Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Secret Life of Money & Hardwiring Happiness

Episode Date: December 12, 2020

Confident people just have a way about them. The way they act and talk draws people to them. So how can you be (and appear) more confident? I begin this episode with some expert advice on how to project confidence. https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2015/04/01/12-things-truly-confident-people-do-differently/?sh=2e5271174766 How does your money move around? In other words, you write me a check, how does the money get from your account to mine? What makes a $20 bill worth $20? And how does Bitcoin work? These questions and more are answered by my guest Charles Wheelan, who teaches economics at Dartmouth and is author of the Naked Money (https://amzn.to/2qb0N58). You probably have an ice maker in your freezer. If so, you should be aware that your ice maker has its own heater to keep it from freezing and that little heater is costing you. http://science.time.com/2011/04/14/how-the-ice-in-your-drink-is-imperiling-the-planet/ One reason that happiness can be so hard to find is because our brains aren’t wired for happiness – they are wired for survival. Rick Hanson, author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (https://amzn.to/2uY5Hr4) reveals how, with a little effort, you can rewire the brain so happiness becomes part of who you are. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Lampsplus.com/something for up to 50% off https://www.lampsplus.com/?src=verit&mdm=display&cmp=new&trm=pod&cnt=something&sourceid=MEVERITPODSOMETHING The Jordan Harbinger Show https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-harbinger-show/id1344999619 HelixSleep.com/sysk (for up to $200 off and two free pillows!) https://helixsleep.com/pages/landing-page?promo=sysk https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Visit https://bluechew.com and get your first order FREE when you use promo code: SOMETHING https://deals.dell.com/en-us or 1-800-BUY DELL for the best savings available now! https://www.bluenile.com Use Promo Code: SYSK to get $50 off orders of $500 or more at BlueNile.com! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Today on Something You Should Know, how can you appear to be more confident and likable? I'll have some easy,

simple strategies. Ben, do you understand how your money really works? For example, what makes a $20 bill actually worth $20? It is worth the paper it's printed on, which is not much, plus the reputation of whatever institution is responsible for protecting the purchasing power of that paper. And that, in this country and in many other countries, is worth quite a bit. Also, if you have an ice maker in your freezer, there's something you really need to know. And finding true happiness. It takes effort every single day. The question is, how can you learn and gain and grow from this day?

We have the power, each one of us, to slow things down, register useful experiences, and as a result, build up an unshakable core of calm and strength and happiness. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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. 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 to Something You Should Know. Hope you're feeling as much in the holiday spirit as you can, given the circumstances we're in. Our first topic today is confidence. People like people who are confident. So how can you be more confident? Well, according to Forbes magazine, here's what confident people do differently.

They stick their neck out. When confident people see an opportunity, they take it. Instead of worrying about what could go wrong, they ask themselves, what's stopping me? Why can't I do that? And they go for it. Fear doesn't hold them back because they know if they never try, they'll never succeed, and failure is a great way to learn. Confident people don't pass judgment on others because they know that everyone has something to offer,

and they know that they don't need to take other people down a notch in order to feel good about themselves. Confident people don't say yes unless they really want to. Research conducted at the University of California shows that the more difficulty you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. People with confidence listen more than they speak because they don't feel like they have anything to prove. Confident people know that by actively listening and paying attention to others, they're much more likely to learn and grow. And confident people exercise. A study conducted at Eastern Ontario Research Institute found that people who exercise twice a week for 10 weeks

felt more competent socially, academically, and athletically. And that is something you should know. Do you know how money works? And what I mean by that is, when you say you have, for example, $10,000 in the bank, where exactly is that money? And if I write you a check for $10,000, how does that money get from my account into your account? Or that $20 bill in your wallet? What makes that little piece of paper worth $20? Says who? Well, to help explain all this and more is Charles Whelan. He teaches public policy and economics at Dartmouth,

and he is the author of a series of books, Naked Statistics, Naked Economics, and the one we're talking about today, Naked Money. Hi, Charles. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Oh, it's good to be with you. So I think everybody has this kind of vague notion, like we know just about enough to know that money works, and somehow we write a check and it gets in the other guy's bank account. But we don't really get it. We don't really know much about it. We just know enough. So what is it that we should know, do you think? Well, we should know that every once in a while it stops working.

If you were in Zimbabwe or in Venezuela now, the paper that you took for granted doesn't buy what it used to. Zimbabwe's come out of that problems, but for a long time, their inflation got to the point where they were weighing bills instead of counting them. That's how bad the inflation was. And we should think about what money really is, because when things like Bitcoin come along, and people are arguing that this is going to replace the dollar, we should step back and think about whether that's really likely to be the case.

So in its purest sense, I mean, money is just a means of exchange, right? It's a means of exchange, and money that works well, works well as a means of exchange. So that's kind of circular logic, but we can drill down on it a little bit, which is, you know, live elephants have value, but they're really lousy means of exchange because they're big and they poop all over the place and not everybody wants an elephant. Small bits of gold actually work quite well because they hold up, they don't tarnish, they don't deteriorate. People across cultures seem to appreciate them. On the other hand, gold is so valuable that you can't go out and buy a pack of gum with it because it would be such a small speck that it doesn't work. So you start to think about things that are portable, things that are durable, things that

have a known value, things that you can carry around, and you get to a place where there are a set of things that work reasonably well throughout history, whether it's bags of salt or certain minerals that work for the purposes of conducting commerce. So we go from trading elephants to gold to bags of salt. How do we get to paper money? The first leap is small and not too difficult, which is to say gold is valuable. You don't really want to be carrying gold around, but we know it works as a means of exchange. So how about if we just put it on deposit someplace, somebody gives us a receipt and says, Charlie or Mike has deposited seven ounces of gold.

Maybe they divide that into one-ounce certificates. And we go someplace and that certificate has some meaning because somebody recognizes the signature or the nature of the certificate. And we start trading those certificates because we don't really want to carry the gold around. That's not a giant leap to make. And you could do that with diamonds or anything else, but gold and silver serve that purpose throughout history. The point where it becomes a crazy leap is when you take the gold away. And that's where we are now. The paper no longer, you can't show up at the Federal Reserve and say, hey, I've had enough of this Ben Franklin in my wallet. Can you give me the gold? Because it's not backed by gold anymore. That's fiat money. That's what most of

the, actually all of the developed economies use now. And that's backed only by confidence, which is to say that if I give you a dollar, you are perfectly confident in the near term. You can take it and use it with another dollar to get some coffee or some mints or gum. So confidence, rather than gold or anything else, is what underlies money right now. Which is, I guess, a little scary because it's literally worth the paper it's printed on, right? I mean, there's nothing else to it other than the confidence that everyone else will recognize this is valuable. It is worth the paper it's printed on, which is not much, plus the reputation of whatever institution is responsible for protecting the purchasing power of that paper. And that, in this country and in many other countries, is worth quite a bit.

The Federal Reserve has as its mission the job of maintaining a predictable purchasing power for that piece of paper. And even through the financial crisis, pretty much after about the 1970s, when Volcker came in and broke the back of inflation, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have done an admirable job of protecting the purchasing power of that paper. Now, it's not constant, and we can talk about why that's the case. It's actually designed to lose about 2% of its value a year, but you know it's not going to lose 80% of its value like it has in Venezuela. You know that it's not going to cost a hundred, I have on my desk, a hundred trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. We know it's not going to get to that level. So yeah, it's confidence plus paper, but really vote on the confidence. So what do you mean it's designed to lose 2%?

What's designed, that money, U.S. money is designed to lose 2% a year? It is. We don't say it that way. What we say is that we have a target inflation rate in this country of 2%. Just about every central bank around the country or around the world also aims to have some positive inflation rate. So when you look at our monetary system, which has had some, you know, big legendary problems like the Great Depression and then the economic crisis of 2008, so there have been some big hiccups. But overall, how well does the monetary system function? It works quite well in terms of facilitating commerce. There's a huge demand around the world for American dollars. Even nefarious characters, drug dealers and arms

merchants would prefer to have a briefcase full of $100 bills as opposed to other currencies. It does a pretty good job of facilitating transactions, which is really all it's supposed to do. The less we think about money, the better it's working because it's just the lubricant for commerce. Now, that said, there are some changes on the horizon. We've been talking a lot about printing money. The reality is that neither you nor I are probably using a lot of dollar bills these days. So electronic money, which is really just a different kind of record keeping. So I can give you a $20 bill and the bill itself is a representation of the fact that I've transferred value to you. Or I can write you a check, which is really the same thing. Somebody goes through

a clearing process, but somebody takes $20 from my account and moves it to yours. If you do it with an ATM, it's the same thing. It's all just one big process for keeping score of who's got value and who doesn't. So those kinds of things change, but fundamentally, the system works quite well for what it was designed to do. I'm speaking with Charles Whelan. He teaches public policy and economics at Dartmouth, and he is author of a book called Naked Money. 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 Lightning, 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. 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. So, Charlie, you say the monetary system works, but how does it work? In other words, okay, so I write you a check and then you deposit my check. Does my bank actually send money to your bank or how does the money move around? It's just a giant accounting process. The Federal Reserve is responsible for that whole clearing process. And it's what you described, which is, no, we're not going to move money to my account, to your account. And it turns out you wrote a check to my wife and that gets moved back to our account. Instead,

there's a central clearing process where all the member banks of the Federal Reserve System kind of tally up the directional flows and net it out at the end of the day. So that, you know, if my bank on the whole wrote $270 million of checks to accounts at your bank and you wrote $272 million back to my bank, really the net transfer will be $2 million and the rest will just be kind of moving around among the accounts. Just one big giant accounting process. But it's one of the many things that we take for granted. That's part of the reason that the financial system works. But where's the money? When I say I've got, you know, so many thousands of dollars in my bank account, where is that money really? It's a ledger. It's really, the bills are only a tiny proportion of the money that you actually

have on your account. The rest of it is just imagine someone with a giant chalkboard kind of keeping track of who has accumulated value. One way to think about it is like poker chips in a poker game, which is all they're doing is keeping track of who's won and lost. And if at the poker game, you ran and got me a drink and I gave you two chips, that's two chips worth of effort that I've put in. And it kind of signals that now you owe me two chips worth of effort. So really it's all just a giant record-keeping process, and it's written down. It doesn't have to be physically manifested in the form of a bill, only a tiny fraction of that value. Like if we had a poker game, we could write down the big hands, and we wouldn't have to have chips in front of us that represented that.

We just kind of put it in our wallet. Because the hope is, or the assumption is, that not everybody on any given day is going to say, let's go get the money from the bank and have a run on the banks, because that would destroy everything. Exactly, which is, of course, the history of financial crises. Everything we've described works brilliantly until, for whatever reason, we decide we do want all of our poker chips, and it turns out they've been loaned out to somebody. Or if you've seen It's a Wonderful

Life, that bank run scene is the best manifestation of what a financial crisis looks like anytime. I mean, it can be a bank, it can be the repo market. Anytime anybody in this complex system decides that they have to have liquidity now, it doesn't work very well because not everybody can have liquidity at the same time. And seldom do they want it. It's just that on those days, like in It's a Wonderful Life, everybody wants it, and then the whole house of cards collapses. Exactly. And if you remember, it's because that money's been loaned out. The whole point of the financial system, we've kind of talked about

money as facilitating transactions, but there's another really important purpose, which is I've got a lot of money right now that I don't need. Now, my kids are headed to college. I'm going to need it soon. There may be somebody starting a fast food restaurant down the road who needs it now and will be able to pay it back. So the financial system is also intermediating a loan between me and these entrepreneurs. Now, I don't necessarily meet that person. It happens through the bank or through other financial systems. The important point is that my money, as Jimmy Stewart eloquently points out in the movie,

is not in the bank. It's been loaned out. So if I want it back and it's been invested in this hamburger joint, I can't get it right away, even if that's a strong loan. So the nature of the financial system is if there's some reason that everybody wants their money at the same time, there's going to be some kind of big problem. Can you explain in relatively simple terms how Bitcoin works? I will do my best. My first thing to point out is I do not believe Bitcoin is money in the sense that we described correctly money at the outset of this discussion as something that is good for facilitating commerce.

I said elephants are bad. Bitcoin is also bad. Part of the reason Bitcoin is bad as a medium of exchange is that the value is bouncing all over the place. So every time you read that Bitcoin is up 75% or down 25%, just imagine if you'd bought your house with a mortgage denominated in Bitcoin. So your mortgage payment is going up 75% one month and then going down 25%. The whole point of medium of exchange is it's not supposed to bounce around in value. So that's the first thing to file away.

The second thing is that Bitcoin exists because people think it might be valuable. So you have this computer programmer, still anonymous, who creates a computer system where Bitcoins are deposited in people's accounts when they use their computers to solve complex problems. It's called mining. That's not a bad way to think about it, which except that instead of like using your pickaxe in the stone to find nuggets of gold, you use your computer to solve riddles and you get bitcoins for doing so. Now, do they have any intrinsic value? No, but we've already discussed neither does the dollar. The difference is that people have

started using Bitcoin because they think other people will take Bitcoin. And remember, this is all predicated on confidence. So as long as you think that somebody else is going to take it, then it has some value and you might be willing to accept it. The long-term question is, do we think it's still going to have value in 10 or 12 years like we think the dollar will, we think gold will, and so on? And I think the answer there is quite dubious. There is no institution that's responsible for protecting and stabilizing the value of Bitcoin. Its primary value right now is for people who want to move large amounts of money anonymously. Those people tend to be drug dealers and weapons merchants and terrorists and kidnappers. So if governments crack down on Bitcoin, then it won't be valuable.

And if it's not valuable, other people won't think it's value, and the whole confidence thing collapses. So I think the short answer is people kind of agreed they'd use this as money. As long as that agreement holds, it will work as money. If there's a chink in the confidence, it will collapse completely. What about the message you see and hear in commercials for companies who are selling precious metals, gold and silver, and they often make the case that you should own hard assets, gold and silver. And they often make the case that you should own hard assets, gold and silver, because if and when the monetary system fails

or if your money ever becomes worthless, at least you'll now have hard assets, although I don't know how you then take gold to the supermarket and use it to buy milk. But that's the argument, that hard assets are intrinsically valuable, whereas paper money could be worthless, and that that's a good reason to buy precious metals. Is that a valid fear?

In some places. I don't think it's a valid fear in the United States. And if we get to a point where there's some Armageddon, you know, I would urge you to stockpile water, canned beans, and other things that are more valuable than gold. After the nuclear holocaust, the gold isn't going to do you a lot of good. You're going to show up at the supermarket with your gold, and there's going to be nothing on the shelf. Right. So, you know, I think if you were in Venezuela or Zimbabwe or some of the other places that we're talking about where the institutions are quite poor, then getting your money out of cash is a good idea.

But you could put it in dollars. You could put it in real estate. You could put it in a lot of other things. The difference between other assets and gold is that gold is a dead asset. So let's suppose you put $50,000 worth of gold in your basement. You're not earning any interest on it. You may actually have to pay somebody to store it. Whereas if you buy stocks or bonds or real estate,

there's going to be a return associated with that. So it is true that everybody should probably have some hedge against inflation, but there are better ways of hedging against inflation than gold. Yeah, but if you bought a bunch of gold back in the 80s, it doesn't gain interest, but the value of gold has gone up pretty substantially since then, so your gold would be worth quite a bit of money. But so would real estate or any of the other assets that you were likely to have bought at the time. But it sounds like your message is in part that in this country, in the United States,

the confidence that money needs to have is well-earned, that we should have confidence in our monetary system. We should, barring any institutional change, and I see no reason to think that that's on the horizon. I would actually give, you know, part of the book is also about the financial crisis, and I would give the Federal Reserve remarkably high marks for dealing with a really difficult situation. And by and large, what they did was rescue the financial system in a way that protected the currency and made the downturn much less severe than the Great Depression or what it might have been. So I give the Fed high marks both for their two missions, which is trying to promote stability in the macroeconomy and protecting the value of the currency. And through a rough patch from 2008 to about 2011, they did strikingly well.

Well, as I said in the beginning, most of us have kind of a general sense that the money system works, but we don't really understand exactly how it works. So it's nice to get a little peek behind the curtain to see how it works and to understand why, for example, that $20 bill is worth $20. So thanks for explaining that, Charlie. Well, thank you. And as I said, it's a good day when you don't have to worry about whether that $20 bill is worth $20. If you have to start worrying about it, then there are bigger problems. Yes, I'd say so. My guest has been Charles Whelan. He teaches public policy and economics at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, and he is author of the book, Naked Money, which is part of a series of books, Naked Statistics, Naked Economics, and Naked Money.

There's a link to the Naked Money book in the show notes for this episode. 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 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 listener 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. So who doesn't want to be happy? Everybody wants to be happy. And yet sometimes happiness can seem to be a million miles away. Maybe it's because our brains are not so much wired to be happy, but rather wired to survive. And survival isn't always in sync with happiness. In fact, it's sometimes at odds with happiness. So what do we do about all this?

Well, Rick Hansen is someone worth listening to. He is a therapist and author of several books, including Hardwiring Happiness, the new brain science of contentment, calm, and confidence. Hi, Rick. Welcome. Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thank you. So something caught my eye on the Amazon page for your book, which I think is so true for people, and it is, why is it easier to ruminate over hurt feelings than it is to bask in the warmth of being appreciated?

And I suspect everybody knows exactly what that means and has experienced that. Why is that? The fact of it is really clear to everybody, but why goes into how the brain evolved over 600 million years, actually, of the whole evolution of the nervous system. That's what scientists call the negativity bias of the brain, or I kind of cut to the chase and call it, we've got a brain that's Velcro for the bad, but Teflon for the good. And that's because for our ancestors, they had to get carrots, the good, but they had to avoid sticks, the bad.

The difference is, if you don't get a carrot today, food, mating opportunity, whatnot, you'll have a chance at one tomorrow. But if you fail to avoid that stick today, that predator, that aggression inside your band or between bands, whack, no more carrots forever. So we've got a brain that's just designed to scan for bad news, overreact to it, and fast track the whole package into memory. So for me, Mother Nature is tilted towards survival, but against quality of life. And if we are interested in long-term quality of life

and long-term health and happiness, we've got to tilt toward the positive just to level the playing field. So if that is the natural inclination, and everyone knows that, that it is, you worry about what can go wrong, you never think about what's going to go right, then if that's the inclination, how do you fight it? I mean, it is what it is. Yeah, that's where the tilting comes in. And so for me, I've worked backwards from what does it take to grow resources inside, like mindfulness, compassion, confidence, grit, and gratitude? How do you actually grow them inside yourself? And it's a two-step process to hardwire them into your own brain.

First, you need to experience whatever you want to grow, like gratitude or confidence or determination. And then you need to take a few seconds with it. Take a breath or two or three, feel it in your body and see what's rewarding about it to help turn it into a lasting change in your brain. Without that lasting change, by definition, the experience was wasted on your brain. So give me an example, because when you say experience confidence, I don't know what that means. Well, when you experience confidence, when you have a sense of self-worth or capability, that's confidence, or a sense that other people care about you. These are ordinary,

authentic experiences. When you have those kinds of experiences, or when anyone does, that must involve some kind of pattern of activation in your nervous system. To turn that momentary experience into any kind of lasting change for the better so that you actually become over time more confident or happier or more compassionate or wiser. You have to stay with the experience for a breath or two or three for it to have a chance to leave any kind of lasting trace behind in your nervous system. The problem is negative experiences get converted very quickly to lasting change. We acquire or develop anxiety or depression or irritability over time pretty quickly. But on the other hand, it takes a little bit of deliberate effort to acquire greater resilience and well-being

over time. But the good news is that it's sweet work because it really just simply involves for a dozen or two dozen seconds at a time just kind of marinating in your authentically good experiences. Knowing that you're wired to be negative and that if you know that you can try to be proactive in countering that, that in itself should help. I think you're exactly right. In a way, this is the essence of resilience. the world around them or mistreated by the world around them or the world around them is kind of barren and not very helpful, the more important it is for a person to look for those little moments in the day when they get something done or another person smiles at them or they feel inside themselves their own determination or good heart. It's more important than ever that when, as it were, those little authentic songs are playing in the inner iPod, you slow it down for a breath or two or three to turn on the recorder and internalize the benefits of that experience into yourself. But it does seem that there are people who just are naturally not what we're talking about. They're genuinely fairly positive and they don't dwell

on the negative. How did they get that way? That's interesting. Two things. So first, there is natural temperamental variation. You know, the joke about parents is that if you have one kid, you believe in nurture. But when you have two kids, you really believe in nature. And our two kids are different in that way. One is really quite sunny and cheerful. The other person, the other child, who's an adult now, would agree that a tendency toward seeing a glass is always half full, you know, empty, half empty, rather, on the one hand. The other thing, though, is that nothing in what I'm saying is about positive thinking.

I believe in realistic thinking. And in fact, it's based on recognizing that life is often hard, and sometimes it's terribly hard for people. And because it's hard, and because we have a brain that's not good at gaining from our beneficial experiences, which are usually enjoyable, not always, but usually. Because of that kind of hard-headed clarity as an evolutionary neuropsychologist, in my case, that's a mouthful, I'm very oriented around helping people find in the middle of their own lives, whether they have a cheerful temperament or a grumpy temperament, either way, the question is, how can you learn and gain and grow from this day from your real day today and we have the power each one of us in our own brains to slow things down register useful

experiences and as a result build up build up an unshakable core of calm and strength and happiness i've always felt and believed that self-talk has a lot to do with who you are and what type of person you are because you're talking to yourself all day long and listening to yourself and believing yourself and that really does shape who you are. What does the science say? There's a lot of science that negative self-talk is a major factor for anxiety and depression. But to be clear, that's the kind of self-talk that's very repetitive and keeps beating you up or dwelling on resentments or regrets. That's harmful for people. Now, that's different, of course, from, you know, finishing, as I did yesterday, an interaction with your wife and walking away and thinking to yourself, dude,

don't be a jerk next time. That's useful. Okay, there's a place for that. It's also true that positive self-talk that's credible, not like, oh, you're the most wonderful person in the world. We don't believe that stuff. But genuinely accurate self-talk that says Not like, oh, you're the most wonderful person in the world. We don't believe that stuff. But genuinely accurate self-talk that says something like, wow, this was hard and you did okay. That's really, really useful for people too. Now, deeper, just to finish, deeper than that, more cognitive or conceptual stuff around self-talk, what really seems to have a bigger impact on people over time is what they feel and what it's kind of like in their body, their felt sense of things. And the opportunity there is both to take in, internalize into yourself so that you believe it,

useful self-talk. But even deeper than that, when you're having a sense in your body, let's say, of relaxing, or if you have a sense in your body that you're strong, slow down to receive it. Or if you have an emotion like gratitude, or you feel cared about, or you like somebody, or you feel relieved or reassured that you got something done. Again, you're having an emotional experience and that is a high value opportunity to slow down and receive that into yourself. But what do people usually do if they don't do that? What is it you think people are doing? A lot of research shows that literally they'll do these studies that are pretty neat actually. They'll ping people randomly over the day on their smartphone who agree to do the study and ask them in the moment, is your mind wandering or are you kind

of here and now doing whatever you're doing? On average, 50% of the time, people have a wandering mind. And to the degree that a person has a wandering mind, they tend to wander into negative material, stressing about this and that, worrying about this or that, or having momentarily nice moments that are genuine and real. You eat the cookie, you finish the email, you finally get into bed at night, but they don't dwell on those moments, not from the standpoint of clinging to them or trying to hold on to them, but they don't just slow it down for a breath to receive those experiences into themselves. That's pretty typical. On the other hand, there is research that shows that people in general who do what I'm talking about, who take a moment to let learning land. If you have a useful insight or you learn how to run a meeting more skillfully or talk to your teenager more skillfully, register it so that it becomes a part of you. It

actually is internalized. Then you become one of those people who has a relatively steep learning curve, a relatively steep growth curve. You can't do anything about the past. But what each of us can do each day is to gain as much as possible over the course of the day in terms of our healing, our development, our growth, our greater competency, greater mastery, greater capability, more virtues over the course of the day. That's our opportunity. And to me, in a sense, to finish, if what we're trying to grow inside ourselves for the course of the day. That's our opportunity. And to me, in a sense, to finish, if what we're trying to grow inside ourselves for the sake of others as well as ourselves, we're trying to grow know-how, we're trying to grow useful attitudes, wisdom, happiness altogether. Those are kind of like superpowers because those are the factors that much research shows are the foundation of being successful and happy and satisfied in your

relationships over this life. Well, if those are the superpowers we're trying to grow in ourself, learning, in effect, is the superpower of superpowers. Learning in the broadest sense, including emotional learning or motivational learning. And that's the superpower of superpowers that I'm especially interested in. So I understand the importance of paying attention to the good things and letting those experiences sink in and trying to rewire that. But sometimes life sucks.

There aren't good experiences. There are stretches in life where things are just bad. Yep, absolutely true. So that's completely true. And I'm a longtime therapist. And I've also been in business and had losses and dealt with real things. And many people have had lives that are much harder than the life I've had. So nothing in what I'm saying is about suppressing or denying the negative. If we could say that, it's not about looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. When the oatmeal hits the fan, the best we can do is to be aware of it right out the storm without making a bad

thing worse. And what enables us to be resilient, what enables us to handle the truly sucky, including sometimes horrible, traumatic aspects of life, are those inner resources we have inside ourselves. And the good news is that we can do simple things in the flow of everyday life to build up those inner resources so that we are more resilient when things are really difficult. When you look at this, it would appear that the people who need this message the most are the people who don't even know they need it, that you don't know what you don't know, and that those people who think that their life sucks and that there's no better way are completely oblivious to the fact that there is another way. You're definitely right. There's a joke in therapy world.

How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change. And that is true that motivation is really, really the bottom line. That said, I think that many people realize that they're facing the world and they do want to have more know-how. They want to be more skillful with their own mind. They want to have more competence with their own thoughts and feelings. They also want to develop, as we would wish for our friends or our children, they want to develop more happiness inside themselves, more inner peace, more fundamental contentment. And if that's what you want to do, the how to do it is shockingly

straightforward. But as you've said a couple times, you're totally right, Mike, people don't have the habit of this. They don't have the habit of taking in the good. And it's really poignant. What it leaves inside is a nagging background sense of unfulfillment, discontent, uneasiness. And the alternative is to be engaged in the world, dream big dreams, go for it, be strong, stick up for yourself, you know, help the world become a better place. While at the same time, in the core of your being, have this fundamental foundation of resilient well-being, even as you deal with the challenges in life. Well, that's a perfect way to wrap it up. That's a great message. My guest has been Rick Hansen. The book is Hardwiring Happiness, the New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm,

and Confidence, and there is a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Rick. Thank you. You're a total pro. Well, thanks. I'll take that as a compliment. I want to talk to you about your automatic ice maker in your freezer. Yes, it's very convenient to have an ice maker making ice cubes all the time, but what you may not realize is how much that ice maker is costing you. Overall, refrigerators have gotten more efficient

and they use a lot less electricity than they used to, but they still represent a big chunk of your electric bill every month. A few years ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology decided to look a little closer and found something really surprising. The automatic ice maker inside the freezer eats up a lot of electricity. Ice makers use between 12 and 20 percent of the electricity used by the entire refrigerator freezer. Why so much to freeze water into ice cubes? Well, it turns out there's this tiny little motor in there

that has to operate to make the ice cubes. And that motor requires a heater to keep it from freezing. And it's that little heater that keeps the motor from freezing that's using up all the electricity. In fact, three-fourths of all the energy used by the ice maker is to keep that heater going. By just turning off the ice maker and getting some old-fashioned ice trays, you can save all that money and all that electricity.

And that is something you should know. If you'd like to know what you could get me for Christmas, well, it's simple, really. Share this podcast with someone you know so they, too, become part of our audience. That would be the best gift of all. 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. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a 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.

Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.