The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The "Happy Life" Scientist: How To FINALLY Beat Stress, Worry & Uncertainty! Dacher Keltner

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

When was the last time something took your breath away, or left you speechless? Awe is something that is hard to put into words and understand for yourself, let alone scientifically examine. However this is exactly what Dr Dacher Keltner has dedicated his career to. As a psychology professor Dr Dacher is dedicated to the study of emotions and happiness, in his groundbreaking research he believes that awe, the feeling when you see something beyond your understanding, can have huge impacts on both your brain and body. In this eye opening conversation Dacher discusses just what it means to live a good life, our need for connection, and his personally journey from tragedy and despair to finding and spreading the awe of everyday life. Dacher: Website - http://bit.ly/3HtgCuQ Dacher’s book - https://bit.ly/3YrvAIB Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Life expectancy has been declining for the last few years. How do we reverse that trend? These are the five safest things to do. Dr. Dacher Keltner. A renowned expert in the science of human emotion. Discovering ways on how we can improve our happiness. He's also the author of several books, including The Power Paradox. I read just someone touching you can make you live longer and be less stressed.

Is that true? Yeah. There are all kinds of findings that speak to this. You have premature babies. They used to just put them in these little units that warm them and they would die. And then they figured out they needed skin to skin contact. They need food and they live. They gain 47% waking. You know, the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. And if you want others to be happy, practice compassion.

If I am kind to you, my act of kindness makes you more kind downstream. And then that person you've helped actually is kinder to another person. And they've proven that. Yeah. So like karma is a very real thing. It's very real.

That'll save eight, 10 years of life. You've got to find a few moments just to be kind are we worse people the richer and more powerful we become yeah so we've actually done experiments right you know it's a movie about a child who has cancer and poor people show activation of the vagus nerve which is part of compassion well to do people less activation the wealthier you are the more you've navigated for serious economic policies that hurt the poor. Jesus. And this is where it gets really worrisome. Daka, could you start by giving me your professional academic resume? Wow. Well, it begins early with my parents who were very important in my education and my formation.

So my dad is a visual artist and my mom taught literature and poetry and romanticism and got me interested in all kinds of things about the human mind. And then I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergraduate and then went to Stanford for a PhD. Subsequent to that, worked with Paul Ekman as a postdoc who's kind of a pioneer in the study of facial expression and inspiration for the show Lie to Me. And then became a professor, Wisconsin, and then UC Berkeley for 27 years and helped run the Greater Good Science Center, which is about disseminating kind of the new knowledge of

meditation and compassion and stress to a broad audience and have taught at Berkeley, which I love for 27 years. You referenced the Greater Good Science Center. Yeah. What's the mission of the Greater Good Science Center? Yeah, thanks for asking. You know, 20 years ago, post 9-11, we were in a world much like post-Trump

and Boris Johnson and others. You know, like, are we fragmented? What happened to humanity? What happened to humanity? What happened to community? Why are life expectancies in the United States dropping the last two years? What's going on, right? I saw that. Yeah, striking, right?

Really disturbing. And we had the conviction and there was this new science of things like, if you have strong social ties, it adds 10 years of life expectancy to your life, right? If you practice kindness, it quiets down the threat regions of the brain. And so we at Berkeley, in partnership with the journalism school, kind of had the sense early, like if we can get this knowledge out, right, in actionable prose, where you read it and you say, oh, I could teach breathing to my medical team, or I could teach an awe walk to my neighborhood friends, that would be good for the world, you know. I'm super compelled by that. Thank you. The Greater Good Science Center. Let's talk about

some of the things that you've given away in terms of knowledge and some of the sort of discoveries that I think would surprise most people. You mentioned some of them in passing there about breathing and all walks and how you can add 10 years to your life. Give me some of the top line, more detail on some of those top line findings. This really comes into focus for me, Stephen, when I speak to medical audiences. I do a lot of work with healthcare providers,

teaching medical doctors, residents, helping programmatically with kind of the spirit of hospitals and the like. I talk about awe, that the feeling of awe reduces activation in the inflammation system in your immune system. Your immune system is all these cells distributed throughout your body that helps you protect against dangerous elements on the outside, viruses and bacteria. And the feeling of awe

sort of reduces the activation of the cytokine system, which heats up your body. And if your body is always hot, that is bad news for your heart. It's bad news for your diabetes. And awe helps moderate that. I teach the work on compassion that 65-year-olds who practice altruism and compassion have greater life expectancy.

And you can go on. Each of these, what used to be thought of as kind of new age, soft things like awe or compassion or breathing benefit us. Just simple breathing, if you breathe in and out, counting to four as you breathe in, counting out to four, actually increases neural density in this part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, which helps you handle stress. What is awe for someone?

Yeah, awe is just feeling an emotion you have when you encounter something big or vast that's outside of your frame of reference, right? Of reality that you don't understand. That I think, I like the word mystery. You know, wow, who, I can't figure this out. And then that emotion of awe stimulates wonder, right? Like, how do I, why do rainbows exist? What, you know, how are they produced when water, when light bends through water molecules? So it's, it's an emotion that drives wonder and creativity.

What is the positive net impact on humans of experiencing awe? Other than, because when I think of awe, I think of going to like Machu Picchu and seeing those big mountains and going, what the hell is this? This is insane. And I think of that as being like a memory. Oh, that's fun. That was amazing. I take the picture, put it on my Instagram, get the likes, go home.

But there's something deeper going on, right? In my physiology. Yeah, thank you. You know, one of the fascinating things, Stephen, when you're, you know, is when you study this complicated realm of emotion is we have these words that we all use to talk about an emotion. And they're much as we have words about, you know, ethnic categories or class

categories. Oh, he's lower class or he's African-American. Those are just words and concepts that may not capture reality at all. And awe suffers from this, which is when people talk about awe or they share it on Instagram, they share the big moments of like, I was at the Grand Canyon or I was in the Lake District or by this cathedral. But in point of fact, there are a lot of ways in which we feel awe all the time, right? Encountering somebody who's really kind in the streets. You're like, wow, that was really generous. So yesterday on the train, the team were coming up to Manchester where I was speaking and an elderly lady overheard them saying that they were going to climb a mountain for

charity. The elderly lady got up, walked over, gave him five pounds and said, I climbed that once. Here's five pounds, put it towards the charity. And for all of us, it went into our like company chat, but that had happened. It was a real moment of like an affirmation of what it is to be a human and kindness, I guess. Yeah. And what's stunning to me, and this is a digression is your story just gave me the chills and that's amazing. It's incredible, isn't it? It is incredible that I wasn't there. I've just got the chills myself. Just you saying you had the chills has just given me the chills. It's amazing. And that we don't understand scientifically, the contagious power of chills and awe.

But it's not the stereotype that we are led to understand or think about with words. It's around us all the time, right? The generosity in the train, the beautiful clouds, a piece of music, a visual design, driving here to your studio, all the incredible design of London, it's around us. And so it's there every day. And, you know, Stephen, I don't know why this happened to me, but I've taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people online and in classes and the like. I was a

grouchy kid, stressed out most of my life, terrible meditator, but I was forced into this job. And, you know, serving the science of happiness we've been talking about, man, two minutes of awe every other day is about as good for you as anything you can do. You know, it calms stress, calms stress regions of your brain. Talked about inflammation, it reduces inflammation, activates the vagus nerve, which is this bundle of nerves that wanders all throughout your body and calms your heart rate. It's good for digestion. So, you know, it's good news for the human psyche. And when we talk about giving a little stressed out 12-year- young 12 year old, some awe each moment in a classroom,

we know that's really good for health and creativity. So, um, it's good news in terms of what it can bring to us. Talk to me about some, some science then, um, that supports that, um, assertion where the science shows that every day or so like accessible or be all that I could go get out in the street or that I could actively go practice after listening to this conversation has proven to have a positive physiological impact on humans or their emotions or their behavior. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this was one of the most exciting developments of the science of awe. Um, when we started to get this picture of the health benefits of awe, less stress, a sense of time, reduce loneliness, right?

Loneliness, 40% of people in globalized cultures feel lonely, right? That is hard on the body. We started to think about all interventions. And, you know And one of my favorites that has compelling health data, if you will, is a lot of people go for regular walks. The UK is famous for its walking traditions. It's one of the great cultural strengths, just paths and walks and et cetera. And so we just added one element to people's regular walk. And we called it the awe walk, which is when you go out, pause, take some breathing, deep breathing,

get synced up with your footsteps. This is a classic kind of walking meditation approach. And then look for awe, right? Take a moment to look at small things, look at the reflection on this cool mug, then pan out and look at the vastness of where you are, city or nature up at the sky. That was it, right? And that gets you into this awe mindset. And our participants were 75 years old or older. At that age, a lot of data suggests you start getting more anxious and depressed, right? Your people you love are dying.

Your body's falling apart. You are facing your mortality. And the awe walk over eight weeks, once a week, compared to a really rigorous control condition, led our 75 years old participants to feel less distress, less pain, and more awe and joy in their lives. So it's just this simple addition to a daily walk, right? Listening to some music, do it more intentionally. And a lot of the studies of awe are really simple. You know, just watch an awe video, share an awe story, which you shared

to me that just gave me the goosebumps, you know, that goosebumps is a register. It's these little muscles around hair follicles that are part of what are called your parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, which calm you down. So share stories of awe. So there's a ton of ways in which you can build more everyday awe into your life. What's the evolutionary basis for this? The, you know, in 1978, I think, Richard Dawkins published Selfish Gene. Massive book, right?

You know, if you read that, it's the argument, which is true, is that we are, we have these genes that are replicating themselves through us. We are these machines that replicate genes, right? And all of our characteristics are ways to do that. And it's all, the language is very aggressive and adversarial. These genes are competing with these genes. I'm competing with other people in the game of evolution. And there's been this massive shift in evolutionary thinking in the past 40 years

where we're just starting to discover around the world, people share 40 to 50% of a resource with a stranger, if asked, just like as a default. That's our intuition. We have neurophysiological systems like oxytocin, parts of the brain and the vagus nerve, which help us sacrifice and give. We readily are contagious in our feelings. Your story gave me the chills and then my chills bounce back to you and you got the chills. So we're united and connected. And now, you know, the thinking is we're very cooperative alongside violent and rapacious and the like and collective.

We're hyper collective. We synchronize with each other physiologically. We mimic each other. We collaborate unlike any other primate. That's just who we are. It's probably our big strength. I think because in part, hyper-vulnerable offspring needed a lot of care, right? To live. Food scarcity, warming in the face of cold. And we need emotions and social practices that make us feel like we're collective. And awe is it.

When, you know, it's so striking, Stephen. I don't know if you've had an awe experience in nature recently, just being outdoors. Oh yeah, I mean, yeah. So I went to Bali in Indonesia to write my book in Ubud. And that's one of the places where, I mean, you're in a vast jungle. But also whenever you get to the top of a mountain,

you look out across the jungle. And I remember one particular moment looking out across the jungle, stood on this platform that was awe-inspiring. But also it's quite weird that I, my awe-inspiring experiences in that country are always just being on the moped and going through the countryside.

Because it feels like the essence of nature. There's something about, I don like the essence of nature. There's something about, I don't know what it is. There's, there's this realness to it that makes me feel like I'm at home. It's hard to explain, but. And that's feel like you're at home. Right. And it's striking. Think about it conceptually. Like here I am on a moped in nature with, you know, the, the ecosystems kind of moving into my body and my brain. And out of that comes the concept I'm home. And that's what awe does is it says, I'm part of this people. The other, the other time was actually last week I was at Soho farmhouse,

which is a sort of like a, uh, like a hotel village they've constructed where you can go on the weekends to be in nature. And it was actually walking back to my cabin. I looked up for the first time. And obviously, when you're in the countryside, you get to see the stars. In London, you don't have that luxury. And I looked up and I saw the stars and I started talking, like having a mental conversation about what that is, like what I'm looking at. That is a, I mean, that one over there is a bigger than planet earth. And it's, I'm basically this tiny little seemingly insignificant piece of irrelevant dust. And that made me feel a sense of all. The feeling is really because I am so small, I am part of this bigger thing. Like, you know,

when you don't look up and when you're looking down, let's say figuratively, there's a sort of an individualism. Yeah. Whereas like, it's me. I'm the center of the universe. When you look up, you realize that you are irrelevant, but therefore also part of this greater thing, I guess. Yeah.

Thank you for bringing that up. You know, and one of the simple actionable things that we've been teaching at Greater Good, we have a practice on this, is look at the sky. Just like, look up, take a minute. If you ask the average citizen in a city like London, teaching a greater good, we have a practice on this is look at the sky. Just like look up, take a minute. If you ask the average citizen in a city like London, when's the last time you looked at the sky? Yeah, I don't see it.

Yeah, and it's powerful. Yeah, one of the paradoxical qualities of awe and is this shift, this transformation in sense of self that you're talking about. And it's profound, which is, you know, in one of the early writing traditions around awe, which is spiritual journaling, a lot of people, early accounts of awe in the Bhagavad Gita and Julian of Norwich

and, you know, the great Christian writings, almost every spiritual tradition, the Buddha, it's just like, God, I'm having this ecstatic, ah, mystical experience. What's it like? And they write about the self just like vanishing, you know. Psychedelics has a rich tradition of ego death in it. Carl Sagan, you know, has this great statement

about space like yours, like, man, when I think about the universe, look at me. I'm just this little, I'm a little speck of dust, you know. But the self is huge in our minds. Yeah. And awe quiets it. It puts it into perspective. And what's striking, Stephen, which, you know, took us a long time to figure this out scientifically is it actually feels liberating, you know? Oh, it's the, do you know what, when I'm stressed,

I remind myself of how insignificant I am because stress is often the, like the, um, the fit, like the fatal decision to overestimate the significance of your, your issues, your problems, like relative to, you know, to whatever. But the other day I was, I was a little bit, um, I was overthinking something a lot and I was, I was a little bit, um, I was overthinking something a lot and I could feel myself getting a little bit stressed. And I re I reminded myself of looking down on a plane over a country and just how irrelevant I am in the grand scheme of things because of, you know, I became a dragon on the, on dragon's den and the podcast became bigger. You know, it's, it's easy sometimes to fall into the trap of when there's a lot of people talking about you or writing about you

to think that this is the center of the universe in some respect. I'm leading a movement of 2 million people. Yeah, but whenever I go up in a plane and I look down, I go, nothing that I do matters in a good way. It's funny because it's a paradox. It's like, I want to be empowered and I want to think that I matter. But at the same time, I like to realize empowered and I want to think that I matter. But at the same time, I like to realize that I absolutely don't matter

in any respect. And I love saying this to people because you can see that kind of their ego square. Yeah. When you go, when you put in context that we are, as an individual, we absolutely don't matter. In the millions or whatever, billions of years that the universe has existed,

we are just this blink and I'm just this irrelevant speck of dust and once i'm gone you know give it another million years no one's even gonna remember yeah or whatever probably cut with a couple of years but but that's what's great about all on the human mind right is we we need the ego and the self and we need to maximize our interests and desires and reproductive possibilities, et cetera, status, all that obsessive stuff. But man, we have this great realm of transcendence that awe is part of that. And in our studies, we literally, we took students up to this tower

on the UC Berkeley campus. They got to look out at the, and they no longer felt stressed about things. We had students look up into trees and just admire these. We have a lot of tall trees on campus. I hope you visit it sometime that are beautiful and tall and make you feel like, you know, we have redwood trees that are a thousand years old. that is so self-critical or stressed or egomaniacal. It's just a moment in time of seven, nine billion people.

It's, you know, for me personally, it was liberating to find this in awe. Like you're saying, like, this is all, this is just one human's effort, so. Why did you write this book? Of all the things you could have written about, you're a very smart individual. You've studied so many things relating to sort of social sciences and how humans behave and why we, why we do what we do, but to commit your life to writing a book about this subject matter is, writing books is not easy. It takes

a long time, a lot of effort to promote them, et cetera. Why this book? Why now? Yeah. Thank you for asking that. Yeah. You know, it is hard to write books and we had done a lot of research on awe. And, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book was, you know, I'm now at an age where I've been following how we're doing as cultures. And, and a lot of the things that have surfaced here, Stephen are true. Like, you know, people feel lonely. They feel adrift. They're searching, they're searching for something more meaningful than elevating a paycheck. And I felt that awe was part of that story, that awe gets us to what is meaningful to us as individuals at a moment in history.

And then my younger brother died. And he was born, I'm one year older. We had this wild childhood, you know, of like born in Mexico and raised in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon, a very experimental place, wandering the foothills of the Sierras. And he was my source of meaning in many ways in life. And he got colon cancer and died

and it was brutal and horrifying. And at the moment of his dying, uh, the last night he, uh, sitting by his bed and, um, and he, he was my moral compass in life. You know, he really, he was very courageous, super kind, really only cared about, like devoted his career to the least resource kids in the country, these four poor kids. And when I was watching him die, I had an awe experience. I was like, what is going on?

He seems really calm. He's heading into a space I don't understand. I saw like pulsating light, you know, that was uniting everyone around him in this sense of reverence and the sacredness of his life. And afterward, I was knocked into a really profound state of grief where this is about five years ago. I couldn't make sense of the world. You know, I could do my work, but I just didn't. I was lost because he was a very important voice to me. You know, and I was waking up, wasn't sleeping, panicky.

And I, like a lot of people in grief, I was like hallucinating. Like I would see him, follow a guy in the streets, and it wasn't him. I'd wake up thinking he was there. I felt his hand on my back a couple of times. And it was weird. I had this epiphany in this really bad state of mind, the worst I've ever felt. Like, I got to find awe again. You know, I have to, my brother, you know, he and I went dancing and did wild things and backpacking and, you know, just live this life of awe. He was my source and he was gone. And so I wrote the book, you know, and I dug in and just started writing about him. And he features prominently in the book, you know, what he meant to me and how I grieved his loss and then worked up the science too.

So in many ways, you know, what we're observing in our, our globalized culture is, is this, the problems of capitalism, the search for meaning, the, you know, rising, the reduced life expectancy, U.S., rising anxiety, depression. And I was kind of in that state, you know, suddenly like, wow, my career is good, but, you know, and so knowing a little bit about the science, I was like, I've got to do this myself and go get it. Did you find that organ? I did. It, it, it, it took a lot of work. You know, I was in a really tough place and you know, I, I just was, I just started anew. Like, where do I find meaning? And I find meaning working with prisoners. I don't know why, you know,

but just, you know, being in prisons, volunteering, helping with the formerly incarcerated. I challenged myself to find on places I wouldn't ordinarily find it. Like just to open my mind, like, whoa, I'm at a symphony. You know, I love African music and Sona Jobarte and, you know, and here I was in the symphony, not understanding it, but starting to feel it. You know, nature's easy for me. I've always backpacked and gone into the mountains. I had a lot of spiritual

conversations, you know, of like, I'm not a religious person. And I was like, what is this? You know, why mystical awe? So, and what it gave me, I think, with respect to my brother's death is an openness. Like, we don't know what life is. We don't know where it goes. We don't, you know, and it opened my mind to a lot of new sources of awe. There's almost an injustice I heard in that story because of the way you characterized your brother and his behavior. Yeah. For him then to have passed early from cancer. Yeah. Feels in many respects to me like the opposite of awe or, you know, the universe being compassionate or fair or whatever in that. Yeah. Yeah. It hit me hard. You know, it was,

and that's well put like for the first year, you know, you, you ask these questions like, why would a guy who teaches speech therapy to the poorest kids in the United States go and is it with a teenage daughter and a young family? Come on, you know, come on. And Donald Trump is indestructible. And you're like, the world is fucked, you know, and, and I grappled with that very hard. And then I was, as you well put, I was in this antithesis state of awe. I was like, nothing meant anything. You know, it was all pointless. I could sense nothing bigger about life that mattered. And that's why, you know, that's why I said, all right, I have this career that allows me to do these investigations. And we're all investigating.

We're all searching for these things in music or moral beauty or being in collectives or sports. And I just threw myself into it. And, you know, frankly, it, you know, the idea of everyday awe, which is very important in the book, we can find it anywhere, you know, on the train with the act of generosity. That is now, it just feels alive all the time what's kind of the through line to gratitude because when you were talking about the old question and you picked up the glop this um mug this silver mug we have in front of us yeah and you started admiring it it almost sounded a bit more like gratitude to me yeah and even the the study where you had the elderly and participants do the walk and then sort of self-report, I'm guessing, on how they felt.

It sounded like nature also gives us a sense of sort of gratitude for our lives, for the world we live in. What's the distinction or difference if there is one? Yeah, what a terrific question. of David Hume, Scottish philosopher, Charles Darwin, Martha Nussbaum, more recently a Chicago philosopher that we, and it really animates a lot of this conversation. The work I've done is like, we have these amazing emotions that are like deep intuitions about the world that are good for us and good for the world. You know, compassion, take care of people who are vulnerable awe you know connect to others to face vast mysteries and gratitude adam smith the great economist felt like this is the emotion that holds societies together gratitude the feeling of reverence for things are like wow this is really

important and sacred of things that are given to you and And that is key. Like, oh, my friend helped me with my work. My work colleague brought me lunch. You know, my child did the dishes tonight. You know, whoa, I feel grateful. Gratitude, really close to awe as you intuit, but it tends to be different in that awe tends to be about vaster things like you know uh you almost get into a car crash or you get into a car crash you almost die and you're like oh i'm just i feel awestruck that i'm alive you know and then awe has more mystery to it you can't understand it like music or right like yeah exactly you know music rushes into you and you start crying right and you're like oh my god so what's a recent experience of that for you of music yeah um it would be where you just start sobbing and you know or not sobbing oh sobbing

or chills it would be we do this live show for it's called the driver co live and we toured the country last year we did three nights at the palladium then we took it to all these theaters and i'm stood and there's a house gospel choir about 40 people behind me for the whole two hours while i'm speaking and i mean jesus yeah they sing a lot of like songs as part of the message that i'm conveying and i mean every night i night I'm, you know, I'm crying. It's funny because I rehearsed it. I rehearsed it. I practiced it. I practiced it. But then with the people there, the audience of 2,500 people and the choir there, I would cry every night. Yeah. Which is bizarre, which is strange. Isn't it striking? It's a sense of connectedness.

Maybe. I wonder why in the live show, when there's thousands of people there then i feel the most intense emotions yeah versus when we're in rehearsals yeah that's a complicated question but your examples tell us you know that you the vastness of that experience of like wow there are sound waves that i'm producing that are moving bodies i see this pattern of movement and i am part of that and as the poet r Gay says, these boundaries between self and other become very porous. You're like, whoa, we're our one organism. That's all vast. And I don't understand why. Gratitude is more, you're at the show and somebody looks you in the eye and smiles and you feel like they're grateful for you. It has this more readily understood economy to it almost. And why, you know, in writing about awe,

you know, there are some things that are intuitive, like, oh, nature makes us feel awe and people's moral beauty and kindness, your story on the train. But how in the world music, sound waves, hits our ear, produces a neurochemistry in the brain. And the next thing you know, you're crying, you know, and feeling one. That's amazing to me. And we still, I don't know if science will ever answer it. You know, it's, it's just the transcendent power of music and you're lucky to share it. Do you have any insight into the positive impact that gratitude has on us based on any sort of studies that have been done?

It's huge. And you know, Stephen, like when following and teaching the science of happiness literature for 25 years, you know, at UC Berkeley, I started teaching a happiness course. I think it was Harvard and us for the first 25 years ago and tracking like, what are the things you can count on? And when I go out and teach happiness, it's very humbling. Like you asked me in some sense, a related question to have a parent come up to me and say, my son is massively depressed and suicidal.

What do I do? And obviously you go see a therapist and you consider medication, but the happiness literature can point to like, these are the five safest things to do. Social connection, develop some way to use your body to calm down, breathing, yoga, sports, whatever. And gratitude is a winner. And I think awe is up there now too, but you know, gratitude, practicing gratitude benefits the cardiovascular system. It helps people who have heart vulnerabilities, patients, they do better. It is very good for your place in social networks. Like I join a group, I'm worried, I'm socially anxious.

What do I do? Practice some gratitude, say thank you and show a little appreciation to people. You will have stronger social ties. We did research showing it's good for romantic bonds. If partners simply say on occasion, like, hey, thanks for doing the dishes, or I appreciate the jokes you tell, or I love your music selection. It helps, right?

So it's a safe bet for a happier life. I've come to learn that there's so many forces in our day-to-day lives that act against gratitude and stifle its presence. But in the context you've given there, whether it's in a social group or at work or in a relationship, or even with yourself, I've come to learn how important it is to not rely on gratitude just showing up, but to try and create a system for frequent gratitude. Now, one of the things that's been a real unlock for me,

my companies over the last couple of years is in every company that I run, we have a gratitude chat. So it's just a channel and it's open. There's really no instruction, but it's funny that we created the channel first at Social Chain and then in my current companies. And when you just create the channel, what happens is gratitude pours in yeah so today there'll be i can guarantee at some point today there'll be a message in there that says thank you so much ross for going and getting me that cup of coffee um that i didn't ask for but you knew that i needed or whatever or thank you jack for helping me lift that box

upstairs and it pours in and and it's such a simple thing to do but it creates this insane um um hard to understand amount of like connectiveness and appreciation and i imagine for the individual on the receiving end of the gratitude um a sense of like worthiness or or respect respect come on yeah and it's such a small thing to do. It is. That I think every company should consider, which is having a system to move gratitude, friction-free across your organization to bind it together. But in your person, in your relationship, the same thing. Yeah. Like you can rely on it being a, you know, your partner helping you with the bags or helping you with your packing or whatever. But it's great to also in a relationship

have a system for gratitude. And what I love about your system, Stephen, I've taught gratitude in a lot of organizational contexts and sometimes people force it like, okay, let's say what we're grateful to for each person in this meeting. And it's like, oh God, that's tricky. But to allow it to be spontaneous and intuitive like you did, right? and it's like, oh God, you know, that's tricky, but to allow it to be

spontaneous and intuitive like you did, right. And let it flow. That's, that's the strong source and manifestation of gratitude. And it reminds us, you know, in Western European thinking, probably largely Western European male thinking has been so hostile to emotion. This is what I was saying when I said there's so many forces acting against it. Yeah. And it's just like, why would you ever say thank you? It makes you weak. It makes you vulnerable and the like, et cetera. But there are a lot of great thinkers from David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, you know, early, a lot of the East Asian, you know, contemplative philosophies, like our best human tendencies come out of emotions of gratitude and express them. And, and I think that your example speaks to sort of a big shift

culturally. And what do we do with these emotions at work? They're really vital to our sense of connectivity and community. Makes me think a lot about relationships. And I know that's something you've written about extensively, the role that a romantic relationship plays in health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. But then I also was, I was pondering this idea of monogamy broadly. So my kind of question is kind of twofold is, are we meant to be monogamous? Yeah. And also this, I'm thinking a lot about how the relationship dynamics and monogamy is changing in some ways eroding. Yeah.

I was reading some stats around marriage and how people are getting married less. Yeah. You know, having less kids and all these kinds of things. So what's your thoughts on all of that? Are we meant to be monogamous? You've done a lot of research on apes and you talked a lot about them in your work. Yeah. But Are we meant to be monogamous? You've done a lot of research on apes and you talked a lot about them in your work, but are we meant to be monogamous?

And if so, how does that relate to the fact that being in a relationship extends our life? What a terrific question. Well, you know, anytime that you pose these questions, right, you have to remember, you know, and I always approach things from an evolutionary framework, which is humans are many different kinds of individuals, right? There's massive individual variation. And when I, you know, and there's cultural variation. So some cultures will be less monogamous, others more. Yeah. I think that the safest answer we can offer and it's dispiriting. And I teach it to my young students at Berkeley is, I hate to tell you this, but you're in love right now,

but odds are very good that that's not gonna be the last relationship you're in. And so we tend to move from one semi-committed relationship to another. So serial monogamy is what many believe to be kind of our default orientation. There's variation around that. Some are more polyamorous.

Others are really fiercely monogamous given genetic makeup and cultural makeup. My belief is, and your generation is really bringing this to the fore, which is that the old model of single monogamous relationship for 60 years probably is not working. When you look at divorce rates, 50%,

those people who stay together, half of those marriages are really pretty unhappy. So it's not working. You look at certain cultures. I was struck, Stephen, recently as, you know, the Scandinavians always do really well in happiness measures, right? And I was like, and I just Goog, Stephen, recently as the Scandinavians always do that may be a model to be not living with the partner, sorry. And so I think that we have many kinds of love, one of them being a monogamous love. It puts a lot of pressure to, with this old kind of romantic, chivalrous, Victorian ideal of

like, that's the only person. I don't think that works, right? And so we're moving towards more flexible arrangements where we express many kinds of love and it comes with a lot of complexity. So when I teach love, I say there are all these kinds of love, right? Walt Whitman, love friendship, you know?

I mean, friendship love, and in a lot of the data, friends give you more happiness than any kind of relationship, right? Oh, I shouldn't say, I shouldn't say I agree. My girlfriend is somewhere upstairs. You're young, man. You get it, but I, you know, I understand.

Yeah. So the, I think this think this model of like, you know, singular, devoted, all consuming romantic love is misled us. And we need varieties of romantic love, which your generation is creating, which is exciting. And then we need to remember the other forms to have the rich life. And then you get at that, you know, I got the right social configuration

to give me those 10 years of life expectancy. I've always been going back and forward about marriage because I understand that some people say marriage is a system that allows for the rearing of kids. It's a form of commitment, which changes things in the relationship. But I've always wondered if there's another way. Yeah. That's more, you know, where, which kind of, I don always wondered if there's another way that's more, you know,

where, which kind of, I don't know, it's a controversial topic. Is there another way? Like, I'm not even sure me and my partner would get married, but I'm sure we'd make some kind of commitment to each other. But, you know, I'm not sure involving the law and church and all these things in the process is necessarily conducive with a productive outcome. I know. And not only that, but just think about like, you know, I'm going to be, wait, I'm going to do everything from physical exercise to streaming movies, to cooking food with one person. Right. You know, it's interesting, Stephen, there's this really striking literature. You know, one of the raw facts of our evolution is our offspring are very vulnerable.

They're the most vulnerable offspring of any mammal on the face of the earth. They take seven to eight to 20 years just to, I even say like 55 years to even be semi-functioning as an individual. But what that meant is love in our hominid evolution was distributed in communities, right? And there's this concept called alloparenting, which is we all kind of take care of young ones, even if they're not our own. We're all affectionately related to fluidity in that dynamic that probably reflects the truth of today that we don't face with this Victorian ideal of singular romantic love. And maybe your generation is moving us toward that sort of more communal approach to love. And it's complicated, right? It involves different ideas about sexuality and

different ideas of caregiving, um, but probably healthier. And I hope it happens. Why, why won't it work and why doesn't it work? Cause you know, when we think about polygamy or, um, being polyamorous, I don't know the difference. I've got to be honest. Yeah. They sound similar. Polygamy, multiple wives, polyamamorous multiple people you love okay yeah so when we think about those polys yeah um it seems impossible in the modern world to execute a poly situation yeah without jealousy and all the other bullshit yeah and you know i grew up raised around hippies you know my parents were counterculture i grew up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, very wild place.

And I saw a lot of this as a young kid and it was comical. You know, it's like, you're fighting over the dishes and I don't get to sleep with my wife tonight. That's, you know, he gets, my roommate does. Ah, you know, it's hard, you know? Yeah, you know, and a lot of things get in the way.

I think that, you know, forgive me, but, you know, I think of the US and how lot of things get in the way. I think that, forgive me, but I think of the US and how much of United States culture is designed around the nuclear monogamous family of single homes, suburbs, driving in a car, really structured around that. And maybe that's poor design. It doesn't seem to fit our evolutionary past of being in these, you know, these collectives that are sharing in the raising of offspring and sharing to a certain extent in romantic partnership. So.

Are you married? Yes. You've been married for a long time? Yeah. I think it's 33 years. Wow, geez. Yeah. Important context. Yeah.

Some people might think that you were like anti-marriage or anything like that, but you're clearly, I can see from the room in your finger. Yeah, but I grew up around a mom who, you know, she taught women's literature and feminism in the seventies. And, you know, that early feminist critique of marriage is right. You know, early on it, it, women did a lot of the work. It constrained them. It costs them in terms of job mobility. And so I've always questioned it. And then I think the evolutionary literature we talked about is like, wait a minute, maybe love is more distributed. It comes in many varieties and that's how we get this love work done. So I'm glad you guys are questioning it. Seriously.

Yeah. Good luck. Yeah. The good thing is we're really like, we're really open to new things as in we're open to like building new systems for our relationship in the modern world based on how we feel we're very good at being um resistant to like social pressure to to follow a conventional path yeah so even with valentine's days and things like that we have a conversation about like does this make sense like why would we do this yeah what's more important yeah which a lot of people don't i've been in relationships before where you you you don't hit the perfect like a social cue to show up or give flowers or whatever and you get like a fucking an essay and you're you know you're a bad guy for that day but um going back to one of the points you said you were talking about how men in particular struggle to show

express those emotions yeah um and you know stereotypically we're not as affectionate and kind as, as our female counterparts. One of the things that you talk about is the difference in social class and how things change. Oh man. Are we worst people, the richer and more powerful we become. Because your research seems to show that. Yeah. I would say yes. And I'm sorry to say that, you know, it's, it's, you know, we, um, uh, I got interested in social class, um, actually living in England. You know, I lived in England in 1978. And United States is very blind to social class. We're now more aware of it, Bernie Sanders, et cetera, rightfully so, 1% critique. You know, 80s, 90s, we're just blind to it as a more egalitarian time. And I lived in Nottingham, England, very working class town in a very tough time in England's history of, you know, coal strikes and the like.

And it was tough. And the English had this just much more sophisticated understanding of class and differentiations between on the dole and working class and posh and, you know, all these categories. I was like, wow, class is everywhere. It affects how people speak and dress and eat and so forth. And so we started to apply social class to what we've been talking about, like the compassion, awe, gratitude, empathy, kindness, sharing, altruism,

and just across studies. And largely in the United States, I think you could question whether this applies to Holland or UK or Japan, where there's less inequality, I might add. You know, as you rise in wealth and privilege, you share less, you feel less compassion to images of suffering. You know, you see an image. This was a striking study to me. It's a movie about a child who has cancer and poor people show activation of the vagus nerve, which is part of compassion. It causes you to want to help well-to-do people, less activation. They feel less awe as you rise in the social class hierarchy in the United States are more impolite. And so that was part of my Power Paradox book was that story about class.

I, you know, I hesitate, I worry about like, am I a worse person? And I'd rather use your earlier language of like, what are the structural conditions that get in the way of this? And you think about, you know, rising in wealth and privilege and class as introduced, you create a life that makes it harder to be kind, you know, that you're, people are assisting

you with things and you don't come into contact with suffering. You know, you live in a neighborhood in the United States or probably UK where it's like, you don't see it, you know, and so it doesn't train those tendencies. And, you know, frankly, Stephen, I, you know, I think this is increasingly true in the UK, but in the United States, you know, with one in six people impoverished, life expectancies dropping, you know, six, 700,000 unhoused people in the United States. Where I live, Berkeley, California, everywhere you go, you're bumping into somebody who doesn't have a home. I think it's our central failure in the US is how privilege has short-circuited our our better human tendencies how do we know that it's the increase in wealth and social class that is causing us to become less kind yeah less empathetic less compassionate

or it's just assholes go further yeah like there's a distinction there. Maybe these people were always assholes and that's why they became successful or rich or wealthy or whatever, or in a higher social class. Yeah. I mean, there are two, and that's a critical question, right? And people have long championed this idea

that, well, maybe all of this, what it really tells us is, if you practice our compassion, you don't rise in the ranks and you don't gain wealth and the like. And there are two rebuttals to that idea. The first, which I chart in the power paradox, which people still don't believe too much, but on balance today, people who practice empathy, who listen and share resources, practice gratitude,

rise in the ranks. They do better in social hierarchies. And that replicates in a lot of contexts. And really what happens is, this is why I call it the power paradox, is once I have everybody's respect and wealth and the like, then I tend to misbehave in the ways we've talked about through a lot of different forms of unethical behavior. The other rebuttal is we've actually done experiments, right? And you can take a middle-class individual and you can get them into the mindset like, hey, you're actually have a lot of advantage vis-a-vis most of society through simple manipulations, right? Just think about how you compare to a lot of poor people

and they're like, oh, I'm doing really well. And that simple shift in mindset leads to reduced compassion, reduced empathy. So you can actually move people around where you give them the sense that they're privileged and it tends to undermine these tendencies. Jesus. I know.

That's fucking horrible. It is. And, you know, I worry about it. I worry about it a lot. You know, the kind of poor distribution of privilege in the United States and increasing UK and other countries is doing to the social fabric. It's problematic.

It's interesting because there's kind of a long prevailing stereotype that rich people are like bad, like less compassionate, less empathetic. And I always wondered whether that was just, I don't know, was it true? Was it people being jealous? Was it just too much of a broad generalization? Was it based on the acts of maybe a few?

But you're telling me that the science supports the fact that generally the richer you are and the higher you are in terms of social class, the less compassionate, less empathetic you are as a human. Yeah, and it is, I mean, that's the broad argument. I've given you a couple of findings here. There are all kinds of other findings that speak to this. You know, one, this is one of my favorites is, you know, in these, these epidemiologists who are studying broad trends in social behavior discovered this accidentally. They're interested in who shoplifts

as a teenager in the United States, you know, a basic unethical tendency, really costly for businesses in the United States. Is it the rich or the poor? Well, you know who I would assume it would be, but I feel like I'm wrong. It's the rich. Rich high school kids in the United States are more likely to shoplift, right? And that's striking. They've got their parents' credit card. They can buy whatever they want, and they violate that social rule. This is where it gets really worrisome.

My former student, Michael Kraus, did really nice work on U.S. senators and U.S. policymakers. You know, American politicians are rich, they increasingly so. And he was simply interested in, does your degree of privilege or wealth predict regressive policy preferences? Like let's not give resources to schools for the poor. Let's not fund, you know, Medicare. Let's really move wealth through taxation policies to the well-to-do.

And the wealthier you are, the more you preferred and advocated for serious economic policies that hurt the poor and benefit the well-to-do who already have, in the US, the 1%, they have enough. They have more than enough, right? Why not share a little? So it's deep. And I think, and then you look across history, European aristocracies and, you know, the popes and so forth. And it's, I think it's one of the, you know, frankly, Stephen, and I hate to say it, you know, Lord Acton, you know, power leads to abuse and absolute power, absolute corruption, our powers corrupting. It's a pretty safe law in human behavior. I hate to say it. It's because you're rising in prominence and facing a new life and you better watch out. I was thinking most of the time you're

talking, which is like, how do you avoid that? How do you avoid that how do you avoid yeah how do you avoid the uh that scientifically supported tendency to become an asshole with with the more wealth and power you accrue um i guess my my assumption was just being conscious of the fact yeah first thing yeah but also just like there's probably act things you could do actively to remain uh aware of your own insignificance, maybe not the word, but like the fact that everybody is exactly the same. Yeah. It's like the way I describe it.

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's an awareness dimension to this that you've suggested. There's an ethical practice of like, how do I create more gratitude in an organization if that's what we care about, et cetera? How do I counteract my own biases then as well? So how do I put people around me who represent,

and we're thinking here, I'm thinking here about governments that represent the entirety of the population, not just the rich private school colleagues that I might surround myself with, which has often been the case in government. And that is hard to work against, right? That is a deep sociological process that like you appoint the cabinet member from Oxford or whatever, and you're in trouble. Yeah. You know,

it's, it's, uh, it is, uh, you know, a lot of economists, a lot of the work coming out of, um, you know, spirit level UK, this is a central challenge of the structure of our societies today. It's this increasingly unequal distribution of privilege and wealth and all that goes with it. Do people that are wealthy and in higher social class live longer? Because I say that because the attributes of becoming less empathetic and rude or all these things seem to be the antithesis of social connectedness and all of these things. And you even said earlier that, you know, wealthier people experience less or, and all of those things are, um, uh, are associated with living longer. So one would assume that if

you become rich and powerful, you then there's also then also a risk to your life expectancy. Yeah. That's terrific. That's a really striking question. And we don't know. And I think your reasoning is right on the point, which is, wow, you- Have less friends. Right, privilege knocks out these important tendencies that help with inflammation and vagal tone and the like. Rich people do live longer. That's robust.

Healthcare. Yeah, yeah. And food you eat and so forth. Sure. You know, opportunity for health, you know, yoga, all the things that benefit us. Rich people, this is interesting, surprised me, rich people are less likely to experience anxiety

and depression in the United States. Yeah, interesting, isn't it? We think so lonely and anxiety producing to be at the top. No, mental health issues are really concentrated in the poor for obvious reasons, working two jobs, riding the bus, you know, schools are under-resourced, et cetera. But to your point, and it's interesting, the effect of wealth on happiness is much smaller than people think. People think, you know, in particular in a country like the United Kingdom or, you know, Great Britain or US, like, oh, once I make a lot

of money, it'll be bliss and happiness and contentment. That turns out not to be true. It's a weak relationship. And I think part of the reason is, you know, when you gain in resources, you don't have these raw feelings of compassion as often or, God, I'm grateful for that gift, right, that you gave me. Or this is awesome, this person's courage or how they overcame obstacles. And so that diminishes how wealth could make you happier. So I think it's at play in some of these phenomena and maybe in others. You talked about how life expectancy has been declining for the last few years.

Why? Yeah, you know, in the United States, and I don't know the data in the UK, and it's really related to inequality and opportunity and the poor distribution or, uh, of, of opportunity and resources is, um, there have been these amazing findings, uh, related to what's called death by despair and certain populations in the United States, um, very poor white people, large group of the, um, large subculture in the United States, very poor white people, large subculture in the United States, are often forgotten in the cultural discourse. They're poor.

I grew up around these people. Very poor. Don't eat good food. Schools are not that good. Work is uncertain. And they feel disrespected in some sense. And that subculture in the US has been killing themselves, you know, with opiates and, you know, drinking and drug addiction and suicides and the like. And it's a serious problem. And it's part of that statistic. And then I think that, you know,

if you think about the problems of contemporary culture concentrated in the United States of lack of civility, rage, self-focus, a lot of things that undermine our physical health through the mind, that probably is part of this story too. Too much stress, too much loneliness, not enough music and joy and shared communal experience. We are struggling. And that's part of probably that statistic too. And so that's why, you know, as I mentioned, like the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a very smart team looking at these kinds of processes and saying, how do we build community? You know, and they've got a big program now. So it is alarming. And that statistic is important for thinking about where we are. I looked at the life expectancy

on Google a couple of years ago and I could see that it was basically going up every single year. Yeah. And then there was these two years, I think it might've been last year or the year before, this was, I think before the pandemic, there was these two years where it had dropped both in the UK and the US in a row. Yeah. And I was trying to understand why that was. And I heard some social commentators say that there's this epidemic of purposelessness and describe that as leading to the opioid crisis, but also suicides and all these other behaviors. Is that a good way in your view to define it, like this epidemic of purposelessness? Yeah, it is. Thanks know, thanks for bringing that up. And, you know, purpose, a lot of people now call it meaning, right? What vague term has many different definitions, but it's, you know, I as an individual, how do I connect to things that are larger than the self that don't have to do with income or status or directly, but like, what's my point here in my brief life on earth? You know, what am I going to serve? What's the big cause that I'm part of? And this is really emerging in the science

of happiness as a central focus of, you know, we know well how to find income. We have good ideas about sensory pleasures, what's good to eat, how do I drink wines, what's the great coffee and the like. But we've lost sight of meaning. You know, churches and religions used to give that to us, you know, and religious participation is on the decline in the West. Dramatically so for people your age, where they gave us a big picture of life. And now, you know, young people are hungry for it and they're challenging a lot of the approaches to happiness that don't give meaning, you know, new conceptions of work. Like, I don't have to stay at one career if it isn't meaningful.

New conceptions of romantic relationship. And so I think, you know, I think a lot of different perspectives are saying this is one of the crises of our times is meaning, is what will be the big thing you're devoted to? If you were to fast forward. How would you answer that question? Which question? What are you devoted to? I'm devoted to so many things I'm devoted to this this podcast and this show

for so many reasons for very selfish reasons but those selfish reasons happen to be selfless yeah aligned you see what I mean? like doing the podcast I know helps helps the people some of the people that listen

because they come up to me in the street and they tell me all the time wherever I go and the stories they tell me are like I remember I was at Old Trafford because they come up to me in the street and they tell me all the time, wherever I go. And the stories they tell me are like, uh, I remember I was at, um, Old Trafford, uh,

two days ago, the Manchester United stadium. And a guy who was the, he said he was the nearest survivor to the Manchester, um, terrorist attacks, um, approached me in his,

in his wheelchair and told me that of the impact this has had on him. Yeah. And I literally had to walk like i took the phone with him walked um like two meters out out into this um this balcony and i remember feeling just overwhelmed with emotion and it was this wonderful reminder of like how why i do this yeah for for both the listener but also for me so this is something that i'm increasingly devoted to because of those experiences. And thank you to that young man.

He's tweeted me about doing that because I needed the reminders. I feel like you need the reminders sometimes, often. I'm devoted to my relationship with my partner, my dog, my family, my team. And I'm devoted to myself. I'm devoted to like my health, of both my body and my mind. Yeah. I think that's what I'm devoted to myself. I'm devoted to like my, my health, my, you know, of both my body and my mind.

Yeah. I think that's what I'm devoted to. And I think I'm devoted to, yeah, I probably answered this in the first piece awe as an emotion to study, a brief state that you go out and you see the moment of generosity that you saw or look at the sky or think about a big idea, the idea of space or infinity is it does bring people, it kind of moves people away from transactional considerations. So in one of our studies, look up into the trees, you feel all you're less interested in money. You're less focused on the self and you're really more focused on the greater good. Like what, how do my actions promote healthier societies? And I think that, you know, a lot of young people are raising questions of meaning right now with climate crises and economic inequality, the state of democracy.

What is the point? When you think about conversations from the last century and the centuries before, in a reading for all, people would use words like the soul and spirit. And like, this is what I'm really about in life. And we've lost sight of that, you know? And so hopefully with this book, people, whatever language they want to use, they're asking questions like, what am I devoted to? What's sacred?

What is- Why do people suddenly care? It seems like this younger generation i'd say millennials and gen z they all want to change the world yeah now they don't necessarily know what they want to change yep but they want to be involved in the process and this is literally a quote and i say this because of the amount of young people that have come up to me various times dm me and said i said like what you want to do they they'll say things like i want to change the world yeah how do you want to change it and they're say things like, I want to change the world. Yeah. How'd you want to change it? And they're like, they don't know, they don't know,

but they want to be involved in changing the world. I've always wondered if this is like virtue signaling because it's good for social media. Probably. Probably. Right. Yeah. Or there's been some inherent change, you know, from my father's generation to my future kids generation and my generation where we suddenly are these great philanthropists and we change everything. Yeah. No, it's exciting for me. I mean, you know, the, and there are a lot of good findings on this that when Thatcher and Reagan hit in 1980, and that's when I was 18, right. We had this big return to materialism. And you think about the movie Wall Street being iconic. Greed is good. And that truly, that was the idea, right? Of like, the point of life is selfish genes and maximizing my wealth. And we had this massive, you know, shift in Wall Street and that became our ideology. And that's been documented

sociologically. Like in my generation, you know, suddenly coming out of the sixties and all the social revolutions of those times, now young people are allowed to say, I want to make a ton of money. I want to live in a big house. I want to, you know, I want to drive whatever car and your generation is reacting against that big pendulum shift. Right. And suddenly it's like, Hey, that didn't work. Look at the Amazon. Look at economic inequality. Bernie Sanders, right? What about climate crises? Greta Thunberg, right? Suddenly new model and it's coming. But it's not because of social, it feels like that social media and the internet has played a huge role in making us this like one connected mind. And we know from

our sort of evolutionary past that we prefer members of the true tribe that serve the tribe, that are good, you know, that are, I think there's a term you use when you're talking about gossip, how we will gossip against people who are not doing good for the tribe, essentially. Yes. So we know that like being part of the tribe

and serving the tribe and being, you know, empathetic and caring about others is a good trait now we're all connected on these glass screens as if we're one brain and we're rewarded with these likes and these retweets when we do good yeah so if i if i you know if i do something really good for society or whatever um then i'm rewarded with i don't know know, comments or likes or whatever, or, you know, everyone claps and I feel part of the tribe. Yeah. So has social media made us these philanthropic warriors that are seeking for ways to like virtue signal our goodness? Yeah.

You know, I mean, there's one argument that in general, any act of virtue and way of promoting the greater good becomes co-opted and exploited by people who have power. You know, and there's a critique, you know, I hate to say this, but of a lot of nonprofits that they kind of they create these virtuous organizations and pay people good salaries and don't do a lot in the world. And that is a critique out there. And I think it could be even more robustly levied against the digital virtue is like, it's, you could say it's meaningless. Let's take that hypothesis, right? Oh, we turn acts of generosity and kindness and appreciation that you saw on the train into digital things that don't affect anything, right? Black Lives Matter, everyone was told to post a black tile

on their Instagram on a Tuesday. Like I did a post about how much that misses the point in many respects. If we're trying to deal with systemic racism, posting a black tile on a Tuesday really does nothing to address and evoke the conversation that needs to be had. But it was like an easy, quick,

yeah, cool way to say, I'm a good person. It's and to do very little thereafter, you know, and if it's not changing hiring practices, or pay practices, or school admissions, it is BS. And it's a and probably counter works against social progress. I had a call during that time from one of the biggest brands in the world who asked me on a conference call, for those five of them, what should we do? You know, we need, do we do a donation? What should we post on our Twitter channel? Like, what should we do and say? And part of, you know, it was the five executives at this huge company. And I said, I think the most important thing is actually to get your home in order first. It's startling that there's five white men on this phone call right now talking about

race relations and inequality. I think it's better not to be the contradiction. So it's better to get your home in order first before you start, you know, and that's not, I mean, there's, you can almost see the expression in their faces. It's like, oh, that's the hard, that's the hard thing we'll get to work yeah exactly it's much easier just to do a donation right in those situations i want to talk about um compassion yeah it's a word i've i've struggled to understand if i'm honest yeah because like what does it mean does it mean being nice to people what is no you know um compassion is um the feeling of concern about other people's suffering and then taking action, right?

Empathy? Empathy is I feel the same thing as you. I understand your mental states. If you're in pain, I feel pain. Compassion is you're in pain and I wanna make your circumstances better. I wanna lift up your wellbeing. So it's interesting. Compassion is a very dynamic emotion.

It's an empowered emotion. It isn't, nice is great. You know, it's politeness and civility and being considerate. I think we need more niceness in the world. And I think we often, I think the connotations of the word nice sort of devalue how powerful it is, but compassion is powerful. It is the state of wanting to lift up the welfare of other people who suffer. And what's striking about it, and I love the neurophysiology of this, which really speaks to its power, which is that I can see somebody suffering, dying, cancer, flesh wounds, crying, in pain.

And when I lock into the compassion response, certain regions of the brain are activated that are different than empathy. The vagus nerve is activated and it's, it really just throws you into altruistic action, right? So, and that's why, you know, when the Dalai Lama, you know, who's now one of the most prominent spiritual figures in the world says, if you want others to be happy, practice compassion. And if you want to be happy, practice compassion. That gets to it, right? Like, man, if you can stay close to compassion, you and other people and the greater good will do well. It's a really dynamic emotion. Is there scientific evidence that proves that you will become happier if you're compassionate to others? Yeah. And what does that scientific evidence show and prove you will become happier if you're compassionate to others?

Yeah. And what does that scientific evidence show and prove? It's amazing, you know, and it begins with a study by Liz Dunn, famous study replicated in many different cultures, which is you give people some money and they can give it away to help somebody or spend it on themselves. Giving it away boosts happiness more than spend it on themselves. Giving it away boosts happiness more than spending it on yourself. There's research. I love this work. And contagion has been part of our experience here

where if I am kind to you, Stephen, this is kind of extending from the study, that boosts my life expectancy. It shifts my physiology. It shifts my stress. But I love this work where if I'm kind to you and then the experimenter watches you in your next interaction, you're kinder to that person, right? I'm not around. My act of kindness makes you more kind downstream. And then that person you've helped actually is kinder to another person in a subsequent interaction. So, you know-

And they've proven that. Yeah, and really nice research on the contagiousness of altruism and compassion. Yeah, it is like gratitude. It's one of these big winners. If I, there's a loving kindness practice where it comes out of East Asian traditions, where you just calm yourself, get into some deep breathing, find a quiet, safe space and orient kind phrases to other people. I, I,

may you be filled with loving kindness, may you be safe from inner outer danger, well in body and mind, at ease and happy. And that simple practice, two minutes, right, just calms the amygdala, threat-related region of the brain, activates reward circuitry. So, you know, you talked about and you asked about what are these structural conditions of our busy lives that get in the way of, of the good life. And you've got to find a few moments just to be kind. I was blown away. Um, when reading your, your work and watching videos that you produced about, um, so many things that one of the real startling things is the power of touch. I read that if you pat a kid on the back in the classroom, that child is three to five times more likely to try hard problems on the blackboard. And that touch can make you live longer and be less stressed, just someone touching you. Yeah. Is that true? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know,

touch in a lot of mammalian species, including humans is just connection. It's identity, it's I'm with you. You know, you think early in life, we are constantly being held and in skin to skin contact with our caregivers. It's foundational. It's where my sense of me and you connection emerges.

The physiology of touch is mind-blowing. You know, our hands are incredible. They're spectacular, you know, evolutionary adaptations. They can do all kinds of things, including touch. Our skin, eight pounds, billions of cells, our immune system is in the skin. You know, it registers touch in many different ways from the sexual to the friendly, to the cooperative, goes up into the brain and says, man, you're being touched in this way. And that has direct effects on your immune system and your vagus nerve and your heart rate and the health of your body. And so, you know, early discoveries, you know, you have premature babies, they're going

to die. And they used to just put them in these little, you know, sort of units that warm them and had them sort of be comfortable and fed and they would die. And then they figured out you got to hold the premature baby. They needed skin to skin contact. They need food, right? And they live, they gain 47% weight gain. And then, you know, there are, there are just studies time and time again, you know, a nice hug, lower cortisol, a nice embrace with somebody, elevated vagal tone. The studies that you referred to of, you know, patting kids on the back, they do better in school. You know, and it's so interesting, parts of English culture, you know, Victorian culture, Western European culture, they came up with the idea like touch is sexual. It's you got to get it. And it is, but only certain kinds of touch are sexual. There's a lot of friendly touch we need,

right? And it just shut it down. And now it's coming back. It's thank goodness. It's good for us. We talked before we started filming about the study with the recess monkeys. Yeah. I can't remember who the researcher was, but I was saying to you that- Harlow. Harlow, that was it. Yeah. How that was mind blowing to me at 16 to learn that they put these monkeys in these cages. They had like a pretend wire mother. So a mother made out of like metal. And then they had another one made out of like cloth. Yeah. And like a mother made out of cloth, which was essentially a teddy bear.

And there was huge variance between the outcomes of those kids, right? Yeah. I mean, if you deprive those monkeys of the nice touch, they don't learn how to behave socially effectively. You know, if you give them a choice between a wire monkey mother that provides milk and then a terrycloth one, they always hang around the terrycloth one, right? They just love the social contact. If you deprive non-human primates of touch, they are almost schizophrenic

or psychopathic, or they're just like aggressive. They can't handle social interactions. You know, orphans deprived of touch, famous orphan studies. And humans, same thing. They just like, they don't become human in some way or they are human, but they have trouble with social contact. Yeah, I mean, part of the questioning that you're engaging in, Stephen, of the literature is like, well, what can I do just to live a more meaningful life?

And from gratitude to kindness to find some, oh man, if you're not hugging, you know, from gratitude to kindness to find some, oh man, you know, if you're not hugging people you love, if you're not, if you don't have a rich language of touch with your friends, you know, I learned it playing pickup basketball. Basketball, which is the, I believe, the most fascinating sport in human history, it has this amazing language of touch, you know, and it's unique to the court, right? Your fist bumping, chest bumping and the like. If you're not doing that with your friends, you're missing out on one of the great languages of human kind, which is to be in contact with each other. So, you know, parents, you know, when you have kids and I hope some of your listeners

are doing that, you know, it's this mystery, like should they take naps on my body? Should we, how should I hold them? Should I carry them in public? Am I indulging them? And I think the more friendly, kind touch, the better. So we're moving back to where we began evolutionarily and I think it'll be a good thing. What if I'm touching a dog?

Does it have the same effect? Yeah, I mean, dogs evolved because we love them and they love us. And there's all this new amazing dog science where, this is one of my favorite studies and touch releases oxytocin, which is this little chemical that floats in your brain and your blood

and it helps you be kind to other people and cooperate. And there are now studies from Japan showing, you may do this with your dog, Stephen, where if you look into the eyes of your dog, your dog will have a surge of oxytocin and you will have a surge of oxytocin. So it's like all of this social stuff that's so simple of eye contact and touch brings us good things, even with our dogs. It makes me kind of realize two things. The first is that men tend to be stereotypically much worse at that. Yeah. Much worse at touch. We don't, we, we do the, like the macho hug where you're like, on the back, you know, like when you pat them on the back, it's like, get the fuck off me.

We're, we're less good at even things like eye contact and sort of emotional engagement and then you look at the stats around male suicides and all of those you know uh drug addiction and all those things and it's significantly higher yeah i believe the stats say that the biggest killer of men under the age of 40 is themselves in this country yeah by suicide um and there really feels like there needs to be a reversal of that yeah the adjacent point is just the one we talked about earlier which is just loneliness yeah and now it kind of makes sense as to why if you are lonely you have a significantly worth worse health outcomes um and a shorter life expectancy because you're not getting the compassion the touch you're not you're

probably experiencing less or gratitude etc yeah um and i feel like we have to we have to talk about how we fix that yeah like you know because some of the saddest moments i can i think about when i've had private conversations are men coming up to me after like a talk on stage and whispering to me that the part i said about me being lonely when i was like 23 24 and i'd given everything just for this business coming to the office every day, sacrifice, friendships, family relationships. I'll have men come up to me and whisper to me that that was the part that they needed to hear the most, but then asking me what they can actionably do to fix that. As if they don't want the group around me to hear that they are lonely.

Yeah. And they want to do something about it. They are sat on their computers, often playing video games or on the internet, um, struggling to attract, you know, maybe the opposite sex or the same sex or whatever, whatever they're interested in. And it feels like it's going in one negative direction generally. I mean, the stats kind of support the fact that we're getting lonelier and lonelier. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are such deep insights and really worth thinking more concretely about what to do. I think that the, you know, kind of the gender complexities here are really striking, right? Men live significantly fewer years than women in most Western globalized cultures. And I think you're on a really interesting hypothesis, Stephen, which is that, you know, if the gender stereotypes and these rigid concepts and then the lives we lead don't allow us to hug and feel grateful and feel empathetic, it countervails that. And

those are gender stereotypes, right? Oh, if I practice compassionate work, I'll be weak and I won't rise. That's not true. That's a gender stereotype. And it denies men this proportion of this opportunity for these emotions, right? And that, you know, with new conceptions of gender, new ideas about work is changing dramatically, That will shift. And I think it'll be good news for the health of men. And then loneliness. Loneliness in some sense is the deprivation of everything we've been talking about.

It's that you don't get to hug somebody like you would like to every day. And that you don't hear the words of appreciation. William James, you know, the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people. You don't hear it. You don't hear the thank you. You don't get to go out and feel awe with somebody or feel kindness. You know, so I think we have to think very actively about building these emotions into those contexts. In the United States, there are 35,000 long-term care facilities. The elderly in the United States, a lot of them live alone. When people from India see how we treat the elderly or people from Mexico, it's just like the unhoused. They're like, what are you guys doing?

You know, you're taking the vulnerable and sort of shunting them off alone. But these emotions point to really direct actionable things to do, right? With all practices and compassion. So it gives me hope, but we've got, you know, I think in part historically, we took these pro-social emotions out of our lives,

right? And now we got to build them back in. And if we do, it's good for not just ourselves, but it's good for the reciprocance of those emotions. You know, hugging my dad or hugging my mom or hugging anybody is a mutually beneficial behavior in terms of all the, you know, life expectancy, happiness, reduction in stress. And not only that, but I just heard 50% of US healthcare expenses are on the last five years of life when a lot of those people are living alone and feeling lonely. And there are simple ways to address that as we've been talking about. So there's a bottom line that's really relevant here too. And then the bit I imagine a lot of people will,

especially those that are much more spiritually inclined will love is the idea of that karma and how, you know, if I hug one person or if I'm kind to some person or express that gratitude or compassion, it has this sort of cascading knock-on effect and how they go through the day. So like in that sense, karma is a very real thing. It's very real.

Yeah. In every respect, even in the, in the, the concept of gossip where how you treat someone more spread. I think you said in your, your book that, um, when we treat someone badly, people on average gossip that bad treatment to 2.5 people or something to it, which is, you know, which is slightly terrifying, but it's, but it makes sense. Yeah, and part of our theme in our conversation is how we're all connected and united in these super organisms, some people call them, through practicing gratitude and sharing resources

that spreads through these social networks. And then the compliment is also true, which is, and as much as I don't like gossip and I didn't like being gossiped about, it's a human universal. It can be horrifying and we've got to worry about it. Like online catfights and it escalates. But we study these social groups. And the thing that people really gossip about is when you're not kind, right? They're like, look at what that person just just said these harsh things that spreads through the network. And it tries to keep those problematic tendencies in check.

I guess that's a good thing. It's like a community sort of regulation tool. Yeah. Thank you so much. I've had a wonderful, brilliant time over the last week, learning more and more about all of your work and reading and watching your content in great detail. This book is absolutely fantastic. It's very challenging, but it's this concept of awe was one, was not one that I'd ever thought of before. You know, you think about these other sort of emotions, gratitude, compassion, there's a lot written about them, but I've almost never heard someone talk about the topic of awe as a very accessible, but very profound, powerful human medicine, I would say. And the way that you do that throughout your book is, um, is incredibly

important. And I've, as I say, I've really never encountered a book quite like it. So I highly recommend everybody goes and gives it a try. And the reviews on the back by people like Adam Grant and Steven Pinker, I mean, they speak for themselves. So thank you for writing such a brilliant book and thank you for having such a brilliant eye-opening conversation with me today. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. Okay, funny. The question that's been left for you is, is do you think obesity is a choice? I don't. It's a terrific question, right?

And obesity is, I think in the US, I think the latest estimates, 56% of US citizens, probably pretty comparable here in the UK. And man, when I think about the food that we put into our bodies, the lack of activity that are not chosen, right, that depend on what kind of soft drink that's readily available and cheap, and how fast food is so cheap, and provide, provides us a certain kind of high. To me, that says that it's mainly not a choice of the people eating, but it is a choice of the policymakers. So I would make that argument. And there is some sort of through lines between the conversation we've had today about stress,

connectedness and all of those things as it relates to food and diet and anything which is again social constructs and and access to awe there is a movement parks living near parks london is one of the greenest cities in the world living near parks boosts life expectancy i think through awe there's a movement in the united in california that everybody should be 10 minutes public transport away from a park for free. 360 million people went to the national parks in the United States last year. So there's a lot of, with this stress profile that we've been talking about culturally, there are easy solutions. And one pathway is through being outdoors with all. I want to close then just on that point about,

sort of an adjacent point to what you've just said, which is about, and you also talked about prisoners earlier. I read once upon a time when I was doing some research for one of my books that prisoners who had a exposure to nature were significantly less likely to become depressed than those that were like basically looking out at concrete. Which is mind blowing to me. It is. The thought that just seeing nature can have a massive impact on our chances of depression and anxiety. Yeah. Do we need to put more of that stuff in prisons then? We do. We do. And that, you know, you've been challenging me, Stephen,

like, all right, what do we do? Just look at a hospital, put some nature in it, right? Look at a prison. Prisons are horrifying in the United States. Norway has more open prisons with views and so forth, different recidivism rates. So I take from this science and I'm really grateful to you for profiling it in such a scholarly and thoughtful way. Like we got to use this knowledge

and prisons is a nice application, but even in our own homes, you know, we, most of us are living in these white boxes in big cities and those that live in social housing, unfortunately are living in even worse conditions often. Um, and nature is somewhat of a privilege. It seems it shouldn't be, especially in the home environment, just having some plants. I have zero in here. I have loads upstairs because I have a girlfriend and she's just, she's very in touch with those things,

but she's filled my house with plants. But that's the simple thing we can all do to be happier every day is just have a bit more nature in our environment. It's not a bad first step. Becca, thank you so much. Thank you, Stephen.

It's been an honor and a pleasure.