Speaker 1: Pushkin. The fighting in the streets of Saigon during the
Speaker 1: New Year or Tet Offensive made the war too real tonight.
Speaker 1: I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessons to
Speaker 1: make no attacks on North Vietnam. It's nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: a pretty tumultuous year had wrapped in the combat. Banic
Speaker 1: being helped the cart the road now. The officers also
Speaker 1: reportedly chased and fired on a radio equipped carc and
Speaker 1: may not optimistic about one hundred people league that one
Speaker 1: tum tumour wounded three. But there was one event in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight that didn't make the headlines, even though
Speaker 1: it's still having a huge effect on your well being.
Speaker 1: I had to wait, wait, wait, and I really got
Speaker 1: a little bit afgate because I knew I had the
Speaker 1: money there. So all I had to do is, you know,
Speaker 1: cashy check and get out of there. This is dawned Uzel.
Speaker 1: He's recalling a fateful day in November of that year
Speaker 1: when he was trying to do something simple. He just
Speaker 1: wanted to withdraw some cash at his bank. I was
Speaker 1: scheduled to take a trip on a Monday morning on
Speaker 1: so on Friday, on a lunch hour, I went to
Speaker 1: my bank to get some money. I would say maybe
Speaker 1: eight to ten people in line. My guess is, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I was in that line for like eighteen to
Speaker 1: twenty minutes just to cash you check. Don's time was
Speaker 1: really valuable. He was a talented engineer and vice president
Speaker 1: of a technology company that was on the hunt for
Speaker 1: a new business. But instead of problem solving at his
Speaker 1: desk at work, he was stuck in a bank lobby.
Speaker 1: So my job was to come up with one or
Speaker 1: more new products, and I was getting you nowhere. Half
Speaker 1: a century later, we still share Don's misery. We're stuck
Speaker 1: in lines all the time, when we wait for coffee
Speaker 1: in a cafe, when we stand on a crowded train platform,
Speaker 1: when we get stuck for hours an airport security. We
Speaker 1: know exactly what he was feeling, watching time slip through
Speaker 1: his fingers. My brother Aaron wrote a book called how
Speaker 1: Many Legs? Hey, Santo's How's it going? Or how to
Speaker 1: estimate damn Near Anything. I asked him to calculate for
Speaker 1: us how much time we're likely to spend waiting in
Speaker 1: line over our entire lifetimes. Yes, so I think the
Speaker 1: number we came up with was seven thousand hours, seven
Speaker 1: thousand hours waiting in line. That's more than six months
Speaker 1: of our life stuck in some queue. That's crazy. Right
Speaker 1: With seven thousand hours, you could take a massive vacation.
Speaker 1: You could learn a new instrument, or a new language,
Speaker 1: or a new sport. But you're not doing any of that.
Speaker 1: You're just waiting, staring at the back of someone's head,
Speaker 1: and it sucks. We tell ourselves that standing in line
Speaker 1: is an awful, annoying, happiness training waste of time. But
Speaker 1: what if we could see that line is a huge
Speaker 1: pain in the butt, but as an opportunity to be happier.
Speaker 1: Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
Speaker 1: be happy. What if our minds are wrong. What if
Speaker 1: our minds are lying to us, leading us away from
Speaker 1: what will really make us happy. The good news is
Speaker 1: that understanding the science of the mind can point us
Speaker 1: all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab with me, doctor Laurie santos Hey. Don Don
Speaker 1: Wetzel doesn't have the same name recognition as Thomas Edison
Speaker 1: or Steve Jobs, but he's an inventor too, and it
Speaker 1: turns out his irritation with waiting in line led to
Speaker 1: a creation that revolutionized the financial sector. It has also
Speaker 1: completely changed the daily routines of ordinary people around the world.
Speaker 1: Before I met Don, I had a certain image of
Speaker 1: him in my mind. I rang the doorbell, expecting to
Speaker 1: me a slick, self important enter guy. But then ninety
Speaker 1: year old Don welcomed me into the cozy Dallas home
Speaker 1: that he shares with his wife, Eleanor, and I realized
Speaker 1: Dawn wasn't the Elon Musk type I had imagined. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm delighted you're here. Thank you so much. Dn was
Speaker 1: like the friendliest grandpa you've ever met. I sat with
Speaker 1: Don and Eleanor in their living room, which was filled
Speaker 1: with comfy pillows, smiling photos of their twelve children, and clocks,
Speaker 1: lots of clocks. They were lovely, but clocks are kind
Speaker 1: of the nemesis of the podcaster. And wait till this
Speaker 1: an stops at a second and I'll finish out fucking
Speaker 1: stop there, No, that's okay. The clocks are kind of fitting, though,
Speaker 1: because Don understands the value of time. In fact, it
Speaker 1: was that feeling of wasted time back in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: eight that led to his life changing idea. So while
Speaker 1: I was in line, I thought, seems to me a
Speaker 1: teller's job mostly is cash. He checked and taken deposits.
Speaker 1: So I just got the idea that I think a
Speaker 1: machine could do that. That's right. Dawn had just dreamed
Speaker 1: up the ATM, the automated teller machine that millions upon
Speaker 1: millions of busy people use every day nowadays. The idea
Speaker 1: of an ATM seems really obvious, but Dawn faced a
Speaker 1: lot of resistance when he first pitched the idea on
Speaker 1: the board of our company. There was a banker he
Speaker 1: thought it was the dumbest idea he had ever heard.
Speaker 1: He said, we have tellers to do that. Has anybody
Speaker 1: told you that? Yeah, you know, we do have tellers
Speaker 1: to do exactly what you're saying your machine can do.
Speaker 1: So why you think anybody would buy this? That board
Speaker 1: member wasn't entirely crazy. There had been earlier attempts at
Speaker 1: automated bank machines, and they'd all failed, including one that
Speaker 1: took deposits. It's inventor, Luther Simgion lamented the only people
Speaker 1: using the machine were prostitutes and gamblers who didn't want
Speaker 1: to deal with a teller face to face. The genius
Speaker 1: of Don's ATM is that it won the trust of
Speaker 1: millions of regular customers who loved its convenience. You know,
Speaker 1: everybody prefers to get thing done quicker, and you know,
Speaker 1: the ATM was a quick, an easy way anybody could
Speaker 1: use an ATM, really, because it's very simple. Stick to
Speaker 1: card in key in your PPN number and bingo, here
Speaker 1: comes the money if you got it in the bank,
Speaker 1: of course. But now in hindsight, can you see that
Speaker 1: this started, you know, in some ways a revolution of convenience. Well,
Speaker 1: I never thought of it that way, really, Laurie. Now
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a story about that. You know, I
Speaker 1: had to come up with a forecast as to how
Speaker 1: many of these ATMs were going to sell, and I
Speaker 1: felt like we could sell four thousands of these machines.
Speaker 1: I think there might have been four thousand just in
Speaker 1: the in the airport where I was just at DFW today. Well,
Speaker 1: at the latest report that I heard throughout the world,
Speaker 1: there's they estimated there is one point three million ATMs
Speaker 1: installed nowadays. But the real success of the ATM, according
Speaker 1: to Dawn, is it it improves people's well being. It
Speaker 1: gets them out of those annoying lines. It just made
Speaker 1: sense that nobody wanted to wait in the tel A
Speaker 1: line like I did, so it makes every bank customer
Speaker 1: happy to get in and get out and do some
Speaker 1: other things. A bit more free time is something we
Speaker 1: all need, and Dawn's simple idea has probably freed up millions,
Speaker 1: possibly billions of hours the world over. But it turns
Speaker 1: out there's an awful downside to all this convenience and
Speaker 1: save time, one that are lying minds don't even realize.
Speaker 1: Don Wetzel's intuition was that most people want a bit
Speaker 1: of extra free time, that it'll make us happier, and
Speaker 1: the science backs him up. Simply put, we all feel
Speaker 1: way too busy today. Many of us experience what scientists
Speaker 1: call time famine. We're really starving for time, and that
Speaker 1: vamished feeling has a negative effect on our well being.
Speaker 1: In fact, people who report feeling short on time are
Speaker 1: more likely to be depressed, anxious, and less happy than
Speaker 1: people who feel like they have lots of free time.
Speaker 1: Psychologists have even come up with a term for that
Speaker 1: amazing feeling you get when say, a meeting is canceled
Speaker 1: and you suddenly have a free hour. You didn't expect.
Speaker 1: We call it time affluents, and those rare moments when
Speaker 1: we feel wealthy in time can make us feel amazing.
Speaker 1: It's one of the reasons that every once in a
Speaker 1: while I sometimes surprise my Yale students by canceling my
Speaker 1: Happiness class, and their reactions show just how important a
Speaker 1: little unexpected time off can be. One student even burst
Speaker 1: into tears. She said it was the first time she'd
Speaker 1: had an hour off all semester. She'd almost forgotten what
Speaker 1: it was like to have some free time, so adding
Speaker 1: even a few extra minutes to our perceived time banks
Speaker 1: can feel really good. But recent studies also suggest something
Speaker 1: rather counterintuitive. That is, we misestimate just how busy we
Speaker 1: really are. While there's lots of work showing that we
Speaker 1: feel busier than ever before, there is very little evidence
Speaker 1: showing that we actually are busier, which is kind of weird.
Speaker 1: It's as though our minds tell us we're super busy
Speaker 1: all the time, but in reality it's not as bad
Speaker 1: as we think. But there's another even more insidious way
Speaker 1: our mind leads us astray. When we try to save
Speaker 1: some time, it turns out there's an opportunity cost that
Speaker 1: comes from avoiding those bank lines, and the cost is
Speaker 1: a social one. Long lines are frustrating, but they're also
Speaker 1: an opportunity to be around other people, and the sheer
Speaker 1: amount of time we spend around other people actually critics
Speaker 1: how happy we are. Take one famous study by positive
Speaker 1: psychologists Ed Deaner and Marty Seliban. They looked at people
Speaker 1: who scored in the highest tenth percentile and happiness surveys
Speaker 1: and tried to figure out what makes them so much
Speaker 1: happier than the rest of us. The searchers discovered that
Speaker 1: these happy people didn't spend any more time exercising or
Speaker 1: doing religious activities. What did these happy folks do differently?
Speaker 1: They were more social. They spent more time around other
Speaker 1: humans than people with average levels of happiness. The results
Speaker 1: were so strong that these researchers deemed being around other
Speaker 1: people as a necessary condition for very high happiness. Another
Speaker 1: study by Nobel Prize winning psychologist Danny Koneman confirmed this.
Speaker 1: He and his colleagues tested which daily activities make us
Speaker 1: feel best. The winner socializing with others. It's better than eating, shopping, relaxing,
Speaker 1: or even watching TV. Just being with other people makes
Speaker 1: us feel good, even if those people are strangers. There
Speaker 1: are lots of sources of well being standing around you.
Speaker 1: You just have to tap into them. My friend Nick
Speaker 1: Epley is a professor of behavioral science at the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Happiness isn't about the
Speaker 1: intensity of experience as that we have, It's about the
Speaker 1: frequency of them. Happiness is like is like a you know,
Speaker 1: a leaky tire on your car. You don't have a
Speaker 1: nice conversation with somebody and then are happy forever. But
Speaker 1: if you're having a nice conversation with somebody on a plane,
Speaker 1: that plane ride is more enjoyable than it would have
Speaker 1: been otherwise. But then you know, once you're off the
Speaker 1: plane ride, you know your tire goes flat a little bit.
Speaker 1: You got to do something else to pump it back up.
Speaker 1: And so I find a lot of these conversations are
Speaker 1: are like, uh, you know, air compressors for my tires.
Speaker 1: Nick studies why we're so resistant to being more social.
Speaker 1: Why don't we take more time to fill up our
Speaker 1: leaky happiness tires with a quick conversation. People get the
Speaker 1: consequences of social interaction wrong, particularly with strangers not engaging
Speaker 1: in conversation with somebody else gives you a cost somewhere else,
Speaker 1: and people don't always seem to recognize that. It turns
Speaker 1: out the cost of not being social, not taking enough
Speaker 1: time to connect with other people, is that it makes
Speaker 1: us feel pretty awful. Feeling lonely or isolated. It just
Speaker 1: kind of stinks. Loneliness is now a growing epidemic around
Speaker 1: the world. People today report feeling lonely at double the
Speaker 1: rate they did in the nineteen eighties. Take college campuses
Speaker 1: like where I work at Yale. Nationally in the US,
Speaker 1: right now, over sixty percent of college students report feeling
Speaker 1: very lonely most of the time. This is higher than
Speaker 1: in any other previous generation. A stressor like that impairs
Speaker 1: your well being at it impairs your health. Recent research
Speaker 1: shows that the physical consequences of our increased loneliness are staggering.
Speaker 1: Feeling isolated is said to be as bad for our
Speaker 1: health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. If loneliness had
Speaker 1: a health warning, it would sound like this may cause
Speaker 1: increased risk of inflammation, disrupted sleep, abnormal immune responses, depression, anxiety,
Speaker 1: higher stress levels, early cognitive decline, alcoholism, cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, diabetes, suicide,
Speaker 1: and even early dine. So what can we do to
Speaker 1: fight this loneliness epidemic. Well, you can get a few
Speaker 1: hints from people who don't feel all that lonely, people
Speaker 1: like Eleanor Wetzel. I'm half extrovert and half introvert, and
Speaker 1: so that part of my personality enjoys the connection with people.
Speaker 1: From the moment Don Wetzell's wife welcomed me into her home,
Speaker 1: it was obvious that this old fashioned grandmother was the
Speaker 1: opposite of lonely. She was one of the most sociable
Speaker 1: people I had met in a while. She had a
Speaker 1: story for everything, including how she met Don. It was
Speaker 1: a blind date, so we were starting at zero, and
Speaker 1: I think there was just a chemistry there. I had
Speaker 1: planned to spend only thirty minutes or so on this interview,
Speaker 1: but I ended up chatting with Eleanor for over two hours.
Speaker 1: We talked about our families, while her life was like
Speaker 1: growing up, how she was able to raise so many children,
Speaker 1: and other stuff too. I asked what her secret was,
Speaker 1: how did she connect with people so easily. It turns
Speaker 1: out she just chats with strangers whenever she can. I
Speaker 1: had no problem with direct eye content and smiles. You know,
Speaker 1: that's who we are, that's how you relate to people.
Speaker 1: But I can see a lot of downers with the
Speaker 1: technology that we have available. The ATM doesn't smile back
Speaker 1: at you, marvel or show me their pretty eyes or whatever.
Speaker 1: So we don't want to lose all of that. It's
Speaker 1: true that Don's ATMs have given us back time, but
Speaker 1: they've also robbed us of an important opportunity to connect
Speaker 1: with human tellers and our fellow bank customers. They steal
Speaker 1: one of the small chances we have each day to
Speaker 1: fill up our leaky happiness tires with a quick conversation,
Speaker 1: which is why Eleanor has taken a relatively shocking stance
Speaker 1: on ATMs. Well, I've actually never used one. Period. That's right,
Speaker 1: Eleanor has never used an ATM, even though her husband
Speaker 1: is the guy that invented them. She just prefers to
Speaker 1: chat with the teller. I don't think we even know
Speaker 1: yet how much she's being a long without that interaction
Speaker 1: of human beings, the whole bit. So there's so many components.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't even have time to go into all of them,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure I haven't even thought of all of them.
Speaker 1: Eleanor's right here. We're automating the humans out of everything.
Speaker 1: Take music, for example. Back in nineteen sixty eight, if
Speaker 1: Eleanor wanted to hear a new song, she'd have to
Speaker 1: interact with a bunch of people. She'd have to find
Speaker 1: a record store, ask the clerk where to find that
Speaker 1: new song, stand in line with other folks to buy it,
Speaker 1: and only then could she drive home with her kids
Speaker 1: to throw it on her record player. But today it's different.
Speaker 1: Who is this Alexa that you can have do everything
Speaker 1: for you? Every new automated convenience we introduce into our
Speaker 1: lives has a cost, and that cost, all too often
Speaker 1: is a social one. The problem is it's not often
Speaker 1: a cost we even realize. The question is why. But
Speaker 1: first we need some music to sent us into the break.
Speaker 1: So let's tease what's coming up next? Alexa, play anything
Speaker 1: by the Talking Heads. I'm having trouble connecting to the internet. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry, Give me a moment. The Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: will be right back. I ride the train into Chicago
Speaker 1: every day to my office in High Park from one
Speaker 1: of the far Southside suburbs, and every day I get
Speaker 1: on the train, and I was seeing exactly the same
Speaker 1: kind of phenomena I've seen it for years. Science begins
Speaker 1: with observation, and Nick Epley observes something on his daily
Speaker 1: commute that is so commonplace yet so odd when you
Speaker 1: really think about it. Where people would get on sit
Speaker 1: down next to their neighbors, perfectly decent, lovely people going
Speaker 1: into Chicago to work for the day. They would sit down,
Speaker 1: cheek to jowel next to somebody else, and they would
Speaker 1: then ignore each other for forty five minutes. Most train
Speaker 1: cars are full of people, which means they're also full
Speaker 1: of knowledge, stories and jokes, but most are also deathly quiet.
Speaker 1: I mean, almost nobody ever talks on the train. The
Speaker 1: question is why Nick decided to test this. He recruited
Speaker 1: passengers sharing his commute to work, dividing them into three
Speaker 1: different groups or conditions, as we researchers call them. He
Speaker 1: asked each group to act in a certain way while
Speaker 1: they were on the train. The one condition, we told
Speaker 1: them to keep to themselves, just focus on their day ahead,
Speaker 1: don't engage others around you in conversation this morning. The
Speaker 1: second condition, we asked them to do whatever they normally do,
Speaker 1: which is typically the same as what happens in the
Speaker 1: solitude condition. Almost nobody talks to strangers on the train.
Speaker 1: And in the third condition, we asked them to do
Speaker 1: something radical. We asked them to try to make a
Speaker 1: connection with the person who sits down next to you
Speaker 1: this morning on the train. Try to get to know
Speaker 1: something about him or her, so they were going to
Speaker 1: have a conversation. Let's think about these different groups for
Speaker 1: a second. Which one would you be happiest in the
Speaker 1: groups in which you could enjoy your solitude or the
Speaker 1: one that forced you to talk to a complete stranger.
Speaker 1: You might naturally have a pretty strong intuition here, but
Speaker 1: I bet that intuition is wrong. People reported the most
Speaker 1: positive commute in the connection condition, less positive in the
Speaker 1: control condition, and least positive in the solitude condition, where
Speaker 1: they kept to themselves. Being forced to talk with a
Speaker 1: stranger was far and away the most pleasurable experience. Simply
Speaker 1: making a connection with someone we don't know makes us
Speaker 1: feel really good. Nixed out on this very same study.
Speaker 1: In a number of different contexts, on city buses and cabs,
Speaker 1: at the airport, in waiting rooms, they all find the
Speaker 1: same result. People are happiest when they're being social with someone,
Speaker 1: But what about that other person? You could imagine that
Speaker 1: we were potentially spreading misery, that the person who was
Speaker 1: talking too maybe was unhappy about this. We were like
Speaker 1: polluting the train with all of this unwanted conversation. So
Speaker 1: does your conversation make other people miserable? Well? Nick tested
Speaker 1: that too by creating a fake waiting room in his laboratory.
Speaker 1: They were also happier when they were talked to than
Speaker 1: when they were not talked too, and that effect was
Speaker 1: just as big as the effect on the people who
Speaker 1: were instructed to talk. So I didn't I don't think
Speaker 1: we're spreading misery on the trains or the buses. Connecting
Speaker 1: with someone as pleasant, whether you are the one who's
Speaker 1: initiating it or the one you're receiving it. Note that
Speaker 1: Nick's not advocating harassing someone on the train or continuing
Speaker 1: to try to talk to someone who clearly doesn't want
Speaker 1: you to speak to them. All Nick saying is that
Speaker 1: a quick conversation can make us feel good. The problem
Speaker 1: is that's not what we think is going to happen.
Speaker 1: When Nick asked people to imagine how they'd feel getting
Speaker 1: into a conversation with a strange they wrongly predicted that
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be fun or uplifting. The reason that's interesting
Speaker 1: is because our expectations guide our behavior. So if you
Speaker 1: expect it's going to be freezing cold outside, you'll pick
Speaker 1: up a jacket and you'll wear it when you go outside.
Speaker 1: If you expect that it's going to be really warm outside,
Speaker 1: you won't wear a jacket. If I expect that talking
Speaker 1: to somebody will be pleasant, I'll do it. If I
Speaker 1: expect it it'll be miserable, I won't. But I bet
Speaker 1: your thinking, what if you're shy around people? Maybe all
Speaker 1: this talking to stranger's stuff works if you're really outgoing,
Speaker 1: but maybe it sucks for introverts. And we did measure
Speaker 1: this and we found actually no difference at all between
Speaker 1: introverts and extroverts, and in across these conditions. That is,
Speaker 1: introverts enjoyed connecting with others as extroverts did. Introverts did
Speaker 1: not enjoy keeping to themselves in solitude, and extroverts didn't
Speaker 1: enjoy that either. What tends to vary our people's expectations
Speaker 1: about how they're going to feel. So an introvert, because
Speaker 1: they think they're not going to enjoy it already, is
Speaker 1: going to choose not to go, whereas an extrovert who
Speaker 1: enjoys a party might choose to go. On average people
Speaker 1: tend to feel happier when they are connecting with others,
Speaker 1: and that's true for both extroverts and introverts. Nix's results
Speaker 1: are quite challenging for a lot of people to hear.
Speaker 1: No matter what your personality type is, you will increase
Speaker 1: your happiness if you interact with people you randomly meet
Speaker 1: in stores or on public transport. Creates a social connection.
Speaker 1: It keeps you connected on the right level. I made
Speaker 1: this very point on the CBS Morning News recently. Happy
Speaker 1: people take time for social connection. They try to make
Speaker 1: connections with the people on the street, and I got
Speaker 1: some interesting reactions from the viewers. Here's one tweet from
Speaker 1: someone who says, quote, talk to a stranger on the bus?
Speaker 1: Are you insane? Don't talk to strangers. It's dangerous. Didn't
Speaker 1: your mamma teach you anything. Here's another one one of
Speaker 1: my personal favorites. If a stranger talks to me on
Speaker 1: a bus, I will go nuts. People die because of
Speaker 1: shite like this, hell no, So do you get do
Speaker 1: you hit similar reactions where people hear these data and
Speaker 1: are just like, not true, not me, Oh yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah No. I get it all the time. I get
Speaker 1: a lot of pushback on this because the expectations are
Speaker 1: so strong. So what people are imagining, I think, are
Speaker 1: random people who might come up to you and talk
Speaker 1: to you, and they imagine sort of the worst case outcome.
Speaker 1: So they're imagining homeless people are mentally ill people or
Speaker 1: something who who are dangerous to them, or psychopaths, whatever.
Speaker 1: But that's a different situation from what we're asking people
Speaker 1: to do here. We're just asking you to talk to
Speaker 1: a person who happens to be sitting next to you,
Speaker 1: and the person who happens to be sitting next to
Speaker 1: you is likely to just be a normal person, not
Speaker 1: a psychopath. We don't do something that's almost certain to
Speaker 1: make us happier because we think we'll be preyed upon
Speaker 1: by some imaginary psycho killer. Actually we're going into the
Speaker 1: break again, Alexa play psycho killer. By the talk. I'm
Speaker 1: having trouble connecting to the internet. That's so annoying. I'm
Speaker 1: so sorry. The show will be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: Nick Epley thinks we're too scared of falling victim to
Speaker 1: some psycho killer to strike up conversations on a train.
Speaker 1: Such unfounded fears are part of why we seem to
Speaker 1: find the automation revolutions. So alluring Don's ATM was the
Speaker 1: first step. But now we're killing the human part of
Speaker 1: so many of our interactions. I want to introduce you
Speaker 1: to someone who's deeply worried about this new direction, someone
Speaker 1: who is making changes in his own life to fight back.
Speaker 1: David Byrne, We're losing something, and a lot of the
Speaker 1: efficiency that we think is there is kind of an illusion.
Speaker 1: This is insane. You probably know David as a Talking
Speaker 1: Heads frontman, but what you may not know is that
Speaker 1: David also writes brilliant social essays. You recently authored a
Speaker 1: fantastic article for the MIT Technology Review on the hidden
Speaker 1: dangers of automation. It's title eliminating the Human. If these
Speaker 1: things are becoming so ubiquitous, the elimination of the human interaction,
Speaker 1: what does that mean for us as individuals, as a society,
Speaker 1: as a community. David's thesis is that humans have developed
Speaker 1: over millions of years to work trade, have fun, and
Speaker 1: form relationships face to face. You're getting all these different signals.
Speaker 1: You're getting signals from their body language, their facial expression,
Speaker 1: what their eyes are doing, the tone of their voice.
Speaker 1: We are social animals, That's what we are. We're like
Speaker 1: ants and wolves, and we are an animal that flourishes
Speaker 1: because we are social. And you wonder what will happen
Speaker 1: or what is happening when that aspect of our deep
Speaker 1: makeup starts to be taken away from us, or not
Speaker 1: so much taken away, we give it up voluntarily. David's
Speaker 1: worried that we're all voluntarily turning our backs on our
Speaker 1: fellow humans every day thanks to new products which promise
Speaker 1: us ease and convenience, be it an ATM or an
Speaker 1: app to preorder our groceries, or a film streaming service
Speaker 1: that saves us a trip to a crowded movie theater.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that whoever designed these things had in
Speaker 1: the front of their mind. Can I come up with
Speaker 1: a technology to eliminate some of the human interaction in
Speaker 1: my life? But it sure seems to be the result.
Speaker 1: No disrespect to inventors like Don Wetzel, who is as
Speaker 1: socialist social can be. But David worries that a relatively
Speaker 1: small section of society, namely the engineers who design all
Speaker 1: this stuff, they're creating a world the rest of us
Speaker 1: must inhabit, and they are creating it in their own image.
Speaker 1: My father was an engineer. I enjoy that mindset of
Speaker 1: looking at things from an engineer's point of view, but
Speaker 1: I recognize a lot of that and a lot of programmers,
Speaker 1: coders engineers who are designing a lot of the things
Speaker 1: that kind of envelop us in the contemporary world. You
Speaker 1: can sense that a lot of these guys, and most
Speaker 1: of them are guys, are not comfortable in social situations.
Speaker 1: So even if they would not vocally say I want
Speaker 1: to make a world where I never have to interact
Speaker 1: with a person, they might unconsciously do that that's the
Speaker 1: world that has been made for us, and whether we
Speaker 1: want to or not, we're living in their world. Whether
Speaker 1: or not you completely by the sterio type that all
Speaker 1: engineers shun human company, most of us can admit that
Speaker 1: what they've designed is often pretty tempting. Many of us
Speaker 1: have moments where we relish opportunities to be by ourselves
Speaker 1: or just hide away a bit. When I was much younger,
Speaker 1: I was much shyer, I was much much more uncomfortable
Speaker 1: and social situations. I would create a kind of facade
Speaker 1: or character or persona that would be my face for
Speaker 1: a social interaction, and it was a little bit artificial
Speaker 1: in that sense. I can identify and understand that a
Speaker 1: lot of people feel like oh no. If I can
Speaker 1: figure out a way to navigate the world with as
Speaker 1: few annoying interactions with the human, then very good. Let's
Speaker 1: design interfaces that speed things along and help someone who
Speaker 1: is uncomfortable in social situations, for example, get through them
Speaker 1: without the pesky human. At the end of his MIT
Speaker 1: tech review article, David argues that as we spend less
Speaker 1: and less time talking and listening to each other, will
Speaker 1: become less tolerant of each other's differences, will become more
Speaker 1: inclined to envy and antagonism. It's a chilling prospect. But
Speaker 1: can science save us? Can researchers like Nick convince the
Speaker 1: champions of automation that they're getting the balance between convenience
Speaker 1: and happiness all wrong? I'm afraid to say it doesn't
Speaker 1: look promising. Remember Nick's experiment using train passengers, how he
Speaker 1: found that the people he forced into conversation with their
Speaker 1: fellow commuters had happier journeys well. Nick reported these findings
Speaker 1: back to the head of marketing at the railroad company,
Speaker 1: and here was her response. Nick, you're not going to
Speaker 1: believe what we're about to do. She said, we're going
Speaker 1: to roll out a new policy on the trains. We're
Speaker 1: going to put in place a quiet car. I said,
Speaker 1: oh really, And the quiet car is one she explained,
Speaker 1: where people are not allowed to engage in conversation, they're
Speaker 1: not allowed to talk on their cell phones, they're not
Speaker 1: allowed to talk to somebody sitting next to them. It's
Speaker 1: supposed to be absolutely quiet. Nick was surprised why the
Speaker 1: train company had made a decision that completely contradicted his
Speaker 1: well being research, and she said, wow, because we asked
Speaker 1: people on a survey what they wanted, and this is
Speaker 1: what they said they wanted, which, of course I pointed out,
Speaker 1: there is exactly what our participants said they wanted too,
Speaker 1: and it just turned out not quite to be right,
Speaker 1: at least in terms of their well being. Nick, being
Speaker 1: a good scientist, wanted to know if the railroad people
Speaker 1: had carried out an experiment with the opposite of a
Speaker 1: quiet car. Have you ever just put a chatty car
Speaker 1: on the line where people can just get together, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you got snacks or something, and you can get
Speaker 1: together and you just talk. You just get to know
Speaker 1: your neighbors a little. I get to know your commuters
Speaker 1: your chatty car. And she laughed and she said, no,
Speaker 1: we've we've never done the chatty car. But we used
Speaker 1: to have bar cars on the trains where people would
Speaker 1: get together and often they would then connect with each
Speaker 1: other there. And I asked her to used to have
Speaker 1: the bar cars anymore. She said, no, we don't. I
Speaker 1: don't have them anymore. And I asked why not. I
Speaker 1: was imagining, you know, her telling stories about people stumbling
Speaker 1: off the trains drunk or something. But she said, the
Speaker 1: real problem was they were too crowded. That is, they
Speaker 1: were too popular, so there were too many people who
Speaker 1: wanted to be in there. That's the point at which
Speaker 1: as a behavioral science you just sort of sigh, we
Speaker 1: think it clearly seems they have clear data that people
Speaker 1: really enjoy being able to connect with each other, and
Speaker 1: yet that service doesn't doesn't get extended, so they canceled
Speaker 1: it because the chatty car or the equivalent of it
Speaker 1: was was too crowded. So if banks and railroad companies
Speaker 1: and app designers and store owners aren't going to come
Speaker 1: to our rescue, what are we to do to stop
Speaker 1: feeling so isolated? The answer is pretty simple. We just
Speaker 1: need to connect with other people, and not just our
Speaker 1: friends and family members. We also need to make the
Speaker 1: effort to connect more with strangers, the random people around
Speaker 1: us in lines and on our commute. They matter more
Speaker 1: than we think. David Byrne realized this. Despite his natural shyness,
Speaker 1: he's trying to be part of the cure. He now
Speaker 1: embraces opportunities to connect with the people who cross his path. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it happened the other day. The subways were messed up
Speaker 1: and there was a Chinese guy who was really having
Speaker 1: at He had some luggage with him and he was
Speaker 1: really having a hard time. Everything all everything has changed.
Speaker 1: You know, this trains now on this line, This trains
Speaker 1: now running on this line. This used to be an
Speaker 1: express now it's a local, And it was all this
Speaker 1: We kind of figured it out together, which was kind
Speaker 1: of sweet. You have made a connection. And what I
Speaker 1: discover is very often they'll smile that you are sharing
Speaker 1: this acknowledgement with them. They might laugh, you'll laugh, and
Speaker 1: so it kind of well, it sounds to get cliche,
Speaker 1: but it brightens your day for another fifteen minutes at least.
Speaker 1: So what have we learned in this episode? For one thing,
Speaker 1: we too readily assume that convenience, efficiency and near instant
Speaker 1: gratification are the roots to happiness, but that assumption is
Speaker 1: often wrong. Tiny human interactions are the burst of air
Speaker 1: we need for our happiness tires to steal. Next metaphor,
Speaker 1: your mind might tell you a quick conversation is going
Speaker 1: to be awkward, too much time, not worth it, But
Speaker 1: those intuitions are wrong, even for shy folks. So get
Speaker 1: out there and make a new connection. Next time you
Speaker 1: are standing in line, talk to the person next to you.
Speaker 1: If you can't think of something to say, you could
Speaker 1: tell them that lines are an opportunity, and that the
Speaker 1: guy who had the inspiration for the ATM machine did
Speaker 1: so while waiting in a bank line, and that his
Speaker 1: wife has never used that invention. You could even tell
Speaker 1: them that you heard that on a podcast, a podcast
Speaker 1: called The Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed the show, I'd be super grateful if you could
Speaker 1: spread the word by leaving a rating and a review.
Speaker 1: It really does help other listeners find us, and don't
Speaker 1: forget to tell your friends. If you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about the science you heard on the show, then
Speaker 1: check out our website Happiness Lab dot fm. You can
Speaker 1: also sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive content.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Speaker 1: The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and
Speaker 1: edited by Julia Barton, fact check by Joseph Friedman, and
Speaker 1: our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Mia LaBelle, Carly mcgliorre Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos