The One You Feed - The Secret to Learning & Problem-Solving in Life with Ben Orlin

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

In this episode, math teacher and author Ben Orlin explores the secret to learning and problem-solving in life. He explains why struggling through challenges (in math and life) can actually be a good thing. Ben also discusses the unexpected power of humor and how we can rethink our approach to learning and change. Key Takeaways: 05:16 – Struggle is a Sign of Learning, Not Failure 13:27 – Why We Fear Math (And How to Overcome It) 25:06 – The Role of Humor and Play in Learning 27:36 – The Paradox of Change and the Infinite Steps of Progress 22:03 – Why We Need to Step Away to Solve Problems 50:27 – The Link Between Happiness and Expectations If you enjoyed this episode with Ben Orlin, check out these other episodes: How to Find Real Life in Stories with George Saunders Improvising in Life with Stephen Nachmanovitch For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's this infinite series of actions you have to complete just to high five somebody. And this is sort of true of all motion, it feels like, all change. Anything that you want to happen, you can decompose it into an infinite series of steps, which certainly from a perspective of making change in your life is very daunting thought that somehow any change is infinite in scope. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Math has always been a challenge for me, so naturally I figured, why not have a math expert

on the podcast? Really as a way to explore how we handle challenges in general. Today I'm talking with Ben Orlin, who's a math teacher and author who makes problem-solving feel surprisingly human. We'll explore why struggling is actually a good sign, how humor helps us push through tough moments, and even what a dog retrieving a ball can teach us about calculus. I've spent most of my life intimidated by complex math, but as I talked with Ben I realized that how we approach math mirrors how we approach any challenge. Whether it's breaking a habit, learning something new, or facing uncertainty. By the end of this episode you might not just rethink math, you might rethink how you take on hard things.

I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. I'm Kristin Davis, host of the podcast Are You a Charlotte? The incredible Cynthia Nixon joins me this week for a conversation filled with memories and stories I didn't even know. Cynthia could have been Carrie. When I first read the script, they asked me to read for Carrie as I think they asked you to read for Carrie.

And then I did. And they were like, yeah, not so much. You can't miss this. Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Brooklyn Nine Niners. It's a reunion. The ladies of the Nine Nine are getting back together

for a special episode of the podcast, More Better. Host Stephanie Beatriz and Melissa Fumero welcome friend and former castmate, Chelsea Ferretti. Remember when we were in that scene where you guys were just supposed to hug and I was standing there? Oh yeah! I was like, can I also hug them? Listen to More Better with Stephanie and Melissa on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow More Better and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Y'all what up? It's your girl Jess Hilarious, and I think it's time to acknowledge

that I'm not just a comedian. It's time to add uncertified therapists to my credentials, because each and every Wednesday, I'm fixing your mess on Carefully Reckless on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Got problems in your relationship? Come to me. Your best friend acting shady?

Come to me. Thought you was the father, but you not? Come to me. I can't promise I won't judge you, but I can guarantee that I will help you. Listen to Carefully Reckless on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Ben. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, hi, Eric. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to have you on. You are a little bit of an odd guest for us. I don't mean that you're odd as a person, although perhaps you are. I think that's a good thing. But yeah, I get that at dinner parties when I show up though, you're an odd guest for us.

Yeah, you're writing books about mathematics, which is a topic we have literally never covered except me trotting out some sort of cliched like happiness equations or something. But I was really taken by first the title of your book, and then as I look deeper into your work some of the other titles and some of the ideas that you're playing with and your new book is called Math for English Majors, a human take on the universal

language. So I think there's a lot that we can cover that listeners I think you're going to be surprised at how interesting this is, particularly if you don't like math or you're afraid of math. This is a great conversation. surprised at how interesting this is, particularly if you don't like math or you're afraid of math, this is a great conversation. So we're going to start, however, like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, I think of the feeding as the what you do every day. I think sometimes I give into the temptation to want to imagine I have this self,

which is somehow separate from the way I spend my time. There's like there's this me and I have this high opinion of myself maybe. But if you look at what I'm doing day by day and week by week, it's like, well, am I doing those things that I claim to value? And so as a teacher, I think about this as a teacher, you're sort of always on the clock in some sense, you know, when the students are in the classroom with you. Yeah, they're taking the lesson from whatever it is you're doing that day. They're not taking some lesson you've imagined in your head. And so to me, that's what the feeding is, is how are you spending every minute, every hour. I love that idea. There's a concept out there that I know has a name, but I don't know what

the name is. It's a concept in the mental health world a little bit. And it basically says that if you want to know what somebody values, look at what they do, actually do, not what they say. I think that's a little reductive. I get it because I do think it's true that that does show at least what our operating values are at the time. But I also think that there are ways in which we can get better at bridging the gap between that idealized self that you talked about in your head and the actual self that shows up day to day. Because there's a lot of time in my life, if you took who I was only measured by what I did, you'd be like, that guy is a piece of shit, right? Like that guy is a real asshole. Because I mean, I was a heroin addict. I mean, I was not behaving well. And I like to think that

wasn't all that was true in those moments. No, I think that's fair. Maybe that's why I think having the multiple wolves in the story is an afty metaphor. Because we're not these unified coherent people. You can't look at someone and say, oh, yes, this is the explanation for their behavior and who they are and what they do. It's like, we're not that tidy. We're not characters in a fable. We're something much more complex than that. So let's take that idea there that we're something much more complex than that because we really are. And if there's one thing that I sort of push against in the space that I'm in is

the idea of easy answers. The idea that there there's this one-size-fits-all formula or there's these five easy tricks or all of that. And I heard you say on a different show, I'm not going to get this exact, but you basically said that one of the things to be a good problem solver is instead of trying to immediately solve the problem, is to relax a little bit into what the problem is and explore it a little bit more before you move on to solutions. Say a little bit more about that. Yeah, yeah, I've talked about this with students

and in my writing a little bit. I think of there's certainly these four stages of solving a problem. And mathematics is a really good place actually for learning these stages because mathematics is this series of challenges, of problems that you run into. And some of them are routine, you know, sort of exercises, like doing your weightlifting for the day. And you don't get stuck on those,

you can just kind of move through them. But sometimes you run into a problem and you don't know what to do. The first thing you try doesn't work. And then there's a temptation to just bounce off that problem and go do something else with your day, especially in math. There's a lot of ways to spend a day other than doing mathematics. So I know this with my students, like there's other ways to spend their time. So when a student runs into a problem that they're stuck with, my first piece of advice is to stop trying to guess the answer or stop trying to solve it right away. I remember one time, this is a class of seventh graders I was teaching and I gave them a problem that I thought was going to take the whole lesson to solve, but

they weren't accustomed to problems like that. So some of them just started shouting out guesses right away. Is it 12? Is it 14? And it's like, you're probably not going to guess the answer in the first 30 seconds. So my advice in those situations and beyond math too, is to explore the problem, to make the goal for that next 10 minutes, that next half hour, not to solve the problem, but to figure out what would a solution look like? What are the obstacles here? What's the tension in this problem? Why isn't there an easy answer? What are the things that people have tried maybe for this problem? To view it as you're researching and playing with the problem rather than trying to solve it. This is something that research mathematicians, the people who are trying to

solve new math problems tend to be very, very good at because those problems can take years to solve. I mean, some of them can take centuries. They're sort of passed on generation to generation. And so you have to be patient. Sometimes progress on a problem doesn't look like a solution. It looks like an idea of what the solution would have to look like or ruling out possible solutions. I love that. And I do think that that really does apply to challenges in our life, changes we want to make or problems that we're having, is that if we can spend time really looking at the problem or the change that we want to make without immediately jumping to a conclusion of what we should do, it

really helps. And you mentioned like there's contradictions and there's opposing tensions and it's like, you know, let's say I suddenly am like, well I want to begin reading for 30 minutes a day. I'm just making something up. If you don't spend some time to acknowledge like what's been blocking me from doing that, you know, what other tensions are pulling on me in those moments? Like that sort of exploration can be really, really valuable. We tend to jump right to action.

And it's interesting, I think a lot about like one of the most accepted models for behavior change is called the trans theoretical model of behavior change, most commonly known as the stages of change model. And there are three stages before you even ever get to action. And if you don't do some of the work in those stages, very often your action just isn't going to go anywhere. It's going to just peter out really quickly and it sounds a lot what you're saying, which is like, I'm just going to start shouting out answers, hoping that this problem is solved in three minutes and I'm on to the next thing.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that I like the preparation before the solution seems important. And I think another thing that I learned from mathematics is the hardest problems don't always look hard and the easy problems don't always look easy. There's a very famous one. This is a problem that was first just kind of jotted down in the margins of a book 400 years ago. It was someone who was reading an old geometry book, this guy Pierre, and he jots it down and he's like, oh, I've got an idea for another equation here. There's a certain kind of equation that I think doesn't have a solution. He jots it down in the margin. He says, oh, and I can actually, I know the solution to this. I could prove this to you, but I don't have quite enough space in this margin of

the book. Then it just sort of sat there in the margin of his book for a few years. His son discovered it a few decades later and published it with his writings. People started looking, what was this proof that he had come up with that he didn't quite have space for? It took three to 50 years. He probably had it wrong. His proof was probably false. But the thing he was trying to prove that this kind of equation didn't have a solution, it's a very simple equation. I've showed it to eighth graders. And it's true what he said, but it was one of the hardest problems anyone had ever uttered in mathematics up to that moment. It wasn't solvable with the mathematics at the time. You needed 350 more years of mathematical

developments for that to be solvable. So it looks really simple. And sometimes I want to read for 30 minutes a day. It sounds so simple. It's like I got books on the shelf. I've got 30 minutes in the calendar. This seems very easy. Right, right. But maybe that's tapping into issues of attention and patience and anxious worries that keep you from focusing.

Like it can tap into so many difficult issues. Exactly. And so yeah, I find mathematics a very crisp model of those things often. Because in math, it seems like of all places, it should be easy to tell what's an easy problem, what's a hard problem. But things can be simple and very hard or complex and actually not so hard. You know, a lot of surface complication, but if you just understand what the terms are, it's actually a straightforward problem. This is a question about problems like that. Like, how does someone know that they're proposing a mathematical problem or proof or quandary versus just writing down a bunch of nonsense? Are there points where

people are like, we're trying to prove something that should not be proved because it's not true or real? I know this isn't a question that probably is like three podcast interviews, but I'm just curious because I often think about that. Yeah, that's another one where I think it's interesting to hear what mathematicians say about this. I'm a math teacher, right? I don't do my own mathematical research, but knowing lots of people who do, often they'll run into a question where you're trying to decide, okay, is this statement true or false? And actually, if you sit there wondering whether it's true or false, you never get anywhere. What they have to do is they have

to commit to the thought, okay, today I'm going to try to prove it's true. I think it's true or false, you never get anywhere. What they have to do is they have to commit to the thought, okay, today I'm going to try to prove it's true. I think it's true. I'm going to try to prove it and they'll work to prove it. And maybe in the process of trying to prove it, they'll find out that it's false. Or maybe they just don't get anywhere. And the next day they go, okay, given I couldn't find a proof yesterday, I think this is false. I'm going to look for an example that shows this is false, something that breaks the purported rule. And then they'll do that. But what I've heard from a lot of mathematicians is you can't occupy both states at once. You have to at least temporarily commit yourself to one side of the ledger. You know, I'm going to push in this direction today.

And even if you don't know which direction to go, you learn a lot by picking a direction and trying that. I find that ability to sit with a problem like that for years astounding. I recently, very recently figured out that I can solve crossword puzzles. Now as a 50 year old man, 50 plus years, who loves words, I should have known that sooner. But I didn't because I would get stumped early on and be like, I can't do this. Now I realize like, oh, I can do this, I love doing this, this is fun, this is enjoyable.

There is some switch in me, and I don't know if that switch was that I suddenly started to believe that I could do it, and then that enabled me to stick with it. But I think that we could extrapolate this idea a little bit to how do we stick with things that we feel like we can't do. Now you must face this all the time as a math teacher, right? Because one of the most common things you'll hear people say is, I'm not good at math. You know, if you ask people what they're good at or it comes up you're

gonna hear, I'm not good at math a lot. So I think there's a similarity here to me and my crossword puzzles. So let's talk a little bit about that process, maybe in how you teach it for math, and then maybe we can broaden it out to how we apply it to other areas of our lives that may be more impactful than a crossword puzzle. Yeah. Although I love crossword puzzles, it's pretty high impact. You know, if you can spend 15 minutes a day sort of enjoying the New York Times puzzle, that's a nice way to spend the time. It's definitely true what you say about people identifying as not a math person. It's funny because everyone when they present it, they presented as this idiosyncratic fact about them personally. It's like, oh, it's just me. I'm

just this funny person. It's like, ah, math didn't really click with me. It's like, yeah, there's hundreds of millions of people like that in the United States. This is a solid majority of the country, I would say. So it's obviously not, and maybe that's, I think, the first step for people. It's not some personal failing of yours. And I try not to blame you. I'm a teacher. I love lots of other teachers. I try not to blame. It's not the teachers have failed. It's a weird thing we're trying to accomplish in math education. We're taking these five-year-olds and setting them down on this 10-year journey where they're supposed to come out the other side having learned sort of like centuries worth of mathematical ideas, becoming expert in stuff that really only a very

small elite would have ever had to learn in a lot of past generations. These very abstract ideas that come with their own language that's presented in epithy, very sometimes too short, too brief the glimpse you get of these ideas. To me, there's no shock when someone struggles with mathematics or with mathematics education. That's sort of the default state. And I think for me, that's a first step when there's something that I'm struggling with, mathematical or something else, or when I see a student struggling is to depersonalize it a little bit. It's not some shortcoming, some gap within you. There's some missing jigsaw piece in your brain that you're never going to be able to get this. It's like things are hard to learn. It takes time, it takes

effort, it takes a teacher to walk you through it. So that's the first step for me. The second step is often motivational. Why would I want to learn it? For a lot of students, the benefit to learning math is you can pass math classes and then stop taking them. It's a thing you want to learn so you can cease ever having to think about it. And so this varies a lot from person to person, but I try to find something that feels meaningful to them that will open something up for them in their life. Just a student the other day actually, it was their first day coming to my class. They enrolled late and missed the first week. And we were doing a little bit of work in spreadsheet programs just in

Microsoft Excel. And the student was saying, it was just sort of like mouth open. They're like, my mom's been running a small business for years and doing the accounting with literal spreadsheets, like sheets of paper spread out in a hand calculator and adding up the numbers, hours every month to get that to work. I was like, oh yeah, take this home by the end of the semester, you'll be able to do that hours of work and five, 10 minutes of updating the spreadsheet. So for a lot of people, I think it's personal finance. You can give you a grasp on money and where you're putting it and how it's flowing and where it goes when the money's gone from the bank account, where

did it go? Just a little bit of extra grasp on mathematics and mathematical tools can really help with personal finance. So especially for a lot of the adults I teach at community college, that's a very relevant one. And then especially for younger students, but for some adults too, mathematics is just this beautiful set of ideas. It's connected to everything a little bit. It's like this underground water source or something, underground river that connects all these different parts of the landscape that you wouldn't have thought were connected. And so, one of the things I love to do is collect great thinkers who are fascinated by mathematics. And Abraham Lincoln loved mathematics. He read a lot

of Euclid, the geometry. He, in fact, memorized the whole geometry book while he was in law school. He was working on his legal studies. He goes, oh, I'm never going to be a good lawyer unless I really understand argument, logic, and proof. So, okay, so I guess I've got to go read ancient geometry texts and learn it that way. And memorize them. Israel, oh yeah, he memorized the arguments, yeah. I guess you can just get a lot done if you don't have TVs or cell phones or you know. CB Yeah, right. All you had to do back then was chop wood. RG Electric lights, I mean.

CB That's right. That's what I've been saying for years is electric lights are a huge distraction for us. It's really, you know, it's shortening our attention span. We really gotta go back to candles. This is rambling here in this answer. But yeah, I think the reason I ramble a little bit is because every person needs to find their own connection here. For Lincoln, it was logic. It was mathematics as a model of logic. And for people who love Sudoku puzzles, that's a little bit the same thing. That's all airtight logical reasoning. And for some people, it's mathematics being connected to the arts and the ways geometry plays into different artistic traditions. Cosmology is a topic that I'm always fascinated by. What is

this universe and how does it work and what on earth is going on here? How did we get here? And mathematics is really central to answering some of those questions. So for some people, they sort of, you get excited about science and maybe learning a little bit of mathematics will help open doors there. BD That is a quandary I run into often, which is the last time I took math would have been a long time ago. My main attempt in most of high school was simply, how do I not go to school? How can I get out of going? So if I could have used mathematics to help with that, I probably would have.

But I love popular science. But a lot of it, I'm reading the introduction and I'm like, okay, I'm cruising along here and then start the equations. And all of a sudden I'm like, you know what? To understand this, I'm gonna have to go back a little ways. And I just never quite take the time then to go back and go, you know what? Some basic algebra would serve me really well in getting into all of these ideas. Yeah, yeah. I think of algebra especially, it opens a lot of doors. It's a key. It's a key that's very hard to acquire, right? It takes a few years of education. And in the US we teach a course called algebra to usually 14-year-olds or

so. And I've taught that course and students don't really internalize it, don't really learn it until usually three, four years later at the earliest when they're taking calculus or something like that. It's having to use those algebra skills later on that really forces you to absorb them. So it's not easy to learn algebra, but it just opens up so many doors down the road that you wouldn't have guessed. Yeah, especially in the sciences, but well, I don't know, sciences touch everything. So if you want to learn about economics or finance or astronomy or population biology or epidemiology and think about predicting the next pandemic, any of that, yeah, just having the language of algebra really pays off. I'm trying to balance the desire to keep this conversation

somewhat about what the one you feed talks about versus chasing it down mathematical rabbit holes. So I'm going to pull back up here for a second and say like, let's keep going with this question of, okay, there's something in life that I can't seem to do, or I'm intimidated by, how do I work through it? And we've talked about how recognizing you're not alone in doing it is really important, right? Recognizing that this is a problem lots of people share, humanizing it. We've moved on to trying to connect it to why it matters. And I think that's really important too. Same thing with like reading a book for 30 minutes. Like, okay, why? Why does that actually matter to you? If we're unable to articulate that well, we're not going to have sufficient motivation to stick with it,

which I think is what you're saying about math. You've got to get the student interested somehow. to stick with it, which I think is what you're saying about math. You've got to get the student interested somehow. So, okay, now you've got the student recognizing I'm not alone and not liking math. Okay, I can see why this might be valid to me. I have always wanted to read Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and I can't. So, okay, algebra. Where do we go next? Yeah, yeah. For solving any particular problem, what I like to say is the next step once we've walked around the outside of the problem and we're motivated to solve it, is getting a wrong answer down on the page. Deliberately wrong.

Like you're not trying to answer it correctly yet. You're trying to get maybe an obvious wrong answer. And then that gives you something to work on. It sort of solves that blank page problem. Anyone who's written knows that it really helps to have a draft in front of you. Getting that first draft down is pulling teeth. That's the hard part. When solving a problem, just getting an answer down in math, one of the questions I like to ask students is what's an answer you know is much too big and what's an answer you know is much too

small for trying to solve for some number. And that can start to build some intuition. It sort of says, okay, this is the sort of thing we're looking for. Or if you're looking for some problem solving method, you can say, okay, well, why wouldn't this work? It's another way of teaching yourself about the problem. Introducing something that you know isn't quite the right solution, yeah, it gives you a first draft to build on. Excellent. I want to jump back to a loop I didn't close earlier, which is you talked about, I think

you talked about four steps of solving a problem or four stages and I think we got through about half of them. So maybe we can pause right now and close that because I think it's relevant to where we are in the conversation. Yeah, yeah, this doubles, I think, making mistakes or like getting a wrong answer down, I would call that. Yeah, sort of my second step there. Once you've explored the problem, once you've explored it further and you've worked for a while, one very important step, I think think is to step away from it to not have a

false sense of urgency that you have to solve it in the next 10 minutes and just give it some time, especially once it's kind of circulating around your mind. The back of your brain can do incredible things given a little space to breathe. So for me, it's putting on headphones and going for a walk or going for a run, although I have to be careful when I'm on a run. Often I'll have ideas that I think are brilliant at the time. And then I get home and look at the little note I took on my phone. It's waking up after a dream. That wasn't the idea I thought it was. Yeah. What's interesting about that is I do think it mirrors an experience I used to have when I was a heavy substance user is I would write some part of a song or something and

be like, this is incredible. Wake up in the morning and be like, not so much. And for some reason, walks seem to do a little of the same thing. Some of the ideas are great, but I'm a little bit astounded by how some of them, I'm like, there must be something about the state of flow or it is what you want to have happen when you're initially brainstorming, which is that the critic takes a vacation for a little bit. You're like, go away critic. And walking seems to do that for me. Yeah. Yeah. That puts me a little more at ease. And it's a good reminder to someone who very much lives in my head. I think math induces this in

people. It's sort of like you spend a lot of time with your thoughts and looking at screens, looking at paper. But it's good to remember I'm a body. That's what I am. That's what I have. And then it moves around the world. I'm not just a computer where you can predictably feed me inputs and get the right outputs. I need a little bit of serendipity. I need some surprises and things in front of my eyes that I didn't expect to see. I think stepping away and going for a walk or cooking a meal or whatever it is that gives you something to keep your hands or your feet busy, and then your brain can keep working in the background. And then the final step is sort of the counterpoint to that, which is then you got to go back to work. You can hope that some

inspiration will come, but this is true even of artists, right? A lot of the artists I admire, they have a very strict writing regimen, right? I mean, Paul Simon, when he was writing albums, he would just be writing a certain number of hours every day and that's how he generated it. You know, Stephen King wrote, you know, 3,000 words a day or some completely superhuman number of words. And I think most working artists, I should say, they have to, right? Otherwise, you don't create what you need to create. Otherwise, you don't solve the problems you're trying to solve within each work. Even if you feel uninspired, you've got to go back to it. Hey y'all, it's your girl Cheeky's and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Cheeky's and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys.

And I know a lot of people are gonna attack me. Why are you gonna go visit your dad? Your mom wouldn't be okay with it. I'm gonna tell you guys right now, I know my mother. And I know my mom had a very forgiving heart. That is my story on plastic surgery. This is my truth. I think the last time I cried like that was when I lost my mom.

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Whether you're a long time fan or new to the ranch, Welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon. I look forward to it. Let's shift direction just a little bit here. We're still talking about sort of overcoming fear or overcoming being stuck. I want to talk a little bit about the role of play in that and also the role of humor because your first book was I think called Math with Bad Drawings. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. It's always fun seeing how translators handle that. There's one where it gets translated as math with the worst drawings. It's like, oh, wow, I got demoted here.

So yeah, you draw humorous little drawings that are intended to illustrate the concept, but also oftentimes just have fun, right? There are times I see they help me figure out the concept and there are other times I think they just sort of make light of the whole thing a little bit, which I think causes a reduction in the strain around trying to figure it out. So talk to me about play and humor and why that is the direction you've chosen to go. Yeah. Yeah. For me, the bad drawings, there's a few things that led me to them. And one is my inability to draw. I just can't do it. And math is very visual. So you need pictures to explain things and you need pictures to punctuate the end of a thought. So I needed to draw and I never doodled as a kid. I really,

I should have practiced more. But anyway, so I arrived in adulthood and wanted to write these books about math and wasn't able to draw. So they're okay, we're going to do stick figures. We're going to do- You embraced your limitation. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think it wasn't a calculation on my part. It was a shrug of the shoulders and like, okay, I guess that's the best I can do. But I think it creates a different tone or a different kind of space for people coming to mathematics, maybe not super enamored with the subject. Because you come thinking, oh, I'm not really a math person. And it sort of activates people's defenses around being good at things, being bad at things. And so to have the person you're learning this

stuff from be very self-evidently leading with something they're bad at, right? Kind of putting their worst foot forward. I think it kind of demystifies a little bit. We're coming here as fellow human beings with our strengths and our weaknesses and our gaps and our knowledge sets. We're here to share things. I'm not here to stand on a mountain top and pronounce the truths of mathematics. One of your earlier books is called Change is the Only Constant. It's about calculus. I may not have that title exactly right.

But as a person who studied a lot of Buddhist and Eastern thought, this idea of impermanence is central to the whole game. Talk to me about the role that change plays in mathematics and maybe how math brings that concept alive. And I'll say one last thing, and then I'm going to turn it over to you. There's a phrase from the Japanese poet, Basho, who says, I'm not going to get it exactly right, you learn more about impermanence from a falling leaf than like 1,000 words about it. But math probably shines a different light on that same idea, right?

There's another way of learning more about impermanence. Talk to me about it mathematically. Yeah, change was something that mathematics always struggled with, I think is one way to put it, that somehow a lot of mathematics that was developed by brilliant mathematicians dealt with static situations. And it was actually change in motion that presented some of the most vexing mysteries. And of course, one of the most ancient ones, and this comes up in the Western tradition, comes up in the Chinese school of names, was a philosophical school, is what we call Zeno's paradox. So the idea that if you and I are going to high five each other, Zeno would have phrased it a little differently,

but if we're going to do a high five, to complete that high five, we need to get halfway there, right? Our hands start three feet apart, we got to get to a foot and a half apart. And then, okay, that takes some amount of time. But then to complete the high five, now we need to go halfway again and get, you know, three quarters of a foot apart, so nine inches apart now. But we're still not there yet. There's another step. We got to go halfway again. And now our hands are really close, but there's still another step. You got to go halfway again and halfway again. And so there's this infinite series of actions you have to complete just to high five somebody. And this is sort of true of all motion.

It feels like all change, anything that you want to happen. You can decompose it into an infinite series of steps, which certainly from a perspective of making change in your life is very daunting thought that somehow any change is infinite in scope. It often is. I think there is change that is goal oriented as, as in, I'm going to run a 5K. But if your bigger goal, the reason you want to run a 5K, is that you value your physical health, then change is infinite.

Because there's never a day that your physical health is like, okay, I have established it. Now it is set. I will go about all my other business and it will remain in place. It's the same thing with like we can't just eat once. Right. I've locked in healthy eating. I had a salad for lunch yesterday. It was delicious. That was it. Now I'm done. Now I can have cinnamon buns every day and it'll be fine. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So maybe that's right though. Yeah. Xeno was onto something. I think Xeno was

certainly onto something. Obviously, as youeno understood, you can complete an action, right? We see people walk across a room and they get all the way to the end. So clearly, there's something a little tricky about his logic. But Bertrand Russell, the 20th century philosopher said that every generation since Zeno has had to reckon with that paradox, right? On the one hand, we do complete actions. On the other hand, there's complete actions. On the other hand, there's this sort of compelling argument that it's impossible, that it's infinite, that we'll never get there. And so every generation has sort of had a different answer to that question. HOFFMAN What is your generation? I think we're probably sort of a generation apart,

not quite. So what would Russell say your generation's wrangling with Zeno's paradox is? BELLAMY Oh, that's interesting. Right. I guess I'm sort of squarely in the millennial generation. Yeah, I don't know. I think millennials, looking at us from the outside, I think we have a reputation for being a little square, a little earnest compared to Gen X, which was always steeped in irony, and Gen Z, which sort of finds millennials hopelessly straightforward and earnest. I think there's something about millennials maybe that just want to be like, no, no, I'm going to get there. I'm going to go halfway and halfway again. I'm going to complete that sequence of actions.

So maybe the lesson for millennials would be to embrace a little more mystery in that, a little more accepting it as a paradox. BF So listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember knowledge is power but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built

with this little exercise, I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life and they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at OneUFeed.net slash SMS and if you don't like them you can get off the list really easily. So far there are over 1,172 others from the One You Feed community on the list and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to oneyoufeed.net slash sms and let's feed our good wolves together. So there's a recent post on your blog about the

poet Adrian Rich and really about this idea of change. Can you share a little bit more of what you wrote there? Yeah. Yeah, I came to Adrienne Rich very sideways. It was just through I came across a quotation of hers totally out of context that the moment of change is the only poem. I thought that was lovely. Didn't know anything about Adrienne Rich because I'm not particularly knowledgeable about poetry. And so this was actually while I was working on that calculus book, I went and read a few of her collections and essays she'd written and found her a fascinating figure and really someone who embodied change in her life because she was living in the right doing her best work in the 60s, 70s,

80s. And so as of the late 50s into the early 60s, she was living a very sort of conventional looking life. She was I think mostly, mostly a homemaker, housewife. She had a few kids. Her husband was a professor at Harvard, and she wrote very careful and sort of immaculate but fairly traditional poetry. And anyone who knows Adrienne Rich knows her as a radical feminist lesbian who had female lovers and wrote about breaking loose from societal constraints and completely reimagining the world around us. And so, how did she get from the one spot to the other? And it was sort of this gradual process. One of the things she started doing was putting the date, the year in parentheses at the end of each of her poems. I'm sure it was just a sort of artistic

intuition. But later, when she reflected on it, she said they were starting to feel more like snapshots, less like completed works and more like moments of- CB And ongoing dialogue. BD Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Something ongoing and evolving. And that poem that has the line, the moment of change is the only poem, it's dedicated to the French film director Godard. And so, yeah, it begins, the opening line is driving to the limit of the city of words, which I love as a line. The word limit happens to be a very important word in mathematics and calculus. She's coming at kind of the same idea from a different direction. She's saying, what are you trying to do in film or in poetry? You're trying to go right to the edge

of what words can tell us and let those words gesture at something beyond themselves. And then towards the end of the poem, she circles around this thought or uses this thought to propel herself forward. She says, the notes for the poem are the only poem, which I like that the idea is that the poem itself is too polished, too final. And really the magic, the poetry is in those notes, is in that first impression. And then a few lines later, she comes back and says, no, the mind of the poet is the only poem. Even the notes, there's something recorded and documentary about that. And really, it's just what's happening in the airspace. And then the very final line of the poem is the moment of change is the only poem. It's like, no,

no, it's not even really the mind. It's something. Yeah, I don't know. I can't explain in words because she's gesturing beyond words. Anyway, I wrote a whole chapter that I wound up cutting from the calculus book because it was more about poetry than it was about calculus. But it really shaped my thinking about when I was writing that book about calculus. I suspect I'm the first author of a calculus book to really have my thoughts on the subject shaped by Adrienne Rich and her radical poetry. But it felt very true to the insights of the math to me that there's something about trying to reach towards something infinite that you can't ever quite attain, but there's a lot of meaning and purpose in that reaching. Yeah, that whole thing is such a Zen idea. I mean, Zen is a form of Buddhism that really talks a lot about how, yeah, words, you need them because they're the main thing we have,

and yet they're only pointing at something. They're only trying to get you to look in a certain direction in a certain way. And then that same idea of we tend to think that the end output is the thing and Zen would say no, no, no, it's much more the doing, the being one with the doing. And then ultimately it would go on to say sort of that last level is that even the mind itself is in change. You can't pin it down to anything. What you think is your mind is this constellation of conditions that have come together extraordinarily temporarily, right? And that you're freezing. And so, Change is the Only Poem resonated

so much with me. I thought the way you wrote that up and her lines are really beautiful. Yeah, and I think, no, I really do. I love that poem. It's a fun one to revisit. On the subject of your calculus book, I read your latest book, which is The Math for English Majors, a Human Take on the Universal Language, and really enjoyed it. But I sometimes dig a little bit deeper with guests. And so I opened up your calculus book about

change and the chapter titles. If I wasn't like an hour and a half from an interview with you, I would have bought that book and been like, I've got to read this and I may go back because the chapter titles are so good but I thought maybe we could talk about a couple of them. And the first is when the Mississippi ran a Million Miles Long, How Calculus Plays a Prank. Yeah. So there's this fun passage in Mark Twain. One of his nonfiction books is The History of the Mississippi. And he talks about this funny fact about rivers, which is that they create these meanders over time. They sort of have these curves and so you get these

wide almost circles. And every so often, the river will actually complete the circle. So just time going on and the water changing course, it'll sort of jump the gap, especially during a flood. And so this has happened periodically on the Mississippi. We have decent records of this. And so in the century or two, before when Twain was writing this, you could chart the decrease in the length of the Mississippi as it jumped those gaps. And so a long circular meander became a straight jump. He's just applying arithmetic he learned in school. He said, well, here's what you can do. You can say, okay, if the Mississippi River has... I'm going to get the numbers wrong. But if the Mississippi River

has gotten 100 miles shorter in the last 100 years. Well, that means the Mississippi is shrinking by about a mile a year. So a million years ago, the Mississippi River would have been a million miles long, right? It would have stretched out four times past the Moon. It would have been visible from deep in the solar system, just this extraordinary astronomical river or maybe wrapping many times around the Earth. Who knows how you want to do it? And then his line, which I love, Twain is such a brilliant stylist. He says, that's the marvelous thing about science or mathematics is nowhere else can you get such a wholesale return of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact, which

is very astute, I think, as to what science and mathematics can often do. Say that again? A wholesale return of conjecture from a trifling investment of fact. BF. I would say that might be shaping a lot of our online political discourse at this point also. CB. I think it's a very limited investment of fact. BF. We've got a whole lot of conjecture, not very fun conjecture to be honest, for a trifling amount of fact. CB. No, I think we'd be better off. I mean, I spend more time reading social media than I do Twain,

but I should probably defer that into reading more Twain. The lesson I take away from that, Twain knows that that's not what happened, right? Obviously, the Mississippi River did not wrap many times around the earth. But it's actually quite an important lesson in mathematics and I think in life, which is that there's growth patterns that mathematicians talk about and in particular linear growth, which is what Twain was talking about where sort of every time period, the same thing happens. Each year, it gets one mile shorter. And then there's other growth patterns. So we saw this very vividly in COVID, for example, where from day to day, you would get big increases. I'm thinking like March

2020 when the caseloads were starting to explode. Day to day wasn't the same change. March 2nd, you get 100 new cases. March 3rd, you get 300 new cases. March 4th, it's 500 new cases. So the change is not linear, it's accelerating. But the funny thing about changes like that is that if you zoom in enough, they always look linear. So it's only at a big scale that you see the actual pattern of the change, which is almost never linear forever. It's sort of analogous to how the Earth looks quite flat. Every experience I've ever had of the Earth, it looks very flat. But I know it's a sphere. It's just that I'm very small. The Earth is very big. And so if I got up in a spaceship, I could see the whole thing and see the curvature. But from the zoomed in perspective,

it just looks linear, everything looks flat. And so the same thing is happening there with Twain. Obviously over time, the Mississippi River has grown and shrunk and changed length in a very non-linear way. It's probably over thousands of years, it's gone up and down, extends a little bit through those lakes and then it gets cut off and some new tributary joins it. So at the big scale, it's very non-linear. But over a few hundred years, that's actually a pretty small scale for a geological feature like a river. So that's the takeaway lesson in that chapter is that if you zoom in really close on something, you're going to think it's some more predictable kind of change. But over large scales you get surprises. Hey y'all, it's your girl Cheeky's and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite

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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them. Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe. Our family legacy is this ranch. And I protect it with my life. Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone podcast takes you

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work. I love that idea. It really echoes a couple of things that I talk about and teach, and one of them is that idea of, you know, little by little, a little becomes a lot, right? That day to day, doing a little thing

and a little thing and a little thing, you don't really see much. But you zoom out far enough and you're like, oh that actually really did add up to something substantial. And then the second is that idea of zooming out in general as a way of having a different perspective, right? I mean there's that phrase that people use like making a mountain out of a molehill. The way you make a mountain out of a molehill is you get really close to a little bump on the ground and you stare at it, right? It looks really big then. You stand

up and you're like, oh, it's just a little bump on the ground. And so that same idea of if we can zoom out, if we can change our perspective would be the core thing. But zooming out is just a really easy way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. Not always easy to do. It's actually easier on a graphing calculator and then it doesn't, graphically hit the minus button, you go minus button, zoom out, zoom out, zoom out. 100%. Okay. What about, there's so many great titles in here. I'm just going to read a couple. We're not even going to talk about them, but that's Professor Dog to you in which calculus

vaults a dog to stardom. That's a pretty good one. What the wind leaves behind when calculus poses a riddle, another great one. But the one we're going to talk about is if pains must come in which calculus takes the measure of your soul. Yeah, which I don't know, it makes my soul shudder a little bit. I'm not sure I want calculus taking that measure. Precisely. It would come up with an equation I'm certain that I wouldn't be able to solve and I would be no further along in understanding soul than I am today. You might be able to understand it. Right. I mean, I think one of the things I take from math, and actually it's very much the theme of this chapter is that math, although it feels complex when you're learning it, math

is designed to offer us simplified answers. Because they're simplified, they're almost never quite right. They're always capturing some feature of the world, but leaving something else out. But they can still be useful because they're these simple schematics. They're these stick figure drawings of reality. So the one there, I think it opens with a quote from the economist Jeevans, a 19th century economist. And he was writing at a time when there was a lot of excitement about math is doing so much for us. Look at what math did for physics. We went from a world where it was kind of hard to explain how things move and just the basic mechanics of stuff in the world to we've got great equations for this. We can predict it

with exquisite accuracy. And economists in his day were hoping, maybe we can do the same thing for a lot of human behavior, not just for markets, but for maybe for individuals for your moral sentiments or even your sense of happiness in life. What he does, what Jeevans does, he sort of imagines a graph of your happiness, your state of mind. And he says, well, imagine over time, so we've got this line going up and down. And if you feel bad, it goes down. If you feel good, it goes up. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the model of what happiness is. You can picture this line going up and down, and you get to the end of the day. And what you actually want is you want to maximize the area under the curve.

Because if it's very high all day long, there'd be a lot of area under there. And if it's very low all day long, it'd be very close to the bottom of the graph,, there'd be a lot of area under there. And if it's very low all day long, it'd be very close to the bottom of the graph and there'd be very little area under the curve. And you can make up for things. If it's kind of low most of the day, but then it has a really high spike, then you'll get a lot of happiness total. But it's about adding up the area under the curve, which is what the calculus teacher would call an integral and what Jeevans calls an integral. Help me understand the curve. I'm not visualizing this. Oh, sure, sure. I'll show you a picture. Imagine, let's say you've got a big piece of paper on your wall and you mark it along the bottom, midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., all the way to the next midnight.

And every hour or even every minute, you go and you extend a line starting from the left. And if you're feeling really unhappy, the line goes down towards the bottom of the page. And if you're feeling great, you're feeling really happy, the line goes soaring up towards the top. And what you'd be able to do at the end of the day is look at this picture. And it would be this abstract picture of your experience of that day. And maybe if you had a great breakfast, it sort of starts out low, but then it spikes really high because of delicious eggs. And then it maybe goes back towards the middle as you go to work and it's kind of hovering around the middle. You have a boring meeting, it dips towards the bottom. You have a nice afternoon,

it kind of rises up. You get home and you're, I don't know, for me getting home and having my little ones run up to me is like that's my happiness spiking way up high. Two-year-old jumps into my arms, I gotta extend the paper at the top and then she throws a tantrum. Yeah, I was gonna say an hour later, you're exhausted. Yeah, that's right. And now we're back towards the bottom. And then, you know, so you get this kind of abstract picture of your day, this mountain range. And what Jeevens is suggesting, he wasn't the first to suggest it, he just put it very nicely, is why I quote him, is that maybe this mountain range, maybe that's your day, maybe that's it. It's the highs, the lows. And what you want in a day is you want kind of a big mountain range. And there's a few ways to have it. It could be a very flat mountain range,

not a lot of up and down, but it's just at a pretty high level. Or maybe it has some real lows, but also some incredible highs. And that would be another way to get a big mountain range. Robert Frost has a poem that's titled, happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length. Or maybe getting the phrasing slightly wrong there. But anyway, but same idea, right? Happiness can be kind of an intense exultant happiness can make up for its brevity. Say that again, happiness. Yeah, happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length. I think that's it. I see.

Something along those lines. Love that. So that makes me think about the sort of half-baked equations I occasionally hear for happiness or for well-being. There's two that I really like. There's one that I love and it's suffering equals pain times resistance. And I like the mathematical precision of this one actually. If you assume suffering is to the total amount of overall suffering that you have in relation to something. You can break that down and say, well, some of that is pain. So let's just take like my back hurts. There's a physical sensation of pain. And then there is all the things I'm thinking about that pain.

Oh, God, it shouldn't be happening. Oh, if I feel like this at 50, what am I going to feel like at 80? My mom has all that. And so a lot of that is we could call sort of resistance to the pain. And so if you were to make this mathematical and let's say you might say that your pain is a five and your resistance is a five, you've got 25 total units of suffering. What I love about this is oftentimes times I can't change the pain. Right? A lot of situations in life you can't change the thing that's wrong.

So I'm going to have 5 units of pain no matter what I do. But if I can lessen that resistance from a 5 to a 3, well now I have 15 total units of suffering which is way better without changing the underlying problem. And I'm not a believer that resistance ever goes to zero. Maybe that's what enlightenment is when resistance goes to zero. But for most of us, we're not going to get there. But if we can turn down the, what would be the way to say it, turn the dial, all of a sudden you have less units of suffering. So that's one that I've always really loved and I've understood the math of. CB Oh, yeah. To jump in, no, I like your

thought on zero, the unattainability of zero there. Because that was my first thought when you multiply two things. If one of them is zero, then it's gone. So if you can get that resistance down to nothing, then somehow you could have pain without suffering. And maybe when I think about, I'm a very amateur student of Buddhism, but when I think about the Buddha, that sort of seems to be the image that's conjured for me that somehow if the resistance vanishes entirely, then there can be pain, but maybe it's not pain that really matters, maybe it is suffering. BD Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is a core Buddhist idea and core Buddhist message. I've had big enlightenment-like experiences that were like

everything you read about in the book. And I would say, yeah, resistance was near zero, but boy, it just doesn't want to stay there. Right? Because it does seem to me that if you look at things from an organism perspective, we move away from what causes pain and we move towards what is nourishing or causes pleasure. You can see this in an amoeba, right? Put something that's toxic to it on one side and put something that's nutritive to it on the other side,

you know which side it's going to go to. And so if you try and push it towards the toxic side, it's probably going to be like, no thank you. And so it almost feels like some degree of resistance to me seems built into being an organism. It's so deep that hoping to make it go away on any kind of permanent basis is to hope to be something that as a living creature, I don't know that will ever be. But I do think you can turn that resistance down in a truly meaningful way. Yeah. Yeah. I think about athletes too when I see athletes, there can be a time when it's quite painful to be doing what you're doing. Michael Jordan during the flu game or whatever. But the resistance is in their case, maybe negative. Not only they're not resisting the

pain, they're embracing it. You can't do that all day, as you say, or even for an hour. But yeah, people can find moments. Yeah. That's another great example of being able to look at that from a slightly different perspective. The last one that I want to talk about, and this is one where I haven't quite figured out why the equation is written as it is, which is that happiness equals reality divided by expectations. So the core idea makes sense. Our happiness tends to be higher when reality meets or exceeds our expectations, right? And when it disappoints us, we feel less happy. I don't quite know why it's a division though. I'm asking the mathematician I happen to have on this call here to say why. Any ideas?

Yeah. Yeah. I think division seems right to me there. Okay. Because what division does is it if you have a vast number, right? Say it was reality over expectations. Yeah. if you have a vast number, say it was reality over expectations. So take someone whose reality looks tremendous to any outsider, like we would call that a million. Somebody, a celebrity who's got every material comfort and adulation and followers on social media platforms, whatever you'd be hoping for. And what we tend to think is we bring our very mortal expectations. I'm

expecting 100 out of life. So if I had a million and I was only expecting 100, my happiness would be huge, right? A million divided by 100 is an enormous number. It's 10,000. But if you're in that situation as a celebrity, probably your expectations are very similar to that million. In fact, maybe you look over there and you know the two other people in your field who have a bigger audience, who have better reviews. Your comparison set becomes very restricted to the absolute top performers. And so now you have a million, but you're expecting two million. And so that's only half of what you're expecting. So your happiness is at one half rather than even being at a comfortable one where reality

meets expectations. There's something that the ratio has the nice property that if you double the reality, but you also double the expectations, in terms of happiness, nothing has changed. BD Yep. Would subtraction not do essentially the same thing? CB It would do very similar, but it wouldn't quite have that exact doubling property. So for example, let's say that you're expecting to make up numbers, you're expecting five and you have a 10. If you double both of those, now you're expecting a 10, but you have a 20. So you've actually sort of gotten happier. Have you?

In a ratio, no, because 20 divided. So if you, well, we're getting into the weeds. I need a whiteboard to draw this out. Okay. And I'm not going to draw this out. Okay, okay. And I'm not gonna understand it once you do so. Yeah, right. I think subtraction would capture a similar thing, given that these aren't precise numbers anyway. You could probably write the same thought with subtraction.

Division works, yeah. As I was preparing for this interview and thinking about these two equations that I've used and here I decided to say, what other equations are out there for happiness. There was some crazy out of it, some Chinese research lab equation that I think would take me literally the rest of my life to try and prove or disprove because it was so convoluted. Their point, which they then summarize this crazy long, who knows what went into this

equation. I just think this is interesting. And they said, well, essentially it comes down to, you know, reality divided by expectations, except if you take your expectations too low, that doesn't work either. That to suddenly expect that everything is always going to be terrible

is not a recipe for happiness either, because then I guess you don't try to do anything and pessimism invades every aspect of your life. But I just thought it was interesting that they then had some fancy equation to sort of then say, but you can't have zero expectation or that's going to be problematic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And to me, that suggests not so much a shortcoming of the equation itself. It's a nice equation, the reality of our expectations, but actually just a shortcoming of equations writ large. Like equations are not as complicated as reality. Reality is very complex,

and equations have a couple of terms. They're meant to show us a little schematic picture, which you have to close the loop actually on Jeevans and the graph of your happiness, that mountain range. Where I land on it in the book is that it just doesn't work. It's not right. I like social psychology research. So there's a nice set of studies where one of the things they did is they made people stick their hand in ice for a minute. You're familiar with this study. So you spend a minute with your hand in ice water, really cold. And then half of the people, that's it. You take your hand out. You've spent 60 seconds in ice water, you're done. And half the people, you stick your hand in ice water, and then you get another 30 seconds in slightly warmer ice water. You know, the original bucket was maybe 35 degrees, the next bucket is 40 degrees. So it's still uncomfortably cold, but not as cold. And then

when they looked back on their experience, the second group liked it better. They rated that as less unpleasant. They rated that as less unpleasant. They rated that as like a happier time than the first group did. The first group thought it was more unpleasant. The researchers talk about peak end theory that when you look back on a memory, you're not actually looking at the whole mountain range. That's not how we remember. We look at the peak, what was the most extreme experience, the greatest bliss or the greatest pain. And we look at how it ended, what happened at the end of the day. And that actually matters much more than the specifics of the mountain range

because the mountain range theory would tell you another 30 seconds of pain, even if it's less pain, it's still more pain, more total pain that should be worse. So that's a limitation of, again, a little graph of a mountain range of your happiness. That's not actually your mood. That's a little picture. One of the reasons I like trying to spread a little more awareness of math is that it makes people more able to call BS. You know, like mathematics is often, it's simplified, it's useful, but simplified. And if you view it as magic, you can't call BS on it. You can't be like, no, there's something missing from that picture and here's what it is.

I had not heard that version of the study. There seemed to be a whole bunch where they plunge people's hands into ice water. I love reading psychology studies. They've gotten more ethical as time has gone on. You can't get away with quite what you used to be able to, but there's still a lot of really funny things. The version I'd heard of that was people getting to dental procedure and for the last couple minutes the dentist just hangs out in their mouth. Don't do anything really particular, right? But you would think that then you would rate the whole thing as worse because you had a dentist in your mouth for longer, which is inherently uncomfortable.

But the people where it ended relatively low pain compared to maybe what it was before, like you said, they rated it as a better overall experience. I think this is also really fascinating because the other thing that I think factored into this Chinese paper and its equation is another idea that I'm often fascinated by and that psychologists discuss. And what they're discussing is two broad ways of measuring happiness. One way would be to simply like ping you randomly throughout the day and say, how do you feel? Right? Plot your mood on a chart, you know, four, seven, one, whatever. And you just add all that up and basically

that's kind of how happy you are. There's another way of doing it which is you actually ask people broadly speaking, how happy are you? How satisfied you are with your life? And those can produce different results. And I find that sort of fascinating. This equation apparently also tried to take some measure of that into effect. Or maybe it was a different paper, but it was this idea of, they were calling it eudaemonic versus hedonic happiness, right? Hedonic meaning moments of pleasure, eudaemonic meaning overall broad satisfaction. And I just always think about how you measure those two things. And there's a lot of debate

about which is the right method. Yeah, that's nice though. It's interesting that trying to decompose happiness. It's such a vast word with so many meanings that it makes it that that's a good start I think on decomposing. You say, okay, right, moment to moment pleasure and then a sense of life satisfaction and you're kind of the narrative you're telling about your life. But I'm sure you could decompose it into many more elements than that. Exactly. I mean, like no equation solves us as a human, right? It's just, it's not possible. You mentioned children earlier, and that's another one of these weird findings is they

find that if you measure moment to moment happiness, most parents will end up with a net negative when they have children. But if you're measuring meaning and purpose and overall fulfillment and satisfaction, people will say they will rate children much higher than that. And so it's sort of this like what we think we're experiencing versus what we're telling ourselves we're experiencing or the story that we're putting on it, which are not separate from each other. Right. They're intertwined in complicated ways. Yeah. Yeah, I may be misremembering this, but I think another study along similar lines was that if you ask parents of young children,

how are you doing? How satisfied are you? You get one answer. But if you want a higher answer, you just first ask them, how are your kids doing? Okay. They talk about their kids for a minute and then they say, okay, now how are you doing? Interesting. And just activating that different side of what they're thinking about this. It's hard to say because I've read about this for a lot of psychology studies in the last 20 years of now having trouble replicating and how do this effects generalize. But they still give, I think, nice illustrations of intuitive effects sometimes. That's one I can vouch for that as a parent of young kids. If you ask me, sort of how's my mood compared

to before I had kids, like, you know, day to day, probably a little rockier. But if you start getting me talking about my kids and then ask me, it's like, oh, I'm going to be glowing. Exactly. Right. It's a priming effect to some degree, right? It's what it's bringing to your mind. My version of this that I would play, and this is a story I tell often that I kind of go back to just because it was so illustrative, right, was me complaining that when the boys were like middle school age about every single day driving them to some sporting event, one or the other of them, and finding myself saying like, I have to

do that, I have to do that. And then finally, ultimately realizing I didn't have to do it, I was choosing to do it. But I think a version of the study would have been, would be to ask me, like, what's your son get out of soccer? You know, or how much does your son like soccer? And I would have answered that question, then you would have said, like, well, how do you feel about driving him to soccer? And I'd have been like, I feel great about it, right? Like, it just would have reset my mind in a direction of something that matters, which is honestly a lot of what the mental psychological game is, is how

do you sort of move your mind from here to over to here? Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think something I find from writing about math and then putting it in contrast with lots of more human social topics or the social sciences and philosophy is that math always gives us this vision of simplicity and singularity and very straightforward things you can define. And those are useful, but you need multiple lenses like that. You've got to move between different models because we are so much weirder and more complex than that. We've each got a city inside our minds of these different selves. And so how do you coordinate them and lead them? How do you get them to agree on goals? It helps to adopt a simplified lens for a little bit, but precisely because it's only for a little bit. So listener, in thinking about all that and the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate

just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Not your top 10, not the top 5, just one. What is it? Think about it. Got it? Now I ask you what's one tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing you can do today to put it in practice? Or maybe just take a baby step towards it. Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot.

Profound change happens as a result of aggregated tiny actions, not massive heroic effort. If you're not already on our Good Wolf Reminder SMS list, I'd highly recommend it as a tool you can leverage to remind you to take those vital baby steps forward. You can get on there at oneufeed.net slash SMS. It's totally free and once you're on there I'll send you a couple text messages a week with little reminders and nudges. Here's one I recently shared to give you an idea of the type of stuff I send. Keep practicing even if it seems hopeless. Don't strive for perfection, aim for consistency and no matter what keep showing up for

yourself. That was a great gem from recent guest Light Watkins. And if you're on the fence about joining remember it's totally free and easy to unsubscribe. If you want to get in, I'd love to have you there. Just go to onufeed.net slash SMS. All right, back to it. Knowing when a broad principle of well-being or happiness or whatever will serve you, even of parenting, anything will serve you. like, okay, that's useful. And then also recognizing when it's like, okay, that sort of applies, but I have to trust myself that that's not useful here anymore.

Ultimately trusting ourselves. You and I are gonna continue for a few minutes in the post-show conversation because I have realized I cannot get away without knowing about Professor Dog. That's Professor Dog, you in which calculus vaults a dog to stardom. So you and I are going to cover that in the post-show conversation. We may also talk about how mathematics makes us want to quantify everything, which we've

been doing for the last 15 minutes, trying to quantify happiness or expectations or put a number on everything. And, you know, what are some of the costs of that? So listeners if you would like access to the post-show conversation we're about to have if you like ad free episodes as well as a special episode I do each week where I share a song I love I teach you something useful based on the show Then you can go to one you feed dotnet slash join and become part of our community. Ben, thank you so much. This was really fun.

I've enjoyed being in the math world a little bit for the last week and diving into your world a little bit. It's always hard when we have mathematicians, which we've never done before, but I have had visual artists on before whose drawings are a big part of what they do, and obviously we couldn't do that here. So I will make a call out for listeners which is his books are much better with the drawings than they may have sounded in you know in our dry discussion. So his latest book is Math for English Majors, a

Human Take on the Universal Language. Thank you, Ben. Yeah, thanks so much, Eric. I really appreciate the conversation. consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. We are so grateful for the members of our community, we wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to OneYouFeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

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