Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Thanks to everyone who listened to the most recent season
Speaker 2: of The Happiness Lab, which was all about the well
Speaker 2: being challenges that I struggle with most. I've learned a
Speaker 2: lot from making that series, but I got to admit
Speaker 2: at times it was pretty hard. I know it's healthy
Speaker 2: to be vulnerable and talk about your problems, but it's
Speaker 2: often easier said than done, which is exactly what I'll
Speaker 2: be discussing on this week's episode with my dear colleague,
Speaker 2: the Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist ta mark Endler. I'm
Speaker 2: guessing you've probably heard Tamorro and The Happiness Lab before.
Speaker 2: In the past, we've talked about what famous philosophers like
Speaker 2: Socrates and Aristotle said about happiness. But as my close friend,
Speaker 2: Tamar also had lots of interesting ideas about the problems
Speaker 2: I decided to tackle in the last season.
Speaker 1: So when Tomorrow and I were.
Speaker 2: Invited to give a joint talk at the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: four International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut,
Speaker 2: we thought, why not reflect.
Speaker 1: On what we've both learned from these personal shows.
Speaker 2: The first of Little Arts and Ideas kindly allowed us
Speaker 2: to share our conversation, so now you can listen to
Speaker 2: I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much to all of you who are
Speaker 3: joining us here. It really feels like we are among friends.
Speaker 3: But one of the things you may or may not
Speaker 3: know is that, in addition to being professional colleagues who've
Speaker 3: done a lot of work together, Laurie and I are
Speaker 3: actually very close friends. And in fact, we're such close
Speaker 3: friends that we often finish one another's sentences. So what
Speaker 3: we want to do today is actually have a conversation
Speaker 3: with you that's much more intimate and personal than we
Speaker 3: have ever done before in a public setting. Everything that
Speaker 3: we say to one another is going to be in
Speaker 3: warmed by the academic research that we do. But our
Speaker 3: goal in speaking before you today is really to give
Speaker 3: some autobiographical information about our own experiences, our own struggles,
Speaker 3: and our own challenges. And Laurie has set the tone
Speaker 3: for doing this with her recent podcast.
Speaker 2: The Happiness Lab is my podcast where I talk about
Speaker 2: so many things in the science of happiness. We focused
Speaker 2: on lots of different topics, but just this summer we
Speaker 2: started a new season. It's a whole season about the
Speaker 2: happiness challenges that I face personally, and this is a
Speaker 2: spot where you might be saying, like wait a minute,
Speaker 2: hang on, Like I signed up really early for this
Speaker 2: event to talk to a happiness expert.
Speaker 1: How is the happiness expert.
Speaker 2: So messed up when it comes to having a challenges
Speaker 2: like you know, did I not train?
Speaker 1: Like what's going on?
Speaker 2: And it turns out that that's in part because I'm human, right,
Speaker 2: we all struggle with happiness challenges. But it also comes
Speaker 2: about do I to A kind of funny puzzle that
Speaker 2: comes up in cognitive science is actually a puzzle that
Speaker 2: Tomorrow and I have written about.
Speaker 1: I believe it was.
Speaker 3: In fact, I think it was our first paper that
Speaker 3: we ever wrote together. And it's basically about how it
Speaker 3: is possible to have theoretical knowledge and lack practical knowledge.
Speaker 3: So there's a great tradition in ancient Greek philosophy of
Speaker 3: distinguishing between knowledge of abstract things, a kind of theoretical
Speaker 3: wisdom which goes by various names, a knowledge of practical things,
Speaker 3: of how to flourish, of how to live, which is
Speaker 3: in certain parts of the Greek tradition called phronesis practical wisdom.
Speaker 3: And what's interesting about practical wisdom is that it comes
Speaker 3: about through different sorts of activities than theoretical wisdom does.
Speaker 3: And so Laurie and I were at the late Great
Speaker 3: La Fitness, who belonged to La Fitness in Hamden, right
Speaker 3: near the Stop and shop. So we were at La
Speaker 3: or La Fitness, engaging in bodily exercise, and I was
Speaker 3: talking to Laurie about this ancient philosophical tradition and basically
Speaker 3: telling her how in ancient Greek philosophy there's a distinctionion
Speaker 3: roughly between book smarts and street smarts.
Speaker 4: And Laurie said, oh, my.
Speaker 3: God, did you know there's also an eighties television show
Speaker 3: about that? And of course I did not know there
Speaker 3: was an eighties television show because I grew up with
Speaker 3: parents who bought a TV to watch Nixon resign and
Speaker 3: then put it away.
Speaker 4: But it was that eighties.
Speaker 3: Television show, which Laurie will describe, that gave us the
Speaker 3: idea for the first joint paper that we wrote, which
Speaker 3: is about why Laurie, even though she's the world's happiness expert,
Speaker 3: is still having trouble making it work in her life.
Speaker 2: Anybody who want to guess to get guess what the
Speaker 2: eighties TV show was, it was actually Gi Joe.
Speaker 1: It was eighties cartoon.
Speaker 2: To be fair, why is the Gijo television show about
Speaker 2: this disconnect between kind of head knowledge and street knowledge?
Speaker 2: If you remember the g I Joe? How many you
Speaker 2: have actually seen the g I Joe TV show? Okay,
Speaker 2: we're seeing some hands some of you. Some of you
Speaker 2: are a little older than eighties TV shows.
Speaker 1: That's cool. Some of you are a little younger.
Speaker 2: They're like, So g I Jo was the show with
Speaker 2: a bunch of like army guys who did kind of
Speaker 2: army guy heroic things. But it's most famous for how
Speaker 2: each cartoon episode ended. It ended some of you're not
Speaker 2: It ended with this public service announcement which taught kids
Speaker 2: really important things in the eighties, like don't talk to
Speaker 2: strangers or look both ways when you cross your street.
Speaker 1: It was really basic stuff.
Speaker 2: But Gi Jo would explain this big public service message
Speaker 2: to their kids and the kids would say, thank you,
Speaker 2: g I Joe.
Speaker 1: Now I know, and g I Jo would say and
Speaker 1: knowing is half the battle, and go gi Joe, Now
Speaker 1: that's all.
Speaker 2: I would be like, oh, now I remember. But this
Speaker 2: was the catchphrase, Knowing is half the battle. When you
Speaker 2: know a thing, you're most of the way there, and
Speaker 2: what tomorrow I wrote in our you know now pretty
Speaker 2: well known. I think paper is the idea that that
Speaker 2: statement knowing is half the battle is a fallacy, one
Speaker 2: that we've christened the g I Joe fallacy.
Speaker 1: Knowing is not half the battle, right, you know? Take
Speaker 1: take my fitness.
Speaker 2: I know what I should be eating, I know I
Speaker 2: should get to the gym all the time.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean I do it right.
Speaker 2: We know so many things about the stuff that we
Speaker 2: should be doing, but that doesn't translate into the practical
Speaker 2: doing those things. And this is what I feel like
Speaker 2: I'm struggling with a little bit when it comes to
Speaker 2: the happiness science. Obviously I know about this stuff, right,
Speaker 2: I teach an Ivy League institution, all these tips and
Speaker 2: strategies that we should be using to feel better and
Speaker 2: protect our mental health and so on. But it's still
Speaker 2: really hard to put those strategies into practice. And so
Speaker 2: this is what we wanted to get intimate about today.
Speaker 2: Does that sound good a reason to it?
Speaker 4: Not that, right?
Speaker 3: So one of the really cool things about the GI
Speaker 3: Joe fallacy is that it's self referential. It applies to itself.
Speaker 3: So I traced it through the entire Western philosophical tradition,
Speaker 3: all the places where somebody had noticed this.
Speaker 4: The Gi Joe fallacy is true of itself.
Speaker 3: The fact that we know that knowing is less than
Speaker 3: half the battle doesn't mean that we thereby assimilate that
Speaker 3: knowledge into our behavior. And the key challenge of flourishing
Speaker 3: in the ancient philosophical tradition of the West, in Greece
Speaker 3: and Rome, and I would say the key challenge of
Speaker 3: flourishing and happiness in contemporary cognitive science discourse is the
Speaker 3: question of how you speak, how you train, how you
Speaker 3: control the aspects of yourself that are not subject to
Speaker 3: rational control.
Speaker 4: It's really easy.
Speaker 3: To understand the Gi Joe fallacy. It's really easy to
Speaker 3: listen to Laurie's podcast. It's really easy to read a
Speaker 3: bunch of neuroscience articles, and doing that is less than
Speaker 3: half the battle. So a lot of ancient wisdom tradition
Speaker 3: work in Western philosophy, things like Plato and Aristytle, are
Speaker 3: actually about how you make things stick in a way
Speaker 3: that you have them present at the moment that matters
Speaker 3: in lots of ways. The challenge of understanding in a
Speaker 3: practical sense is the challenge of having the thought that
Speaker 3: you want to have the reaction that you want to
Speaker 3: have ready to hand at the moment that you needed
Speaker 3: You can do all the rehearsing you want of staying
Speaker 3: calm in the face of things that enrage you. And
Speaker 3: if that skill is not ready to hand at the
Speaker 3: moment where you are in a conversation with a loved
Speaker 3: one who says something painful to you, it has not
Speaker 3: properly served you. So the very first explicitly self help
Speaker 3: book was actually called the ready to handbook.
Speaker 4: It's a little book by.
Speaker 3: A philosopher named Epicteitis, was written about two thousand years ago.
Speaker 3: It was called in Greek the Enchiridion. What that means
Speaker 3: is handbook, ready to handbook. It was meant to give
Speaker 3: you a bunch of skills that would be available to
Speaker 3: you at the moment that you needed them. And what
Speaker 3: Laurie has been working on in the most recent aspect
Speaker 3: of her podcast is really a set of reflections on
Speaker 3: making things ready to hand. She's been focusing on five
Speaker 3: topics and what we want to try to do today
Speaker 3: is to get through at least three of them. We
Speaker 3: may make it to four, we may even we'll see
Speaker 3: not if I keep going on like this make it
Speaker 3: to five.
Speaker 4: But let me just let you know what.
Speaker 3: They are so that you have a sense of the
Speaker 3: issues that we want to discuss today. So the first
Speaker 3: is the topic of perfectionism and how we deal with
Speaker 3: expectations that we have for ourselves that are hard to meet.
Speaker 3: The second is the question about the relation between your
Speaker 3: present and future self. How do we rightly decide what
Speaker 3: we do now that will help us later, what we
Speaker 3: do now that will harm us later? How do we
Speaker 3: balance ourself across ten third is the issue of stress
Speaker 3: and how we represent it to ourselves and manage it.
Speaker 3: The fourth is the issue of busyness and how we
Speaker 3: manage in a world where we may feel over committed.
Speaker 3: The fifth, because this is arts and ideas and we
Speaker 3: don't want to shy away from the biggest ones, is
Speaker 3: the question of how we think about our own mortality
Speaker 3: and the ways in which reflecting on our own mortality
Speaker 3: can help us to live each moment of our non
Speaker 3: mortality as well as we can.
Speaker 4: So I want to start.
Speaker 3: By asking Laurie to say a few words about perfectionism.
Speaker 2: How many folks and audience think of themselves as a
Speaker 2: little perfectionists. A show of hands. I'm seeing a lot
Speaker 2: of hands. Okay, yeah, I mean I don't need to
Speaker 2: even explain, right, Like, I'm a type AIVY League professor
Speaker 2: who cares about a lot, and I set really high
Speaker 2: standards for myself. That's the way I say, in a
Speaker 2: kind way, Oh, I set high standards for myself. It
Speaker 2: sounds like the kind of thing you say in an
Speaker 2: interview when someone asks what's your worst trait and you say, oh,
Speaker 2: that sounds good. But the reality out of it inside
Speaker 2: is much different. The reality of it inside is that
Speaker 2: I'm incredibly self critical. It's really hard to figure out
Speaker 2: anything I do that feels like it's above bar right.
Speaker 2: Everything I do is like, well, I could have done
Speaker 2: that better, I know, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And that causes me to do a couple things that
Speaker 1: I don't like.
Speaker 2: When is it causes me to shy away from anything
Speaker 2: where I feel like I might screw up. Right, there's
Speaker 2: always like new hobbies or new cool things I want
Speaker 2: to try to be like, oh, I'm not gonna be
Speaker 2: good at that, and I kind of run away. It
Speaker 2: also means that I constantly feel kind of yucky because
Speaker 2: my internal monologue is this sort of terrible, mean drill
Speaker 2: sergeant who's kind of yelling at me all the time.
Speaker 2: And so even though it's kind of in some ways
Speaker 2: something that we get a little bit proud of, the
Speaker 2: person I interview for my episode, Thomas Kurrn says it's
Speaker 2: our society's favorite flaw, perfectionism. Like, it's actually something that
Speaker 2: makes me feel kind of crappy on a regular basis
Speaker 2: and something that I've wanted to fix.
Speaker 3: So I had a wonderful example of perfectionism hit me today.
Speaker 3: So I actually have to be in Denver tonight, and
Speaker 3: so right after this event, I'm going to go down
Speaker 3: to look Hard Airport and fly out. So while I
Speaker 3: am away, I have a house sitter who is a
Speaker 3: student who's probably going to listen to this podcast and
Speaker 3: hear this story. So I'm incredibly anxious that my house
Speaker 3: be super clean and organized, and I can't bear for
Speaker 3: her to open my fridge and not see the shelves
Speaker 3: perfectly polished. And for some reason, I got obsessed this
Speaker 3: morning with the fact that I had an extra head
Speaker 3: of ridicio in the fridge, which I had purchased it
Speaker 3: had been very expensive. I bought it at Nika's and
Speaker 3: I hadn't eaten it, and I literally called Laurie and said,
Speaker 3: could you come over before and ideas talk to take
Speaker 3: the ridicio so that I don't let it go to
Speaker 3: waste in my fridge in a way that is visible
Speaker 3: in this undergraduate research assistant who's going to be house sitting. Now,
Speaker 3: what's funny about that story is that both my anxiety
Speaker 3: and my instinctive reaction were due to a particular deep
Speaker 3: fact about human beings, which is what other people think
Speaker 3: of us matters to us. The philosopher Plato spoke of
Speaker 3: our soul as having three parts. He called them reason, spirit,
Speaker 3: and appetite. Reason is the part of you that responds
Speaker 3: to rational concerns and information and facts. Appetite is the
Speaker 3: part of you that basically responds to your need to
Speaker 3: keep going that's roughly food and procreation. And spirit is
Speaker 3: the part of you that responds to the social world
Speaker 3: around you. So Plato recognized that a deep segment of
Speaker 3: our motivation as human beings results from our desire to
Speaker 3: be judged affirmatively by others.
Speaker 4: And what's really.
Speaker 3: Cool is that just as that led to detriment this
Speaker 3: morning as I was anxiously polishing the coffee filter, polishing
Speaker 3: the coffee filter because I was sure that this lovely
Speaker 3: nineteen year old young woman must come from a home
Speaker 3: with a polished coffee filter, not with a dirty coffee
Speaker 3: written coffee filter.
Speaker 2: Shacsay had like coffee filters, I caro when I showed up,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, fixed this before we go on stage.
Speaker 1: Anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 3: I was so concerned with the gaze of another that
Speaker 3: I lost track of a lesson that Plato's student Aristotle
Speaker 3: puts forward, which is the idea that a friend can
Speaker 3: serve as a second self. Aristotle says, a friend is
Speaker 3: a second self. It magnet defies our joy and cuts
Speaker 3: in half our sorrow.
Speaker 4: So I want to.
Speaker 3: Let Laurie give you a sense of the science behind
Speaker 3: why the right thing for me to do when I
Speaker 3: was anxious about my ridicio was to reach out to
Speaker 3: someone else and say the shameful words.
Speaker 4: I bought a.
Speaker 3: Head of ridicuo at Nika's that I.
Speaker 4: Did not eat.
Speaker 2: The most sad thing was it because we were prepping.
Speaker 2: We actually didn't end up eating still in the fridge,
Speaker 2: but we're working on the grace that comes with that.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I think you know.
Speaker 2: Tomorrow pointed out that this issue of being worried about
Speaker 2: what other people think is part of human nature. But
Speaker 2: one of the things we also learned in the science
Speaker 2: is that this particular aspect of our perfectionism is getting
Speaker 2: worse over time. Doctor Curran, who I had on the show,
Speaker 2: did this very famous paper where he's a professor in
Speaker 2: the UK. He deals with students just to the way
Speaker 2: that Tomorrow and I do, and he started having this
Speaker 2: sense that, like, the modern college student is like a
Speaker 2: little bit more perfectionists than they were five years ago,
Speaker 2: ten years ago, and so on.
Speaker 1: And he said, well, could that really be?
Speaker 2: I wonder if there's survey data about that, And so
Speaker 2: he went all the way back to the eighties and
Speaker 2: looked at every paper that gave college students a survey
Speaker 2: about perfectionism, and just like tight traded up over time.
Speaker 1: And what he's found is that since the nineteen eighties, since.
Speaker 2: Gijoe was on the air, overall perfectionism has gone up
Speaker 2: in young people about thirty percent, which is pretty intense.
Speaker 2: But he also found that there's one part of perfectionism
Speaker 2: that's going up the most. We have different parts of perfections,
Speaker 2: is like I have these high standards for myself, right,
Speaker 2: or perhaps I hold high standards for other people. We
Speaker 2: often talk about like a perfectionist boss who expects you
Speaker 2: to do too much. But the part that's most going
Speaker 2: up in young people today is the opposite of that.
Speaker 1: I assume that other people expect a lot of me.
Speaker 2: Right, if my students coming over my house, they're going
Speaker 2: to judge me for what my coffee pop looks like
Speaker 2: and so on. That's the part that's gone up the
Speaker 2: most since the nineteen eighties, which is a problem. It
Speaker 2: means not only do we have the kind of human
Speaker 2: nature that is really worried about what other people are thinking,
Speaker 2: our misconception about that has gotten worse over time. And
Speaker 2: you can probably make guesses about why that is, things
Speaker 2: like being on social media all the time and having
Speaker 2: the gaze of others on you in a very special way.
Speaker 2: But the way you solve this, of course, is to
Speaker 2: try to harness not some like general kind of misconceived
Speaker 2: idea of the other who's really being judge of you.
Speaker 2: You bring to mind a real second friend, right to
Speaker 2: mark think about, well, what's Lauria're going to really think
Speaker 2: about the Ridicia if it was her staying in my house,
Speaker 2: which she really judged me, and she'd be like, actually,
Speaker 2: probably I'm not back. I actually don't have any vegetables
Speaker 2: in my frider now, so I definitely would have be judging.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I should be like, oh, when I think
Speaker 2: about myself and my own achievements from the perspective of
Speaker 2: a friend, now all of a sudden, I can give
Speaker 2: myself grace. And it turns out that this is the
Speaker 2: practice that you bring to mind if you want to
Speaker 2: fight your perfectionism. You actually think, you know this terrible voice,
Speaker 2: this inner drill sergeant in your head is kind of
Speaker 2: yelling at you. You give them a voice like, okay,
Speaker 2: you know our drill sergeant voice. I'm going to summon
Speaker 2: the Tomorrow voice, like what would Tamorrow tell me?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And just the instant of doing that is a really
Speaker 2: key way to fight your inner critic and bring in
Speaker 2: somebody who cares about you. And I love this idea
Speaker 2: of kind of using self talk as though you're hearing
Speaker 2: from a friend, because that kind of self talk isn't coddling, right,
Speaker 2: Tomorrow wouldn't judge me for having a erdicio in my fridge.
Speaker 1: But if I was truly messing something up tomorrow, woul
Speaker 1: want to talk to me about it.
Speaker 2: She wouldn't scream at me like a drill sergeant in
Speaker 2: the way I often do with my perfectionist voice. But
Speaker 2: she'd get curious. She'd be like, what is going on?
Speaker 2: We need to address this, Let's talk about it. And
Speaker 2: so harnessing that friend voice allows you to do something
Speaker 2: really important. You're shutting off the drill sergeant perfectionist voice
Speaker 2: that's demanding too much of you, But you have a
Speaker 2: curious voice there that's wise, that really is going to
Speaker 2: push you if you needed. And so it's this perfect
Speaker 2: balance between kind of overcddling but kind of being too
Speaker 2: drill sergeanty. On the other hand, ability to adopt a
Speaker 2: different persona in order to talk to yourself is an
Speaker 2: important skill.
Speaker 1: It's also one that can improve your happiness.
Speaker 2: But I'll let Tamar explain more when the Happiness Lab
Speaker 2: returns in a moment. So far, in our talk at
Speaker 2: the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, my friend Tamar
Speaker 2: Genler and I have discussed why talking to yourself like
Speaker 2: a compassionate friend can help you fight perfectionism, but tomorrow
Speaker 2: thinks this technique can apply and lots of other situations too.
Speaker 3: It's actually the most important general skill that we can acquire,
Speaker 3: because it's roughly a skill of perspective taking. We spend
Speaker 3: our entire lives viewing the world from inside our own heads,
Speaker 3: from the perspective of the world that is unique to us,
Speaker 3: and when we're young children, infants, we're so certain that
Speaker 3: the world is in accord with our perception of it
Speaker 3: that when we cover our own eyes, we think we're invisible.
Speaker 3: The moment of coming to be a social being is
Speaker 3: the moment of recognizing that, in addition to your own eyes,
Speaker 3: there are eyes of others, and the capacity to have
Speaker 3: ready to hand the eyes and voices of others. The
Speaker 3: other perspectives that might be taken at both the instance
Speaker 3: when you are being too easy on yourself and the
Speaker 3: instance of when you are being too hard on yourself
Speaker 3: is perhaps the deepest way to take advantage of our
Speaker 3: ability to perspective. Take notice that even as perfectionists are
Speaker 3: super with the self whose viewpoint they are sitting in,
Speaker 3: all of us, including perfectionists, are remarkably able to make
Speaker 3: exceptions for ourselves to recognize that something that objectively speaking
Speaker 3: would be wrong or problematic or unfair is, in our
Speaker 3: particular case, being done for this enormous set of reasons
Speaker 3: to which only we have access. So the observation that
Speaker 3: the way we deal in a very practical sense with
Speaker 3: perfectionism is to have ready to hand at all times
Speaker 3: the voice of another right. It's like wearing a bracelet
Speaker 3: that says, what would LORI say, or if you are
Speaker 3: a member of a faith tradition, what would the figure
Speaker 3: who represents goodness and truth and understanding in my faith
Speaker 3: tradition do?
Speaker 4: Or say?
Speaker 3: That capacity to use the perspective of another the very
Speaker 3: practical advice think about what your friend would say is
Speaker 3: part of the general skill of being able to recognize
Speaker 3: that there are multiple perspectives in the world. Now, one
Speaker 3: of the interesting ways that this plays out is actually
Speaker 3: with regard to the second dilemma that Laurie has been confronting,
Speaker 3: which is that, in addition to being friends with other people,
Speaker 3: that is, beings who exist at the same moment we do,
Speaker 3: but aren't us, we're kind of also stuck forever being
Speaker 3: friends with, or at least being affected by our past
Speaker 3: selves and our future selves. Roughly speaking, most of the
Speaker 3: stuff that our past self does renowns on our present self,
Speaker 3: and most of the things that our presence self does
Speaker 3: is going to determine what happens to our future self.
Speaker 3: And the question of how to think of selves across
Speaker 3: time is the second fundamental issue that Laurie's been addressing
Speaker 3: in her podcast.
Speaker 2: And when I started thinking about this issue, I realized
Speaker 2: that even though I'm very kind to other people, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm not judging about tomorrow, about what she has in
Speaker 2: fridge and so on, there's actually like one person out
Speaker 2: there that I'm really mean to future Laurie. I assume
Speaker 2: future Laurie loves going at the gym. She's not gonna
Speaker 2: mind taking on that terrible task that I agreed to
Speaker 2: over email, because I just want to get the person
Speaker 2: over email, like she's happy to do this, like a
Speaker 2: really big work project. She is moral and not so
Speaker 2: busy and really excited to do all the stuff that
Speaker 2: President Laurie doesn't want to do at all.
Speaker 1: But of course, you know, true perspective taking would lean
Speaker 1: to this. This is fact that that Laurie doesn't want
Speaker 1: to deal with this stuff.
Speaker 2: Either, And so what happens is that it's kind of
Speaker 2: like the Lauri's are all at this like negotiation table,
Speaker 2: but I President Laurie and the only one with a voice.
Speaker 2: I'm like, oh yeah, future Laurie would love to do that,
Speaker 2: and somewhere she's off in some like other dimension. So
Speaker 2: the episode was an attempt to deal with like my
Speaker 2: myopia right the fact that I'm really near sighted. I'm
Speaker 2: thinking about me right now and how can I get
Speaker 2: nicer to my future self. But what I wound up
Speaker 2: realizing in this episode is that I was focused on
Speaker 2: all these cases of myopia right like present Laurie is
Speaker 2: like kind of really messing with future Lari.
Speaker 1: But as I did the episode, I started to think.
Speaker 2: About other cases where I'm not being myopic, but I
Speaker 2: might instead be being hyperopic, very far sighted. All those
Speaker 2: evenings were trying to send one more email off, but
Speaker 2: present Laurie could be hanging out with her husband. All
Speaker 2: those cases where I got something nice and nice bottle
Speaker 2: of wine or like a new dress, I feel like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's not the right time right now to enjoy that.
Speaker 2: I'll wait for future Lauri to enjoy that. There's all
Speaker 2: these times where I'm kind of assuming future Laari will
Speaker 2: get to enjoy this thing.
Speaker 1: That means I'm kind of missing out on the present.
Speaker 2: And so the episode is an interesting one because it
Speaker 2: helped me realize I messed up both ways. I assumed
Speaker 2: it was mostly being unkind to future Lauri, but sometimes
Speaker 2: President Lauria is being unkind to herself on behalf of
Speaker 2: future Laurie.
Speaker 1: But if I could just talk to future Laurie, you'd
Speaker 1: be like, don't do that on behalf of the either.
Speaker 2: And so we in an episode talk about solutions, but tomorrow,
Speaker 2: first I want to hear about you know, what did
Speaker 2: the ancients say about this?
Speaker 1: Did they have some insight?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the ancients are really interested in actually developing
Speaker 3: habits that allow your past self, your present self, and
Speaker 3: your future self to kind of equally divide both the
Speaker 3: costs and the benefits of the things that are going
Speaker 3: to be of long term value to you, So eating
Speaker 3: healthy food, being deeply connected to those around you, being
Speaker 3: an individual who exhibits character virtues like braveness or honesty
Speaker 3: or justice. What the ancient philosopher Aristotle says to do
Speaker 3: is to act like you already were the thing that
Speaker 3: you wish to become fake it till you make it,
Speaker 3: as the contemporary version calls it. But notice that that
Speaker 3: is about creating intertemporal fairness.
Speaker 4: Across sells. There is a set.
Speaker 3: Of activities that may be locally unpleasant. The local activity
Speaker 3: of engaging in exercise until your muscle hurts, the local
Speaker 3: activity of holding back your desire to indulge in a
Speaker 3: particular way, the local activity of tamping your emotion. If
Speaker 3: you practice doing that now, it becomes natural to you.
Speaker 3: It becomes part of who you are, and it solves
Speaker 3: some of the intertemporal problem. Notice that, as with self regulation,
Speaker 3: so with self care. Both Laurie and I laughed when
Speaker 3: Laurie said, whenever I buy a bath bomb, I think, well,
Speaker 3: but I can't use that now.
Speaker 4: How many of you have beside your bathtub?
Speaker 3: Yes, Shelley Kalum, my next door neighbor has beside our bathtub,
Speaker 3: many many bathballs. What Aristotle would tell you to do
Speaker 3: is to create a ritual. On Thursdays, I take a
Speaker 3: warm bath with my bathball. I'm not going to use
Speaker 3: them up too fast. I'm not going to use them
Speaker 3: up too slowly. I've made them part of a routine.
Speaker 3: I've made them part of a ritual. I've made them
Speaker 3: part of a habit. When you are trying to distribute
Speaker 3: things across as Lori points out, individuals, only one of
Speaker 3: whom is at the table at that given moment, only
Speaker 3: present you is there. The best way for present you
Speaker 3: to relate both to past you and to future you
Speaker 3: is to engage in these processes where the world causes
Speaker 3: you to split the resources across time. You can use ritual,
Speaker 3: you can use habit, you can use routie.
Speaker 2: And so I think that those are the kind of
Speaker 2: things that we talk about in the episode. I actually
Speaker 2: tried a different hack that was probably not available to
Speaker 2: Aristotle at the time, or at least not in the
Speaker 2: way I tried it, but it does get back to
Speaker 2: one of his insights. It goes back to the importance
Speaker 2: of perspective taking. Right, if I could really bring Futulaari
Speaker 2: to the negotiating table and like talk to her and
Speaker 2: really see what she wanted, maybe I would do better.
Speaker 2: And the technology that wasn't available at Aristotle's time, even
Speaker 2: though he kind of realized this whole second self thing,
Speaker 2: was to go on, say Snapchat and use a future
Speaker 2: filter where you can look at himself Aristotle, young Aristotl
Speaker 2: and fast forward to what he looks like when he's seventy.
Speaker 1: Aristotol obviously didn't have iPhones, but I did.
Speaker 2: And so I could go on there and use these
Speaker 2: How many people in the audience have used these kind
Speaker 2: of aging filters and looked at you if you're a
Speaker 2: there's like three college students and they're like, I had
Speaker 2: never done this either, but I did this. I encourage
Speaker 2: you to kind of try it out. If you've never
Speaker 2: done this. You basically are looking at a little video
Speaker 2: of yourself as a selfie, and you become like thirty
Speaker 2: or forty years older, like through these aging filters. And
Speaker 2: I stay had a very interesting reaction, which is like,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm looking at this picture of future Lauria
Speaker 2: as though I would be looking at a FaceTime call
Speaker 2: with tomorrow, Like she's there, she's my friend, and she
Speaker 2: has preferences. And so this is actually some lovely work
Speaker 2: by hal Hirshfield, who's done this in experimental context. He
Speaker 2: shows people older versions of themselves, and he finds that
Speaker 2: they wind up solving the same kinds of like temporal
Speaker 2: choice problems that Aristotle was so concerned with. They wind
Speaker 2: up saving more for retirement and one experiment for the
Speaker 2: next month. After they've done this, they wind up eating
Speaker 2: healthier and so on. And so this was maybe like
Speaker 2: the high tech version of the ritualistic thing that Aristotle
Speaker 2: wanted us all to do. But given that it's available
Speaker 2: on all of your smartphones, worth trying out.
Speaker 3: And one of the crazy things that that brings out
Speaker 3: is how powerful how we represent the world as being
Speaker 3: is to how we experience the world. Right, it wasn't
Speaker 3: a fact already that thirty years from now, Laurie is
Speaker 3: going to be thirty years older, but bringing that vividly
Speaker 3: before your mind, bringing that into active awareness, causes it
Speaker 3: to play a role in your thinking. And one of
Speaker 3: the really cool things in Laurie's episode on We'll turn
Speaker 3: to our third example now, stress is the work of
Speaker 3: a contemporary psychologist helps.
Speaker 4: Show how powerful how we.
Speaker 3: Represent an experience as being can be on how that
Speaker 3: experience affects us. Do you want to talk about some
Speaker 3: of the alio chrom work on stress.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And first, maybe this is one I don't need
Speaker 2: to set up right. I was going to tell you,
Speaker 2: like I'm really stressed out, but I'm guessing.
Speaker 1: A lot of you are about to laugh right now.
Speaker 2: Anybody out there feel a little stressed out right now?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I thought, right, Like.
Speaker 2: Stress, it affects us all, And I think one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that you're all laughing is like it affects
Speaker 2: us all.
Speaker 1: But it's we don't think.
Speaker 2: Of it as this wonderful experience, right, It's not like
Speaker 2: we think of being stressed out as our body's reaction
Speaker 2: to protect us against the bad things and pump luclose
Speaker 2: into our blood.
Speaker 1: When we need it the most.
Speaker 2: Like it's not especially designed evolve system to give us
Speaker 2: the energy we need. Well, we really need to push
Speaker 2: it to the metal. That's not how we think about stress.
Speaker 2: But if you're a biologist looking at the autonomic nervous system,
Speaker 2: you might say exactly that about stress. We think of
Speaker 2: stress as debilitating, right. We think it's there to kind
Speaker 2: of mess us up and it's going to destroy us.
Speaker 2: And that's impart because if you don't regulate your stress,
Speaker 2: it does. Right. Chronic stress is really terrible for so
Speaker 2: many aspects of our biology. But it turns out that
Speaker 2: the act of thinking about stress as bad might be
Speaker 2: one of the reasons that chronic stress is so bad.
Speaker 2: This was an insight by the Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb,
Speaker 2: who incidentally was a student here back in the day.
Speaker 2: She actually worked with, you know, this unknown psychologist Peter Salada,
Speaker 2: who is right now president of Yale.
Speaker 1: But Alia had this insight.
Speaker 2: You know, there's so many ways that our mind, if
Speaker 2: we think about something in a certain way as good
Speaker 2: or bad, in some ways, that thinking makes it.
Speaker 1: So I wonder if that works the same way for stress.
Speaker 2: And so she brought students into the lab gave them
Speaker 2: some like stressful situation.
Speaker 1: Often this is what's called the Streer stress test.
Speaker 2: It means you bring a student into lab and like, great,
Speaker 2: You're going to give it impromptu speech with no preparation.
Speaker 2: There's going to be a really mean panel of judges
Speaker 2: that watches you go for it. And what happens is
Speaker 2: that immedia stress Reactually, you know, stress worm was like
Speaker 2: cortusol kick in.
Speaker 1: It's really scary.
Speaker 2: Some students got the primer that tells them, rinds them
Speaker 2: and remember how stress usually feels. It's pretty debilitating, right,
Speaker 2: It's usually bad. Your heart's going to raise, it's not great.
Speaker 2: The second group of students got a different way to
Speaker 2: think about stress. They said, you know, you might feel
Speaker 2: stressed out right now, but that's actually great. That means
Speaker 2: your stress hormones are really pumping energy into your blood.
Speaker 2: Like literally, there's going to be more glucose in your blood,
Speaker 2: which will get more kind of energy up to your brain.
Speaker 2: It will make you think a little bit better. It'll
Speaker 2: help you out right. Stress can be enhancing. What she
Speaker 2: didn't looked at is students' performance. They wind up performing better,
Speaker 2: but more they wind up having not the same reaction
Speaker 2: as the folks in the other condition whose chronic stress kind.
Speaker 1: Of kept them going.
Speaker 2: They performed badly, but then they showed these harsh effects
Speaker 2: kind of days on when you look at them later.
Speaker 2: Those students who thought that stress was good, all of
Speaker 2: a sudden they experienced the stress, they do better and
Speaker 2: they shut the stress off. One of the reasons that
Speaker 2: our chronic stress is there is we might be thinking
Speaker 2: about it in a way that it's going to really
Speaker 2: harm us. One of the researchers I interview for the podcast,
Speaker 2: David Yaeger, who's at UT Austin. He took this in
Speaker 2: a different direction. He said, well, that's true maybe with
Speaker 2: these messages about the fact that stress isn't actually that
Speaker 2: bad when you look biologically, maybe we can actually stop
Speaker 2: chronic stress in a population that we know experiences a
Speaker 2: lot of stress. He actually worked with low income high
Speaker 2: school students from marginalized identities, right, so these are students
Speaker 2: who are just experiencing all kinds of stresses financial, social,
Speaker 2: and these kinds of things in high school. He started
Speaker 2: by giving them this primer that said, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: stress can be really good when you experience it, and
Speaker 2: it's good over time, you'll kind of get better at
Speaker 2: dealing with it, a little bit of a growth mindset too.
Speaker 2: And what he finds is that those high school students,
Speaker 2: when they give journal entries later about the things that
Speaker 2: are going on in their life, they wind up saying
Speaker 2: on days where their journal says I was experiencing something
Speaker 2: really stressful today, something that was really hard, they say,
Speaker 2: but it's going to be all right, I'll deal with it.
Speaker 2: They also show lower cortisol, which is a stress hormone,
Speaker 2: throughout the semester. Right. So, just this reframing of how
Speaker 2: we think about stress can affect whether or not a
Speaker 2: truly objectively stressful situation right, like growing up as a
Speaker 2: low income high school student and a tough neighborhood, whether
Speaker 2: or not that's really kind of stress you out. And
Speaker 2: so this was really powerful for me because it brought
Speaker 2: up exactly the same thing that the ancients were kind
Speaker 2: of thinking about that like, in some sense, thinking does
Speaker 2: make it so.
Speaker 3: So that brings us and I believe we are actually
Speaker 3: going to make it through all five are okay, and
Speaker 3: we are going to make it through all five because
Speaker 3: I allowed myself to succumb to both the benefits on
Speaker 3: the costs of the fourth of Lori's topics, which is
Speaker 3: the topic.
Speaker 4: Of being busy.
Speaker 3: I'm putting too much into a limited period of time.
Speaker 4: Laurie Santos take it away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think we're all subject to being
Speaker 2: a little bit busy these things, and I think busy
Speaker 2: and especially the way that tamarg just said is being
Speaker 2: which is putting too much into a limited period of time.
Speaker 2: In the episode, I talk with the journalist Oliver Berkman,
Speaker 2: who has a fantastic book which you haven't read it,
Speaker 2: you should check it out. It's called four thousand Weeks
Speaker 2: Time Management for Mortals, and.
Speaker 1: His idea was that you know, when you really.
Speaker 2: Come to terms with the fact that you are finite,
Speaker 2: it really changes the amount of stuff that you feel
Speaker 2: like you can reasonably put on your plate, right, Like,
Speaker 2: really true time management is recognizing there's just never going
Speaker 2: to be enough time for stuff. There's never going to
Speaker 2: be enough time for stuff this summer. There's never going
Speaker 2: to be enough time for stuff in this life, right,
Speaker 2: which is scary. But the question is like, given that,
Speaker 2: how do we decide what to put on our plate?
Speaker 1: Right? How do we navigate like how to be the
Speaker 1: most productive?
Speaker 2: And this is another spot where the scholars haven't really
Speaker 2: helped us out because there were historically not as far
Speaker 2: back in history as Tomorrow was thinking about, but there
Speaker 2: were historically like good ideas about what counted as productivity.
Speaker 2: Right back in the day we had agriculture, we could
Speaker 2: easily figure out how we should be spending our time, right,
Speaker 2: how much should we plant?
Speaker 1: How much should we work to deal with the crops?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: You know you count bush corn that you get per
Speaker 1: your time?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Okay, however I maximize that I'm doing good?
Speaker 2: Or imagine you work on an assembly line, how many
Speaker 2: like little widgets should you build? Well, it's like we
Speaker 2: can figure out like the amount of work that goes
Speaker 2: into making a maximum number of them. So many of
Speaker 2: us these days don't work in agriculture. Many of us
Speaker 2: don't work on an assembly line. Many of us do
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that Tomorrow and I do, which
Speaker 2: you might call knowledge work. I'm a podcaster, I'm a professor.
Speaker 2: I come up with lectures. We're both academics. We come
Speaker 2: up with ideas and books. But it's not like Tomorrow
Speaker 2: and I at the end of our day have like
Speaker 2: a big pile of widgets, like you know, academic paper
Speaker 2: widgets that we produce.
Speaker 1: Papers take different amounts of the time. You have to
Speaker 1: think about the ideas you have to work on.
Speaker 2: You have to noodle it, fill of bit. Sometimes we
Speaker 2: get more intense periods and so on. And this is
Speaker 2: an insight that one of my podcast guests, cal Newport
Speaker 2: comes up with. He's like, the problem is that we
Speaker 2: don't have great ideas of productivity right now. He thinks
Speaker 2: that we came up with one though, because of course
Speaker 2: we want a kind of assembly line model for everything
Speaker 2: we do. And his argument is that we've come up
Speaker 2: with what's known as soon productivity. Basically, instead of counting widgets,
Speaker 2: we count the visible activity that it looks like we're
Speaker 2: engaged in. So you answered that Slack message, you're applied
Speaker 2: to that email, you're at work, you know, typing away.
Speaker 2: And that's what we use because figuring out like what
Speaker 2: means to be productive on the big stuff, like how
Speaker 2: many good podcast episodes come out, or how many academic articles,
Speaker 2: or the number of good ideas your doctors.
Speaker 1: Come up with when he's trying to heal you.
Speaker 2: Those are too hard, right, So we use visible productivity.
Speaker 2: But then what happens Then you're trying to maximize that metric.
Speaker 2: You're answering all these emails, you're being at all those
Speaker 2: standing meetings, you're looking at those Slack messages. But what
Speaker 2: does that do to the actual amount of time you
Speaker 2: have free to work on the big projects?
Speaker 1: It goes away Yanks.
Speaker 2: She has this lovely phrase that he uses where he
Speaker 2: says that those kind of little tasks become what he
Speaker 2: calls productivity termites that eat away at your schedule. You know,
Speaker 2: So you look at your calendar and it's just like
Speaker 2: this crumbling building of this schedule because you don't have
Speaker 2: time to do any of the big stuff. And so
Speaker 2: the podcast is in an attempt to say, Okay, how
Speaker 2: do we do this, how do we kind of answer
Speaker 2: to the fact that we have the wrong metric when
Speaker 2: it comes to what it means to be productive.
Speaker 3: And what's fascinating is that when Laurie and I were
Speaker 3: talking about this, I realized that in many ways this
Speaker 3: touches on the most fundamental philosophical distinction that Plato makes,
Speaker 3: which is the distinction between what is and what seems
Speaker 3: to be, what is actual and what we use as
Speaker 3: its surrogate representation, what is most fundamental and deep and
Speaker 3: what is on the surface. And the entire warning of
Speaker 3: Plato's philosophical work is an attempt to warn us against
Speaker 3: taking seriously what Plato calls the shadows in the cave,
Speaker 3: rather than what it is.
Speaker 4: That the shadow in the cave are reflections of.
Speaker 3: That is, Plato's warning is a warning against falling for
Speaker 3: surface rather than deep features, for the smoke, which is
Speaker 3: a typical indicator of the fire, rather than the fire itself.
Speaker 3: And in a lot of ways we are subject to
Speaker 3: teaching to the test for ourselves, right we get this measure?
Speaker 3: The measure is how many things did I get taken
Speaker 3: off my checklist today, and we use that surface feature,
Speaker 3: the platonic shadow, rather than focusing on the fundamental object,
Speaker 3: which is how deeply did I come to understand something
Speaker 3: about the world. Notice that, as in Plato's Republic, what's
Speaker 3: true of the individual is true of the society, and
Speaker 3: vice versa. There are so many structures in sociat society.
Speaker 3: Teaching to the test is a literal example of it,
Speaker 3: whereby we have something we care about, we have a
Speaker 3: mechanism by which we measure it, and then we devote
Speaker 3: our attention and effort to the mechanism rather than to
Speaker 3: that which the mechanism is meant to be an indicator of.
Speaker 4: I want to.
Speaker 3: Point out that that general structure is the fundamental philosophical
Speaker 3: distinction between being that is, the way things really are,
Speaker 3: and seeming that is the perfectly reasonable, superficial features that
Speaker 3: you make use of most of the time to make
Speaker 3: sense of the world. And when you are in a
Speaker 3: situation where you can trust the world, seeming and being coincide.
Speaker 3: You're in your own house, and if the serial box
Speaker 3: says cheerios, unless you're someone who moves around your cereal,
Speaker 3: you can assume that inside that box is a set
Speaker 3: of cheerios. Right, you set up your world in such
Speaker 3: a way that the surface features indicate the deep features
Speaker 3: that you care about mistrust where you can't count on
Speaker 3: surface and deep features aligning. It's actually one of the
Speaker 3: most disruptive experiences.
Speaker 4: That we can have.
Speaker 3: And what this work on busyness shows is that we've
Speaker 3: been put into a situation where we have to be
Speaker 3: distrustful of our own sites of accomplishment. Because even though
Speaker 3: it says cheerios on the outside, right, it says accomplishments
Speaker 3: when you open it up inside it's just full of
Speaker 3: all of these tiny bits that are eating up our time.
Speaker 3: And so I was really struck when Laurie and I
Speaker 3: were talking about these data that have been observed by
Speaker 3: this empirical scientist at how deep a question they are
Speaker 3: getting at. But in many ways, there's no deeper question
Speaker 3: than the question we have come to twice already, one
Speaker 3: when Laurie pointed out that thinking about herself thirty years
Speaker 3: later altered the relation between her present and future self,
Speaker 3: and the second when she pointed out that the subtitle
Speaker 3: of the book four thousand Weeks Thriving for Mortals, so Lauren,
Speaker 3: let's talk about mortality.
Speaker 1: I'm really spooked by death. I don't like it. I
Speaker 1: don't like when anything ends.
Speaker 2: I don't like when a nice meal ends or a
Speaker 2: vacation ends. When I was a little kid, this is
Speaker 2: a very famous video of me when I'm three years
Speaker 2: old and my family is watching a really nice fireworks display.
Speaker 2: And I used to get really upset when fireworks end,
Speaker 2: especially because you only see them on July fourth, and
Speaker 2: it's a nice fireworks display and it ends. You see
Speaker 2: my dad really trying to distract me, like, oh, look
Speaker 2: at look at this, guys, and here's little Laurie.
Speaker 1: Voice goes, Daddy, are the fireworks all done? How the
Speaker 1: fireworks are done?
Speaker 2: And then eventually he admits screaming, Dad, scream is the
Speaker 2: scream I want to give every time I think that,
Speaker 2: you know, eighty ninety years from now, I won't be here, right,
Speaker 2: I won't be here in the year twenty one hundred, right,
Speaker 2: probably maybe medical technology being what it is, we'll see.
Speaker 1: But that really spooks me.
Speaker 2: And that means that I kind of ignore the fact
Speaker 2: that I'm finite. But what the research shows is that
Speaker 2: might not be such a hot thing because recognizing that
Speaker 2: things are final make you appreciate them more. One of
Speaker 2: my favorite studies on this worked with college students that
Speaker 2: got to college students not to think about their own death,
Speaker 2: which is really far away, but the fact that college
Speaker 2: was going to end. They brought seniors in and reminded them, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: you only have this many weeks left, versus another condition
Speaker 2: where they kind of made it seem like, oh, it's
Speaker 2: a really long stretch of time. And what they found
Speaker 2: is that by the end of this semester, those seniors
Speaker 2: who've been reminded of how short the time they had
Speaker 2: was the sort of temporal scarcity is the word they
Speaker 2: use for it, they wound up happier at the end
Speaker 2: of the year. But that was in part because if
Speaker 2: you measured the number of kind of cool activities they did,
Speaker 2: they wound up doing more because they felt like, it's
Speaker 2: so sure, I got.
Speaker 1: To get them in right.
Speaker 2: And so temporal scarcity, when we think about our own
Speaker 2: lives seems to do the same thing. We wind up
Speaker 2: making time for the things that really matter, the people
Speaker 2: that really matter, the stuff we really want to get to.
Speaker 2: If we think the time horizons too long, we just
Speaker 2: kind of put it off right. We talked about these
Speaker 2: temporal biases before, but recognizing that things are scarce, as
Speaker 2: existentially scary as it might be, kind of makes us
Speaker 2: do a little bit better.
Speaker 3: And speaking of temporal scarcity, we have fifty three two
Speaker 3: one seconds left. The philosopher Don Stewart Male developed a
Speaker 3: moral theory that basically said, the most important feature of
Speaker 3: happiness is that the joy of others brings joy to you,
Speaker 3: and thereby the conflict between individual happiness and communal happiness collapses,
Speaker 3: because what brings individual happiness is the capacity to take
Speaker 3: joy in the experience of others. And I will say
Speaker 3: this hour has been an opportunity for me, and I
Speaker 3: believe for my second self, Laurie, to feel exactly that.
Speaker 3: Thank you for being present with us as we thought
Speaker 3: and talked together. Thank you for being a group of
Speaker 3: people to whom we felt connected and ready to feel
Speaker 3: vulnerable in.
Speaker 4: Front of.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks to my friend Tamar Ginler and the amazing
Speaker 2: staff and sponsors of the International Festival of.
Speaker 1: Arts and Ideas.
Speaker 2: If you're in New Haven, Connecticut next summer, you should
Speaker 2: definitely check out the festival. I know I'm not the
Speaker 2: sportiest of podcast hosts. Next week, I'll be bringing out
Speaker 2: my inner athlete because the Happiness Lab and other Pushkins
Speaker 2: shows will be going to the Olympics. We'll meet a
Speaker 2: track and field athlete who fell out of love with running.
Speaker 2: We'll learn how she hung up her shoes, only to
Speaker 2: explode back into the sport years later as one of
Speaker 2: the fastest women in the world.
Speaker 1: I just genuinely go into races so excited.
Speaker 2: You know, I could be in office right now, but
Speaker 2: I'm said, I'm going into this massive race with huge athletes, Like, how.
Speaker 1: Cool is that.
Speaker 2: That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me
Speaker 2: Doctor Laurie Santos