The "Happy Life" Scientist: How To FINALLY Beat Stress, Worry & Uncertainty! Dacher Keltner | E219

life expectancy's been declining yeah the last few years how do we reverse that Trend these are the five safest things to do Dr Decker 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 like they need food and they live they gained 47 weight gain you know the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people 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 that karma is a very real thing it's very real

that'll save eight ten years of life you've got to find a few moments just to be kind are we worst people the Richer and more powerful we've 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 to vagus nerve which is part of compassion well-to-do people less activation the wealthier you are the more you navigate it for serious economic policies that hurt the poor Jesus and this is where it gets really works then I just want to start this episode with a

message of thanks a thank you to everybody that Tunes in to listen to this podcast by doing so you've enabled me to live out my dream but also for many members of our team to live out their dreams too it's one of the greatest privileges I could never have dreamed of or imagined in my life to get to do this to get to learn from these people to get to have these conversations to get to interrogate them from a very selfish perspective trying to solve problems I have in my life so I feel like I

owe you a huge thank you for being here and for listening to these episodes and for making this platform what it is can I ask you a favor I can't tell you how much you can change the course of this podcast the the course of the guests were able to invite to the show and to the course of everything that we do here just by doing one simple thing and that simple thing is hitting that subscribe button helps this channel more than I could ever explain the guests on this platform are incredible because so many

of you have hit that button and I know when we think about what we want to do together over the next year on this show a lot of it is going to be fueled by the amount of you that are subscribed in that tune in to this show every week so thank you let's keep doing this I can't wait to see what this year brings for this show for us as a community and for this platform [Music] could you start by giving me your professional academic resume uh wow well that it begins early with my

parents who were you know 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 you know all kinds of things about the human mind um and then I was at UC Santa Barbara as an undergraduate and then went to Stanford for PhD subsequent to that worked with Paul Ekman as a postdoc who's kind of a Pioneer in the study of facial expression uh and inspiration for the show lie to me and then became a professor uh Wisconsin

uh 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 reference at a greater good science center yeah what's the what's the mission of the greater good science center yeah thanks for asking you know um 20 years ago uh post 911 um you know we were in a world much like post Trump and uh Boris Johnson and others you know like

are we are we fragmented what happened to humanity um what happened to community um why are life expectancies in the United States dropping the last two years what's going on right so I saw that yeah striking right really disturbing um 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 um 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 inactionable Pros where you read it and you say oh I could teach breathing to my my medical team or I could teach an aw walk to my neighborhood friends uh that would be good for the world you know I'm super compelled by that thank you the Great's a good science center can you let's talk about some of the things that you've 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 yeah about breathing and all walks and um how you can add 10 years to your life yeah what give me some of the top line um 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 um you know teaching medical doctors residents uh helping programmatically with kind of the spirit of hospitals and the like um I talk about uh 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 um you know I teach the work on compassion that you know 65 year olds who practice altruism and compassion uh have greater life expectancy

um you know 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 you know 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 the this part of your brain the prefrontal cortex which helps you handle stress what is all for someone yeah Oz 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 I think I like the word mystery uh you know wow who I can't figure this out and and then that emotion of awe stimulates Wonder right like how do I why do people 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 um positive net impact on humans of experiencing or other than because when I think of ore I think of going to like Machu Picchu

and seeing those big mountains yeah what the hell is this this is insane and I think of that as being like a memory oh that's fun that's amazing I take the picture yeah put it on my Instagram get the likes go home yeah but there's something deeper going on right 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 always lower class or he's 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 show they share the big moments of like I was at the Grand Canyon or I was in the Lake District or by this Cathedral um but in point of fact you know there are a lot of ways in which we feel awe all the time right uh 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 a 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 his five pounds put it towards the charity and for all of us it went into our like company chat that that 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 yeah yeah and that's amazing it's very incredible isn't it it is incredible that I wasn't there I've just got the chills myself just yeah just saying you have the chills it's just giving me this it's amazing and that we don't understand scientifically the contagious power of chills and all but you know all it 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 and the Train the beautiful clouds a piece of music a visual design you know driving here to your studio all the incredible design of London it's around us um and so it's there every day and you know Stephen I I'm not a uh 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 calm stress regions of your brain talked about inflammation it reduces inflammation activates the vagus nerve which is this bundle of nerves the 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 old 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 assertion where yeah the science shows that every day or so like accessible or yeah the all that I could go get out in the street or that I could actively go practice after listening to this conversation yeah 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 our um when we started to get this picture of the health benefits of 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 um and you know one of my favorites uh that has compelling Health Data if you will is um a lot of people go for regular walks the UK is famous for its walking Traditions you know it's one of the great cultural strengths you know just paths

and you know and walks and you know Etc and and uh so we just added one element to people's regular walk uh and we called it the ah 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 look take a moment to look at small things look at the reflection on this cool mug then pan out and look at you know the vastness of where you are City or nature up at the

sky that was it right and that gets you into this ah mindset and our participants were 75 years old or older um 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 they all 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 and a lot of the studies of awe are really simple you know just watching all video share an off 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 all so 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 um the you know in 1978 I think Richard Dawkins published selfish Gene massive book right you know if you read that it's it the argument which is true is there we are the we have these genes that are replicating themselves through us we are these machines that replicate genes right uh and all of our characteristics are ways to do that and 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 you know we're just starting to discover you know around the world people share 40 to 50 percent of a resource with a stranger if asked just like as a default that's our intuition um we have neurophysiological systems like oxytocin parts of the brain and the vagus nerve which help us sacrifice and give we readily we are contagious in our feelings your story gave me the chills and then my chills bounced back to you and you got the chills so we're United and connected and now you know it

it the thinking is we're very Cooperative alongside violent and rapacious and the like and and Collective we're hyper Collective um we synchronize with each other physiologically we mimic each other we collaborate unlike any other primate we're that's just who we are it's probably our big strength um I think because in part um 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 it's so striking Stephen

I don't know if you've had in our experience in nature recently just being outdoors oh yeah I mean yeah so I went to 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 yeah but also whenever you get to 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 yeah 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 yeah because this because it's this it feels 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 right 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 weekend to be in nature and it was actually walking back to my cabin I looked up up for the first time and obviously when you're in the countryside yeah you get to see the stars in London you don't have that I'm not sure no 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 into 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 yeah 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 it's me yeah 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 when's the last time you looked at the sky right yeah I don't see it yeah and it's

powerful yeah the you know one of the paradoxical qualities of awe and and is this shift this transformation and sense of self that you're talking about and it's profound which is you know in the s in one of the early writing Traditions around awe which is spiritual journaling a lot of people early accounts of awe and the bhagavad-gita and Julian of Norwich and you know the great Christian writings almost every spiritual tradition the Buddha uh it's this like God I'm having this ecstatic ah mystical experience what's it like and they write about the uh the

self just like Vanishing you know psychedelics has a rich tradition of ego death in it Carl Sagan it has this great statement about space like yours like man when I think about the universe look at me I'm just asleep yeah yeah I'm a little speck of dust you know but the self is huge in our minds yeah and ah quiet said it puts it into perspective and what's striking Stephen which you know it took us a long time to figure this out scientifically is it actually feels liberating you know oh it's the you know what

when I'm stressed I remind myself of how insignificant I am because stress is often the like the um the like the Fatal decision to overestimate the significance of your 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 could feel myself getting a little bit stressed and I reminded myself of looking down on a plane yeah 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 to to think that this is the center of the universe in some respect I'm leading a movement of two million people yeah but whenever I go up in a plane and I look down I go nothing that I do is really math matters in a good way yeah it's funny because it's a paradox it's like I want to be empowered

and I want to think that I matter yeah but at the same time I I like to realize that I absolutely don't matter in any respect and I love saying this to people because it 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 you know in the 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 a couple of years but but that's what's great about I 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 Etc status you know all that obsessive stuff but man we have this great realm of transcendence that awe is part of that you know in our studies you know we we literally we took students up to the tower on the UC Berkeley campus they got to look

out at the 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 and I hope you visited sometime that are beautiful and tall and make you feel like you know they're we have redwood trees that are a thousand years old you know that oh this little moment of Consciousness that is so self-critical or or stressed or or ego maniacal is 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 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 yeah is writing books is not easy yeah it takes a long time a lot of effort yeah to promote them Etc

why this book why now yeah thank you for asking that um yeah you know um 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 um 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 um adrift they're circing they're searching for something more meaningful than elevating a paycheck and and I

felt that awe was part of that story that all gets us to what is Meaningful to us is individuals at a moment in history um and then uh my younger brother died and he um he was 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 and uh he was my source of meaning in many ways in life um 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 I really only cared about like devoted his career to the least uh resource kids in the country these four poor kids and um when I was watching him die uh I had an awe experience I was like you know 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 uh afterward um I was knocked into a really profound state of grief where um this about five years ago uh I couldn't make sense of the world you know I could do my work um but I just did I was lost because he was a very important voice to me you know and I was waking up wasn't sleeping panicky and and I like a lot of people in grief I was like you

know hallucinating like I would see him follow a guy in the streets like and he wasn't him I'd wake up thinking he was there I felt his hand on my back a couple times and uh it was weird I was I had this Epiphany in this really bad State of Mind the worst I've ever felt like um I gotta 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 um and so I wrote the book you know and I 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 uh you know and so um 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 war again I did it it it it took a lot of work you know I was in a really tough place and uh you know I um 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 um 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 Joe barte and you know and here I was in the symphony not understanding it but starting to feel it um you know nature is 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 why mystical also 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 uh and it opened my mind to a lot of new sources of awe there's almost an injustice I had 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 or or you know the universe being uh compassionate or fair or whatever

and that yeah yeah it hit me hard you know it was uh and that's what I 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 his with a teenage daughter and a young family come on you know come on and Donald Trump is you know indestructible and you're like the world is [ __ ] you know and and I grappled with that uh 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 cert see searching for these things in music or moral beauty or being in collectives or Sports and I just threw myself into it and and uh and you know frankly um 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 whole question when you picked up this um mug the 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 participants do the walk and then sort of self-report I'm guessing on

how they felt yeah it sounded like nature also gives us a sense of sort of gratitude for our lives for the way we live in yeah what's the distinction or difference if there is one yeah what a terrific question and there's a deep philosophical tradition um of David David Hume Scottish philosopher um 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 oh you know connect to others to face fast mystery 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 that is key like oh my friend helped me with my work um my work colleague brought me lunch um you know my my child did the dishes tonight you know whoa I feel grateful

gratitude really close to awe as as you into it 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 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 music 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 oh something or chills it would be we do this live show for it's called the driver CEO 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 of about 40 people behind me for the whole two hours while I'm speaking and I mean [ __ ] Jesus yeah facing a lot of like just

songs as part of the message that I'm conveying and I mean every night I'm you know I'm crying it's funny because I rehearsed it I rehearsed it I practiced I practiced it but then with the people there the audience of 2500 people and the choir that 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 Ross gay says these boundaries between self and other become very porous you're like Whoa We are one organism that's awe vast and and I don't understand why gratitude is more you know you're at the show and you know somebody looks you in the eye and smiles and and you feel like they're grateful for

you it has this more readily understood economy to it almost or um and why you know in writing about awe um the 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 tracking like what are the what are the things you can count on you know and when I go out and

teach happiness um it's very humbling like you asked me in some sense um a related question to have a parent come up to me and say you know my son is massively depressed and suicidal what do I do you know 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 as a winner and I think Oz up there now too but you

know gratitude practicing gratitude uh benefits the cardiovascular system it helps people who have heart vulnerabilities patience they do better it is very good for your place in social networks like I join a group I'm I'm worried I'm socially anxious what do I do practice some gratitude you know say thank you and uh show a little appreciation of people you will have stronger social ties we did research showing it's good for romantic bonds you know the if Partners simply say on occasion like hey thanks for doing the dishes or I appreciate how you the jokes you

tell or I love your music selection it helps right so it's it's a safe bet for a happier life you know this I've come to learn that there's so many forces in our day-to-day lives that act against gratitude yeah and um 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 yeah 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 yeah so it's just a channel yeah and it's open there's really no instruction but it's funny that we 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 it's such a simple thing to do yeah but it creates this insane um um hard to understand amount of like connectiveness and appreciation yeah I imagine for the individual on the receiving end of the gratitude um a sense of like worthiness or or respect respect or mine yeah and it's such a small thing to do it is that

I think every company should consider which is having a system yeah to move gratitude friction free yeah across your organization yeah to back bind it together but in your purse 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 would it's great to also in a relationship have a system for yeah gratitude and what I love about your system Stephen you know I've taught gratitude in a lot of organizational contexts and sometimes

people force it like you know okay let's see what we're grateful to for each person in the in this you know this meeting 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 uh 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 Etc 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 um 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 this is something you've written about um extensively the the role that a romantic relationship plays in health outcomes etc etc but then I also was um I was pondering this idea of monogamy broadly yeah whether so my kind of question is kind of twofold is yeah are we meant to be monogamous yeah um and also this I'm thinking a lot about how the relationship Dynamics and Alchemy is changing in some in some ways uh 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 yeah what's your thoughts on all of that are we meant to be monogamous you've done a lot of research on apes and yeah you talked a lot about them in your in your work yeah 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 um you know and I

always approach things from an evolutionary framework you know which is humans are many different kinds of individuals right there's massive individual variation and when I um you know and there's cultural variation so some cultures will be less monogamous others more um yeah I think that I think that um the the safest answer we can offer and it's dispiriting and I teach it to my young students at Berkeley is you know I hate to tell you this but you're in love right now but odds are very good that that's not going to be the last relationship

you're in and so we tend to move from one semi-committed relationship to another um so serial monogamy or uh is 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 um my belief is um and and your generation is really bringing this to the fore which is that the old model of single monogamous relationship for 60 years uh probably is not working when you look at divorce rates 50 percent those people who stay together half of

those marriages are really pretty unhappy so it's it's not working you look at certain cultures I was struck Steven recently as you know the Scandinavians always do really well in happiness measures right and it's like and I just Google like you know what is the um is sort of living configuration romantic relationship configuration in Sweden Sweden has really high rates of people co-parenting but not living with the parent right and that may be a model to be not not living with a partner sorry um and so I think that we have many kinds of Love

uh one of them being a monogamous love um it it puts a lot of pressure to uh 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 and it comes with a lot of complexity so I when I teach love I say there are all these kinds of love right Walt Whitman love friendship you know I I mean friendship love and 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 know I understand yeah I understand so the I think this 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 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 forth about marriage because I understand some people say marriage is a A system that allows for the rearing of kids yeah um it's a it's a form of commitment which changes things in the relationship but the but I've always wondered if there's another way yeah that's more you know where which kind of I don't know 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 in church and all these things in the 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 gonna be wait I'm gonna do everything from physical exercise to streaming movies to cooking food with one person right um you know it's interesting Stephen um the 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 twenty years just to I even say like 55 years to you know to even be semi functioning as an individual but what that meant is love in our our hominid Evolution was distributed in communities right and there's this concept called aloe parenting which is we all kind of take care of young ones even if they're not our own we're all affectionately related to each other in that work we're all there's much more sexual 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 and maybe your generation is moving us toward that that sort of more communal approach to love uh of com 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 because you know when we think about polygamy or um popping polyamorous I don't know the difference going to be honest yeah they sound similar polygamy multiple wives polyamorous multiple people you love okay yeah so when we think about those Pollies

yeah um It seems impossible in the modern world yeah to execute a poly situation yeah without jealousy and all the other [ __ ] yeah and you know I grew up raised around hippies you know my parents were Counter Culture 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 who you're fighting over the dishes and I don't get to sleep with my wife tonight that's you know he gets my my roommate does ah

you know it's hard you know um yeah uh you know and a lot of things get in the way I think that you know I I forgive me but you know I think of the U.S and how much of United States culture is designed around you know the nuclear monogamous family of you know single homes suburbs driving in a car um you know really structured around that and 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 um and sharing and to a certain extent in romantic partnership so are you married yes you've been married for a long time yeah they're uh 90 I think it's 33 years wow geez yeah important context yeah some people might you know think that um you were like anti-marriage or anything like that but you're clearly I can see from the room in your face yeah but I grew up around a mom who you know she taught women's literature and feminism in the 70s 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 cost them in terms of job uh 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 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 and yeah what's more important yeah which a lot of people don't I've been in relationships before where you you don't hit the perfect like a social Cube to show up or give flowers or whatever and you get like a [ __ ] an essay

and you're you know a bad guy for that day but um okay Max 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 yeah yeah and how things change oh man oh are we worst people of richer and more powerful we become because your research seems to show that yeah I would say yes um and I'm

sorry to say that you know it's it's uh you know we um uh I got interested in social class um actually living in England you know I lived in England in 1978 um and the United States is very blind to social class we're now more aware of it Bernie Sanders Etc rightfully so one percent critique you know 80s 90s were just blind to it as a morgalitarian 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 and the English had this um 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 classes 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 ah gratitude empathy kindness sharing altruism and just you know across um studies and and you know largely in the United States I think you could question whether this applies to Holland or UK

or Japan where there there's less inequality I might add um you know as you rise in wealth and privilege you share a less you feel less compassion to images of suffering you know you see an image this was a striking study to me of you know it's a movie about a child who has cancer and poorer people show activation of the vagus nerve which is part of compassion you know causes you to like want to help well-to-do people less activation uh 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 the class I you know I I hesitate I worry about like in my worst person and I you 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 in wealth and privilege in class is introduce you create a life that makes it harder to be kind you know that you're people are assisting you with things and um 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 um Stephen I you know I think this is increasingly true in the UK but in the United States uh you know with one in six people impoverished uh life expectancy's dropping you know six seven hundred thousand 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 I

think it's our Central failure in the U.S 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 and less empathetic less compassionate or it's just [ __ ] go further yeah yeah there's a distinction there like maybe these people were always [ __ ] and that's why they became successful or rich or wealthy or whatever or or in a higher social class yeah I I mean they're too and that's a critical question right and and

people have long championed this idea that well maybe all of this what it really tells us is you you 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 um people who practice empathy who listen and and share resources practice gratitude rise in the ranks they they do better in social hierarchies and that replicates in a lot of contexts and

and really what happens is is this is why I call it the power paradoxes once I have everybody's respect and you know wealth and the like then it I tend to misbehave right in the ways we've talked about through a lot of different uh uh 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 you can actually move people around where you give them the sense that they're privileged and it tends to undermine these these Tendencies Jesus I know it is and you know um I worry about it I worry about it a lot what um you know the 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 it's

uh problematic it's interesting because there is there's kind of a long um prevailing stereotype that rich people are like bad like yeah less compassionate um less empathetic and I and I always wondered whether that was just I don't know was it true was it um was it was it people being jealous was it um just too much of a broad generalization was that you know based on the acts of maybe a few yeah but you're telling me that the science supports the fact that generally the more the Richer you are and the how you are

in terms of social class and the less compassionate less empathetic you are as a human yeah you know and it is that 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 Jesus um you know one this is one of my favorites is you know in these um these epidemiologists who are studying broad Trends and social behavior discovered this accidentally they're interested in whose 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 picture the poor well you know what who I do 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 Krauss did really nice work on U.S senators and U.S policy makers 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 produ you preferred and advocated for you know serious economic policies that hurt the poor and benefit the well to do who already have you know in the US the one percent 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 it's I think it's one of the you know frankly Stephen and I hate to say it you know Lord Acton uh you know power leads to abuse and absolute power absolute corruption our power is corrupting um 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 yeah I think most of the time you're talking which

is like how do you avoid that how do you avoid yeah how do you avoid the uh that scientifically supported tendency to become an [ __ ] with with the more wealth and power you accrue um I guess my my assumption was just being conscious of the fact yeah the first thing yeah but also just like there's probably act things you could do actively to remain uh uh aware of your own insignificance maybe not the word yeah 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 Etc um how do I counteract my own biases then as well so yeah how do I put you 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 right 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 of the structure of our societies today it's this this increasingly unequal distribution of privilege and wealth and all that goes with it to people that are wealthy and in higher social class live longer because I say that because

the the attributes are becoming less empathetic and rude around these things seem to be the antithesis of Social connectedness and yeah all of these things and you even said earlier that you know wealthier people experience less all yeah and all of those things are um uh are associated with living longer yeah so one would assume that if you become rich and Powerful you're 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 um and I think your reasoning is right on the point

which is wow you have less friends right privilege knocks out these these these important tendencies that help with inflammation and vagal tone and the like um rich people do live longer um that's right yeah yeah and food you eat and so forth sure um you know opportunity for health you know yoga all the things that benefit us um uh rich people this is interesting um 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 resource Etc 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 U.S like um 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 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 overcome 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 as some of you will know Intel have been sponsoring this podcast for a little while now and this makes the search for high spec laptops super easy because all you have

to do is look for the Intel Evo badge and you'll have everything you need the thing that's great about the Intel Evo platform is that you still have so much choice and that's key for me there are now over a hundred designs that have been Intel Evo certified so you can quite literally find the perfect laptop for you amongst that vast selection now I've got two in front of me here one is the Samsung Galaxy book 360 which rotates over 360 degrees and is amazing for things like teen presentations meetings and Etc also really great

for keeping podcast notes on when you're sat with a guest but I personally use the Dell XPS because it's lightweight super lightweight and its battery lasts for over 9 hours even while you have multiple tabs open which helps to to stay at the pace that I run out in my day-to-day life so to find out more and get your hands on your own Intel Evo laptop head over to intel.co.uk Evo right now let me know how you get on I've now been a cool Drinker for about four years roughly so much so that I ended

up investing in the company um and I play a role on the board of the company but they also very kindly sponsor this podcast and to be honest I've never said this before but he all believed in this podcast before anybody else the CEO Julian um told me before we even launched the podcast how successful it would be and that Hill would back it and I absolutely have a huge amount of gratitude for them for that support but an even greater sense of gratitude for the fact that they've helped me stay nutritionally complete throughout the

chaos and hecticness of my tremendously busy business schedule so if you haven't tried out here which I hope most of you have at least given it a go by now try it out it's an unbelievable way to try and stay nutritionally on course if you have a hectic busy schedule and let me know what you think send me a tweet and a DM tag me let me know what you think back to the podcast you talked about how life expectancy's been declining in the last few years why yeah you know in the United States um

and I don't know the data in the UK um and and it's um it's 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 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 you know work

is uncertain and they and they feel disrespected in some sense and those that subculture in the U.S 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 um that probably is part of this story too too much stress

too much loneliness um not enough music and joy and shared communal experience um we are struggling um and 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 kind of processes and saying how do we build community you know and they're they've got a big program now so it is alarming and that statistic is important for I think thinking about where we are I looked at the life expectancy on Google a couple of years ago and

I I could see that it was basically going up every single year yeah and then there was these two years I think it might have been last year the year before this was I think before the pandemic um there was these two years where it had dropped both in the UK and the US yeah in a row yeah um and I was trying to understand why that was and I heard some social commentators say that there's this epidemic of purposelessness yeah yeah and describe that as leading to the opioid crisis but also suicides and all

these other behaviors yeah um is that is that a good way to in your in your view to Define it like this epidemic of purposelessness yeah it is you know thanks for bringing that up and you know purpose a lot of people now call it meaning yeah 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

um 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 um you know we we know well uh 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 um 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 the approaches to happiness that 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 went to Father how would you answer that question uh which question what are you devoted to I'm devoted to so many things I'm devoted to this this this podcast in the show for so many reasons for very selfish reasons but those selfish reasons happen to be selfless yeah a lot you see what I mean like yeah 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 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 fight 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 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 for doing that because I needed I needed the reminder I feel like you need the reminders sometimes often I'm devoted to my relationship with my partner my dog my family yeah um my team and I'm I'm devoted to myself I'm devoted to like my my um 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 um the the yeah probably answer this in the first piece but the the greater good of like the collective so yeah you know um yeah and you know it's so interesting you know Stephen one of the reasons that I got really excited about awe as an emotion to study a brief state that you you know you go out and you see the the moment of generosity that you saw or look at the sky or you know think about a big idea the idea of

space or Infinities 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 oh you're less interested in money you're less focused on the self and you're you're really more focused on the greater good like what how do my actions promote healthier societies um and and I think that um you know a lot of of young people are raising questions of meaning right now with climate crises and economic inequality the state of democracy like what is the point you know

when you know you think about conversations from the last century in the centuries before you know in reading for all people would use words like the soul yeah and spirit and like this is what I'm really about in life uh and we've lost sight of that you know and so hopefully with this book people how 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 young generation Millennials and yeah gen Z they all want to change the world

yeah now they don't necessarily know what they want to change yeah 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 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 like they don't know they don't know but they want to be involved in changing the world yeah 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 yeah yeah 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 60s 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 tunberg right suddenly new model and it's 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 yeah making us this like one Connected Mind yeah and we know from our sort of evolutionary past that we we prefer members of the the true tribe that are that serve the tribe that

are good yeah you know that are I think there's a there's a term you use when we're talking when you're talking about gossip um 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 and 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 comments or likes whatever or you know everyone collapse and I feel part of the tribe yeah so is social media made us these philanthropic Warriors that are seeking for ways to like virtually signal our goodness yeah you know I I mean there's one argument in 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 you have a lot of non-profits 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 uh levied against the digital virtue is like it's I it you could say it's meaningless let's take that hypothesis right oh we 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 um how much that misses the point in many respects yeah if we're trying to deal with systemic racism yeah posting a black tile on a Tuesday really does nothing to um address and evoke the conversation that needs to be had yeah 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 PA practices or school admissions it

is BS and it's a and and probably counter works against social progress I had a call during that time from one of the biggest brands in the world who who asked me on a conference call um there's five of them what should we do you know we need do we 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 um race relations and inequality I think it's it's better not to be the contradictions 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 so 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 struggled to understand if I'm honest yeah because like what does it mean does it mean being nice to people no you know um compassion is um the feeling of concern about other people's suffering okay and and then taking action right uh 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 want to I want to make your circumstances better I want to lift up your your well-being um so it's interesting um 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 considered I think we uh we need more niceness in the world and I think we often I think the connotations of the word nice uh 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 um and what's striking about it and and I love the neurophysiology of this and that the 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 um and that's why you know when the Dalai Lama um 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 improve it's amazing you know and it 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 us to help somebody or 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 um if I am kind to You Stephen um this is kind of extending from the study uh 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 they're proving that yeah and really nice research on the contagiousness of altruism and compassion um yeah it is like gratitude it's one of these big Winners you know if I there's a loving kindness practice where 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 and body and mind at ease and happy and that

simple practice two minutes right uh just calms the amygdala threat related region of the brain activates reward circuitry so you know um 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 the one of the real startling things is the the power of touch yeah I read

I read um that if you pat a kid on the back in the classroom that child is three to four 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 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 um 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 uh and 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 um you know you have premature babies they're gonna die and and they used to just put them in these little you know um 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 gotta hold the premature baby they needed skin to skin contact like they need food right and they live they gain 47 weight gain um and then you know they're they're just studies time and time

again you know nice uh lower cortisol uh nice Embrace with somebody elevated vagal tone um the studies that you referred to of you know patting kids on the back they they do better in school um 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 touches sexual it's you got to get it and it is but only certain kinds of tetosexual there's a lot of friendly touch we need right and it just shut it down and now it's coming back it's uh

thank goodness it's it's good for us we we talked before we start filming about the study with the Recess Monkeys yeah I can't remember that through who the researcher was but yeah I was saying to that Harlow Harlow that was it yeah um 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 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 defrive those monkeys of the nice touch they they don't learn how to behave socially effectively you know if you give them a choice between a wire uh monkey mother and that provides milk and then a terry cloth one they always hang around the terry cloth one right they just love the social contact if you deprive non-human primates of touch they they are almost schizophrenic or Psychopathic or they're just like personality disorder aggressive they can't handle social

interactions you know orphans deprived of touch famous orphan studies you know in human 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 you know I mean part of the questioning of that you're engaging in Stephen or the literature is like well what can I do just to live a more meaningful life and you know from gratitude to kindness to find some ah 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 at 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 it's Unique to the court right you're 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 but if I'm touching a dog yeah I mean dogs evolved yeah 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 uh which is

this little chemical that floats in your brain in 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 Steven where if you look into the eyes of your dog you your dog will have a surge of oxytocin and you will have a surge of oxytocin so so it's like all of this social stuff that's so simple of eye contact and touch uh 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 Hub where you like on the back you know like we Pat them in the back and say get the [ __ ] off me um we're we're less good at even things like eye contact yeah 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 think 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 they really need Fields like they need to be a reversal of that yeah the adjacent point is it 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 um it needed to hear the most but then asking me what they can actionably do to fix that yeah as if they don't want the 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 yeah the fact that we're getting lonelier and lonelier yeah yeah I mean those are such deep insights um and uh really worth thinking more concretely about what to do I think that the you know kind of the the gender complexities here are really striking right men live significantly fewer years than women in most western globalized cultures and and I think you're on a really interesting hypothesis Steven which is that you know if the gender stereotypes and these rigid Concepts and then The Lies We lead don't allow us to hug and feel grateful and feel

empathetic it countervails that and they're those are gender stereotypes right oh if I practice compassion at work I'll be weak and I won't rise that's not true that's a gender stereotype and it it denies men um disproportionately this opportunity for these emotions right and that's that you know with new conceptions of gender new ideas about work is changing dramatically uh that will shift and I think it'll be good news for the health of men um and and then loneliness um 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 um 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 you know if 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 and sort of shunting them off alone but the but these emotions point to really direct actionable things to do right with awe 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 gotta build them back in and if

we do it's good for not just ourselves but it's good for the recipients of those emotions you know hugging hugging my dad or hugging my mom or hugging anybody is is a mutually beneficial um behavior in terms of all the you know life expectancy happiness reduction in stress and not only that but you know I just heard 50 of U.S 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 it's

it there's a bottom line that's really relevant here too and then the the really the the bit I imagine a lot of people will especially those that I'm 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 of some person or Express that gratitude or compassion it has this sort of cascading knock-on effect yeah 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 con concept of Gossip where how you treat someone will 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 yeah which is you know which is slightly terrifying but it's but it makes sense um yeah you know it's in part of our theme in our conversation is how we're all connected and United in these these super organisms some people call them through practicing gratitude and sharing resources that spreads through uh these social networks and then the the

compliment is also true which is you know and 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 and we've got to worry about it like online cat fights and ah that it escalates but we study these social groups and and the thing that people really gossip about is when you're not kind right they're like look at what that that person 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 a brilliant time over the last week learning more and more about all of your work and reading and watching your your content in great detail this book is absolutely fantastic um it's very challenging but it's this this concept of all 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 yeah I've almost never heard someone talk

about the topic of all 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 said 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 Stephen 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 huh okay funny um the question that's been left for you is do you think obesity is a choice [Laughter] um it's a terrific question right and obesity is I think in the U.S I think the latest estimate's 56 of U.S citizens probably pretty comparable here in the UK um 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 us 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 policy makers so I would make that argument and there is some sort of three lines between the conversation we've had today about stress connectedness and all of those things very much yes to food and diet and anything which is again social constructs and and access to Art um 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 uh there's a movement in the united in California that everybody should be 10 minutes public transport away from a park for free um 360 million people uh 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 they're easy solutions and one and one pathways through being outdoors with all I want to close in just on that point about yeah

a sort of an adjacent Point 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 um prisoners who had a exposure to nature yeah were significantly less likely to become depressed than those that were like basically looking out at concrete yeah um which is mind-blowing to me it is the thought that just seeing nature can have a massive impact on our our chances of depression and anxiety yeah do we need to put more of

that stuff in prison sir 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 uh different recidivism rates so I take from this science and I'm really grateful to you for profiling it you know in such a uh uh scholarly and thoughtful way like we got to use this knowledge and prisons is a nice application

but even in our own homes yeah 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 yeah 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 she's filled my house with with plants but yeah that's a simple thing we

can all do to be happier every day is just have a bit more nature and our in our environment it's not a bad First Step okay thank you so much thank you Steven it's been an honor and a pleasure foreign from one of our sponsors I've got a tip for all of you that will make your virtual meeting experiences I think 10 times better as some of you may know by now Blue Jeans by Verizon offers seamless high quality video conferencing but the reason why I use blue jeans versus other video conferencing tools is because

of immersion their tools make you feel more connected to the employees or customers you're trying to engage with and now they're launching one of their biggest feature enhancements to impact virtual events so far called Blue Jean Studio I actually used it the other day I did a virtual event using the studio which I think about 700 of you came to TV level production quality all done by one person with very little technical experience on a laptop so if you've got an event coming up and you're thinking about doing it virtually check out blue jean studio

now let me know what you think because I genuinely believe I know this is an advert and I'm supposed to say this but I genuinely believe it's the best tool I've seen for doing really immersive simple but high quality production virtual events [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]