Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Science of Creativity & How Happiness & Health Work Together

Episode Date: October 17, 2020

We humans are programmed to flirt. It’s the beginning of the process that keeps the species going forward. And while some people are clearly better at the art of flirting – there is some science to it as well. I begin this episode with scientifically proven ways to improve your flirting skills. http://theweek.com/articles/448643/how-flirt-according-science One thing that makes us human is our creativity. We are all creative and many of us could be even more creative according to Allen Gannett. Allen is the CEO of Track Maven, a software analytics firm and he has been on the top “30 Under 30” lists for both Inc. and Forbes magazines. He is also the author of the new book, The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time ( https://amzn.to/2Jt9vaH) . Allen joins me to reveal some fascinating science behind creative people and the creative process that we can all benefit from. It turns out that not all olive oil is what it appears to be. In fact a lot of extra virgin olive oil isn’t what the label says. Is there fraud in the olive oil business? And if it isn’t olive oil, what is it? We’ll discuss. http://time.com/3894609/extra-virgin-olive-oil/ If happiness is a choice, why do so many people choose to be unhappy? That is just one of the questions I tackle with Rick Foster co-author of the book, Happiness & Health: 9 Choices That Unlock the Powerful Connection Between the Two Things We Want Most (https://amzn.to/2JEdz78). I think you will be amazed by what Rick has to say. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, we are programmed to flirt. And it's a bit of an art, but flirting is also a science. I'll explain that, plus what is it that highly creative people have in common? That was a very common motif I found with a lot of these creators, is that they become

very obsessive on something very narrow. They're not actually generalists, they're not Renaissance men or women. Oftentimes, that starts in childhood. Then the extra virgin olive oil in your kitchen may not be what the label says it is at all. And, if happiness is a choice, why do so many people seem to choose to be unhappy? There's a lot of speculation about why people choose unhappiness. And I'll tell you, there's a great deal of power. Unhappy people really can control the entire show.

They can control a family or a workplace. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi, welcome. You may have noticed that I never on this podcast ever ask people to send money to support the podcast. We live and breathe off the success of our advertisers. And we have great advertisers on this podcast. I speak to virtually all of them before they advertise, but pretty much all podcast advertisers know there's a lot of podcasts to advertise on. And typically what they do is they try different podcasts and they stick with the ones that deliver the results and they don't stick with the ones that don't deliver the results.

So the best way to support this podcast is to support our advertisers and do business with them so they keep coming back to advertise. First up today, how to flirt. There's no shortage of experts on the subject of how to flirt, but much of the advice on flirting is just opinion. However, there is some science to flirting, and the fact is, human beings must flirt. We're programmed to flirt. It's all part of the dance that allows people to meet and get married and have babies and keep the species thriving. A study at Webster University uncovered several keys to effective flirting. First of all, eye contact is the most important component of flirting.

Gazing, but not staring, gazing into someone's eyes is critical. Body language is more important than spoken language. Only 7% of effective flirting is attributed to what you say, 55% to body language. Effective flirters exhibit what's called social dominance. In other words, they take up space by stretching out their legs or draping an arm over an adjacent chair. Postural congruence is another factor. This is when two people unconsciously mirror each other's body language and posture. It indicates that they're in harmony and have rapport. And one of the most effective ways of flirting is to stop flirting. Change the subject or politely walk away once the connection has

been made. It leaves the other person wanting more. And that is something you should know. One of the things that separates humans from other animals is our creativity. Think about it, the way animals in the wild go through their daily lives is probably pretty similar to the way their ancestors have always done it. But humans are constantly creating new ways to do things. We create and innovate things in technology, art, and music, everything right down to the most mundane parts of everyday life. We're always creating new and better ways. So where does that come from? And I think the big question is, can you, and if so, how do you, become more creative? One of the big thinkers and doers in this area is Alan Gannett. He's the CEO of TrackMaven.

It's a software analytics firm whose clients have included Microsoft, Home Depot, Aetna, Honda, and GE. He has been on the 30 under 30 lists for both Inc. and Forbes magazines, and he's drilled down pretty deep into what creativity is and how to produce it. His new book is called The Creative Curve, How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time. Hi, Alan. Thanks for being here. Cool. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to talk about creativity. So it's interesting that you talk about the science of creativity, because I think in some ways people don't think of creativity as being particularly scientific, that it's more luck and

aha moments and magic almost. So start by explaining the science here. Yeah, creativity is one of these things where there's this huge disconnect between what the science tells us about how creativity works and the public perception, right? The public perception is that there's these some creative demigods who, you know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Pablo Picasso, where, you know, they were born with this thing that, you know, we don't have. And, you know, they were born with this thing that, you know, we don't have. And, you know, if you're not popping out of the womb, you know, painting and playing the piano, inventing computers, well, then you're never going to. And the reality, though, which is so interesting, is that when you look at the science of creativity,

there's actually a lot of academic consensus. The consensus is that it's a learnable, nurturable skill. There's all these really fascinating studies, for example, that will look at things like the relationship between IQ and creativity. And one of the famous findings is called the threshold theory, which is this idea that basically above an IQ of about 104, which is about the average, about the, sorry, the 50 percentile IQ, we all have the same creative potential. There's no correlation past an IQ of 104. And so like everyone listening to this podcast has an IQ of above 104. This is billions and billions of people that we're talking about in this world. This is not a dozen people

per generation or a hundred, even a thousand. But I think what happens is that we really like these stories. I think the media likes them. I think as people, we like them. We like having these hero myths in our culture. And so we've grasped onto this, but I think it's actually a very dangerous belief because I think it makes people limit themselves. Well, when you talk about creative potential,

that we all have this creative potential, well, we also all have the potential to play the piano, but if we don't sit down and play it, that potential is never realized. You know, look at Mozart, for example. You know, we sort of think of Mozart as the character that was portrayed in Amadeus, where, you know, he writes music, we're never having to do any edits, everything's a perfect first draft. He writes his music in his head. At four years old, he's playing the piano blindfolded for the Pope. The reality of Mozart is when he was three years old, his father, who was basically a helicopter dad, hired the best music teachers in all of

Europe and started making this three-year-old kid practice three hours every single day. And by the way, the idea that he would compose music in his head is literally, you know, hashtag fake news. I hate to say it because in the early 1800s, a music magazine publisher forged a letter supposedly from Mozart describing this composition process as literally made up. You did something interesting in that you got to go to Ben and Jerry's and get a peek behind the curtain of their creative process of how they come up with their, you know, roughly what, 10 new flavors every year. So talk about what you discovered there. How they start their process is with two big steps. The first thing is that they consume lots of information about food trends. So they

literally do these trips where they go to different cities to try out new restaurants and bars and see what flavors are percolating all across the country. Then they actually read, you know, social media, you know, food and wine magazine. They're constantly looking online and reading things, you know, going to different farms, talking to suppliers, seeing what's out there. And then every year they make a list of 200 flavor profiles, 200 just written, just ideas of flavor profiles based on these trends. And then what they do is they literally send out an email survey and they ask people, one,

how likely are you to buy this flavor? And two, how unique is it? And the thing they've realized is that they just ask people, well, how likely are you to buy? Well, then you'd end up with all these caramel and cookie and chocolate flavors, which would be good, except that eventually the brand would become tired and stale and would lose favor. And so what they found is that the ideas that seem to resonate really well are the ones that have the right blend of commercial viability and also uniqueness and also novelty. And so from this lo-fi email survey, they're able to winnow down this list of 200 to a list of 15 ideas that have really good commercial potential. And I think this story is so interesting for a few reasons because one, it highlights something that I think is a

misunderstanding in creativity. We talk about creatives as always doing, like they're always active, they're always producing. And we almost talk about them in opposition to consuming and consumers. There's a social media meme you might've seen that I really dislike, which is 90% of people consume, 9% of people engage, 1% create, hashtag hustle. And it's like really terrible. And part of the reason why it's terrible is it's cheesy, but it's also that it's just wrong. It actually turns out that for the book, I interviewed about 25 living creative geniuses. These are billionaires like David Rubenstein, you know, singer songwriters like Pasek and Paul, the team behind Dear Evan Hansen, Nina Jacobson from Walt Disney Motion Pictures.

And what I found is that these creative geniuses are some of the biggest consumers of information. They're constantly consuming information about their field. They want to know everything that they're very, very narrow vertical. This doesn't mean they're on Twitter reading a lot about a lot of different things. No, they're going very, very deep on a small lane of content, of experiences, of whatever it is. So for Ben and Jerry's, what you see is that these people become obsessed with knowing everything what's going on when it comes to food trends, right? What are all

the things out there? And from there, they can come up with a list of good ideas. Well, your Ben and Jerry's story brings up a good point because Ben & Jerry's goes through a big, rigorous process to come up with new flavors. But if you visit Ben & Jerry's in Vermont, where they make the ice cream, out back you'll see the flavor graveyard where their failed flavors, and they're retired flavors,

but their failed flavors, and they've had some real bombs. And so despite their rigorous testing and research, they still don't hit a home run every time. And I think that's an important part of the creative process is you have to be able to fail and pick yourself up and dust yourself off and try again. You generally failure something that people are scared of. And you have to realize that part of your goal as a creative is to quickly fail and to fail in ways that are ideally low cost. But ultimately, your job is to create something for an audience. I mean, there's, you know, I think there's this sort of mistaken notion that your creativity is an act. It's all about me. It's all about myself. I'm creating for myself. But when you actually talk to the world's best creators, they're very, very focused on their

audience's reaction. And they're okay with failing, but they want to move on very quickly. They want to take that lesson and go on to the next project. I'm speaking with Alan Gannett. His new book just out this week is The Creative Curve, How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called the search for the silver lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey,

Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the round table and learns valuable life lessons with every quest sword fight and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast.

And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes.

Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Alan, in the creative world, what is it that creative people have? What is that one thing they have that perhaps other people don't have that allows them to creatively hit it out of the park? There's a very common experience among the creative geniuses I talked to where typically as a kid, they over-rotate or specialize on something,

either by force, like a parent told them to do it, or because of some external event. So, you know, in the book, for example, I tell the story of Ted Sarandos, who, you know, lived in this sort of chaotic house childhood home where he was one of five children. His parents had him when he was a teenager. They were poor. And, you know, he went on to become the chief content officer of Netflix. But when he was younger, when he was younger, he to escape his house, would go to his grandmother's house, who was a big film buff. And he would just watch movies with her, movies and movies and movies. And this is where he felt safe. And, you know, then later he got a job as

the clerk at a video rental store. And there he decided that during the day when the store was empty, he would watch every movie in the store. And he literally did that. And so he specialized very early. And that he specialized very early. And that was a very common motif I found with a lot of these creators is that they become very obsessive on something very narrow, right? They're not actually generalists. They're not Renaissance men or women. They become very obsessive with something very, very narrow. And oftentimes that starts in childhood because there was some external forcing factor or some external factor pushing them that way.

But it can start when you're older. But you have to make a mindset shift. See, I think the problem that people have is since we're all in our pursuit of passion all the time, we think that we should find a task that's easy for us. Something that is, you know, when we do it immediately feels easy. But the reality is it was never easy for anyone in the beginning. It's just that, you know, when Mozart was three, his dad was forcing him. It's when people were young and they were maybe doing something as a way to sort of escape some more troubled situation elsewhere. There's a strong motivation there. So if you want to be creative older, what you have to do is you have to create

that construct around you that supports you, that motivates you, that keeps you going through the difficult parts. And you see this with video games and how they're designed to sort of prey on this notion that we have of that we should only do things that are immediately easy to us because video games start where it's very easy to level up in the beginning. And we like that. We like the idea of, look, I'm already good at something. We like that idea of progress. It's a very core part to our being.

There are those stories, though, and I think maybe this is where people get discouraged, is there are occasionally people who have never written anything before and come out with a book that just takes off or writes a song that's a huge hit and they've never written anything before. And those are the stories that we cling to and see, well, if he can do that, I can do that. But it's hard to do that. It's almost impossible to do that. Yeah. So one of the things that we get really caught up on with creativity is these sort of quote unquote aha

moments or flashes of genius or you know whatever you want to call them and we're like you know well look at that look that person just you know they were walking and they had this amazing idea that went on to become this super successful company and what's interesting is that scientists are sort of like befuddled by this uh aha moments are actually a really well understood thing from a biological perspective. We actually know a lot about how they work. So basically the short version is that, you know, it's kind of cliche to talk about left brain, right brain. We were talking about creativity, but it's actually pretty important.

So, right. Our left brain is where we do more logical processing. It's where we deal with the dominant meanings of words or concepts. So if you're doing a math problem, for example, and when you're solving a problem with your left hemisphere of your brain, it's very, very step by step. It's very conscious. You're aware of each step as you're doing it. Your right hemisphere of your brain is solving things in a very different way.

It's more metaphorical. It's combining different concepts together. It's connecting the dots, so to speak. And I like to use the analogy of your left hemisphere is like a loud lab partner who's like, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do this, then this, and this, and then we got the answer. And your right hemisphere is like the quiet lab partner who's sort of like, okay, we're going to try this and this and connect these dots.

And, you know, all this processing that happens in our right hemisphere, well, it all happens subconsciously. And it's only once it comes to a conclusion or an answer that our right hemisphere, our quiet lab partner, sort of perks up and says, hey, I got an answer. But if our left hemisphere is still too loud, we're not going to hear it. And so this is why people experience these aha moments, which are really just right hemisphere processing. They experience them when they're in

the shower or they're on the commute or they're taking a run. It's because their left hemisphere, their loud lab partners kind of shut up. And so you can finally hear what's been happening in your right hemisphere. And the conclusion that scientists have come to that the real basic mistake that people seem to make with aha moments is that they don't realize that to have aha moments, you have to have prior knowledge. I mean, Paul McCartney famously dreamed the main melody for yesterday, but he spent his entire childhood surrounded by music. He literally was playing in a cover band for years. His brain had all these musical concepts and ideas and patterns percolating around there. So yeah, of course he dreams about music and you don't. J.K. Rowling spent her whole childhood reading books. In college, she famously had fines from

the library for having so many books out. So yeah, when she's on a train, she daydreams about fiction characters and you don't. But that's not shocking or surprising. That's actually pretty logical. And so what scientists have found is if you want to have more of these quote unquote magical aha moments, the most important thing is to actually have knowledge, to have a lot of specialized experience, a lot of specialized memories, a lot of specialized wisdom. And that's another reason why consumption I think is such a crucial part of creativity is that it gives you the dots to connect. It gives you the electricity for your light bulb moments. I said in the beginning of our discussion that in my view anyway, for something to be truly creative, it has to have some element of success to it.

That it can't just be a different way of doing something. It has to be a better way. And somebody has to recognize that and see that value. And I think often in the creative world, there's this belief that when you build this great new thing, or when you write this great new novel, or you paint this great new picture, that that's the end of the creative process, that then the world will just find it and love it. But I've always thought that part of the creative process is convincing people how great your thing is.

It's the marketing, it's the PR. And I think an interesting example of this is modern art. I mean, I've gone to modern art things and seen things that pass as art that I think I could have done that. I mean, it doesn't seem to be anything special, but there's a story to it. There's been an artist who has a story and the creation of this thing has a story and it's the marketing of it that makes it valuable.

Think about Andy Warhol. I mean, Andy Warhol famously had teams of assistants who would create the art. He literally, for a lot of his screen prints, there's a story he would call into the factory and just say, okay, print this image with these colors. Thanks. And like, that was his quote unquote artistic process, right? Jeffrey Koons, you know, there's all these stories about how he has assistants who make his artwork. And so is he the artist? Like what is the role of an artist? And so the more you sort of dive into artist, artistry, creativity, creator, it starts to get really fuzzy. I mean, you think about, I have a meta experience writing a book about creativity. What you see is that there's one name on the cover, but the reality is that you have editors, agents, copy editors, feedback

readers, proofreaders. You have all these people, your research assistants, all these people who are contributing to this. And so the idea that just my name is on the cover is almost kind of silly at that point. So if someone says, geez, this guy, this sounds really great, but so what do I do? What are the first two or three steps that the creative process, in your view, how does it begin? i think consumption's one you start consuming very narrowly but i think the other one that i found that i was really fascinated by was these great creatives they're actually very focused on imitation they're very focused on studying past successful works and almost like turning into a mad lib like i tell the story in the book of ben franklin when he learned how to become a writer was he took articles from the spectator, which was a magazine back then. And he outlined

them and saw how are they structured? How did they build the argument? Andrew Ross Sorkin, who's the squawk box guy, he's editor of deal book, co creator of billions wrote the book too big to fail told me about, you know, when he first got a job as a journalist, he did literally the same thing. He outlined other articles from the front page of the New York Times to see how did they build these. Kurt Vonnegut did something very similar for his master's thesis. You see this again and again, this idea of imitation as actually a very important part about creative skill development. And so I think go to a creative work that you know is good or you feel is good. And instead of just consuming it, right, be a deliberate consumer of it. Touch it, feel it, outline it, turn it into sort of a mad lib. Well, I like how you talk about the science of

creativity and that anybody can develop their creative potential using the science rather than just thinking that it's just the purview of a few people who are just creative geniuses because they were born that way. Alan Gannett has been my guest. He's the CEO of TrackMaven, a software analytics firm, and he is author of the book, The Creative Curve, How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time. There's a link to his book in the show notes for this episode. Thanks, Alan. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love

our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks.

And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. What's the connection between health and happiness? Does being happy tend to bring good health? Does good health tend to make you happy? Or maybe it's a little bit of both. Perhaps more importantly, if you are unhappy, if you feel like a victim, will that lead to bad health? And why is this important to discuss anyway?

Well, Rick Foster and his partner Greg Hicks have been looking at this for a long time. They have a business based on this, and they are the authors of a book on the topic called Happiness and Health, Nine Choices That Unlock the Powerful Connection Between the Two Things We Want Most. Hi, Rick. Welcome. You know, today it seems there's this whole culture of victimhood. A lot of people feel victimized or say that they're victims, which I guess if you say and believe you're a victim, you're a victim. So let's start with this. Why are we talking about victimhood and health in the same conversation?

Because we know that victimhood is bad for your health. As soon as you say to yourself, what can I do about my current situation? What steps can I take? You elevate actually out of your old brain, out of the reptile brain, and into the human brain of innovation, creativity, problem solving, and it's a much healthier biochemical place to be. So victimhood is bad for your health? Victimhood is bad for your health.

In fact, when we ask doctors and nurses all over the world, is there one thing that marks your patients who are most successful or least successful, what we heard almost uniformly, and this is truly all over the world, they told us that the patients who see themselves as victims have a much harder time healing. They're actually hurting themselves by framing themselves up as victims, even though, you know, sometimes we are victims. But seeing yourself as a victim is really bad for you. I wonder where that comes from, that feeling of victimhood. Well, you know, I think that it comes from our old brain.

And the old brain, or the reptile brain, is designed to respond to threat. And when you're responding to threat, there are really three possible actions. It's fight, flight, or freeze. So it's the biochemistry of victimhood. The problem is that our brain, our caveman brain, and we haven't evolved that much, our caveman brain is designed to respond to immediate threat. The saber-toothed tiger is going to jump on us. But it's not designed to live with chronic threat, because that wasn't a reality in our evolution. It's the chronic threat, it's wasn't a reality in our evolution.

It's the chronic threat, it's the chronic state of victimhood that is so bad for us, because our bodies are just not designed to handle it. It's erosive to our systems. But I know people who are such victims that if they did what you talk about and recast that and get rid of that victimhood, I don't know who they'd be. I mean, it is who they are. Listen, there's a lot of speculation about why people choose unhappiness. And I'll tell you, there's a great deal of power in unhappiness. Unhappy people really can control the entire show. They can control a family or a workplace. But in the long run, they're not as productive.

Their quality of life is very much lower. But they do learn to exercise a great deal of power over others with their misery. But not being a victim, not being unhappy, doesn't necessarily make you happy it just makes you not unhappy so how do you how do you become happy I mean where does happiness come from happiness comes from an internal happiness is an internal state but we generate it by the kind of behaviors and attitudes that we have and here's some really easy examples. We know what happens to us when we lie. We've been able to measure this since the 1920s with polygraphs,

with lie detectors. It's bad for us physically. It has an immediate physical impact that's measurable. When we tell the truth, the opposite biochemistry is in play. We're calm. Our respiration is calmer. Our heartbeat is calmer. So over time, we know that telling the truth creates a feeling of calm, focus, well-being, which is really a complex state of happiness. Same thing is true with appreciation or giving. We feel happy when we do certain things. And these are the things that people have done through the centuries to elevate their

own feeling of well-being. things. And these are the things that people have done through the centuries to elevate their own feeling of well-being. But don't you think, I mean, when you look around, it just seems that some people are just wired differently. Some people just seem to be generally happy, and other people seem to be generally not so happy. I think that there's a genetic predisposition to being sunny and cheerful and upbeat. I have two kids. One was born sunny and funny and goofy. My daughter was much more serious and focused. She would not be what you would call a, you know, a sunny disposition.

However, that's about 50% of our preset. The other 50%, if you listen to the scientists, is all about the choices that we make. And that 50% is within our control. And that's really what Greg and I write about. What choices can you make to elevate that 50% that you do have control over? For instance, when we appreciate others or when we're appreciated by others, we feel elevated, we feel happy, and that happiness is a biochemical state. Same thing would be true with giving or a number of the other domains that we wrote about, and we are hardwired to respond that way. So yeah, there are differences,

but human beings worldwide respond the same way to certain things, like giving and like appreciation. So what else can we do besides give and appreciate? We can not frame ourselves up as victims. We can open up options. Flexibility is another hallmark of extremely happy people worldwide. We can set our intentions to respond in certain ways. We can't always control circumstance, but we can always choose the way we respond to circumstance.

We can, again, we can give. We can be highly accountable. That is, we can own our own lives. And when we do these things, we get biochemical rushes that now can be measured on, it's certainly a new scientific technology, but it corresponds to what we've known for centuries about human beings. And the most interesting part of the whole thing is, why do we get positive biochemical rushes for doing certain things? You know, hyenas probably get biochemical rushes from stealing from one another. They're a scavenger species. We get biochemical rushes for doing certain things.

And if you really look at medical anthropology, you'll find that we're rewarded for doing the things that are most helpful to the survival of the species. So the things that make us happiest give us a very positive biochemical rush, and those biochemical rushes are very much associated with good health. So happiness and health really go hand in hand because they're part of what make us successful as human beings. You talk about the importance of setting your intentions. So explain that. What do you mean by that? Setting your intention is really about choosing how you wish to respond. It's choosing who you want to be. It's waking up in the morning and saying,

how do I want to be today? The opposite is just responding to circumstance. It's not being conscious. So intentionality is really, you'll excuse the meta word, but it's meta-conscious. It's that we are aware of being aware. It's aware that we have a choice. So I'll use myself as an example, but I travel a lot. I'm very often jet-lagged. When I wake up in the morning, my intentions on a workday would probably be,

Rick, your intention today is to stay as focused as you can be, to listen, to be upbeat, to not allow the fatigue to overtake you. And do I always get what I want? No. But the intentions really send me on the right course to being the kind of person I want to be and responding the way that I want to respond. We have a lot of control that many people don't recognize. When you and your partner and co-author Greg Hicks, when you took a dive into this and were looking at the connection between health and happiness, what, if anything, jumped out at you as really surprising, really caught your attention? The thing that surprised me the most was the ability of extremely happy people to move through trauma. And interestingly enough, it's the exact same process that many doctors and therapists use when they're dealing with people who are quite ill.

And we called it recasting, which, by the way, is very different from reframing, which is simply seeing things differently. Recasting is a three-step process. Extremely happy people would tell us about a trauma. They were no different from the rest of us, by the way. They had the same losses and griefs and difficulties that we all do, but they dealt with them beautifully. The trauma would hit, and they would, in the first phase of recasting, feel their feelings. So these are not people who are in denial.

They feel what they need to feel. They then move to a next step or a next phase, which is they look for meaning in the trauma. What does it mean that this has happened to me? What does this say about the way I'm living my life? And of course, what we now know all these years later is what was being described to us was people who jump from their reactive emotional brain into a brain of analysis and a brain of innovation and problem solving. So it's a completely different biochemical state. They elevate out of it. And then the third step of recasting is, what opportunities are there for me in this terrible thing that's happened?

And it's very easy for me to say in an interview, but this can take a short period of time or it can take years. But what we found is that extremely happy people and the healthiest people elevate out of the worst that life has to offer into a state of well-being. So to listen to you tell it, there's not a whole lot of upside to being unhappy. As far as I'm concerned, there's no upside to being unhappy. They're not having fun. I mean, they're not enjoying life.

They, you know, really miserable people exert a great deal of control on others. But it's exhausting. And, you know, if you look at the longevity stats, they don't live as long. You know, their lives are not good lives. They're not rich lives. And they're typically not lives full of love, because miserable people are pretty hard to love.

But I wonder if some people who are unhappy are unhappy because they don't know what it means to be happy. You don't know what you don't know. If you've never felt cold, you don't know what it means to be cold. Some of the most interesting stuff that we do is we work with people who have not had a great deal of happiness in their lives, and we introduce them to happiness in the moment. In other words, right now, let's talk about truth. Right now, let's appreciate the person sitting next to you. And they get an instantaneous blast of positive biochemicals because they're hardwired to get them.

And it's an epiphany. It's a feeling of, oh my God, what have I been missing? Why have I withheld that appreciation? So it's wonderful work. It's cognitive. It means we can all choose it. And it's not a mystery unless you've never experienced it. But once you start to move in that direction, once you make some choices,

once you educate yourself to the things that you can do, it's definitely not rocket science. It's within all of our grasp. And certainly worth trying. I mean, what could be the harm? Again, as you pointed out earlier, you know, miserable people tend to control the show. So maybe if they're not miserable, they're afraid of losing control. I think it is a fear of losing control. It's also, you know, the continuation of family patterns. There are some families in which happiness is not a value, or if you're happy, there must be something wrong with you. So there's a lot of social learning around happiness, but that basic feeling of contentment and well-being that you have over time, which is really

deep happiness. It's a really rich, evocative feeling. This is something that we wish everyone could experience because it's a wonderful feeling. But happiness isn't a constant state of being. I mean, even happy people have times when they're not so happy. Anyone who claims otherwise is not a happy person. Because the truth of it is you can't be truly happy unless you allow yourself to feel some of the worst stuff that life has to offer. It would be completely unrealistic to say that a happy person is always happy. In fact, as we wrote the book and people heard about this project about happiness,

and then the later book, the most recent one, Happiness and Health, people would try to sneak into the book as interview topics. And they would say things like, I am always happy. I've never had an unhappy day in my life. You should interview us. And we knew immediately that this was not a truly happy person. You have to be able to experience the extreme lows because it's realistic to experience the real highs of happiness. Well, it's interesting how being unhappy not only makes you unhappy and miserable, it can also make you unhealthy, as you point out,

that there is a connection between health and happiness. There's no real reason not to try anyway to be a more happy person. Rick Foster has been my guest. The book is Happiness and Health, Nine Choices That Unlock the Powerful Connection Between the Two Things We Want Most. You'll find a link to the book in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Rick. For years, you have heard about the virtues of extra virgin olive oil. It is the heart healthy

oil. It is part of the Mediterranean diet. It is supposed to be better for you than all other oils. Only here's the thing. The National Consumers League tested 11 different olive oils purchased at random at various supermarkets. And they found that six of them, despite being labeled extra virgin, were not extra virgin at all. And for those who know, this comes as no big surprise, given the lax standards, if not outright fraud, in the olive oil industry. In 2011, the University of California at Davis found that about 69% of the olive oil sold in the United States is adulterated, meaning it either contains other oil, like soybean oil, or it was not extra virgin. The companies who made the oil claimed the tests were unfair

and that the occasional bottle might be off because of exposure to light and other factors. But it does appear that not all is as it should be in the virgin olive oil category. The five olive oils that did pass the test and were in fact pure virgin olive oil were California Olive Ranch Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Colavita Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Trader Joe's Extra Virgin California Estate Olive Oil, Trader Joe's 100% Italian Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and Lucini premium select extra virgin olive oil. And that is something you should know. This podcast continues to grow because people listen, and then they tell someone they know,

and then they tell someone they know, and then it goes on and on and on. So please start that chain with a friend or a relative, someone you know who would enjoy this episode. And really, who wouldn't enjoy this episode? I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community.

Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.