy business schedule. So, if you haven't tried out Huel, which I hope most of you have at least given it a go by now, try it out. It's an unbelievable way to try and stay nutritionally on course if you have a hectic busy schedule. And let me know what you think. Send me a tweet and a DM. Tag me. Let me know what you think. Back to the podcast. You talked about how life expectancy has been declining in the last few years. Why? Yeah, you know, in the United States um and I don't know the data in the UK. Um and and it's um it's it's really related to inequality and opportunity and the poor distribution or uh of of opportunity and resources is um there have been these amazing findings uh related to what's called death by despair. And certain populations in the United States, um very poor white people, large group of the um large subculture in the United States, are often forgotten in the cultural discourse. They're poor. I grew up around these people. Very poor, don't eat good food, schools are not that good, you know, uh work is uncertain. And they and they feel disrespected in some sense. And those that subculture in the US has been killing themselves, you know, with opiates and you know, drinking and drug addiction and suicides and the like. And it's a serious problem. And it's part of that statistic. And then I think that, you know, if you think about the problems of contemporary culture concentrated in the United States of lack of civility, rage, self-focus, a lot of things that undermine our physical health through the mind, um that probably is part of this story, too. Too much stress, too much loneliness, um not enough music and joy and shared communal experience, um we are struggling. Um and and that's part of probably that statistic, too. And so that's why, you know, as I mentioned, like the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a very smart team, looking at these kind of processes and saying, "How do we build community?" You know, and they're they've got a big program now. So, it is alarming. And that statistic is important for thinking thinking about where we are. I looked at the life expectancy on Google a couple of years ago. And I I could see that it was basically going up every single year. And then there was these 2 years. I think it might have been last year or the year before. This was, I think, before the pandemic. Um there was these two years where it had dropped both in the UK and the US Yeah. in a row. Yeah. Um and I was trying to understand why that was, and I heard some social commentator say that there's this epidemic of purposelessness. Yeah. Yeah. And describe that as leading to the opioid crisis, but also suicides and all these other behaviors. Yeah. Um is that is that a good way to in your in your view to define it, like this epidemic of purposelessness? Yeah, it is. You know, thanks for bringing that up, and you know, purpose, a lot of people now call it meaning, right? What vague term, has many different definitions, but it's, you know, I as an individual, how do I connect to things that are larger than the self, that don't have to do with income or status or directly, but like, what's my point here in my brief life on Earth? Um you know, what am I going to serve? What's the big cause that I'm part of? And this is really emerging in the science of happiness as a central focus of, you know, um you know, we we know well uh how to find income, we have good ideas about sensory pleasures, what's good to eat, how do I drink wines, what's the great coffee and the like, but we've lost sight of meaning. You know, churches and religions used to give that to us, you know, and religious participation's on the decline in the West, dramatically so for people your age. Mhm. Um where they gave us a big picture of life, and now, you know, young people are hungry for it, and they're challenging a lot of the the approaches to happiness that that don't give meaning, you know, new conceptions of work, like, I don't have to stay at one career if it isn't meaningful, new conceptions of romantic relationship, and so, I think, you know, I think a lot of different perspectives are saying this is one of the crises of our times is meaning. Is what will be the big thing you're devoted to? If you were to follow you answer that question? Uh, which question? What are you devoted to? I'm devoted to so many things. I'm devoted to this, this this podcast and the show for so many reasons, for for very selfish reasons, but those selfish reasons happen to be selfless. Yeah, a lot of them. Um, you see what I mean? Like, doing the podcast and you know, helps helps the people some of the people that listen because they come up to me in the street and they tell me all the time wherever I go. And the stories they tell me are like, uh, I remember I was at, um, Old Trafford uh, 2 days ago, the Manchester United stadium, and a guy who was the he said he was the nearest survivor to the Manchester, um, terrorist attacks. Mhm. Um, approached me in his in his wheelchair and told me that of the impact this has had on him. Yeah. And I literally had to walk like I took the photo with him, walked, um, like 2 m out out into this, um, this balcony, and I remember feeling just overwhelmed with emotion. And it was this wonderful reminder of like how why I do this. Yeah. For for both the listener, but also for me. So, this is something that I'm increasingly devoted to because of those experiences. And thank you to that young man, he's tweeted me about for doing that cuz I I needed I needed the reminder. So, I feel like you need the reminders sometimes often. I'm devoted to my relationship with my partner, my dog, my family, Yeah. um, my team, and I'm I'm devoted to myself. I'm devoted to like my my, um, health, my, you know, of both my body and my mind. Yeah. I think that's what I'm devoted to. And I think I'm devoted to, um, the the the yeah. Probably answered this in the first piece, but the good the greater good of like the collective. So, Yeah. you know, um, Yeah. And you know, it's so interesting, you know, Steven, one of the reasons that I got really excited about awe as an emotion to study, a brief state that you, you know, you go out and you see the the moment of generosity that you saw or look at the sky or, you know, think about a big idea, that idea of space or infinity is is it does bring people it kind of moves people away from transactional considerations. So, in one of our studies, look up into the trees, you feel awe, you're less interested in money, you're less focused on the self, and you're you're really more focused on the greater good. Like, what how do my actions promote healthier societies? Um, and and I think that, um, you know, a lot of of young people are raising questions of meaning right now with climate crises and economic inequality, the state of democracy. Like, what is the point? You know, when, you know, you think about conversations from the last century and the centuries before, you know, in reading for awe, people would use words like the soul. Yeah. And spirit. And like, this is what I'm really about in life. Uh, and we've lost sight of that, you know? And so, hopefully with this book, people, how whatever language they want to use, they're asking questions like, what am I devoted to? What's sacred? What is what Why do people suddenly care? It seems like this young generation, I'd say millennials and Gen Z, they all want to change the world. Yeah. Now, they don't necessarily know what they want to change. Yeah. But they want to be involved in the process of And I This is literally a quote, and I say this because of the amount of young people that have come up to me various times, DM'd me, and said, I said like, what do you want to do? They they they'll say things like, I want to change the world. Yeah. How do you want to change it? And they're like, They don't know. They don't know, but they want to be involved in changing the world. Now, I've always wondered if this is like virtue signaling because it's good for social media. Probably. Probably, right? Or there's been some inherent change, you know, from my father's generation to my future kids generation and my generation where we suddenly are these great philanthropists and we want to Yeah. change everything and make it better. Yeah. No, it's exciting for me. I mean, you know, the and there are a lot of good findings on this that when Thatcher and Reagan hit in 1980, and that's when I was 18, right? We had this big return to materialism. And you think about the movie Wall Street being iconic. Greed is good. And that truly that was the idea, right? Of like, the point of life is selfish genes and maximizing my wealth. And we had this massive, you know, shift in Wall Street and that became our ideology. And that's been documented sociologically. Like in my generation, you know, suddenly coming out of the '60s and all the social revolutions of those times, now young people are allowed to say, "I want to make a ton of money. I want to live in a big house. I want to, you know, I want to drive whatever car." And your generation is reacting against that big pendulum shift, right? And suddenly it's like, "Hey, that didn't work. Look at the Amazon. Look at economic inequality. Bernie Sanders, right? Um what about climate crisis? Greta Thunberg, right? Suddenly new model and it's it's coming." But it's not because of social It feels like that social media and the internet has played a huge role in making us this like one connected mind. Yeah. And we know from our sort of evolutionary past that we we prefer members of the the tribe tribe that serve the tribe, that are good, you know, that are I think there's a there's a a term you use when we're talking when you're talking about gossip. Um how we will gossip against people who are not doing good for the tribe, essentially. Yes. So, we know that like being part of the tribe and serving the tribe and being you know, empathetic and caring about others is a good trait. Now, we're all connected on these glass screens as if we're one brain. And we're rewarded with these likes and these retweets when we do good. Ridiculous. Yeah. So, if I if I you know if I do something really really good for society or whatever, um then I'm rewarded with I don't know comments or likes or whatever or you know everyone claps and I feel part of the tribe. Yeah. So has social media made us these philanthropic warriors that are seeking for ways to like virtue signal our our goodness. Yeah. You know, I I mean there's one argument in that in general any act of virtue and and way of promoting the greater good becomes co-opted and exploited by people who have power, you know, and and there's a critique, you know, I hate to say this, but you have a lot of nonprofits that they kind of they create these virtuous organizations and pay people good salaries and don't do a lot in the world and that is a critique out there. And I think it could be even more robustly uh levied against the digital virtue is like it's I you could say it's meaningless. Let's take that hypothesis, right? Oh, we we turn acts of generosity and kindness and appreciation that you saw on the train into digital things that don't affect anything, right? Black Lives Matter where everyone was told to post a black tile on their Instagram on a Tuesday. Like I did a post about how um how much that misses the point in many respects. If we're trying to deal with systemic racism, posting a black tile on a Tuesday really does nothing to address and evoke the conversation that needs to be had. Yeah. But it was like an easy quick cool way to say I'm a good person. It's And to do very little thereafter, you know. And if it's not changing hiring practices or pay practices or school admissions, it is BS and it's a and and probably counter works against social progress. I had a cool during that time from one of the biggest brands in the world who who asked me on a conference call, um there was five of them, what should we do? You know, we need Do Do we Do we do a donation? What What What should we post on our Twitter channel? Like, what should we do and say? And part of, you know, it was the five executives of this huge company. And I said, "I think the the most important thing is actually to get your home in order first. It's startling that there's five white men on this phone call right now talking about um, race relations um, and inequality. I think it's it's it's better not to be the contradictions. It's better to get your home in order first before you start You know, and that's not I mean, there's for You can almost see the the expression in their faces. It's like, "Oh, that's the hard That's the hard thing." Well, get to work. Yeah, exactly. It's much easier just to do a donation, right, in these situations. I want to talk about um, compassion. It's a word I've I've struggled to understand if I'm honest. Yeah. Because Like, what does it mean? Does it mean being nice to people? What is compassion? No, you know, um, compassion is um, the feeling of concern about other people's suffering. Okay. And and then taking action, right? Uh, Empathy? Is that Empathy is I feel the same thing as you. I understand your mental states. If you're in pain, I feel pain. Compassion is you're in pain and I want to I want to make your circumstances better. I want to lift up your your well-being. Um, so it's interesting um, compassion is a very dynamic emotion. It's an empowered emotion. It isn't Nice is great, you know, it's politeness and civility and being considered. I think we uh, we need more niceness in the world and I think we often I think the connotations of the word nice uh, sort of devalue how powerful it is, but compassion is powerful. It is the state of wanting to lift up the welfare of other people who suffer. Um, and what's striking about it and and I love the neurophysiology of this and the the which really speaks to you its power which is that I can see somebody suffering, dying, cancer, uh flesh wounds, crying in pain. And when I lock into the compassion response, certain regions of the brain are activated that are different than empathy, the vagus nerve is activated, and it's it really just throws you into altruistic action, right? So, um and that's why you know, when the Dalai Lama um you know, who's now one of the most prominent spiritual figures in the world says, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. And if you want to be happy, practice compassion." That gets to it, right? Like, man, if you can stay close to compassion, you and other people and the greater good will do well. It's a really dynamic emotion. Is there scientific evidence that proves that you will become happier if you're compassionate to others? Yeah. And what does that scientific evidence show and prove? It's amazing, you know, and it it begins with a study by Liz Dunn, famous study, replicated in many different cultures, which is you give people some money and they can give it away to a to help somebody or spend it on themselves. Giving it away boosts happiness more than spending it on yourself. Um there's research. I love this work in Contagion has been part of our experience here where um if I am kind to you, Stephen, um this is kind of extending from the study, uh that boosts my life expectancy, it shifts my physiology, it shifts my stress. But, I love this work where if I'm kind to you and then the experimenter watches you in your next interaction, you're kinder to that person, right? I'm not around. My act of kindness makes you more kind downstream, and then that person you've helped actually is kinder to another person in a subsequent interaction. So, you know, the you've proven that in studies. Yeah, and really nice research on the contagiousness of altruism and compassion. Um yeah, it is like gratitude, it's one of these big winners, you know, if I There's a loving kindness practice where comes out of East Asian traditions where you just calm yourself, get into some deep breathing, find a quiet safe space, and orient kind phrases to other people. I I May you be filled with loving kindness. May you be safe from inner or outer danger. Well in body and mind. Uh at ease and happy. And that simple practice, 2 minutes, right? Uh just calms the amygdala, threat-related region of the brain, activates reward circuitry. So, you know, um you know, you talked about and you asked about what are these structural conditions of our busy lives that get in the way of of the good life, and you've got to find a few moments just to be kind. I was blown away um when reading your your work and watching videos that you produced about um so many things. The one of the real startling things is the the power of touch. Yeah. I read read um that if you pat a kid on the back in the classroom, that child is three to four five times more likely to try hard problems on the blackboard, and that touch can make you live longer. Mhm. And be less stressed, just someone touching you. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, it's you know, touch in a lot of mammalian species, including humans, is just connection. It's it's identity, it's I'm with you. You know, you think early in life we are constantly being held and in skin-to-skin contact with our caregivers. It's foundational. It's where my sense of me and you connection emerges. The physiology of touch is mind-blowing. You know, our hands are incredible. They're spectacular um you know, evolutionary adaptations that can do all kinds of things including touch. Our skin, 8 lb, billions of cells, our immune system is in the skin. You know, it registers touch in many different ways from the sexual to the friendly to the cooperative. Goes up into the brain and says, "Man, you're being touched in this way." Uh and and that has direct effects on your immune system and your vagus nerve and your heart rate and the health of your body. And so, you know, early discoveries um you know, you have premature babies, they're going to die. And and they used to just put them in these little, you know, um sort of units that warm them and had them sort of be comfortable and fed, and they would die. And then they figured out you got to hold the the premature baby. They needed skin-to-skin contact like they need food. Right? And they lived. They gained 47% weight gain. Um and then, you know, there are there are just studies time and time again. You know, nice hug, lower cortisol. Uh nice embrace with somebody, elevated vagal tone. Um the studies that you referred to of, you know, patting kids on the back, they they do better in school. Um you know, and it's so interesting, parts of English culture, you know, Victorian culture, Western European culture, they came up with the idea like touch is sexual. It's you got to get it and it is, but only certain kinds of touch are sexual. There's a lot of friendly touch we need, right? And it just shut it down. And now it's coming back. It's uh thank goodness. It's it's good for us. We We talked before we started filming about the study with the rhesus monkeys. Yeah. I can't remember that the who the researcher was, but Yeah. I was saying to you that Harlow. Harlow, that was it. Yeah. Um how that was mind-blowing to me at 16 to learn that they put these monkeys in these cages. They had like a pretend wire mother, so a mother made out of like metal. And then they had another one made out of like cloth. And like a mother made out of cloth, which was essentially a teddy bear. And there was huge variance between the outcomes of those kids, right? Yeah. I mean, if you deprive those monkeys of the nice touch, they they don't learn how to behave socially effectively. You know, if you give them a choice between a wire uh monkey mother and that provides milk and then a terry cloth one, they always hang around the terry cloth one, right? They just love the social contact. If you deprive non-human primates of touch, they they are almost schizophrenic or psychopathic or they're just like Personality disorders. aggressive, they can't handle social interactions. You know, orphans deprived of touch, famous orphan studies. You know, in humans, same thing. They just like they don't become human in some way. Or they are human, but they have trouble with social contact. Yeah, you know, I mean, part of the questioning of that you're engaging in, Stephen, of the literature is like, well, what can I do just to live a more meaningful life? Mhm. And you know, from gratitude to kindness to find some ah, man, you know, if you're not hugging people you love, if you're not if you don't have a rich language of touch with your friends, you know, I learned it playing pick up basketball. Basketball, which is the I believe the most fascinating sport in human history, it has this amazing language of touch, you know? And it's it's unique to the court, right? You're fist bumping, chest bumping, and the like. I If you're not doing that with your friends, you're missing out on one of the great languages of human kind, which is to be in contact with each other. So, you know, parents, you know, when you have kids, and I hope some of your listeners are are doing that, you know, it's this mystery, like, should they take naps on my body? Should we How should I hold them? Should I carry them in public? Am I indulging them? And I think the more friendly, kind touch the better. So, we're moving back to where we began evolutionarily, and I think it'll be a good thing. What if I'm touching a dog? Does that have the same same effect? Yeah, I mean, dogs evolved because we love them, and they love us, and there's all this new amazing dog science where This is one of my favorite studies, and touch releases oxytocin, which is this little chemical that floats in your brain and your blood, and it helps you be kind to other people and cooperate. And they're now studies from Japan showing you may do this with your dog, Steven, where if you look into the eyes of your dog, you your dog will have a surge of oxytocin, and you will have a surge of oxytocin. So, so it's like all of this social stuff that's so simple of eye contact and touch brings us good things even with our dogs. It makes me kind of realize two things. The first is that men tend to be stereotypically much worse at that. Yeah. Much worse at touch. We don't We do the like the macho hug where you like on the back, you know, like where you pat them on the back. It's like, "Get the [ __ ] off me." Um, we're we're less good at even things like eye contact and sort of emotional engagement. And then you look at the stats around male suicides and all of those, you know, drug addiction and all those things are significantly higher. I believe the stats say that the biggest killer of men under the age of 40 is themselves in this country yeah, by suicide. Um, And they really need feel as like they need to be a reversal of that. The adjacent point is the just the one we talked about earlier, which is just loneliness. And now it kind of makes sense as to why if you are lonely, you have a significantly worth worse health outcomes. Um and a shorter life expectancy cuz you're not getting the compassion, the touch. You're not You're probably experiencing less awe or gratitude, etc. Yeah. Um And I feel like we have to we have to talk about how we fix that. Like you know cuz some of the saddest moments I can I think about when I've had private conversations are men coming up to me after like a talk on stage and whispering to me that the part I said about me being lonely when I was like 23, 24 and I'd given everything just for this business, coming to the office every day, sacrifice friendships, family, relationships. I'll have men come up to me and whisper to me that that was the part that they um it needed to hear the most. But then asking me what they can actionably do to fix that. Yeah. As if they don't want the the the group around me to hear that they are lonely. Yeah. And they want to do something about it. They are sat on their computers, often playing video games or on the internet, um struggling to attract, you know, maybe the opposite sex or the same sex or whatever whatever they're interested in. And it feels like it's going in one negative direction generally. I mean the stats kind of support the fact that we're getting lonelier and lonelier. Yeah. Yeah, I mean those are such deep insights. And really worth thinking more concretely about what to do. I I think that the you know, kind of the the gender complexities here are really striking, right? Men live significantly fewer years than women in most Western globalized cultures. And and I think you're on a really interesting hypothesis, Stephen, which is that you know, if the gender stereotypes and these rigid concepts and then the lives we lead don't allow us to hug and feel grateful and feel empathetic, it it countervails that and there those are gender stereotypes, right? Oh, if I practice compassion at work, I'll be weak and I won't rise. That's not true. That's a gender stereotype. And it it denies men um disproportionately this opportunity for these emotions, right? And that's that, you know, with new conceptions of gender, new ideas about work is changing dramatically, uh that will shift and I think it'll be good news um for the health of men. Um and and then loneliness um loneliness in some sense is the deprivation of everything we've been talking about. It's that you don't get to hug somebody like you would like to every day and that you don't hear the words of appreciation. William James, you know, the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people. You don't hear it. You don't hear the thank you. You don't get to go out and feel awe with somebody uh or feel kindness. Um you know, so I think we have to think very actively about building these emotions into those contexts. In the United States, there are 35,000 long-term care facilities. The elderly in the United States, a lot of them live alone, you know. Uh if when people from India see how we treat the elderly or people from Mexico, it's just like the unhoused. They're like, "What are you guys doing?" You know, you're taking the vulnerable and and sort of shunting them off alone. But the but these emotions point to really direct actionable things to do, right? With awe practices and compassion. So, it gives me hope, but we've got, you know, I think in part historically we took these prosocial emotions out of our lives, right? And now we got to build them back in. And if we do, it's good for not just ourselves, but it's good for the recipients of those emotions. You know, hugging hugging my dad or hugging my mom or hugging anybody is is a mutually beneficial um behavior in terms of all the, you know, life expectancy, happiness, reduction in stress. And not only that, but you know, I just heard 50% of US healthcare expenses are on the last 5 years of life when a lot of those people are living alone and feeling lonely. And there are simple ways to address that as we've been talking about. So it's there's a bottom line that's really relevant here, too. And then the the really the the bit I imagine a lot of people will, especially those that are much more spiritually inclined, will love is the idea of that karma and how, you know, if I hug one person or if I'm kind to some person or express that gratitude or compassion, it has this sort of cascading knock-on effect. Yeah. And how they go through the day. So like in that sense, karma is a very real thing. It's very real. Yeah. In every respect, even in the in the the concept of gossip, where how you treat someone will spread. I think you said in your your book that um when we treat someone badly, people on average gossip that bad treatment to 2.5 people. Yeah. Which is, you know, which is slightly terrifying. But it's but it makes sense. Um Yeah, you know, it's in part of our theme in our conversation is how we're all connected and united in these these superorganisms, some people call them, through practicing gratitude and sharing resources that spreads through uh these social networks. And then the the complement is also true, which is you know, and and as much as I don't like gossip and I didn't like being gossiped about, it's a human universal. It can be horrifying and and we've got to worry about it, like online catfights and it escalates. Yeah. But we study these social groups and and the thing that people really gossip about is when you're not kind, right? They're like look at what that that A just said these harsh things. that spreads through the network and it it tries to keep those problematic tendencies in check. I guess that's a good thing. It's like a community sort of regulation tool. Yeah. Thank you so much. I've had a wonderful brilliant time over the last week learning more and more about all of your work and reading and watching your your content in great detail. This book is absolutely fantastic. Um it's very challenging, but it's this this concept of awe was one was not one that I'd ever thought of before. Mhm. You know, you think about these other sort of emotions, gratitude, compassion, there's a lot written about them, but I've almost never heard someone talk about the topic of awe as a very accessible, but very profound, powerful human medicine, I would say. And the way that you do that throughout your book is um is incredibly important and I've as I say, I've really never encountered a book quite like it. So, I highly recommend everybody goes and gives it a try and the the reviews on the back by people like Adam Grant and Steven Pinker are I mean, they speak for themselves. So, thank you for writing such a brilliant book and thank you for having such a brilliant, eye-opening conversation with me today. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. Huh. Okay, funny. Um the question that's been left for you is do you think obesity is a choice? I I I don't. Um it's a terrific question, right? And obesity is I think in the US, I think the latest estimate is 56% of US citizens, probably pretty comparable here in the UK. Um and man, when I think about the food that we put in our bodies, the lack of activity that are not cho- chosen, right? That depend on what kind of soft drink that's readily available and cheap, and how fast food is so cheap, and provide us provides us a certain kind of high. To me, that says that it's mainly not a choice of the people eating, but it is a choice of the policy makers. So, I would make that argument. And there is some sort of three lines between the conversation we've had today about stress, connectedness, and all of those things as it relates to food and diet and and eating, which is again social constructs and And access to awe. Um there is a movement parks, living near parks. London is one of the greenest cities in the world. Living near parks boost life expectancy, I think through awe. Uh there's a movement in the United in California that everybody should be 10 minutes public transport away from a park for free. Um 360 million people uh went to the national parks in the United States last year. So, there's a lot of with this stress profile that we've been talking about culturally, there are easy solutions, and one and one pathway is through being outdoors with awe. I want to close then just on that point about a sort of an adjacent point to what you've just said, which is about and you also talked about prisoners earlier. I read once upon a time, when I was doing some research for one of my books, that um prisoners who had a exposure to nature Yeah. were significantly less likely to become depressed than those that were like basically looking out at concrete. Yeah. Um which is mind-blowing to me. It is. The thought that just seeing nature can have a massive impact on our our chances of depression and anxiety. Yeah. Do we need to put more of that stuff in prisons then? We do. We do. And that, you know, you've been challenging me, Stephen, like, all right, what do we do? Just look at a hospital, put some nature in it, right? Look at a prison. Prisons are horrifying in the United States. Norway has more open prisons with views and so forth. Uh different recidivism rates. So, I take from this science and I'm really grateful to you for profiling it, you know, in such a uh a scholarly and thoughtful way. Like, we got to use this knowledge, and prisons is a nice application. But, even in our own homes. Yeah. You know, we most of us are living in these white boxes in big cities, and those that that live in social housing unfortunately are living in even worse conditions often. Yep. Um and nature is somewhat of a privilege, it seems. It shouldn't be. Especially in the home environment, just having some plants. I have zero in here. I have loads upstairs cuz I have a girlfriend and she's just she's very in touch with these things, but she's she's filled my house with with plants, but that's a simple thing we can all do to be happier every day is just have a bit more nature in our in our environment. It's not a bad first step. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you, Steven. It's been an an honor and a a pleasure. Quick word from one of our sponsors. I've got a tip for all of you that will make your virtual meeting experiences, I think, 10 times better. As some of you may know by now, BlueJeans by Verizon offers seamless high-quality video conferencing. But, the reason why I use BlueJeans versus other video conferencing tools is because of immersion. Their tools make you feel more connected to the employees or customers you're trying to engage with. And now, they're launching one of their biggest feature enhancements to impact of virtual events so far called BlueJeans Studio. I actually used it the other day. I did an a virtual event using the studio, which I think about 700 of you came to. TV-level production quality, all done by one person with very little technical experience on a laptop. So, if you've got an event coming up and you're thinking about doing it virtually, check out BlueJeans Studio now. 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