Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 374: The Evolutionary Case for Kindness | Dacher Keltner

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Here’s a question: Is there an evolutionary advantage to being kind?  Our guest today is Dacher Keltner, an eminent scientist who will make the case that, contrary to popular conceptions of evolution (dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest), and contrary to a lot of what we see on the news, our species is actually uniquely wired for kindness and compassion. Dacher Keltner is the Director of the Social Interaction Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, the Faculty Director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, and the author of the book Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.  In this episode, we talk about Darwin’s perspective on human sympathy and selfishness, where he stands on the question of Original Sin versus Buddha Nature, the importance of touch when it comes to communicating compassion, and the relationship between teasing and kindness.  We are bringing you this Ten Percent Happier podcast series in collaboration with the Apple TV+ Original Series Ted Lasso because kindness is a huge theme in the show, and there are many practical lessons embedded right in the plot. Watch Season 2 of Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. Subscription required. Apple TV+ and/or select content may not be available in all regions. Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/install Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dacher-keltner-374 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Yes, yes, hello folks. We got a good one for you today. Centered around this question, is there an evolutionary advantage to being kind? My guest today is an eminent scientist who's going to make the case that

contrary to popular conceptions of evolution, survival of the fittest, doggy dog, red and tooth and claw, contrary to all of those popular notions about evolution and contrary to a lot of what we see on the news, our species is actually uniquely wired for kindness and compassion. Not only that, we're happier and we do better in life when we tap into these natural resources. Dacker Keltner is the director of the social interaction lab at the University of California at Berkeley, the faculty director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center and the author of several books, including one

that has been extremely influential for me, called Born to Be Good, the Science of a Meaningful Life. Dackers also, the host of a hit podcast called The Science of Happiness, which I hardly recommend and I'll have a few more words to say about that show at the end of this show. Meanwhile, in this episode, we're going to talk to Dacker about a number of things, including Darwin's perspective on human sympathy and selfishness, where Dacker stands on the question of original sin versus the Buddhist notion of Buddha nature, the importance of touch when it comes to communicating compassion, of course, touch can be touchy, so we'll get into that. And speaking of touchy, the relationship

between teasing and kindness. Before we dive in, I do want to note that today marks the first episode in a brand new series on kindness we're doing here on the 10% happier podcast. We're calling it the Ted Lasso series. We here at TPH have been really inspired by the show on Apple TV plus called Ted Lasso, which features a very, very kind soccer coach played by Jason Sadekis. If you haven't seen the show, it's very much worth checking out season two, drop this summer, throughout this series here on the podcast, which we'll go through this week, and next week, we're going to explore the science of kindness and learn how and why to operationalize this science in our own lives. To be very, very clear, you do not need to have seen Ted Lasso in order

to listen to this series. We reference it a number of times throughout the interviews you're going to hear, but we do so lightly. So don't worry about it if you haven't watched the show, although I do recommend it. It's pretty good. And just to say we're doing more than just this Ted Lasso series here on the podcast. We're also going to do a free Ted Lasso challenge over on the 10% happier app, which kicks off on September 7th. And we're doing this as well in collaboration with Apple TV+. It's a five day challenge.

It's going to help you re-examine your understanding of kindness and give you some concrete tools for practicing it. Every day during the challenge, I'll be sending you a little video in which I will play a clip from the Ted Lasso show and talk about how you can operationalize the wisdom from the clip in your life. And then after each video, we'll bring in an expert Dharma teacher by the name of La Sarmiento, who will lead a guided meditation to help you practice what you just learned. So you can sign up today to join me in that free Ted Lasso challenge.

Just download the 10% Hemp app, wherever you get your apps. Okay, enough out of me. Let's get this series going, and we kick it off with Dacker Keltner. Dacker Keltner, welcome to the show. Good to be with you, Dan. I have no good explanation for why we're like 300 and something episodes in.

You have not been on the show. That seems like malpractice on my end. Well, I've been waiting for this moment. And I got some other goodies for you down the line. So good. You know, I just to say and your work has been so formative for me in my own work. And in particular, born to be good, your book. So thank you. That's in part fueling the already expressed embarrassment, but not having had you on the show already. I guess it's a long way of saying I'm very happy that you're here now. And I always cherish the time to be in conversation with you. We've had fun. Yes, we have. We're about to have more. So speaking of fun, I know that like me, you're a fan of Ted Lasso. And, you know, I think your work, one of the many really resonant tendrils of your work,

is exploding the trope that nice guys finish last, that somehow kindness is a liability. And it's interesting because I think that Ted Lasso does that too. Yeah, you know, I mean, nice guys's finished last was probably written by a very mean person as a hypothesis about how we find success in the world. You know, and there's a lot of data on this. It was true in different historical eras when Machiavelli wrote in the 16th century. It was a very popular thesis and justified. But you know, we've seen a really profound transformation

in the past 50 years where in leadership context, and parenting practices, in how we speak to each other, you know, putting aside questions about how people speak to each other online, kindness has become more important and rewarded in society. And, in point of fact, that's actually a very deep evolutionary principle that one of the defining, and I would even argue the signature strength of the human species is our capacity for cooperation and kindness.

Say more about that because the common misperception of Darwin is the survival of the fittest. Nature is red and tooth and claw or Richard Dawkins, the selfish gene. We are just by nature design to be out for ourselves. Thanks for asking that, Dan. It's always great to return to Darwin, one of our great thinkers in Western thought. I was doing a lot of research and you and I've talked about this on empathy and compassion and cooperation

and the neurophysiology of compassion, for example, and being someone influenced by evolutionary thought. I was like, let's go back to Darwin, right? And read his autobiography and is the descend of man and the emotional expression book. And they're in a passage in the Descendant of Man is the quote that sympathy is our strongest instinct for those communities with the most sympathetic members

will flourish and raise the greatest number of offspring. And what he was saying really straightforward is the kinder we are as collectives, the better those collectives do. He wrote that in 1871 or two. Much of early evolutionary scholarship that followed shifted course. It said we're aggressive, we're adversarial. And now we're finally getting back to that thesis in the past 10, 15 years that kindness and cooperation have these benefits for the individual, just in

terms of making it in the world. I've stole this from somebody I know, but I often talk about the, I probably stole it from you, but the reason why homo sapiens became the apex predator was not that we were the strongest, it was that we had the ability to work together. Yeah. That we were the strongest it was that we had the ability to work together Yeah, and you know 1978 Richard Dawkins wrote the selfish gene and that book was wildly influential It's all about aggression and adversarialism built into our genes There's really been a very deep revision in how we think about our core human nature With discoveries like Joseph Henrik at Harvard, we share 40% of resources

with a stranger. Michael Tomasello, groundbreaking work, showing that little 18-month-olds, if they see an adult struggle, they will cooperate and assist and empathize and share. And that kindness tendency really separates us from our primate relatives in Tomasela's work. And so what we learned, just like you said, Dan, is like, we're a collective species, we're a collaborative species. We're not a very fast species. We're not as strong as other primates. And that's how we made it. And you know, it's how we're, it's how we'll make it facing these challenges we face today. Wouldn't it be akin to donning rose colored glasses to deny that we are also

and aggressive species? People always accuse me of that. Like I wrote a book born to be good. And the first hand that always goes up is like, what about evil? You know, and the point is, as Walt Whitman like to say, we are a complicated species. You know, we have many different tendencies. to say we are a complicated species. You know, we have many different tendencies. We are adversarial, we're tribal. We can be greedy. There are even worse tendencies. We can be genocidal towards people

who are different from us. Those fit within this deep evolutionary framework. But at the same time, the other half of the story is that kindness is profoundly important to the success of groups and individuals and built into some of our default tendencies in how we react to other people, in our social lives, how we flatter, we cooperate, or we lift up other people, and then in our brains in our bodies.

So it's deeply rooted in who we are alongside these darker tendencies that people tend to assume is human nature. Is there no place in a wise life, a well-lived life for aggression? You mean, you talked before about how Darwin says the tribes that worked well together had sympathy for one another tended to last the longest. But what if there's a tribe down the road that's coming after them? Don't they need to protect themselves?

Absolutely, and you need to be aggressive in the right context. When I teach human happiness, one of the problematic examples to think about is our passion for justice and anger. And there are a lot of data that show getting outraged and protesting brings about social good. Not only for yourself, but for the group you're advocating on behalf of, you need as a leader within the scientific literature on leadership. You need people who can make the tough call and can be really competitive.

But those tendencies are stronger when they're complemented by these more, what we would call pro-social tendencies. So absolutely, you know, I know I'm in Berkeley, I was raised by hippies, people think, you know, I advocate this John Lennon view of life, but there's a place for being tough and competitive very vitally in our social lives. I want to point out what may be obvious to some people that this is a conversation happening between two men. And the thing that comes to mind is,

I think this is generalization. I hope a useful generalization that at least among the men in my orbit, often I find that counseling, kindness and dialing down aggression is almost never bad advice. But often when I'm talking to my wife for female friends or mentees, I find myself airing toward, no, actually, you need to draw a sharp reboundaries,

you need to stand up for stuff, you should negotiate hard for a raise, you should negotiate hard for a promotion, et cetera, et cetera. I just want to be aware that I think that, and I'm sure you know this too, that there are gender nuances here. There are profound gender nuances, but we imagine them to be bigger than is the case, and they're changing historically. So, men tend to be more aggressive. That's a pretty robust universal. You know, there's an interesting measure of this manipulative, aggressive course of strategy in life, of Machiavellianism, and men tend to be more Machiavellian. At work and in community groups, the person who's undermining

things is often through these Machiavellian approaches as a man. And then women tend to be more collaborative in your right-down. Like, you know, when you get out into the work world and you need to make the hard call or draw boundaries or find advantage vis-a-vis other people, that's maybe a little harder for women. And so you've got to counsel, like you said, women to embrace that as part of broad repertoire of strategies that are part of broad repertoire of strategies that are part of the meaningful life. And so it's a very dynamic moment, you know, for gender in this sense that men are becoming

more empathetic and taking on the world of emotion in their lives and women are embracing more assertive power, which is making the world fascinating. I mean, you see it in the show, in Ted Lasson, in the titular character, is what some might describe as quote unquote soft. And his boss, the woman who owns the team, at least in season one, would be described as quote unquote tough. Yeah, and I think that's why so many of the poignant scenes play off that dynamic, right? Where you know, she helps them out with an anxiety attack, right? That was a really poignant scene for me. I've had a whole lot of those anxiety attacks and like to have a female leader come in and do that, and it kind of reverses these usual power expectations. And then his

softness and how it changes the organization, his kindness is poignant and it sticks with you. I think for these reasons, because you know, they're these really interesting broad surveys of what it takes to lead. And the show is about leadership in some sense. And we've moved more across the world toward this more Ted Lasso philosophy leadership, but there are still tensions and gender struggles. And I love how the show reveals them. It's not neat and clean on the show in real life. You know, if you're, if you're making the commitment to leading with kindness, which I've only episodically attempted.

It doesn't mean that life is just going to be friction free. Not at all. And you can get into serious traps, you know, by like, oh, I'll forgive this person and they exploit you again, or I'll lead with cooperation and you lose the deal. And I've had this failure to do like, you know, you all right, let's all just sort of empty out our feelings about each other. And that doesn't go so well. So you need a really a nice array of strategies to make it in life. And you need to be competitive at certain moments,

very obviously, and play hardball, and take on people playing hardball with the right approach. But what I love about this show is it's starting to bring into focus this ancient strategy of human social life, which is to share and lift people up and encourage and create an environment of humor. It's reminding us of how important those tendencies are. I want to get to the humor in a second, but let me just, just staying at this high level for a second. When you talk about playing hardball,

as somebody who, you know, I really do endeavor to be governed to the best of my ability by my better angels, and I know that not everybody else is, so I don't wanna be, you know, bringing a butter knife to a gunfight, what I try to do, and I think this is what you would advise, is yes, there are times when I may need to use tactics that are tougher, but that doesn't mean I need to be motivated by rage.

Yeah, you know, the, and I like that distinction because you think about adversarial encounters, which is part of family life, and it's part of work life life and it's part of history. There's a place for playing hardball, being strong, drawing boundaries, positioning what you want selfishly in a really strong way that tends to work in negotiations, for example. I would also say, Dan, that there's also a place for anger, right? And I wouldn't call it rage, right, or bitterness, or resentment, right? Rage is excessive.

Resentment is where you just feel it over and over. And anger is well calibrated to the context. And one of my favorite findings on this is this broad review that asks the question of how do social movements gain power? How do you change the politics of the day? How could we change the politics of climate crisis, right? And the fossil fuel excess of today. And the literature found like, it's really good for people seeking change to fuel anger, but not rage and not resentment, but to go out and show it. It gives you strength in negotiations and advocating your cause. So it's these really nuanced territories, and this is what I always quote Aristotle, where

he's, you know, very important. He said, all of the passions are useful for us, right? Kindness and anger, fear and devotion, gratitude and awe, as long as they're in the right place to the right degree and toward the right end. So the principle of moderation helps. There's a reason why we have all of these impulses and passions, the reason why they're all of these impulses and passions,

the reason why they're wired into us. One big part of life is the skillful balancing of all of these passions. Back to rage, I was just thinking that, I chose that word specifically, it may be I should have added to it a kind of dehumanizing hatred, or Sharon Salisbury, the great meditation teacher,

says, you can compete without being cruel. So I can use tough tactics, but that doesn't mean I'm trying to utterly destroy the other people or that I'm operating on the principle that they are beneath me. I'm so struck, it's so striking just when you translate that to an everyday observation like you watch great athletes compete. And in the competition,

they're full of strength and adversarialism and empowered anger. But after the game, they hug each other, right? And they embrace. And that tells us, and one of the things that we know about the passions is that passions have this physiology to them. They guide you in action, but what really matters about them is what philosophers call the intentional object of an emotion, which is, what is it about in your conscious mind?

And if you go out and you compete against people, but ultimately you respect them or like them or love them, then you're not in this realm of rage and tribalism, whereas by contrast, if you go out and compete and you're filled with dehumanizing thoughts, that's a different kind of interaction. And it tells us how important the cognitive contents are of these passions that we think about as the key to life. And that's where culture can have a huge influence. And that's why this whole shift in thinking

about athletic competition as not being about war, but being about developing character or play or games is a really interesting extension of that idea. That's another thing I want to get to as well, the importance of play and also athletics because we are at least in some way playing off of Ted Lasso. But let me just stick on this idea of born to be good. What comes up in my mind is the kind of the spectrum between the Catholic notion of

original sin and the Buddhist notion of Buddha and nature. You know, original sin, everybody knows what that means. And Buddha nature is probably less well understood in popular culture is the notion that we are essentially good. We're like a, maybe a mud and crusted gem, but you take away the mud and there's the gem underneath it all. Where are you on that spectrum?

And is there science to back up either point of view? You've captured one of the motivations I've done 20 years of science Where are you on that spectrum and is there science to back up either point of view? You've captured one of the motivations I've done 20 years of science and then wrote born to be good and continue in this line of work, which is, I'm a Western European. I was raised in an intellectual tradition, the science of emotion that we've been talking about down. The really was influenced not only by Western European thought, Catholicism, Calvinism, original sin, Freud, like our two master passions or aggression and sex, and

there are deep Freudian legacies in neuroscience in the study of emotion. And I was on this panel and with his whole name is the Dalai Lama, with some scientist and Tibetan practitioners 20 years ago, and he said, compassion is our natural state. And I swear to God, it was like this epiphany. Like, I feel that, you know, when I see young kids, I feel that. When I see two adversaries embrace and I tear up,

I'm like, wow, what a remarkable emotional reaction that when people transcend their differences, I am moved in this way. I get moved by the moral beauty of people, like a lot of people do. And it's been a remarkable shift in our thinking that there are chunks of your brain. Like the pariah quaddoctal gray that are old and down by the brainstem that

respond when you hear signs of human suffering. If you hear a cry in your environment, that party brain is activated. Oxytocin, right? This neuropeptide that goes into your brain and your bloodstream. If you get a little whiff of it, you're more generous to other people. I study the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve, largest bundle of nerves in the body, goes from your spinal cord to your throat, down to your chest, to your gut, kind of calms the body, helps you communicate. It's engaged when we feel compassion. Parts of your brain, the nucleus accumbens light up when you give

resources away to other people. To me, that tells us that we are wired to be good, not all the time. And so, to your original question, that dimension of original sin to Buddha nature, and I wanted to do the science that said, that's a fair question to ask. I would say it's 55 Buddha, 45 original sin. And people think I'm nuts for saying that. They're like, you're kidding me. It's 87% original sin. And the Buddha is an illusion that we occasionally, you know, clasped to to get along.

So, but that's my estimate. Yeah, but what would fall in the middle would be the indigenous notion of the two wolves, just for the uninitiated here. The notion that we have a wolf of anger and a wolf of love and the elder tribe members in the indigenous story here would say that the wolf that wins

is the wolf you feed. And that jobs with Buddhism, which also of course is an indigenous tradition that love, compassion, whatever you want to call it. This is a skill that you can train through meditation. So it seems like what at least in your schema here that the wolf's analogy would be the winner. Yeah, as this thinking is progressed, I've for various reasons started to teach indigenous traditions in my classes and read them and do scholarship on them. It's so fascinating because these are traditions that are 8 to 12, 15,000 years old and older and they have a different view of the human psyche and the human mind and just how cooperation

and sharing are foundational to our psyches, how our relationship to nature, the sense that you're part of a big ecosystem, which is true. We are a mammal amongst many mammals in an ecosystem. I love your translation. I think it's a deep reflection, Dan, right now, which of these set of tendencies are we feeding in our kids or in the workplace or in how we comport ourselves in the incentives that we build into work and education. And I think that, you know, the stress that young people feel today, that the stress that young people feel today, the millennials and younger, is about the sense that the more aggressive wolves have been fed when we should be feeding other tendencies

in humans. And I think what's encouraging about this science of born to be good is those are right there to cultivate, right? People are pretty good at cooperating. We're pretty good at sharing stuff and we just need to build the right environments for it. So I wasn't going to ask this till later but you kind of brought us there. So how do we bring this science of born to be good to use your your phrase? How do we operationalize that in our lives? The first thing is what you've done and And in some sense, it's the most important thing, which is you contemplate

and you reflect and you cultivate a philosophy of life around this. My generation was the Wall Street generation, the Great is Good generation, and that's a life philosophy and people adhere to it. And there's a big transition going on in the last 20, 30 years, where people are like, you know, I think I want to do work where I might not enhance the bottom line as much as I really serve some purpose, the environment or the unhoused or whatever. I think part of how we work with these findings is we integrate it into our philosophy of life. Ethics is all about this and the idea that, well, maybe my first move in life as often as possible is to cooperate or to express gratitude in an intentional way.

And that is changing the workplace. A lot of workplaces are really building out these opportunities for born to be gun practices. And then the harder stuff gets to policy and how we sentence people in prison if they do crimes. So I think this is a moment of deep questioning at these different levels of analysis. And what I hope this science is useful for is to say, you know, the philosophy of unchecked competition and rising to the top at others' expense, that's just a set of assumptions. And there are other ways to go about this.

Let's see how they work. I'm curious about your optimism level. We are at a tenuous point in human history, especially with a climate crisis within a week or so back. We had the IPCC report on the scientists around the world screaming from the rooftops about the dire state of our climate. And that's just one of many issues facing the species right now. What level of optimism can you muster about our future in light of the scientific work you've done?

Yeah, you know, thank you for asking that, Dan. You know, the last thing people probably want to hear is some lab scientists, you know, weighing in on the state of the world. But, you know, we're all in a deep moment of reflection. And I take a good deal of heart and fuel optimistic a good deal of heart and feel optimistic about some of the social developments in the past 20, 30 years, right? The rise of women to positions of power, the rise of people of color to positions of power, they still need to get paid more. Change is an attitude towards sexual identity,

Steve Pinker's observation that we have dropped in violence, which I find to be compelling. So I feel good reason for optimism in our social progress, although their obvious economic inequality is a tough problem. And mass incarceration in the United States is a big nut. We need to crack. But there's actually movement on that. The recent report from the UN on the state of the climate crises and carbon emissions and fossil fuel use

really put a dent in my optimism because of how systemic that is. But it's interesting in the models that they ran in some of these different analyses, one of the things that they point to is they say, we can make a lot of progress if we change human preference, if we change the human psyche. And what that means is different attitudes towards transport and different attitudes towards consumption.

So it's real. There's stuff we all can do as individuals, and that's my hope. But there's this conflict today, in some sense, between the people who just want to maximize self-interest and drive false-of-whole-burning cars to no end and then the counterpoint. So it's a real struggle, and it put a dent in my optimism, frankly, for a lot of different reasons, like a lot of people. But it's a fight. We have to fight. Our conversation right now is part of this, right, which is, like in our research on awe, which I hope to talk to you about someday, one of the most striking things is people feel it close by,

right? You can go out and feel it in a garden or in listening to music in, you know, and you're a local theater, you don't have to always hop on a plane to get it. So a lot of work to do, I dand in my optimism, but our conversation today is the one we need to have. Much more of my conversation with Dacker Keltner right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of

them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. Your discussion of awe, which I think we should have now rather than someday in the future, is interesting because it may sound initially tangential to kindness, but if I understand your work correctly, is it

inducing the feeling of awe can change your behavior? Oh my God. When you take this deep view of humans, like, can you try to go back in our hominid evolution, compare us to other primates? And look at, like, what's the core to who we are? And obviously, tribalism, the darker stuff is core. But we've talked about kindness and compassion

being core to the human species. And a second one is awe, although Jane Goodall really felt and she observed chimpanzees who show this kind of dance like ritualistic reverence for waterfalls and storms. And she called it awe in the beginnings of primate spirituality. But awe is foundational to who we are. They're deep universals to awe. We feel awe about nature and courage of other people and visual design and song and spirituality and life and death. And tear observation, Dan, we think awe is the collective emotion. We feel it around people, we call our tribe,

culture creates things to make us feel awe, to stick together, and one of the effects of awe is, it unleashes our better angels, and we have studies showing a little burst of awe in the woods. And you suddenly share with a stranger, you help them more. You feel awe when you take in an expansive view and you're more humble, right? You're like, wow, I'm not the master of the universe.

I'm part of a collective that will get things done. A lot of really good effects of awe. So that gives me hope. There are more ways to feel awe today than there were 500 years ago when it was largely concentrated in church. But it's also a reason to worry about environmental destruction, which is one of the great sources of awe. And all this toxic discourse, you know, on digital platforms undermines this really deep tendency we have to feel offered people around us. So we got to fight for it.

Hey, man, I learned this late in my life just having the opportunity to move out of the city in the pandemic just really put me in a position of appreciating nature in a daily fashion that has had so many positive impacts. And I'll just interrupt you here, Dan, and just say, express gratitude to you. You and I have been lucky to have many conversations. We need more public voices and journalists who say, like, hey, the human mind and the good stuff in there

and what we do that's good is just as newsworthy. So I'm grateful for your work seriously. Thank you. On this theme we're on right now of, you know, all as a thing you can deliberately and intentionally create for yourself, which can improve your life, but also improve your behavior in the world. There's a whole list of things like this. You mentioned ethics earlier. improve your behavior in the world. There's a whole list of things like this. You mentioned ethics earlier.

And on that list, and this is something that I promised earlier that we would get to is this notion of laughter and play. And this kind of brings us back to Ted Lasso. Let me just pause for a second and play a clip from the show. So this clip we're about to play. This is Ted Lasso, the coach in the show,

the coach of the American, the coach of the American football coach who takes the job as a soccer coach, although they call it football over in the UK. And one of his players, a grumpy older player, who actually is my favorite character, probably because I relate to him. His name is Roy. Roy has made a boo-boo in the game and after the game, Coach Lasso finds Roy in one of the back rooms at the stadium sitting in a tub full of ice marinating in self-laceration. So here's the clip. Somebody order a royal in the rocks, huh? What are we doing here? Woo! That is cold, man.

Looking at you in there and making me all chilly inside. Hmm. I'm manager. Can you just tell me how to f*** up and then cut it? I don't do that, bud. I lost just a game. I'm a piece of f***ing easy now. You had a bad day, big whoop.

Big whoop. Yeah, big whoop. You beatingop. Yeah, big whoop. You beating yourself up is like, Woody, how you playing the clarinet. I don't want to hear it, all right? So just, you know, knock it off. Go easy on yourself. Okay?

Hey, I got your back. Ain't nothing going to change that. Look at you in there. Looking like a broon at Oscar the Grouch. Honor all. So Dacker, there's a lot in that clip. There's an exhortation towards self compassion, which we can talk about as well. But there's also just the playfulness. Lassos talking to this guy who's really beating himself up and he makes a Woody Allen joke. It's not a therapy

session. It's really a playful moment and at times times, therapy is useful, but at times, playing is also useful. When you go big and you think about, like, we're a mammal and what defines mammals, right? And one is they vocalize and reptiles don't vocalize like mammals. They take care of their young very typically. And they play. And, you know, there's an argument to be made that play is one of the deepest kind tendencies that mammals have evolved. Rats play and dogs play and cats don't play, but that's or maybe their cat owners out there who have observed their cats play, but that's question. Cats play all the time. That's true. Okay. Thank you. Didn't mean to give away my bias here. So I gave away my bias. So you know, it's so interesting because when we think about being virtuous and being a good member of a community and being a great leader and being ethical

We never think of play and in fact one of my great achievements was in this research on virtues. I really made the case for play. I was like, this is a defining characteristic of humans. We have great traditions, like Shakespeare's comedies and teasing and joking and laughter associated with it. So it's fundamental to social life. It begins early. You know, here's an to social life. It begins early. Here's an interesting question, Dan.

Like, how do you know you're really falling in love with someone? Often, people say, we start joking around with each other. We are teasing each other. How do you know you really like someone? Or two potential romantic partners like each other? You'll kind of see them joke and play in T's. So that tells us how vital it is to the good life. Yes, to play and playfulness, yeah, and humor. And I've just seen in my own life how it can be tricky because I love joking around

and I sometimes joke that verbal abuse is my love language. And I've gotten feedback that people like that I make a lot of jokes, but that sometimes I can take it too far or inflict it upon people who aren't ready for it or don't really want it. So it's not as simple as, you know, just cracking wise non-stop. No, no, it's not. And you know, what's wonderful about humans in our social life is there's all this complexity, right? And there are boundaries that we really need to honor and to

navigate around. There are boundaries, for example, between really healthy touch in the workplace, which people do all the time, and touch that can be misconstrued. And there are easy ways and sensible ways to approach that. Likewise, their boundaries between bullying and humor that hurts. And then humor like Ted Lasso's example that uplifts and that expresses compassion. And we did a lot of work on teasing. And it's interesting, I think, dimensions are a subtext of our talk today. You know, and there is this interesting dimension

between hurtful joking banter and teasing, and then loving joking banter and teasing, and we studied them objectively, right? And so loving, fun, playful teasing has exaggeration. It has funny voices. It has self-deprecating elements to it. It has laughter. And if you listen carefully to that interaction between Ted and Roy, Ted does a lot of that

stuff. He's got, woo! He calls him a nickname. It's this funny nickname that exaggerates. He's got a little chuckle in the laugh in there. And once you add that stuff to the teasing, it becomes more lighthearted. And you know, one of the things in finding more happiness is you got to deal with conflict. You know, and you got to deal with tough people and you got to deal with

negotiations. And laughter and joking and teasing are great tools for doing that work. Any thoughts on how to do the laughter and joking and teasing across gender or racial lines where it's very easy to, you know, put a foot wrong? Yeah. You know, the first thing is you have to recognize humbly that there are really interesting cultural differences, right? For example, there's a lot of laughter and joking and teasing in Mexican-American culture. And I live in a state, California, that 40% Mexican-American. I have to shift to being ready for more laughter and joking and teasing. You move to other cultures,

it's going to be different. So you've got to recognize the cultural differences. And then gender differences, although they're not as pronounced as you might imagine, you know, that women do a lot of of this kind of kind of playful language. And I think that humans are sophisticated at this. And I think that humans are sophisticated at this. And if you can just be mindful of like some of these ways in which we can make the playful exchange play more playful, like be self-deprecating, build some laughter into it, find the nickname, that's kind of sweet, but critical at the same time.

And we actually have done research on this. And nicknames are a great element of teasing. And I think Ted calls them the Brunette Oscar the Grouch. Well, that's kind of Oscar the Grouch. He's kind of cartoonish. And you know, he's got this funny quality to it. So there's just like everything, you know, you just need a little thought to make it this nice balance of play and ribbing, if you will, to mix into the teasing. Let me switch gears for a minute and talk about another trope that your work has disintegrated, which is the notion that power corrupts. I think it makes sense in a series inspired by Ted Lasso

to talk about it too, because in any workplace, and Ted Lasso is essentially a workplace comedy, in any workplace, you've got power. And there is this assumption that power does always corrupt, but you've shown that's not true. Can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, it's this age-old question, right? And in fact, philosophers have been thinking about this for thousands of years, Lord Acton, the great Catholic

critic from the 19th century power crops and absolute power crops absolutely. It's just a timeless question. Why does, you know, Nixon win in a landslide and then become, have to resign, etc. And this is where social science is really useful. And I think there's this interesting historical debate between power turns you into an aggressive sociopath. There's a little bit of evidence for that. Or does power reveal and sort of turn up the volume on your pre-existing tendencies? And on balance, I would say that the evidence tends to line up with the latter hypothesis that, you know, this is work by my colleague Serena Chen and others who have followed, which is, you know, on balance, we're a little bit more self-focused than other

focused. And if you get power, you get a little bit more self-focused. You lose sight of other people. You'll take more resources, et cetera. But if you find people who are really kind or really empathetic in some of our research, or consider it and you give them power like Ted Lasso, they will express that in even stronger ways, right? You share more, you'll read people more effectively. So there's this interesting lesson there, which is it really matters who we put into positions

of power. If we keep putting, you know, Machiavellian self-serving selfish impulsive types into power or aggressive types, will get more aggressive outcomes and it'll seem corrupting. And so the real subtle burden is to find the Ted Lassos of the world and get them into positions of leadership and it'll look different. It'll be a different story about power. I really kind of resonated personally with this notion of power reveals.

I've been very influenced by the work of author and executive coach by the name of Jared Kallona, who's been on the show and I've worked with him personally. And he talks about leadership, another way of saying power, as an opportunity to grow up. You know, and I've noticed that the more power I've had, the more I've been in a leadership position, the more it reveals to me, my own deficiencies. And it's been an opportunity to do some work on them.

Does that resonate for you? Completely. I mean, I love Hunter Arantz thinking about power, which is your power is really, it resides in your connections to all the people around you. And when you have power, and I wish leaders would realize this more readily and routinely, when you have power, you have more responsibility, right? You're just affecting more people's lives. On a day-to-day basis, will pay attention to you more, your their emotional lives are affected by you, etc. So there are these interesting responsibilities. And then sometimes with power we lose sight of that. And

it is an opportunity for the most important work we do in many ways in life, which is how do I balance my own self-serving tendencies with my responsibilities to other people, and power just slams you in the face with that, right? Which is, wow, I said something that inadvertently offended a bunch of people, because I wasn't thinking carefully about my behavior, right? Or I used a particular kind of resource in a way that left out some people, these kind

of tendencies that power can lead us to. And so it's a great opportunity for work. And again, you know, it's interesting. We need more schools of thought for leaders to get them to think about that. I think you made a nod in this direction that people in power need to see that power is given to them. And it's based on the goodwill of the people over whom they have this power. And you're likely to lose it if you abuse that. Right. I mean, you know, if one of the big insights of power is that it's about the network you're part of, you know, and great coaches, they know that, right, that, you know, since we're talking a bit about Ted Lasso, like,

hey, my power is not in my words or my charisma. It's in how well my team does. The second big insight is that within that network, it's given to you, right? And you feel it in the sense of like, do the people around me respect me? Do they trust me? And that is core to your ability to do well in the world. There are really cool studies of finance firms and nonprofits and different kinds of social networks. And you will get better work done if you're tightly connected to others, and they're giving you power and opportunities for influence. If you abuse that, you start moving to the periphery and you lose your chance for influence,

so many tendencies work against this idea. We tend, as we gain power, we're vulnerable to the belief that I'm some kind of special person. My mom always said I was, you know, and I did a personality test and said I was a natural born leader. You know, it takes work and it really resides in the given respect of others and we lose sight of that. So you and I met for the first time, I in the late 2000 maybe the early 2010s because you had done a study. Analyzing video of basketball teams and those that well I'll let you tell us what that study. Yeah, you know taking a step back like sports are a great human inclination right.

The ball court sports of Mesoamerica are 3500 years old and villages around all of those countries. Had these games, brought communities together, bad and won and danced and just did this stuff that sports creates, it creates community. And so they've always been this amazing realm for me of just like not only being a fan but playing, playing, pick up basketball, but just thinking about what they reveal about human beings. It's interesting, like, why people have almost religious attachments to the Boston Celtics or the Yankees, et cetera. And that begs the question of, like, well, what makes for strong teams?

And in some sense, sports are this collective reflection of who we are as a species and given all that we've been talking about, you would expect teams that synchronize more to do better on the court and empathize more. That's a finding. You would expect teams that joke around and play more, play better, and that's a finding. And we were interested in this study, and we were really grateful for your covering it of touch, right? You watch games, and you're like, especially like basketball, basketball is a violence sport, really physical, hard on your joints, where's people that lots of physical contact. And we were interested, as we started to study touch, touch is one of the oldest languages

of connection and communication for humans. It's everywhere from the first moment of life to our last. And one of the ideas that we started to develop is touch is this rich language by which, in our groups, we say, we encourage each other. We celebrate with each other. We make light of failures, right? We express pleasure. And so in the study, Michael Kraus led a team.

He's now at Yale where we coded every team in the NBA. We coded one game at the start of the season and just ascertain how much are they touching each other? Do they hug? Do they do it flying hip-bumps? You know, do you and I should do this someday, Dan? Would we a flying chest bump? Next time I see you head bumps, red wraps, you know, all this crazy stuff. Well, both pull a hammy, but that yes. I'm really just right. No doubt. And then tyranny and like, oh, well, we're middle aged. But, but you know, what we found, like you watch this stuff,

and you're like, well, that's just players doing whatever they do. But it's actually this very sophisticated language that connects them together. And we found those teams that touched more, played better. They were more cooperative than they won more games. And leaders on the team who touched more made their teammates better. So, you know, we often have these lofty ideas about what makes for great leaders and great teams. But often it's just this social stuff that we think is we call it soft skills, but it's actually the real glue of great human achievement. And again, as you made a reference to this earlier, it doesn't mean you should

just get super-handsy all the time that you have to be strategic. And you got a tailor to people according to their culture and their gender. And now I think, you know, you see the younger generation with building consent into that interaction right, gonna give you a hug. Yeah. And so I think we're getting smarter about this and we'll avoid all the predatory harassment of the past.

Just by treating it as this sophisticated language that we put to use in the right context. I'm just curious here, you've written books talking about your science. And yet, if you look at the self-help aisle, it's mostly very self-oriented. It's really about, you know, how do I lose weight? How do I get more productive? And I know that there's anything inherently wrong with that, but the notion of kindness still seems to either come off as preachy or sort of bland and twey or weak.

It doesn't seem to be valued as something, yeah, I really want to learn how to do that better. What do you think is going on there and how do we get over that? I mean, that is a really deep question. And I think that you're right. Sometimes when I'm talking about kindness in teaching happiness at Berkeley and elsewhere, I can see people feeling like, oh, here comes the sermon or the, it feels a little preachy, like you said. Or it feels delusional or it feels weak.

And you referred to this ideology of original sin. That's an ideology. Or it's a view of human nature. And there's this other one, or complementary one, or sort of an adjacent one, that economists and social theorists have called homo-economicists. And it's that, you know, we're selfish, we're competitive. The primary drive of the human nervous system is gratification of desire. And we're aggressive. And that's who we are. And that, you know, serious thinkers like Danny Coniman and Barry Schwartz and Franz DeVol. Have said, that's this old view of human beings.

You see it in Freud. Life is bloody and tooth and claw. You see it all over the place, selfish gene. It's just a view of human beings. And within that view, kindness is for suckers. It's just like, hey, man, the real truth of who we are is we're a competitive and aggressive and selfish. That's what you got to come to terms with. Kindness is for suckers and fools. And so we are fighting against that set of biases,

but it's changing. This next generation is really different. And it's interesting we're focusing on Ted Lasso. Part of the big difference is it has a different view of cooperation. It has a much different view of selfishness because selfishness gets you to economic inequality and carbon emissions. Right. And so we are in flux. And yeah, you know, I think the science we've talked about today is helpful in this shift. I think people like Ted Lasso, new models of physicality are helpful in the shift. You're conversations that you have are helpful. And I think, frankly, Dan, now I'm going to get preachy, but climate crises require a shift. All these analyses say, we need to change our model of human beings and what they prefer and what they think is valuable. And that's part of this too. So it's

a work in process with many skeptics. Well, I'm glad you're out there on the front lines. Dacker, just really final question here is, can you plug your books that you've already written and where people can find more information about you online and podcasts and you just let us have it all? Yeah, so in this new world of all kinds of platforms, you know, I am a laboratory scientist, of all kinds of platforms. I am a laboratory scientist. Publish lots of articles on all the stuff we've been talking about that gives me one kind of faith in these ideas. But I've also, it's been fun to be in conversation with you about born to be good.

One of the books I published on the deep kind roots to human nature. I extended that thinking in the power paradox a few years later, which is really trying to encourage a cultural conversation around new kinds of leadership that really are rooted in kindness and building strong social networks. And then I have a podcast, Science of Happiness, that you very graciously appear on. And that was really fun. And we'll have you back. And then, you know, for the interested audience, one of the things we're really proud of at Berkeley is for 20 years, we've been putting together all of these scientific findings on a online magazine greater good, which has a million readers,

and then a set of practices greater good in action. And we've just launched, if you have educators out there, greater good in education, you asked earlier about like, man, how do we seed this stuff in context that really matter? And so we really are committed to schools. And we've got a lot of teachers going to these free resources on mindfulness and gratitude and awe. So we can get our kids to be 10% happier. And so there's a lot of good stuff for people to go to. Amazing work. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you, Dan.

It's always great to be in conversation with you. Thank you to Dacker. As I promised at the top of the show, I do want to say a little bit about Dacker's podcast, the one he hosts on which I have been a guest. It's called the science of happiness. Each episode and expert guest comes on to talk about research tested strategies for living a happier life. The 20 minute episode strap every every other Thursday making it an excellent complement to our Monday, Wednesday, Friday, cadence here on the

TPH podcast. So I definitely recommend you check out Dacker on the science of happiness show ASAP. Before we head out, let me once again plug the Ted Lazo challenge, which will teach you how to practice. Kindness, the challenge starts Tuesday, September 7th, over on the 10% happier app, download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps today. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poyant with audio engineering from ultraviolet audio.

As always, a big shout out to my ABC News Comrades, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen, and we'll see you all on Wednesday for episode two in our Ted Lasso series here on the podcast. And this one features another great scientist by the name of Jamil Zaki, talking about how empathy is a trainable skill. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

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