Speaker 1: We cannot get into any deeper thinking, any deeper meaningful
Speaker 1: challenge when we're constantly flinging between pings and dings all day.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great tinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 1: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 1: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 1: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Neil past Richa, a
Speaker 1: New York Times bestselling author. Neil's books have been published
Speaker 1: in over a dozen languages, and he spent seven years
Speaker 1: in counting on best seller lists and sold millions of copies.
Speaker 1: His first book, The Book of Awesome, was based on
Speaker 1: his blog One thousand Awesome Things, which scored over fifty
Speaker 1: million hits and twice won the Webby Award for the
Speaker 1: Best Blog in the World. His new book is The
Speaker 1: Happiness Equation. Want Nothing and Do Anything equals Have Everything.
Speaker 1: Hi Neil, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. I'm excited to have you on. We're going
Speaker 1: to discuss your most recent book called The Happiness Equation.
Speaker 1: Want Nothing plus do Anything equals have Everything. But before
Speaker 1: we do, let's start, like we always do, with the parable.
Speaker 1: There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. She says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second, looks up at his grandmother
Speaker 1: and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the
Speaker 1: grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 1: you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 1: You know, I find my bad wolf coming out sometimes right.
Speaker 1: And usually when that happens when I'm yelling at my kids,
Speaker 1: or when I get into a fight with my wife,
Speaker 1: or when I like I'm I'm rude over email to
Speaker 1: somebody that works for me, I take a step back,
Speaker 1: and you know, what I always noticed is that I
Speaker 1: have failed to feed the good wolf. I have failed
Speaker 1: to get a good night's sleep, or go to the gym,
Speaker 1: or eat eating nutritions and healthy food, or or eat
Speaker 1: every meal. And that's self care. Feeding that good It
Speaker 1: takes time, right, So if you subtract that time from
Speaker 1: a day when you think you have a busy day,
Speaker 1: you suddenly are like, I don't got time to do that.
Speaker 1: But then you have the anxiety bubbling up, the low resilience,
Speaker 1: and the poor decision making. So for me, it's a
Speaker 1: reminder to always take care of myself first before I
Speaker 1: take care of others. Even if those things appear to
Speaker 1: take time, they're actually just building in more effective use
Speaker 1: of my time later. It's such an important point, and
Speaker 1: it's a hard lesson that you know, I think I learned,
Speaker 1: and then I have to learn again, and I have
Speaker 1: to learn again. But those fundamentals, you know, just like
Speaker 1: you said, sleeping well, exercising, eating well. You know, for me,
Speaker 1: meditation like those are like just the core fundamentals to
Speaker 1: me doing everything else well. And I surely wish there
Speaker 1: were easier fundamentals than those, but they are what they are. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And I think all those fundamentals as well as you
Speaker 1: just listen to them, are also ensconced in little behaviors. Right,
Speaker 1: So for me, sleeping while includes no screens an hour
Speaker 1: before bedtime, it includes having a good book of fiction
Speaker 1: literally at my bedside table, so I have something to
Speaker 1: clear my mind before bed. It means having my eye
Speaker 1: patch or at least like good blinds that are closed.
Speaker 1: It means, you know, no screens when I wake up
Speaker 1: in the morning for an hour. Like, There's all these
Speaker 1: elements that include good sleep. So I can't just be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go to go to a bit of ten
Speaker 1: it works. I have to remember the little habits and
Speaker 1: behaviors that go along with creating it. Yep, I agree completely.
Speaker 1: Sleep has been a little bit of a problem for me.
Speaker 1: I have pretty good sleep hygiene and all that, but
Speaker 1: I also have a condition called restless legs, and they
Speaker 1: have just been coming back lately. And it has been
Speaker 1: a real drag. But that's one of those times that
Speaker 1: like all the advice about sleep starts to backfire a
Speaker 1: little bit because you're like, I know it's so important
Speaker 1: and I'm not sleeping. Oh my god, you know, so
Speaker 1: I have to be like, all right, it is good
Speaker 1: to sleep, it's important, but I'm not. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna die because I'm getting less sleep. And again,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm doing everything I can to to sort
Speaker 1: of figure it out. Well, let's go into your book.
Speaker 1: You have nine different steps that you think are sort
Speaker 1: of critical to getting this, you know, um, the happiness equation.
Speaker 1: And we're not going to go through all of those,
Speaker 1: but we're gonna get through some of them that I
Speaker 1: thought were particularly interesting, and I wanted to start with.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got these nine different things, but you've
Speaker 1: got you've also got here, You're like the Boodha. You've
Speaker 1: got all kinds of lists, seven ways to be happy
Speaker 1: right now. And there were just a couple of those
Speaker 1: I wanted to hit. And the first was the idea
Speaker 1: of three walks. Okay, basically what happened was this guy
Speaker 1: named Michael bab back down in Pennsylvania, did this incredible
Speaker 1: research study and he showed that doing three brisk, thirty
Speaker 1: minute nature walks a week actually outperformed a test group
Speaker 1: who was taking antidepressants, and outperformed a second test group
Speaker 1: who was doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants.
Speaker 1: And You're like, what, how, How's that possible? I could
Speaker 1: just just walking alone, I'll perform the other two groups. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what if I'm ever in like a large
Speaker 1: audience and I was like, well, who here has a dog?
Speaker 1: And like people put up their hand and you're like,
Speaker 1: do you ever have to walk your dog at like
Speaker 1: ten o'clock a night in the middle of winter and
Speaker 1: your partners in the Netflix coma and you're like, who
Speaker 1: stupid dog is this? But by the time you get
Speaker 1: around the block, after putting on your hat and your
Speaker 1: gloves and your mits and everything, by the time you
Speaker 1: get around the block and you get home, you're like
Speaker 1: re energized. You're like ready to build a snowman. And
Speaker 1: that's what the study says. The two key words, of
Speaker 1: course are brisk and nature. So a walk through a
Speaker 1: forest is better than a mall. And Eric, you've probably
Speaker 1: been following this new research that's been coming out this
Speaker 1: year that's saying, hey, actually there's this there's this kind
Speaker 1: of like chemical released by trees that we didn't know
Speaker 1: much about before called picassens p h y t O
Speaker 1: c I N and they're saying that this chemical actually
Speaker 1: reduces cortisol, or the stress hormone in our body. So
Speaker 1: there's over a thousand licensed forest bathers, you know in
Speaker 1: the US now that will take you kind of on
Speaker 1: a meditative forest bathing trip through the forest. I mean seriously,
Speaker 1: we used to call them hikers, which is a term
Speaker 1: I prefer, but but the point is like, literally, you
Speaker 1: gotta us gotta be somewhere in nature. You've gotta be
Speaker 1: somewhere nature. And so that's the three walks. You said,
Speaker 1: what's one of you know I had seven in the book. Well,
Speaker 1: that's one of them. All the ones I have in
Speaker 1: the book, and the happiest equation are thirty minutes or less,
Speaker 1: and that is just get out in nature three times
Speaker 1: a week. Yeah. We had a woman named Florence Williams
Speaker 1: On who wrote a book, uh sometime in the last
Speaker 1: year called The Nature Fix, and it reviews all the
Speaker 1: studies on nature and it's just kind of overwhelming, and
Speaker 1: it's one that I recognize is so hugely important for
Speaker 1: me and one of the first to go as I
Speaker 1: get busy, Like I'm pretty good about the diet, the exercise,
Speaker 1: the meditation. I mean, you know, I'm I'm nine adherence
Speaker 1: to what my goals are or or more, you know,
Speaker 1: over a long period time. But nature is the first
Speaker 1: one to go as I start to get busy and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden be like, I haven't done that
Speaker 1: in a month. Um, yeah, it's just it's one to
Speaker 1: watch for for me. Well, we let it slip. Nature
Speaker 1: doesn't say anything when when you ignore it, you know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing that comes at you and sort of reminds you.
Speaker 1: I had a friend who worked in Manhattan and was
Speaker 1: totally stressed out, anxious, couldn't sleep, working for one of
Speaker 1: the huge, big, famous kind of companies that won't kind
Speaker 1: of out him. And he went to the in house
Speaker 1: kind of consulting company therapist and she said, I want
Speaker 1: you to collect three souvenirs from nature every day and
Speaker 1: just leave them on your desk at work. And he said, literally,
Speaker 1: the act of looking for a really nice crisp maple
Speaker 1: leaf or a certain rounded stone from the edge of
Speaker 1: a fountain on his way to work in Manhattan was
Speaker 1: so grounding and centering amongst the sort of concrete jungle.
Speaker 1: That is a great one. I've never heard of that
Speaker 1: one before. That's a really, really good one. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of another sort of thing, which is to take
Speaker 1: at least one or two beautiful pictures a day, right,
Speaker 1: because then your eye is tuned towards beauty. But that's
Speaker 1: just another variation that I think is a great one, totally,
Speaker 1: absolutely all right, let's talk about you know, this is
Speaker 1: another one that is pretty commonly known, but I want
Speaker 1: to hit on it again because it seems like I
Speaker 1: heard a lot about it for a while, and then
Speaker 1: I don't hear as much recently. Is you know, random
Speaker 1: acts of kindness. So Sia lab Amirsky really famous kind
Speaker 1: of kingpin in the positive psychology world. Um at Stanford
Speaker 1: and now at the University of California. She published an
Speaker 1: amazing book called The How of Happiness, and one of
Speaker 1: the studies she did was showing that performing five you know,
Speaker 1: I call them random acts sometimes but really they're more
Speaker 1: conscious acts of kindness a week actually is shown to
Speaker 1: increase your happiness more than almost anything else. And the
Speaker 1: interesting reason why you're prolled into this. You're like, okay,
Speaker 1: holding a door for somebody, but I got coffee from
Speaker 1: my doorman, you know, um, bringing flowers home for my
Speaker 1: husband or wife. Why why does it make you feel happier?
Speaker 1: The amazing, interesting insight from the study is because your
Speaker 1: own ego fills you up with the positive feedback. So
Speaker 1: when you're holding that door for everybody leaving a meeting room,
Speaker 1: or you buy coffee for your dormant and he says
Speaker 1: thank you so much, for the rest of day, you
Speaker 1: think I'm awesome, I am super nice, I am the friendliest,
Speaker 1: nicest carrying this guy around, and that self fulfilling kind
Speaker 1: of kind of statement that you're saying yourself makes you
Speaker 1: happy for the rest of the day. Is there any
Speaker 1: data in those studies about it being important to remember
Speaker 1: it or dwell on it or you know, think about
Speaker 1: it during the day, Because it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that I do notice like I do it, and it
Speaker 1: it feels good, But they just kind of go by
Speaker 1: pretty quickly for me, like I do it and then
Speaker 1: I'm off to kind of the next thing. And I'm
Speaker 1: also curious whether any of the studies you've read have
Speaker 1: anything to do with that. The more you do it,
Speaker 1: the less efficacy it has. Um which I'm not saying like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, start cutting down on your kindness so each
Speaker 1: one feels better. But I'm just kind of curious, like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're somebody who always holds the door,
Speaker 1: do you really get much of a boost out of
Speaker 1: doing that if you do it all of the time. Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting you asked that question because most of the
Speaker 1: studies are over a very short time frame, right, like
Speaker 1: like a week, two weeks, three weeks, that type of thing.
Speaker 1: A really famous one that we've seen is with employees
Speaker 1: at Google where we actually had them put a little
Speaker 1: reminder in their calendars every single morning at nine am.
Speaker 1: And for your listeners in a corporate setting, they might
Speaker 1: find this interesting. What was the reminder for you by
Speaker 1: Why when you put a reminder at nine am, it
Speaker 1: doesn't block your calendar. It's not like nine to nine
Speaker 1: thirty or nine to ten. It's just a ding, you know,
Speaker 1: pops up and all it says is right, a three
Speaker 1: sentence email to an old boss or co worker. So
Speaker 1: you say, you know, hi, sonja, Uh, you may not.
Speaker 1: You know, this is Neil. You may not remember this,
Speaker 1: but five years ago, when I was just a new
Speaker 1: person on board of the company, you told me to
Speaker 1: talk lass in meetings and try to listen before speaking.
Speaker 1: I want to let you know I'm still doing that today.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Neil. That's it. A three sentence
Speaker 1: email thanking an old boss or co worker for something
Speaker 1: they taught you over time. And why does that work?
Speaker 1: Because I don't know what your email response rate is, like, Eric,
Speaker 1: but mine is like I don't know. Well, it's a
Speaker 1: on the on the easy emails. When you write a
Speaker 1: thank you to somebody, they always right back within an
Speaker 1: hour saying, oh my gosh, you really touched me, you
Speaker 1: made my day, and you feel good all day. So
Speaker 1: we had the Google employees do this for for twenty
Speaker 1: one days, three weeks. And what do you notice, No surprise,
Speaker 1: massive uptick on their happiness levels. Right, because now you're
Speaker 1: going through the day thinking there's someone up there whom
Speaker 1: thinking who's who's thanks me back? I feel good about myself.
Speaker 1: I recognize I learned a lesson, you know, along the way,
Speaker 1: and it adds this positive glow throughout the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a very interesting study for sure. Again, you've got
Speaker 1: seven ways to be happy that take less than thirty minutes.
Speaker 1: We've covered a couple let's talk about a complete unplug
Speaker 1: I'm laughing because this seems to be the biggest problem
Speaker 1: we have in the world right now. Okay, So a
Speaker 1: couple of stats before we jump into this one. Just
Speaker 1: over five years ago, the average person used their smartphone
Speaker 1: for eighteen minutes a day. This year, the most recent
Speaker 1: data I've seen says that we are using our smartphones
Speaker 1: now for four hours and twenty minutes a day. In fact,
Speaker 1: according to a research company called de Score based in
Speaker 1: the US, we now touch our cell phones over twenty
Speaker 1: five hundred times a day, which is more like a
Speaker 1: constant fondl right exactly. And if you are as obsessed
Speaker 1: with your phone as I am, as everybody is, I
Speaker 1: highly recommend you download an app called Moment m O
Speaker 1: M E n T Moment, because all this app does
Speaker 1: is every single day, at noon, it just tells you
Speaker 1: what your screen time was the day before. That's it.
Speaker 1: All it does is tell you what what it was.
Speaker 1: And so if you're you know, if you follow Peter
Speaker 1: Drucker's old adage, what gets measured gets managed. You won't
Speaker 1: be a price to learn that people who use moment
Speaker 1: actually reduce their screen time by something like eight just
Speaker 1: just by having this app. So why does it complete
Speaker 1: unplug actually work? Well, it means what does it mean?
Speaker 1: First of all, it means when you get home after work,
Speaker 1: or when you check into your family on the weekend,
Speaker 1: whenever that is, put your phone on airplane mode, plug
Speaker 1: it into the basement, and do not check it until
Speaker 1: the next day. I mean, just even getting it, Eric,
Speaker 1: even just getting out of the of the bedrooms is
Speaker 1: kind of a win these days, right, Everyone's like, it's
Speaker 1: got it's my alarm clock. I need it. I'm like,
Speaker 1: go to Walmart, play a tent all our alarm clock.
Speaker 1: You know, Because what's happening right now is our brains
Speaker 1: are constantly distracted. We are losing our ability to focus,
Speaker 1: we are lowering our attention spans, and we cannot get
Speaker 1: into any deeper thinking, any deeper project work, any deeper
Speaker 1: meaningful challenge when we're constantly flinging between pings and dings
Speaker 1: all day. Therefore, at the end of the day, where
Speaker 1: all you're doing is bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks,
Speaker 1: which is the actual language the researchers use. Bookmarking, prioritizing,
Speaker 1: and switching. You don't feel like you got anything done.
Speaker 1: And that's what actually is reducing our happiness. It's not
Speaker 1: the actual things that we're looking at on our phone.
Speaker 1: It's the fact that at the end of that we
Speaker 1: don't feel like anything happened. You know, you click on
Speaker 1: enough hyperlinks, you get so many dopamine doses of pleasure.
Speaker 1: At the end you're like, oh my gosh, it's ten
Speaker 1: thirty pm, Like what where did the last hour or
Speaker 1: two hours ago? Like I I just got sucked in,
Speaker 1: you know, and I don't remember any of it. I
Speaker 1: don't remember any of it. There's nothing long lasting. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: I have this like dusty book on my on my
Speaker 1: my bedside table that I've been meaning to read and
Speaker 1: I'm still on page fourteen. Meanwhile, my child is downstairs
Speaker 1: like building a block tower, and like it would have
Speaker 1: been fun to spend two hours playing with my kid,
Speaker 1: and I just ignored him because of because of Instagram,
Speaker 1: Like you, you get all these disgusting emotions, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to judge the emotions that I've been there.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm labeling them. But it's like the complete
Speaker 1: unplug is the exact opposite of that. It's putting the
Speaker 1: phone away, shuddering it And a great hashtag to follow
Speaker 1: for anyone interested in this is called hashtag device free dinner.
Speaker 1: There's this big movement happening right now on the internet.
Speaker 1: They're just saying, can everyone just put their devices away
Speaker 1: for dinner? It sounds like a return to leave it
Speaker 1: to beaver, but we've just come so far away from
Speaker 1: that we need to have a hashtag for it. You
Speaker 1: mentioned Moment is such an interesting app because a it'll
Speaker 1: tell you how much screen time you have. The other
Speaker 1: interesting statu it has is how often how many times
Speaker 1: did you pick up your phone, which is sort of staggering.
Speaker 1: You're like, wow, I picked that thing up thirty times
Speaker 1: in an hour, Like that's every two minutes, you know.
Speaker 1: And the other thing I like about moment if you
Speaker 1: actually I think you might have to pay for this
Speaker 1: version of it, but you can go in and put
Speaker 1: things that are screen time that you consider valid. You
Speaker 1: could take those out of what's counted. So, for example,
Speaker 1: if I'm using my phone to read a book, right
Speaker 1: I can I can take that time out of the
Speaker 1: screen time because I feel like, well that that's time,
Speaker 1: that's not poor use of time, right, um, And so
Speaker 1: you can you can make some of those judgments yourself.
Speaker 1: But I love that app. Yeah, Can I just go
Speaker 1: on like a little extended, tiny round on the cell
Speaker 1: phone thing here right now? Because I cover this in
Speaker 1: the Happy Screen. But as you probably know, er you know,
Speaker 1: I have this podcast. It's called Three Books, and it's
Speaker 1: all about getting rid of devices and focusing on reading actual,
Speaker 1: real books again. And all I do on the podcast
Speaker 1: is is trying to uncover the three most formative books
Speaker 1: of inspiring people. Why am I focusing on that because
Speaker 1: I hate cell phones. They have three problems and they
Speaker 1: all start with the letter P, physical, psychological, and physiological.
Speaker 1: What's the physical problem of cell phones? Well, when you
Speaker 1: tilt your head down to look at your phone, you
Speaker 1: had sixty pounds of pressure to your spine. I went
Speaker 1: to the physiotherapist last year for uh, my thumb, Like
Speaker 1: literally my right thumb stopped working. I couldn't bend it
Speaker 1: it hurts so much. And what my physiotherapist said to
Speaker 1: me was all we do is thumbs Now like, like,
Speaker 1: nobody you ever see a kid with a cast on
Speaker 1: their arm and leg anymore. No, they have bags under
Speaker 1: the rise and broken thumbs. So there's a huge physical
Speaker 1: problem with phones. The second one psychological. You're always online
Speaker 1: comparing your director's cut life with everybody else's greatest hits.
Speaker 1: You know, um, no matter what you're eating for dinner,
Speaker 1: this amazing homemade lasagna, Like you go on Instagram someone
Speaker 1: at a lobster buffet in the Maldives, right, everyone else
Speaker 1: is doing something cooler, And it's impossible to be the
Speaker 1: best anymore. You can't be the best anything. You can't
Speaker 1: be the best high school basketball player because there's someone better.
Speaker 1: You can't even be the best person in video games.
Speaker 1: This is depressed to me. I was as a kid.
Speaker 1: I was like I could get to the end of
Speaker 1: MERRYO three or Contra. And now it's like, now there's
Speaker 1: someone who defeated the entire game on YouTube in twelve seconds. Right,
Speaker 1: So psychologically you're just never good enough. And the third
Speaker 1: palm is physiological. And I mentioned earlier about the nose
Speaker 1: screens before bed, Well, that's is based on research from
Speaker 1: Australia that's showing that when you expose your brain too
Speaker 1: bright screens within one hour of bedtime. Physiologically, your body
Speaker 1: doesn't produce melatonin overnight. You know it's the sleep hormone.
Speaker 1: So you have a less RESTful sleep. What does that mean?
Speaker 1: It means when you wake up the next point, you
Speaker 1: have lower resilience for the next day. You have less
Speaker 1: energy to deflect sort of microaggressions on social media. You
Speaker 1: get a little snappier in meetings. You might ye at
Speaker 1: your wife her husband because you haven't rested your body yet.
Speaker 1: And so when you're not rested, what do you look
Speaker 1: at in the morning? What did Trump tweet? Like? You're
Speaker 1: interested because you don't have the resilience to focus on
Speaker 1: something deeper. So we've got these three huge piece of
Speaker 1: problems with cell phones and and it's it's really really troubling,
Speaker 1: and so device free dinners one. Plugging your phone in
Speaker 1: the basement is another one. No screens an hour before
Speaker 1: bid is a third, and my biggest advice of all,
Speaker 1: it's just like live in airplane mode. You know, turn
Speaker 1: that entire device from a push device which sends you
Speaker 1: alerts and texta notifications all day, into a poll based
Speaker 1: device or once or twice a day, you consciously exit
Speaker 1: out of airplay mode, face the barrage of alerts and notifications,
Speaker 1: recognize that none of them are very important, and then
Speaker 1: go back into airplay mode. Yeah. I survive on do
Speaker 1: not Disturb mode. I mean I am on it very
Speaker 1: very often. You know, just put the thing on do
Speaker 1: not Disturb for a few hours, and I do it
Speaker 1: constantly because downloads, like seriously, with hundreds of No, I'm
Speaker 1: serious with d That's why you have that. You even
Speaker 1: created this incredible pocket because you're not being disturbed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so question for you and around the screen light situation
Speaker 1: before bed. You know the phone, some of the newer
Speaker 1: phones have night shift mode, right that takes that blue
Speaker 1: light out, and I'm really curious if you've seen anything
Speaker 1: about how that works. And the reason I ask is
Speaker 1: that I do most of the reading for the show
Speaker 1: on my kindle because I take notes. It's just the
Speaker 1: amount of time it saves me is dramatic, right, because
Speaker 1: I just highlight it and then I've just got a
Speaker 1: whole process built around it. But I also do worry,
Speaker 1: like am I exposing myself to screens more than I should?
Speaker 1: Before bed? You know, I've got the night shift mode.
Speaker 1: I just haven't heard anything about whether that actually works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's thank god that we have more awareness around it.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, blue light and and there's
Speaker 1: red light and this yellow light. You know, all these
Speaker 1: things are helpful aids. They sort of reduced the what
Speaker 1: you're what the worst case scenario is just like a
Speaker 1: really blindingly bright white screen in your face, which tells
Speaker 1: your primal brain that it's you know, it's daytime. I'm awake.
Speaker 1: But I'm just going to tell you my solution. And
Speaker 1: I'm not comparing or contrasting. But this is where I've
Speaker 1: gotten to is that I've switched entirely to analog books,
Speaker 1: um hunt like pretty much. And I've I've purchased a
Speaker 1: red reading light that I wear on my forehead like
Speaker 1: a crazy person, um because my wife goes to bed.
Speaker 1: David Sedaris has told me in an episode of Three Books,
Speaker 1: he said, you know, he picks garbage on the side
Speaker 1: of the road for like eight to twelve hours a day.
Speaker 1: David Sedaris that the crazy thing, right, And he's like yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, your craziness is correlated to the
Speaker 1: number of things you wear on your head. And he
Speaker 1: was like a light the hat and stuff, and I
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, I guess I'm the same because I
Speaker 1: have a red like essentially camping light that I wear
Speaker 1: on my forehead because the research I've done shows that
Speaker 1: it's not as bad for my brain as as a
Speaker 1: white light. So I have a red reading light on
Speaker 1: an analog book for typically one to two hours before
Speaker 1: I fall asleep, often with a book like on top
Speaker 1: of me. And it's almost always fiction by the way.
Speaker 1: I read nonfiction in the morning and fiction at night. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh if I if I'm reading fiction, I try to
Speaker 1: almost always have the book. I just prefer the physical book.
Speaker 1: But just like I said, for the show and the
Speaker 1: all the reading I do, it's just such a kindle,
Speaker 1: such an amazing device for that. Okay, let's change gears
Speaker 1: here now to one of your nine sections in the book.
Speaker 1: One is called never Retire. And I love this one,
Speaker 1: um because it rings so true to me. And You've
Speaker 1: got a quote in there a woman who's sort of saying, like,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of dogs are working dogs, like
Speaker 1: they have to work to be happy, and she describes
Speaker 1: herself as a working dog. And I realized, like, that's me,
Speaker 1: it's just such an extent that like, I feel like
Speaker 1: I want to be doing things that are meaningful, and
Speaker 1: when I'm not, I don't feel so happy. And but
Speaker 1: you kind of talk about it was fascinating to me
Speaker 1: that the concept of where retirement came from, when it
Speaker 1: came from, and what its purpose was and what it did.
Speaker 1: So you have picked up on of the nine secrets
Speaker 1: in the Happiness, you have just picked the most controversial
Speaker 1: one by far. So I'm glad you picked it because
Speaker 1: it's a provocative conversation. Why did I go and rail
Speaker 1: against retirement? By the way, I'm living in a culture,
Speaker 1: in a society, in my East Indian culture. I'm East Indian,
Speaker 1: I'm Canadian. I live in Troy, where everywhere you look
Speaker 1: it's promoting retirement right in my in my family and
Speaker 1: my um on TV. You know, it's about freedom, it's
Speaker 1: about you know, quitting early, retiring early, all that stuff.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, no, this entire thing is backwards. And
Speaker 1: to and to prove it, I went into the research. Okay,
Speaker 1: where did the phrase retirement come from? It came from
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds in Germany when Chancellor Otto von
Speaker 1: Bismarck declared that anybody over age sixty five who was infirm,
Speaker 1: like they weren't able to work could if they wanted to.
Speaker 1: So it was not mandatory, it was optional leave the
Speaker 1: workforce and receive a small amount of money from the state.
Speaker 1: Three interesting things about that that announcement. First of all,
Speaker 1: he made up the number sixty five, and the only
Speaker 1: relevance of that number was that the average lifespan was
Speaker 1: sixty seven, Like Penicilla wasn't invented for forty more years, right,
Speaker 1: like sixties when people live to sixty seven, he's like
Speaker 1: based like it's like saying ninety now, you know. So,
Speaker 1: So that's the first thing. The second thing is youth
Speaker 1: unemployment in Germany at the time was in the in
Speaker 1: like it was like between twenty and so we had
Speaker 1: a huge problem. He had a huge, like political problem,
Speaker 1: which is that young people have no work. So he
Speaker 1: was also trying to move people out of the system
Speaker 1: to make jobs. What happened, every Western country followed that
Speaker 1: number sixty five as social security Act. I'm in Canada,
Speaker 1: we followed it to England. Whatever. Everyone copied that number
Speaker 1: sixty five. So in the Western world, sixty five is
Speaker 1: this arbitrary number which bears no connection to our lifespan anymore,
Speaker 1: which has extended another twenty thirty years. And it presumes
Speaker 1: a few things. It presumes that we want to leave
Speaker 1: the workforce, it presumes that we can afford to, and
Speaker 1: it presumes that we can afford to pay others to
Speaker 1: do it. Okay, So then I took I zoomed out again.
Speaker 1: I like, wait a minute, is this like, let's go
Speaker 1: back to first principles. Let's look around the world. What
Speaker 1: do you find When you look around the world, you
Speaker 1: find societies in Eastern cultures that are healthier and happier
Speaker 1: than ours, who live longer than ours. For example, the
Speaker 1: famous blue zone of Okinawa, Japan. And when I say
Speaker 1: blues and I'm I'm citing a national geographic study called
Speaker 1: the Blue Zones by Dan Putner. So you go look
Speaker 1: at Okinawa, Japan. They live seven years longer than we do.
Speaker 1: Aar like, that's a long that's a lot longer, seven
Speaker 1: extra years of average lifespan. And then you look in
Speaker 1: their culture and guess what. They don't even have a
Speaker 1: word for retirement, Like literally, no word in their language
Speaker 1: describes the concept of leaving work completely doesn't even exist. Instead,
Speaker 1: they have a different word there. It's called ikey guy,
Speaker 1: which is spelled I K I G A I ikey guy,
Speaker 1: and it roughly translates as the reason you get out
Speaker 1: of bed in the morning. So it turns out you
Speaker 1: don't actually want to retire. You actually just want to
Speaker 1: be doing something that you love. And I argue in
Speaker 1: the happiness equation that you need what I call the
Speaker 1: three s is and they are social statement social like
Speaker 1: like having friends and a connection point at work, the stimulation,
Speaker 1: second stimulation of always learning something new, and the third S,
Speaker 1: which is called I called story because Ikey Guy was
Speaker 1: an eye and I wanted to start with S, which
Speaker 1: means you have a reason to get up in the
Speaker 1: where you have like a you're doing something that you
Speaker 1: couldn't do by yourself. It's like most comparable is the
Speaker 1: company's purpose right or mission statements. So if you work
Speaker 1: at Google, you're organizing the world's information. If you work
Speaker 1: for Wikipedia, you're giving the sum of human knowledge to
Speaker 1: every earthling for free. If you're working for the across
Speaker 1: you're creating health and and troubling situations or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: Every company has some some gigantic, high level purpose that
Speaker 1: they couldn't do without all the people working for them.
Speaker 1: And if you're not working for our profit organization, fine,
Speaker 1: you probably are. Maybe you're part of the community, or
Speaker 1: you're helping spread literacy, or you're you know whatever, connecting
Speaker 1: connecting people through a coffee shop. It could be anything,
Speaker 1: but those three says of social stimulation and story are
Speaker 1: actually what we're craving. We do not actually want to retire.
Speaker 1: We just want to do work we love right till
Speaker 1: the very end. Right. You know, when I think of retirement,
Speaker 1: I think of like, oh God, I can do all
Speaker 1: those other things that seem so meaningful that I don't
Speaker 1: have time to do. I think the other s and
Speaker 1: I feel like I maybe you didn't include it in
Speaker 1: the three s is, but was in the book in
Speaker 1: other different places. Is the s of structure, Right, That's
Speaker 1: one of the things that work does. And whether that again,
Speaker 1: whether that work is the work you do to get paid,
Speaker 1: whether that is after you've retired, the volunteer work you do,
Speaker 1: or you know, anything that you do, it provides a structure,
Speaker 1: you know. And what I notice with people, you know,
Speaker 1: I do a lot a lot of coaching work with people,
Speaker 1: and boy, the people that don't have structure, externally enforced
Speaker 1: structure have to work really hard to create an internal
Speaker 1: structure for their own lives because without any structure, we
Speaker 1: get lost. You know, I always say structure liberate. So
Speaker 1: I think that's the other important piece to why having
Speaker 1: something to do that matters do you at any age
Speaker 1: is so important and totally and how agree. It also
Speaker 1: takes off a lot of pressure. You know. You look around,
Speaker 1: You're like, I'm saving up for this, I'm saving up
Speaker 1: for that. I'm putting away tempercent on my income. You're like,
Speaker 1: you crazy, like, like why you just abandon that concept
Speaker 1: and realize that And by the way, I just also
Speaker 1: add in here. Fortune Magazine has has done a study
Speaker 1: that shows the two most dangerous years of our lives
Speaker 1: are the year that we are born and the year
Speaker 1: that we retire. And almost everyone I talked to knows
Speaker 1: like some distant uncle or a brother in law that
Speaker 1: like retired on that year they had a heart attack.
Speaker 1: You know, Like it's a commonly held story in our
Speaker 1: culture that once somebody loses their sense of purpose, their
Speaker 1: sense of connection, their sense of learning, they lose themselves
Speaker 1: as well. Let's talk about one of the things near
Speaker 1: the end of the book, which is and I loved this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I love the retirement section, but I might
Speaker 1: have loved this section even more, which was don't take advice,
Speaker 1: and not in a hardhead sense, but because all advice conflicts.
Speaker 1: I have this conversation all the time with my girlfriend
Speaker 1: as we're looking at how to eat well. Right, It's
Speaker 1: just like, oh my god. I mean, you know, every
Speaker 1: time you turn around, somebody's got a different opinion. You
Speaker 1: should do this, you shouldn't do that, you should you know.
Speaker 1: You mentioned in the book reading on one day in
Speaker 1: the New York Times a study that says vitamin D
Speaker 1: uh supplements don't do any good, right, waste of money.
Speaker 1: And then the next day the Toronto Star has, you know,
Speaker 1: here's all the benefits of taking vitamin D. And and
Speaker 1: then in the book you go through and you list
Speaker 1: all these I thought this was great. You list all
Speaker 1: these cliches, and that for almost every cliche we have,
Speaker 1: we have another cliche that's almost exactly it's opposite. And
Speaker 1: I just thought that was was so great. So let's
Speaker 1: just talk a little bit about how all advice conflicts
Speaker 1: and how do you recommend people find their way through
Speaker 1: this morass? First of all, the interesting they had discovered
Speaker 1: while researching this was that cliche is actually a French word,
Speaker 1: as maybe you know because it sounds French, but basically,
Speaker 1: in an old printing presses, a cliche was an actual
Speaker 1: physical metal printing plate, which also used to be called
Speaker 1: the stereotype. And over over time it made sense to
Speaker 1: cast commonly used phrases on one single slug of metal
Speaker 1: instead of letter by letters. So cliche was literally a
Speaker 1: collection of words used together often. Okay, So so then
Speaker 1: I started looking up what we call cliches today. This
Speaker 1: is the most kind of timeless advice of all and
Speaker 1: and sure enough, every single cliche you you find has
Speaker 1: an equal, an exact opposite. So birds of a feather
Speaker 1: flock together, or opposites attract or there's clothes make the man,
Speaker 1: or you can't judge a book by its cover. There's
Speaker 1: absence makes the heart grow fonder. And then there's out
Speaker 1: of sight, out of mind, there's nothing ventured, nothing gained,
Speaker 1: or better safe than story. There's you get what you
Speaker 1: pay for. The best things in life are free. That
Speaker 1: you know. It goes on on the good things come
Speaker 1: to those who wait. The early bird gets the worm
Speaker 1: that there's in is my favorite one. The pen is
Speaker 1: mightier than the sword, or actions speak louder than words,
Speaker 1: and it's like suddenly they look flimsy, right, And so
Speaker 1: then this is a real problem because I'm in this
Speaker 1: self help universe right like you, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: happiness equation. I've got a whole new book coming out
Speaker 1: all about resilience right now, and like I'm in this
Speaker 1: self help ghetto. And and it's a lot of snake
Speaker 1: oil salesman right, Like it's a lot of like do this,
Speaker 1: do that, do this? Do that? You know, be Vegan
Speaker 1: b be Paleo as you as you said, there's all
Speaker 1: these exact opposite things. Um and by the way, you know,
Speaker 1: my wife Leslie is expecting. It's even worse. In the
Speaker 1: parenting world. You know, it's sleep with your baby, never
Speaker 1: sleep with your baby. Only breastfeed. Don't don't breastfeed, like,
Speaker 1: don't worry about breast Like it's just NonStop. So what
Speaker 1: do you do? Well, you have to put yourself in
Speaker 1: situations where you can confidently test things yourself. So one
Speaker 1: of my favorite examples of this is something that called
Speaker 1: the bench test. So rather than following advice, you just
Speaker 1: do the bench test. What is the bench test? My
Speaker 1: buddy Fred is super smart, and he got into like
Speaker 1: every Ivy League school. And if you go on, if
Speaker 1: you are in the same boat and you get into
Speaker 1: every IVY the school, you go visit Harvard, and you
Speaker 1: go visit Princeton, you go visit Yale, and what do
Speaker 1: they do. They give you a tour of campus, like
Speaker 1: this is the classic things, like here's the residences, and
Speaker 1: here's the gym, here's and you're like, I'm evaluating which
Speaker 1: school to spend my four years in based on how
Speaker 1: new the treadmills are, Like it's really weird. So my
Speaker 1: friend Fred came up with this idea called the bench test.
Speaker 1: He drove to all the Ivy League schools that he
Speaker 1: got into, and he found a bench in the middle
Speaker 1: of campus and he sat there for an hour in
Speaker 1: each one. All he was doing is patiently listening to
Speaker 1: and observing the conversations around him, the people, the people's mannerisms,
Speaker 1: the sort of the sense of culture. And he thought, really,
Speaker 1: my four years at this school is going to be
Speaker 1: a sum of all these conversations. So where do I
Speaker 1: feel my heart connects most? Right? So in his case,
Speaker 1: he it was Princeton, and he went to Princeton. He
Speaker 1: met the love of his life, he met his best friends,
Speaker 1: he's happily blah blah blah. Everything is great. And so
Speaker 1: why do I mention the bench test? Because when you're
Speaker 1: going for a job interview, you can call it the
Speaker 1: office tour test. I was an HR for ten years
Speaker 1: at Walmart. Hardly anyone ever asked me for a tour
Speaker 1: of the office. But when you walk around the office,
Speaker 1: you see, do people say hi in the hallways? How
Speaker 1: does it? How is this structured? Is there a hierarchy
Speaker 1: that's clear? What do people dress like? Like you notice
Speaker 1: all that stuff? And if you're thinking buying a house,
Speaker 1: it's called the sidewalk tests, right, like don't you visit
Speaker 1: the house? Like walk around the neighborhood. And almost every
Speaker 1: situation people are like, well, you know, my parents won't
Speaker 1: let me live with my boyfriend or girlfriend like cultural, culturally,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, go on a trip together. Like there's
Speaker 1: a version of the bench test for almost every major
Speaker 1: life decision you encounter. I think that's a great one.
Speaker 1: Spending time like that and learning to trust your own
Speaker 1: intuition is so important. The other thing that I find
Speaker 1: really helpful is to look for the commonality. So if
Speaker 1: I look at the diet stuff, right, and I look
Speaker 1: at eat a key agenic diet, eat a vegan diet,
Speaker 1: a vegetarian diet, a paleo diet, what I look at
Speaker 1: what they all agree on is way less processed food,
Speaker 1: eat whole foods. And I'm like, Okay, that seems like, okay,
Speaker 1: here's a point of commonality, you know. Um. I also
Speaker 1: love when I see modern science proving something that's been
Speaker 1: part of a long term wisdom tradition, because I'm going,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm getting it confirmed both ends. It's stuck
Speaker 1: around for this many thousands of years and there's all
Speaker 1: this stuff to it, and science is saying, look, this
Speaker 1: seems to be really good. I'm like, all right, that's
Speaker 1: a double confirmation. Um. So those are a couple of
Speaker 1: things that I also do. And then I think ultimately
Speaker 1: it's just realizing like there is no one right answer
Speaker 1: to anything. I mean, again, if we want to get
Speaker 1: very specific about is there a right answer to whether
Speaker 1: there's climate change or is there a right answer to
Speaker 1: the size of Jupiter. Of course there is, but when
Speaker 1: it comes to things in life that there's a lot
Speaker 1: more subtlety and nuance, there's usually not one right answer.
Speaker 1: My son and I did this with school. I was like,
Speaker 1: you know, do the best you can to make the
Speaker 1: best decision you can. But you know what, there's pros
Speaker 1: and cons to every one of these places and every
Speaker 1: one of these things, So just do the best you
Speaker 1: can and then realize that there isn't the right answer.
Speaker 1: There's just the one you chose. Mm hmm. Yeah. My
Speaker 1: dad always used to say growing up, the best decision
Speaker 1: is the one you made. Yeah, that's great, and there's
Speaker 1: you know, in the happiest equation. I quote this, this
Speaker 1: quote from Charles Varley in eighteen seventy two, which I
Speaker 1: love saying and I don't want to take credit for it,
Speaker 1: and the quote is when we ask advice, we are
Speaker 1: usually looking for an accomplice. Yeah, that's great. And I
Speaker 1: remember that if I'm like, do you think I should
Speaker 1: buy this or not? I'm like, oh, I'm just looking
Speaker 1: for someone else to tell me that I should you
Speaker 1: know or shouldn't. Like I'm just literally looking for someone
Speaker 1: to agree with the thought I'm not willing to even
Speaker 1: tell myself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, we are coming near
Speaker 1: the end of time. You and I are going to
Speaker 1: have a post show conversation where we talk about your
Speaker 1: upcoming audible book on resilience, and resilience is something I've
Speaker 1: been so interested in lately, Like, you know, how is
Speaker 1: it that some people have really difficult things happen and
Speaker 1: they turn that into um positive or they survive or
Speaker 1: they come out stronger, and lots of other people get
Speaker 1: beaten or broken. So we're going to discuss resilience in
Speaker 1: the post show conversation. Uh, listeners, if you're interested in
Speaker 1: that one you feed dot net slash support you can
Speaker 1: get access to all of those. But for the last
Speaker 1: part of this conversation, I want to talk about something
Speaker 1: you say in the book. You say that you know,
Speaker 1: we have a few different wars going on inside of us,
Speaker 1: right we We started the show with the parable, you know,
Speaker 1: battle between good Wolf and bad Wolf, right, um, but
Speaker 1: one that you use is the war between more and enough,
Speaker 1: and I thought we could hit that kind of on
Speaker 1: our way out here. Yeah exactly. Okay. My argument is
Speaker 1: that we used to live in the culture of enough,
Speaker 1: so so for hundreds of thousands a few years the
Speaker 1: history of our species, all you needed was enough. You
Speaker 1: scrounged for enough. You tried to get enough to eat.
Speaker 1: You hoped to find enough of a mate that you
Speaker 1: could you can mate with. Of of the seventeen people
Speaker 1: you met in your life, you know, one of them
Speaker 1: was you know what I'm saying, like you literally needed enough.
Speaker 1: And then something happened, which is that in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, Um, there's a huge culture shift, and we
Speaker 1: switched to this culture of more. Why did that happen?
Speaker 1: Because really the big shift that was happening was the
Speaker 1: invention of appliances like like um, the fridge and the
Speaker 1: washing machine and the dishwater like these these appliances took
Speaker 1: out so much time and so much labor that was
Speaker 1: in our days, and suddenly we had conspicuous consumption came
Speaker 1: into fashion and like you know, showing off wealth and
Speaker 1: all these things that con didn't happened before. And a
Speaker 1: very famous comic strip was developed around this time called
Speaker 1: Keeping Up with the Joneses, which is where the phrases
Speaker 1: actually from, and it ended up becoming the longest running
Speaker 1: comic strip in the world of the time ran for
Speaker 1: like thirty years and thousands of papers and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: because it was about this idea that we're now going
Speaker 1: into this culture of more, we have to have more.
Speaker 1: And the way I kind of close off the sections
Speaker 1: by actually quoting Kurvannigett, who I know is one of
Speaker 1: your favorite authors. When his friend Joseph Heller died. So
Speaker 1: Joseph Heller, author of Catch twenty two, died, Kurvanna can
Speaker 1: Get published a very strange obituary of him the New Yorker.
Speaker 1: And I say strange because it was really just like
Speaker 1: a few sentences he said, true story, word of honor.
Speaker 1: At a billionaire hedge funds party on Shelter Island, you know,
Speaker 1: Joseph Heller and I kind of went as a special guests,
Speaker 1: and I said to Joe, hey, how do you feel
Speaker 1: having written one of the most prominent works of literature
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. How do you feel about the
Speaker 1: fact that this guy made more in a in a
Speaker 1: day or a month or whatever it is, then you've
Speaker 1: made over your entire life. And Joseph Heller said, it's true,
Speaker 1: but I'll have one thing that he'll never have, and
Speaker 1: curvaning and said, well, wha whatever could that be? And
Speaker 1: Joseph Holler said, the knowledge that I have enough and
Speaker 1: what I'm arguing for and the happiness equation is a
Speaker 1: return to the awareness of how much we need versus
Speaker 1: how much we want is a possible tool to save
Speaker 1: us from so many of the ills that we have today.
Speaker 1: Tying together our conversation about cell phones, social media, psychological
Speaker 1: addiction on social media, it ties together like finding purpose
Speaker 1: and retirement. It all comes back to thinking for yourself,
Speaker 1: what is enough to me? How can I articulate and
Speaker 1: how can I define that? And you recognize it's a
Speaker 1: lot less than you probably already have. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: such a great place to end the conversation and bring
Speaker 1: it around full circle. You know, a lot of the
Speaker 1: show is about just being conscious about what we think,
Speaker 1: what we choose, what our brain is doing. And that
Speaker 1: is one of those fundamental questions I think that we
Speaker 1: can come back to over and over again is do
Speaker 1: I have enough? And it's correlate. There is one that
Speaker 1: you talk when we talked about the seven different things
Speaker 1: you can do in less than thirty minutes, right, one
Speaker 1: of them's gratitude right, which is we just hear over
Speaker 1: and over and over again, but again, we hear it
Speaker 1: over and over again because it works. And gratitude is
Speaker 1: a form of reflecting on I have enough or even
Speaker 1: more than that, like you know that I have enough
Speaker 1: and and there's lots of wonderful things right within where
Speaker 1: I'm at, beautiful and an incredible way to remind me
Speaker 1: that I should be thinking about the same way you do. Well,
Speaker 1: that's why I do every one of these interviews, because
Speaker 1: I need them. Well, thanks Neil so much. Like I mentioned,
Speaker 1: you and I are going to continue talking a little
Speaker 1: bit more about resilience, but thank you so much for
Speaker 1: taking the time to come on. Absolutely my pleasure. Eric
Speaker 1: and I always say to the people at the very
Speaker 1: very end of any podcast, these are my favorite people
Speaker 1: in the entire world. They really are. And so if
Speaker 1: anyone listening we wants to drop me a line, I'm
Speaker 1: just at Neil at Global Happiness dot org Neil at
Speaker 1: Global Happiness that or and the reason I throw that
Speaker 1: out there just because, like I said, the people who
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts all the way to the very end,
Speaker 1: especially on my favorite shows, are my favorite people to
Speaker 1: meet around the world. And I always love the connections
Speaker 1: wonderful And we'll have links in the show notes to
Speaker 1: UM your book, your website, and we'll have links also
Speaker 1: for your new audible program that we're going to discuss
Speaker 1: here uh in the post show. So thanks Neil, thank
Speaker 1: you bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you,
Speaker 1: please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast.
Speaker 1: Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.
Speaker 1: The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank
Speaker 1: our sponsors for supporting the show