How to Be a Better Human - How to spend money to buy happiness (with Michael Norton)

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

Can money really buy happiness? Michael Norton is a social science researcher who studies how we feel about our spending decisions. His work explores questions like: What’s the best way to spend your cash? How much should you donate to charity? Do credit cards make us unhappy? In this episode, Michael shares the sometimes-surprising findings that can help you use our money to improve your life. Michael is a professor of business administration in the marketing unit at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining HBS, Michael was a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His work has been published in a number of leading academic journals and has been covered in media outlets such as the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I'm a comedian, and ask any comedian, and they will tell you that people love to give suggestions for jokes. You cannot do stand-up or write comedy without many of your friends and your family saying you should write a joke about this.

Or, you know what I've always thought was funny? But I have one friend, my friend Ivan, who has completely raised the bar on joke suggestions. Whenever he has something that he thinks is funny and that I should make a joke about, instead of just emailing me or texting me, he sends me a message through PayPal that has the joke that he thinks I should tell, and then also a request for $99 in payment. Not only does he have a joke that he thinks I should tell, he also gives me the price tag if I decide to use it. I've yet to take him up on any of his payment requests,

but they always bring me joy. So it is possible for you to get a bill and have it make you laugh. And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about a lot of ways in which spending money can make us feel good. How can we be better at spending money in a way that actually does make us happy? It turns out that while many of

us fantasize about hitting the jackpot or having a higher paying job, if we do actually get lucky and end up with more income, we often spend it in ways that are counterproductive and make us feel bad. So how should you spend your cash? What's the best way to pay for a vacation? How should you donate to charity? And what about credit cards? Well, today we are talking to someone who has studied these exact things. Michael Norton gave a talk at TEDx Cambridge

about how to optimize spending for happiness. And his answers, well, they might surprise you. We said, well, maybe the reason that money doesn't make us happy is that we're always spending it on the wrong things. And in particular, that we're always spending it on ourselves. And we thought, I wonder what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on other people. So instead of being antisocial with your money, what if you were a little bit more pro-social with your money? And we thought, let's make people do it and see what happens. So let's have some people do what they usually do and spend money on themselves. And let's make some people

give money away and measure their happiness and see if, in fact, they get happier. What did we find when we called them back at the end of the day? People who spent money on other people got happier. People who spent money on themselves, nothing happened. It didn't make them less happy. It just didn't do much for them. And the other thing we saw is that the amount of money doesn't matter that much. So people thought that $20 would be way better than $5. In fact, it doesn't matter how much money you spent. What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself. We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on other people instead of on themselves. Of course, these are undergraduates in Canada, not the world's most representative

population. They're also fairly wealthy and affluent and all these other sorts of things. We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries. So almost everywhere we look, we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself. And so I'll just say, I think if you think money can't buy happiness, you're not spending it right. The implication is not, you know, you should buy this product instead of that product. And that's the way to make yourself happier. It's in fact that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself and try giving some of it to other people instead. Okay, we're going to be right back with more from Michael Norton on how to be a smart spender. But first, a message from people who spent their money on ad space in this podcast.

Okay, and we are back. Let's get right into talking about money and spending. I'm Mike Norton. I'm a professor at Harvard Business School. So I'm a social psychologist by training, and I was studying topics like discrimination and sexism and inequality, which are, and I still study those and they're incredibly important, obviously, topics that we need more people working on, but they are also not very funny, I would say. So I was deep, deep in the weeds of working on these issues that I continue to work on. But my colleague and eventual co-author Liz Dunn said, basically, you're depressing. And so, yes, keep working on those kinds of things. But also, you and I are going to work on happiness. And I said, at the time, this is 15 years ago, I said, I don't know if you can really study

happiness. Isn't that kind of a fuzzy sort of thing? How would we possibly study it? And she basically said, don't worry about it. We're going to study it, and we're going to find ways to make people happier. And that hook really got me, the idea that you could not just study the thing, but actually intervene, learn things about what makes people really happy, and then say to people, hey, why don't you do a little bit less of that and a little bit more of that? And we think that will actually make you a little bit happier. It's so interesting to hear you say that one of the motivating factors for studying this was that your other work wasn't very funny, because that's something I really care about in my work,

but I would not have imagined that that's something that a social psychologist thinks about when they're choosing research areas. Well, you just referenced a little bit of the principles. In your book, which you and Liz Dunn co-wrote, you have these five principles that guide how to spend money in a way that actually does increase happiness. Can you tell us what those five principles are? Sure. I'll list them first and then we can chat. Buy experiences, make it a treat, buy time, pay now, consume later. And I should know these and invest in others. These are like five. I'm sure there are more, by the way, we never meant to say, this is the holy set of five things and there's nothing else. But at the time that we were

writing, those were the five we felt were most supported by the current research that we felt confident to say, look, if you do a little bit more of these and a little bit less of some other things, we think from all the data that we've seen, these will actually make you a bit happier. So I feel like a few of these are somewhat like they, for me, at least clicked intuitively, right? Like experiences, it always feels good to have an experience. But some were, at least for me personally, very counterintuitive, like the idea of paying now and consuming later. It seemed to me like it would make me unhappy. Can you explain that a little bit? Experiences always goes over really well because it basically you can say like some people with PhDs told us that we should go out to dinner tonight.

So it's really a great, like a good example. Like we should definitely go over the weekend or whatever it might be. So people love that one. Some of the other ones, they don't love so much because it requires different behaviors and different things that are a little bit harder to do. And I do think one is pay now, consume later.

Of course, we can't pay for everything ahead of time because we're all not trillionaires. But when you can, the idea is to do a little bit of that. And the consume later thing is exactly related to that, which is don't consume everything right now. Wait. And we're really bad at waiting for anything. And everything now is structured to come to us right away.

So we can, I mean, any book, any song, any movie ever, I can click and watch it right now, which is great. We're so used to it, but it's crazy that that's the world. Like I'm old enough that when I was a kid, a movie would come out and then it would be out of the theater and you could never see it again.

Like that was the end of the movie forever. Or if you missed an episode of your favorite show, never see it again. That was the end of the movie forever. Or if you missed an episode of your favorite show, never see it again. Maybe in syndication 10 years later, but I mean, literally, too bad you missed the whole thing. Now that's bad because you miss things and whatever, but it's good because when you had a favorite show every week, you had to wait a week to see the next one. And that week was great, right? Like you thought about what was going to happen. You talked with your friends. There were things called cliffhangers, all this kind of stuff that used to exist. Now, of course, we just go episode, episode, episode, episode,

episode. We never stop. So I have two questions about that. The first one is just for you personally. Do you feel like you've gotten better at waiting now that you have this knowledge? Do you feel like you've gotten better at waiting now that you have this knowledge? As a general statement, the answer is no. Okay. Yeah. To any question that is, you know, like, do you take your own advice? Not really.

So that's just, that's just like flat out the truth. But pay for my advice now. Exactly. Pay for my advice up front. Definitely trust it though. It's really good. It's just not, I don't use it myself. The, yeah, waiting is great actually. I mean, even if you're, it seems silly, but even if you're gonna order dinner, uh, tomorrow night,

um, order it now for tomorrow night. And again, that seems so silly. Like what difference would it make now tomorrow night? But it really is the sense that, you know, you're going to have your favorite meal tomorrow night and you committed to it today. So a little bit that day and then the rest of the next day, a little bit, it's on your mind like, later on, I'm going to have, whereas if you wait until 6 p.m. and order it and eat it at 6.15 p.m., you only got the 15 minutes of like, oh, later on, I'm going to do something fun. And you've got the payment thing messed up with the eating as well. And you've got the payment thing messed up with the eating as well. It sounds almost like what actually makes us happy isn't so much the thing, the experience,

the meal, the trip. It's like we actually really love looking forward to it. Yeah, there's cool research. So if people are waiting for a product to arrive, like a TV or something, the emotion they experience primarily is frustration. Like, where's the thing? I want my thing. Why isn't the thing here yet? Where's the box with my thing? When people are waiting for an experience, the number one emotion they report is anticipation. And anticipation is a weird emotion. It's not entirely positive. You know, there's nervousness to it. You know,

there's a lot of, there's a little frustration and anticipation, but mainly it's great. It's looking forward to things. It turns out is great in general for our psychology to have something to look forward to. And when you do this with your money, you're giving yourself all of these things to look forward to instead of having them all right away. And you totally miss out on that time period. So in my head, immediately I go to like one thing that I'm messing up in my life. In my head, immediately I go to like one thing that I'm messing up in my life. And obviously this was when vacations were a thing. But like I always thought like I like being spontaneous. It's fun to like have a last minute weekend getaway and like get in the car and drive somewhere. Now I'm actually thinking that was a mistake.

And what I should have done has been like I'm going to go somewhere in three months. And then I have three full months of thinking of like that's when I'm going to take the road trip. Yeah, totally. We actually worked with a online travel company. And one of the things they told us was they were worried because people would book like a trip on the website, you know, flight and hotel, whatever. And then they saw that people kept coming back to the website after that. You know, they were coming back to see, oh, did the price go down? And did I make a mistake?

And it turned out that what people were doing is they were going to the page of their thing and they would like the, of their hotel and they were just clicking through the pictures, they were just, it was like snowy where they were and they were sad, but they knew they were going to the beach in three months. So they would just click through the sunny beach pictures. I've for sure done this. 100% I've done this. Okay. So that's Pay Now, Consume Later. Obviously there's so much there, right? Like there's just a whole book and there's a whole podcast just on that. But one of the other ones that I wanted to

also focus on, partly because it's what you talk about in your talk, but also because I think it's counterintuitive in a way talk, but also because I think it's counterintuitive in a way that I think is very important for people to know because it will make the world a much better place if we do it, which is investing in others. So can you tell us about why is that? Luckily, actually. So when we started the research, so a lot of the research that we do is you are a person, you have money.

What should you do with your money to maximize your happiness? And in it are other people. If you get an experience, maybe you go out to dinner with friends or with your partner, but it's not typically central to the other things. And this idea of using your money not for yourself, which is not revolutionary. People are aware that you can give and be nice and it feels good. But we just find people don't do it enough in the sense that we default to, for me, instead of sometimes a little bit more defaulting toward other people. And instead, what we typically find is that on average, meaning not for everyone and not all the time, but on average, if you take $5 and you use it on somebody else, you get more happiness than if you use it on yourself.

And the reason really is that using it on yourself doesn't do anything for you. Because we do it all the time. You know, if you've, if you had 6,000 coffees in your life, buying your 6,001st coffee is definitely not going to do anything really for your happiness. Like that ship has sailed. Giving a coffee to someone who needs a coffee, that could be the first time you've ever done that. So that alone totally changes the equation of how different and unique giving is compared

to focusing on ourselves. And as you said, you're actually helping someone and they might even say, thank you. And they might even say, you're nice, which we also like to hear about ourselves as well. So it's like when we specifically involve other people, we're maximizing the chances that we'll get more happiness out of it. It's just our default is what can I get for me? That would be awesome. So is the reason why that feels better to spend money on other people? Is that because it is nice to see a reaction or is it because we're changing our conception of ourselves? So like, oh, I'm the kind of person who is generous and who does nice things

for people or who gives to charity or who does that? Or is it just like that someone gave me a big smile and a thumbs up and that like on a primitive level makes us, you know, light up. Yeah. It's, it's a bit of both. So we, one thing that we were sure to study all of this research is, is with our collaborator, Lara Aknan, um, as well, who's at Simon Fraser university was like, when does it make you feel the best to give, you know, what are the conditions under which it really is awesome

versus it's just okay. And here, I have to say, we were sort of hoping that it wouldn't matter. You know, that when you give, it's this act, it's the selfless act, and it would make you happy. And you wouldn't care so much that everybody stood up and clapped for you. We kind of were hoping there was some pureness to the giving, you know, and it turns out that humans are humans. So, yeah, we do get even when no one's looking, even when the recipient doesn't know and no one will know, we do still get happy. So that's the good news is even without the social stuff, we still feel good about giving. But the social stuff really helps.

We love the names on the buildings and we love all that stuff because we're, you know, we're human. So it's a separate source of I feel awesome today. Yeah. Maybe this is just my own personal bias, but I'm like, if you're doing good things and it also is because you like the feeling of people telling you're a good person, you're still doing good things. It's better than when you do bad things and people tell you you're a good person.

Yeah. My this is a cheesy joke, but so I work at Harvard University and the joke is there are no buildings called the anonymous building. Yeah. It shows that. Yeah. The impulse is there. Yeah, that's very true. It's also for someone who like lives for people applauding and laughing at me. That is the idea that someone would not want that. I'm like, that's an inconceivable phenomenon. You can't tell yourself a joke in the mirror and feel privately satisfied. I know. Yeah, I do it all the time and I'll tell you it's not satisfying.

So our work, typically what we're saying in one way or another is what you think you should do with your money. It isn't wrong, but it's not optimal. You know, like most people aren't spending their money in ways that ruin their happiness. They're just spending it in ways that don't do that much for them. There's sort of universals that people, no matter where they are, seem to really want in order to make themselves happy. And we see a little bit the same with money as well, that for sure different cultures have different spending practices.

The amount you spend on family, for example, varies dramatically from culture to culture, what you're expected to contribute to the family. At the same time, when we look across cultures, we tend to find everywhere we look that giving makes you happier than spending on yourself. So there's sort of a truism that even though cultures are so different and affect us in so many ways, we still see some things like giving is good for you across all the humans and keeping for yourself isn't bad for you. Again, it just doesn't do that much for you. You know, another universal truth is that every podcast must include an ad break. And this one is one of ours.

We'll be right back. And we are back with Michael Norton. So Michael, we've been talking a lot about the benefits of giving and how giving to others can actually make you feel happier. It feels though to me, like sometimes in our culture, there's a hang up around giving as though like giving to other people is somehow bragging about what a great person you are. And sometimes that stops people from doing it. For sure. I think there is a limitation on people feeling like they're only doing it because they're supposed to do it. And that can be a barrier for people. But I think that, you know, if we ask people, you know, what did you spend your last $20 on? What about before that?

What about the $20 before that? What about $20 before that? People will list all kinds of stuff. And very rarely will they list that they spent it on somebody else. Of course, again, we're always going to spend more of our money on ourselves. But the thing is, if we say to people, giving to other people makes you happy, very few people are blown away by that insight. You know, if they kind of say, Oh, yeah, yeah, I felt that way. And I can imagine that that would

make you happy. So we're not giving some secret recipe of happiness that people have no I, you know, if we said if you turn around three times really fast, you'll be happy. That would have been amazing. So's not going to be fine. But you know what I mean? It would be a secret of happiness. Wait, did you study that? You didn't study that. We're working on it now.

It's four times. Okay. Wow, that's great. Breaking news. Yes. So that's the irony of it, right? Is that we're just telling you things that you already believe. So we know that we shouldn't eat pizza all the time and we should exercise every day.

We know that. I don't need to tell you it more. You're very aware that you should not eat pizza all day and never exercise. The problem is not the knowledge, it's the implementation. How are you going to make yourself exercise? How are you going to make yourself not eat pizza? And these spending things are a little bit the same as well.

It's not that we don't know that giving would be a nice thing to do and it might make us feel good. It's just the implementation of it. Everything else gets in the way. So if a lot of the stuff that you found are practical ways to kind of actually use things that we intuitively have some sense of, what's the opposite of that then? What's the biggest thing that people are just getting wrong when it comes to money that you found? We have this principle called make it a treat, which is the optimistic version of it, of the issue. The pessimistic version is there's a curse of being human, which is that the more we have of things, the less we like them. Hedonic, treadmill,

habituation, there's all kinds of words for that. So your first piece of pizza is amazing. The 11th piece, you're still going to eat it because it's better than no pizza, but it's not so good as the first piece. The make it a treat principle, very, very simply is stop that. You know, literally just take a week off from pizza. And when you come back, that pizza experience will be extraordinarily better. And again, is this a hidden insight of the world? No, most religions in some form or another have a fasting period, or you give something up. It's not as though we invented the idea that you give things up. But if you have ever fasted, you know that the most basic food can be amazing if you

had to give it up for a while, including bread. You know, if you can't have bread for a while and then you come back to bread, best piece of bread in your entire life. If you ate bread the whole time, it's all fine. The bread's fine every day, but you're missing that incredible boost of having giving it up. So do you personally or do you recommend that people then like identify what gives them a lot of pleasure and take some time off from it?

Definitely. So how long is the time? Like, do you take off for a day? Do you take off for a week? What do you do for yourself when you when you think about we don't know exactly for which experience the optimal break is, you know, is it a day for coffee, but a week for your TV show? That we don't know. But we do know that on average, if you take any kind of a break, even in TV, if you take a commercial break, just the commercial break, when you come back, you like the show more than if you just kept watching the show the entire time and you got a little bit sick of it. So even little breaks can do a little bit of that feeling of I'm not so sick of it anymore. I'm ready for more and I'm excited. We talked about anticipation.

There it is again, right? So if I have to look forward to the show, of course, that's an amazing, I'm frustrated. I want to watch the show, but I'm also excited and looking forward to this thing that might be coming later. So in this current moment, our digital lives and our financial lives are really intertwined more than they've ever been. So what are some of the best practices when it comes to our dealings with money online? Another curse of modern life is credit cards. Not that they're not great. They are, but they allow us to pay for things and it doesn't feel like we're paying for things. And that's good. If you're strapped for cash and you need something, you can charge it. That's amazing. I don't mean that credit cards are bad, but it does mean that we're constantly

not feeling the pain of paying. And so we get into a mistake where all we're doing is clicking confirm on our phone. It doesn't even say purchase. It says confirm. Who doesn't want to confirm things? And you press confirm. In a month, you'll see it on your thing. You're going to get the credit card statement. But right now, it doesn't feel like anything. And so it allows us to be a little bit mindless.

We don't really have to think about, should I be spending money on this? Or should I be spending it on something else? Should I be saving this money instead of spending it is of course one thing. But from our perspective, it's also, is this the thing I should spend $17 on? Or is there something else I could spend $17 on that would actually make me happier? And sometimes it's the case that the thing that's in your shopping cart is the thing. You should say, you know, actually this will make me happy. I'm going to buy it. Sometimes though, we hope you'll say,

you know what, that $17 thing, I already have one of those anyway. I don't really need another one of those $17 things. Maybe I can do something else with that money. You've also found, I was reading that you had some research about how people regard Venmo in a social light as well. We, my student, Tammy Camp, so first off, she had to instruct me on regard Venmo in a social light as well. We, my student, Tammy Kim.

So first off, she had to instruct me on what Venmo was because I'm old. But her idea that I loved was that Venmo makes people petty. Not on purpose, just by, so if you and I went out for dinner and the bill came and it was, you know, $30 and 2 cents and I gave you, and you paid for it. And then I gave you $15 and one penny. What would you infer? It's strange, right? You said, just give me $15. The fact that I'm being so specific, it feels like a transaction. You know, it feels like I'm

saying, I don't want to be beholden to you for anything. We're going to close this account right now. And Venmo does it just as a matter of course, where we, you know, I pay you back and it's $11 and 19 cents. And what Tammy finds is that when people engage in that kind of transaction, we see the other person as petty and it affects our relationship because we start to think, oh, I thought we were friends, but now they're treating it like I'm a bank and they're a customer. You think I'm going to hold a penny over your head. Exactly. What kind of person do you think I am?

Exactly. It seems like part of that like pettiness interaction or the feeling of how it's awkward when we get into these specifics is because a lot of us are just really bad about talking about money and it's just an awkward topic. So how can we get better at that? It's hard for sure to talk about money. There are some restaurants that automatically split the bill. There are some restaurants that they keep track of your order separately so that you know you'll only have to pay for your thing. So

there's mechanical ways to cope with the problem. We have not seen really effective ways for people to have conversations about money, but it's much more fun to talk about pretty much anything else in the world than spending our money and how much I owe you and how much you owe me. So with the digital spending and then this idea of conversations, right? One thing that I tried to do personally this year was I was like, okay, I'm going to be better about giving to charities and to nonprofits in a way that feels stable for them. So I set up a bunch of recurring monthly payments where I was like, instead of giving one big amount, I'm going to say I'll contribute $15 a month, $50 a month, whatever it is. Now, though, talking to you,

I'm wondering that's that seems to me to be clearly better for them. Right. Like and obviously that's the only thing that matters is not my happiness. Right. Obviously functionally making change in the world matters a lot more than that, but it does seem like the fact that now those are automatic debits that I don't think about every time I'm probably not getting much happiness out of those donations anymore. Yeah. So smart charity, by the way, if you're only going to give to a charity one time, if you know it, depending on, I mean, if you're going to give a billion dollars, go ahead. But if you're going to give a small amount, it's often the case that you get on their mailing list and they'll send you mail until the day you die and they will lose money on you because they'll keep trying to get you to donate again. So sometimes you should

actually not give a tiny amount if you never, ever expect to give again. On the flip side, smart, and we work with lots of nonprofits to think about how to structure this, because of course, they want recurring donations. You're absolutely right. Like crazy, in part because people forget about it. So just you sign up and then 30 years later, you go, what is that? Because you've been giving the whole time. But we've been working and really smart charities will send you little reminders. So your thing went through today. And as a reminder, here's the cool stuff that we do for people.

And here's why you care about this. So I don't have to give again. It's automatic. But they're giving me the you're a great person and the little bit like the applause and the name on the building so that I get a little boost of it, even though I'm not, again, making the decision each time. Okay, so we've talked on about a lot of different things

that are so practical and really interesting and ways in which people can make an impact on their lives. But I'm just curious to kind of have you directly say it to listeners. The easiest thing to do is, so today you will make tons of purchasing decisions, actually. Some of them are going through automatically because you signed up for stuff, recurring donations, but also bills and subscriptions and all sorts of stuff. So even

behind the scenes, you're buying stuff today. You're just not exactly aware that you're buying stuff and you're going to buy stuff. You're going to go online and buy things or you're going to get lunch, you're going to get dinner, whatever it might be. We're constantly spending money and we almost never think about it. And by we, I mean, also me. So I'm never pointing fingers. I can't believe people act this way. I'm exactly the same. We're going through our day, we're going through a month, we're spending money to get things done and get by. The easiest thing to do is just take a little break and just start thinking about even for the next hour, are the things that I'm buying, are these good things or bad things for my happiness? The thing that takes a little more time but is really, really useful is take a credit card statement from last month and print it out and go through it, not to make yourself feel

bad that you spent too much, but go through it and start to categorize them. Who is this for? What was it for? Did I really get any happiness out of this? All the way through all the purchases. And you can start to see who you are. And some people, when they see who they are, they say, perfect. You know, like I definitely spent my money in the ways that I wanted. But most people say, wow, I didn't think that's who I was.

You know, I wouldn't have thought that I was a person who spent so little on X and so much on Y. So this little quick audit of your expenses can tell you a lot. It shouldn't. Like you made the purchases, you should know them. But going through it like that tells you what you did as a tell you a lot. It shouldn't. Like you made the purchases, you should know them.

But going through it like that tells you what you did as a person for a month. And it can really reshape the way you think about what you're going to do next month. And then by the way, next month, you can print it out again and see if you did any better. So did you actually shift toward the things you thought were important

or did you go back to old you that you love, but you wish that they would do some things slightly differently? Okay, so that's the short term and the medium term. What should people change in the long term? So for me, many of the principles in one way or another do involve other people. The thing that does very little for us

is buying stuff for ourselves that we'll consume by ourselves. Most things that involve other people, and that can be taking a friend out for lunch. It can be donating to charity. Really broadly defined, thinking about other people. Anything I buy and include another person, not only am I making them happier,

I'm changing our relationship in the longer term. And so even though I bought you a birthday present one time, or whatever it might be, now for the rest of our lives, we exchange birthday presents. And we don't care about the presents, we care about the fact that we're going to be friends for the rest of our lives and show it because we exchange gifts on these days. So the social relationships are the things that can carry forward way beyond the idea that I took you out to lunch today. The happiness from taking you out to lunch today, it'll be gone by tomorrow. It's not like if I treat you to lunch, my life is different. But what is different, perhaps, is that I changed our relationship.

And that is something that can actually change my life in the longer term. Wow. Well, this is profound and so useful. And I feel like it's the absolute ideal for this podcast where it's like the really practical and also a really big idea that I'll be thinking about for years to come. And again, for the record, I take none of this advice myself. I just want to be very clear. Very important.

Yeah. Okay. Last question. What is one way in which you personally are trying to be a better human right now? I am. So I'm a dad of a five-year-old. are trying to be a better human right now? I am.

So I'm a dad of a five-year-old. And one of the benefits is not the right word for a pandemic, but I used to travel a lot for work, thinking I was very fancy and I needed to be flying all over the place and sharing my genius or whatever. And not traveling has made my time at home, obviously, increased dramatically. And it's made me a completely different dad in a way that I would never have committed myself to, which is embarrassing and

stupid in retrospect. But that's been something to continue to allocate tons and tons of time to parenting much more than I had before in order to deepen this relationship that is going to carry us both through our lives. Thank you so much for making time to be on the show. Thank you for everything you said. It was a real pleasure. I'm sure people are going to take a lot from it. Thanks so much. That is our episode for today. This has been How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Thank you so much to Michael Norton for being on the show today. On the TED side, this show is produced by Abimanyu Das,

who rounds up when he Venmo's, Daniela Balarezo, who sets up recurring donations, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, who knows to buy yourself some time, and Cara Newman, who only spends on experiences. And from PRX Productions,

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by the queen of paying in advance, Jocelyn Gonzalez, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, who is currently taking a week off from pizza so that she enjoys pizza all the more when she gets back. Thank you for listening and spend wisely. Have a great week.