Michael Norton (on rituals)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Ryther and I'm joined by the Minister of Mayhem. That's a new one. Try it on.

You know what it sounds? It sounds like Screamo. Sure. Or some kind of a metal collective.

Yeah, exactly. Not really my style. No. And not on topic either for our guests.

Well, that's not true. Okay, thanks for correcting me. Because there's a lot of rituals that happen at these Screamo concerts. True, true, true.

Everyone screams at the same time, I imagine. I've never been to one. Michael Norton is a, well first, he's our guest today, and Michael is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School. He has a previous book everyone loved, Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending.

He's also written a lot, and we talk about it on Humble Bragging, which I think is lovely. Yeah, it's fun. It's a fun topic. But he has a new book out right now called The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.

And what's really fun about this episode is, I think, like us, many people enter it thinking they don't have any rituals. And we all do. And we do. This is also the answer to an Easter egg we were talking about on some fact check about teeth brushing and order of things.

And some people actually in the comments sounded off that they totally disagreed with me and that they agreed with me. A lot of people were like, you know, like, the tooth brushing in the middle of the skincare routine is sacrilege. Bad, bad, bad, bad. And other people are like, I do the same thing, and I let my serum set in.

Really? And they're not worried that the toothpaste is going to get into the serum and make a sludge? Apparently not. Wow.

Oh, this isn't the place for it, but I didn't do it in the fact check. And we already did the fact check. But I felt obligated to explain the full situation, because while we were interviewing Amy Poehler, I had mentioned that Wretches Gemstones had reached out and that I wanted to do it. Yes.

And a lot of people were like, definitely take that job. And they were excited to see me, which was so flattering. And I would love to be on it. And when they don't see me on it, I don't want them to think I didn't take that job.

They just never call back. They said, are you available? If you've ever traveled kids or with extended family, you know how much difference a little extra space can make. Everyone's on different schedules.

You want room to actually relax without disrupting anyone. That's where Airbnb really makes a difference. Giving you the space you actually need. Having separate bedrooms, a real kitchen, a common area where everyone can spread out.

It just takes the pressure off. We were up in Toronto, and we opted for an Airbnb over a hotel. What I love about it is everyone can be on their own sleeping schedule. That is nice.

You're not required to wake up when the earliest riser gets up. Not for me. I always start by checking out guest favorites. They're the most loved homes on the platform, consistently highly rated by guests.

Some trips really do feel better when you have the right space. We need to ask. Or do you know for sure? Okay.

I make the jokes he is Mario. Of course you do. Did you make jokes like that before you were a dad? He's a pun master.

Well, and we can talk about this. It kind of dovetails into your research. He is increasingly having impulse control issues with his puns. Compulsion is perhaps entered the chat.

I did a dad joke the other day. My daughter's eight. I said the joke, and she went. And my wife said, oh, really?

That was a joke. And she goes, sadly, I know. Oh, that's good. That's what they're there for, those children.

To humble the shit out of you. Do you have more than one? Just one. You were smart.

You were like, this is a lot of work. Let's cap it here. Yeah, she's right. Because zero to one is a completely different life.

But then one to two is just more of a thing. Yeah, someone said wisely, it's not twice as much. It's exponential. The second one's like four times as much.

Well, my brother's eight years younger than me, so we're not ruling it out for you. You never know. We don't know about your vasectomy or not. We're not going to ask.

We're not going to start there. I'll start. I have one. I sent all the paperwork.

Did you not see the paperwork? How old are you? 49. Me too.

Oh, my God. 1975. 75. What's your birthday?

April 17th. January 2nd. So I am your elder. I want you to treat me as a child.

Obezen. Is that how you say that? Where are you from? From outside Boston.

I'm Irish Catholic. There's only like two places you can live. I have to ask. Yeah, go ahead.

Because you're of the appropriate age. Do you know my boyfriend's Ben and Matt? No. Ben and Matt, like, Ben and Matt.

No, I know you. Believe me, I know you. But you don't know them. No, I don't.

He went to a competing college. He went to Princeton, right? Oh, ouch. Yeah, but he now teaches where they went to school.

It's much more impressive than going there. I agree. I don't think so. I didn't get in, so.

You take a certain joy in becoming a faculty member there? Every grievance you've had, you just visited on the... You know what I mean? It's so fun.

You can resent all these incoming freshmen. So you grew up outside of Boston. Like, how far out? 45 minutes such that we never, ever went into the city.

Once a year, it was kind of a big thing. Otherwise, we just lived on a block that was a circle, and we just kind of biked and walked in a circle all year in the suburbs. And what did mom and dad do? They owned a Hallmark store, actually.

Oh, my goodness. Very novel. Which was very, very interesting as a kid. A lot of gift stuff in my blood.

I used to work security. Oh. At the Hallmark? Yeah, because this is a surprising thing.

People really like to steal cards. Yeah, of course. Oh, I could see that. Because they're so easy.

I mean, they're flat. Put them anywhere. And also, nobody wants to pay for a greeting card. It sucks to buy a greeting card.

Exactly. Well, you know you damn well could have made one out of paper at home. That's right. Now, was most of your concentration on the employees, because we had a prompt for one of our shows, and it was tell us about time.

Oh, mall stores. Mall stores. And we had two people that had worked at greeting card stores, and one of them had just robbed the place blind. And then we had a bunch of people in the comments saying, like, I, too, worked at a greeting card store.

And yeah, we stole every little knick-knack in Chotsky. I wonder if it overindexes and thefts among the employees. Can we follow up with them and see if they worked at my parents' store? Because is there a way to recoup?

She did want to say it on this. I think it was a dead mall in Massachusetts. Then we'll know. Well, that's kind of exciting that mom and dad had a store at the mall.

It was interesting. Okay, I'm the youngest of five, so most of us at some point cycle through working at the store. Now, when you're in high school, you probably want to be working at The Gap or a merry-go-round. A shoe store.

No, it's really cool, actually, to work at a card store or mall. Everybody's like, that guy's cool. He's security. We should hang out with him.

I'd ask his number, but I'm sure it's already taken. What kind of guy were you in high school? I would say a nerd. Your four older siblings, were they boys, girls?

Brother, three girls, and then I'm the youngest. Oh, okay. I was, according to everyone except my mother, an accident. Okay.

She's still keeping strong. She'll never go there. And were the sisters in school with you at the same time? One was.

And was she protective and helpful, or did she distance herself from you? She's four years older than me, so she wasn't in school. And so she was nice, but not let's hang, which I completely understand. And what was your BA in?

Psychology and English, which my father said, I don't know which one of those is more useless. Minimally, you could have gone into law with your English degree. I was thinking about being a lawyer, and then I worked at a law firm as a paralegal. I was applying to law school and two PhD programs.

And this lawyer there, I said, will you write me a recommendation letter? And he said, I will write your recommendation letter if you promise me that you will never become a lawyer. Sure. Wow.

Because lawyers hate being lawyers. He hated it. As soon as you become friends with a few lawyers, you realize the entire field hates their job. Maybe more than any other field.

It was amazing. He had a great job, but he just really does work all the time on hard, sad things. Yeah, and it's all about hours. It's billable hours, right?

So you're just a slave to the hours. Okay, so why psychology? I believe that as the youngest of five, you're automatically an observer of kind of the chaos. Large families are a lot going on.

I was talking to my sister about this. So we have seven, obviously, with my two parents. So the number of possible permutations of coalitions, you know, like two versus five, three versus four, all of the different ones. I'm not going to math for somebody who's like, well, that's easy to do.

There's so many. Today, it's us three against those four, but in an hour, it might be one against six. I think it was this fascinating shifting landscape. And you have the least amount of power and control in the dynamics, so you're probably the most incentivized to figure out why it works the way it does.

Completely. How can I get somebody to drive me to where I need to go? Right. And the parents have stopped parenting probably two kids ago.

It's a miracle you did good in school and stuff. It really just must have been an innate drive. Were they on you? If things went wrong, they would show up.

Otherwise, if we don't hear anything, let's just let them do this thing. Yeah. Let's not fix what's not broken. The wheel's not squeaking.

Then even when applying to graduate school, what tips you to psychology? And he applied to PhD programs in psychology. And I was like, I don't know what I want to do. So I applied also.

That is the actual true reason why I applied is that I was like, this guy is going places. He's a professor at Tufts now, actually. He's going places. Maybe I'll just do what he's doing at least for a little while and see if...

Yeah. And then what was the master's in? Also psychology. So once you get into your PhD program, you're getting, I'm imagining a much more specific thread of psychology.

And what was that? Social psychology, which used to study groups, but it ends up being really just how people think. That was just really fascinating for me. What's going on in social interactions, but also just full stop what's going on with the humans.

Yeah, because throwing social in there makes me confused. Like, are we talking about a hybrid of sociology and psychology? Kind of, yeah. Far from clinical.

I think I would be very bad as a therapist. And so it was more the academic side. And did you want to run experiments? Oh my God, I did.

It's very fun to design experiments and see how people react. That's just the most fun thing in the world. Yeah, what was one you did in your doctoral pursuit? We created a game.

You know that guess who game? Yes. Where you're like, do they have a hat on? That kind of thing.

We were studying racism at the time. We made a version of that where we made new faces for the game. And we varied the age and the race and the gender of the people in the game. And we saw how people play the game.

And basically people will say, is the person old or young? That's fine. The hair color's fine. Eye color's fine.

No one would ever say, is the person black or is the person white? Really? They avoided it completely. And we did it so you made money if you won the game.

And people were like, I'm good. I don't think I need to say that. And so we're really thinking about, it's difficult to have conversations about race. And this is even one step before, which is you can't even say the word.

How can you have a conversation if you can't even use the word to begin with? Well, I'm also thinking of a lot of kind of ancillary or contributing factors. One is they know they're being observed, right? So if they're at home playing with their wife, they would have said, are they black?

So that's interesting. And then also where in the country you are is relevant. There's a million studies within the one study that could have been looked at, right? It reminded me we did one where the person you played with was either black or white and they either went first or second.

And what happens is if you're playing with a black partner and they ask about race, then when you go, you ask about it. Because they've shown that it's okay to ask, but they gotta go first. But if I'm playing with you and you ask about race, I still am like, I'm still gonna stay away from it. Yeah, it's like getting permission from the minority group.

Completely. That's so interesting. What can bleed out of that? Like once you discover that?

This was with grownups. We did this to see those dynamics. But then we did a version with little kids. And one thing we can do then is we can see at what age do kids start to realize that they maybe shouldn't say this?

Yes. Because if you've ever had a four-year-old, they point at people and say, why is this person, you know, whatever it might be. And so it turns out it's eight to ten-ish where five-year-olds are like, are they black? And eight-year-olds are like, are they wearing a hat?

Right. You don't do anything except... Do they not have to apply this much sunblock in the summertime? I'm surprised though that they don't even say, like, I get the inclination to not straight up say, are they black?

I'm surprised they don't say, are they white? Because that feels less scary. Maybe it's a good time. But then you've gotten rid of all the black players.

But it's still a way... No, it's just a way to figure that out without calling out the minority. It's actually calling out the majority. I'm just surprised, I guess.

That wasn't even on the table. Completely. It's funny. I noticed my 11-year-old has a lot of interesting things.

So, like, we were just at a restaurant and I didn't see the child. But she said as this little girl left the dining room at the hotel, oh, did you see that little girl that's going to Swiftie? And I go, no. And she goes, yes, beautiful girl.

And I was like, this is so weird. She's never commented on a girl being beautiful. And so now I'm like, I've got to figure out what, you know. She's saying.

I'll spare you all the many steps before. It was a girl with, like, a shaved head from going through cancer treatment, clearly. And she was in a wheelchair. And my daughter was being so kind.

But it was funny how she just kind of instinctually or innately decided she didn't want to say the girl with cancer. Right. She was rooting for her. She wanted to say how beautiful she was.

Aw. It's sweet, but I know what you mean. It's really... Opaque.

...beating around the bushes to what she really wants to ask or talk about, probably. Yes. And then some other weird cultural pressure, too. I think the most honest thing would be, like, I saw a little girl and I'm so sad she has cancer.

I'm glad she's at this Taylor Swift concert. I'm glad she's having fun. Yeah, but there's something about just saying, I saw this, it was sad, I feel bad, that for some reason you're not supposed to say. But you could.

It kind of focuses the thing on you and your feelings about things rather than, you know, the other person. We just had an experience. This is a total brag. I'm going to virtue signal.

And you wrote about homebred. You just bragged about your daughter, so you mean this is another. Sure. Okay.

I'm just checking where we are. How many were the B, I guess, is what I seem to know. Okay. We're at this restaurant we had all the time, and on Wednesday nights they have drag queen.

Bingo. So we're sitting there and it's just me and my two girls, and the drag queens are setting up, and then the littler one goes to the bathroom, and the older one says me. Delta knows not to point, right? I said, I don't know if she does or not, but drag queens in particular, they put on a show.

They want attention. They might not mind pointing. And then it became this kind of, should I be calling her she or not? And I said, well, this is tricky.

Now the eight-year-old's back. I'm like, drag queens aren't necessarily trans, so just because this current drag queen is a she doesn't mean she identifies as she. I'm about midway through it now, of course, I'm now guessing at a lot of stuff. So the drag queen walks by and goes, excuse me, we're so interested in the drag queen, bingo, and we would love if we could ask you some questions.

And the drag queen was like, oh my god, I'd love to. Sits down. And now there's just two little kids, and it's like, how'd this start? This drag queen knew the history from the 1600s, then we'd get a stonewall education, and then she's not a she when she's not, you know.

And the drag queen was delighted, we were delighted, and I just thought, like, I wish that was easier for folks to do, because everyone was delighted. People usually respond well to genuine curiosity. Exactly. You can read in tension.

These two kids, they just have real questions. Humble bragging, how did you end up? No, no, that's too far ahead. How do you end up at business school?

You have this in common with Adam Grant, right? So he's an organizational psychologist. He's at a business school. How do you end up teaching business administration?

It seems like they just hire bald white men. Okay. Just me and Adam Grant. I got a PhD in psychology.

The normal thing would be to go and be a psychology professor. I was not super interested in that for various reasons, and I quit academia after I got my PhD for a little bit, then found that I was completely unemployable with a PhD in psychology, right? And so I came back and was at MIT for a little bit at the Media Lab. At MIT, which is a super weird, fun, cool place, technology and social life, completely broadly defined, meaning voting machines and online dating and artificial limbs totally blew my mind to be there.

That helped me back on academia. And then I applied for at least a hundred jobs all over the country and world, and I got one job offer. Wow. And it was from Harvard Business School.

And so people are like, well, why did you choose Harvard Business School? And I'm like, that was it. I was unemployed. So I wasn't like, I got to go to a business school.

It kind of happened a little bit randomly. And then it turned out to be great. Well, it really shatters my fantasy of how Harvard's selecting people. My thought is like they have 6,000 applicants.

Every professor in the country wants to work there. Yeah. And then they sift through and whittle it down. But no, they grabbed you.

No one else wanted you. That's so interesting. I've asked the people who hired me and they're not sure what happened. Yeah, they don't know either.

They really don't. I mean, they like me now, but they go, what process were we using with this guy? I was in the marketing group. He didn't know anything about marketing at all, which is true to this day.

Now, one thing that seems kind of new, tell me the history. It does seem that as corporations have got more and more methodical, I guess you have like Welch. What's his name? L-G-E.

Jack Welch. He's applying like a system that's really, really fleshed out and thoughtful. And I imagine they're starting to think of new ways to get more out of businesses. And obviously culture starts to become something they think about.

And then at that point, I guess it's the gateway to let's invite psychology into this. What is the history of that? Exactly. Always companies have brought in social scientists very broadly.

But I think the testing and experimentation that really became huge in the 90s, but really even more the 2000s, business school and companies thought we should get some people who do that because we can learn things from them. Their incentive at that point is they might be able to select in the interview process through a personality test, something that could reap rewards. There's all kinds of ways. Designing product services, advertising for customers.

Testing is really, really great because rather than just put an ad out, you make four and you test them and you say, oh, that's the one that works. Let's use that one and save a lot of money. So it really became a mini company, a culture of experimentation and the internet, which I'm not sure if you've heard of, but the internet allows experiments at huge scale. So Google does hundreds of experiments all the time.

They just vary little things about the web We're not even sure what they're doing to us But they're just checking What do people click, what do people not click Let's rigorously test all these different options And see what we learn Yeah, I remember hearing an NPR or some podcast Talking about how Facebook had originally When you wanted to ask for a photo to be taken down that you were in It had a drop-down menu And it said, it's not me There's all these things One of them, I'm embarrassed Amazing And no one ever checked it And then there was other And they would write in there It's embarrassing And they figured out that if they change it from I'm embarrassed to It's objectively embarrassing That all of a sudden people click that So that's like a social experiment No one even designed It was a total accident But again, talk about the scale of it And someone had to have that insight To make the change, right? Right, that this word And then they could probably reverse engineer All these other things they had Yeah, people don't like to say They're a type of person And it's vulnerable to say I'm embarrassed To say it's embarrassing is not Yeah, that's just the facts The facts are that's an embarrassing photo Any reasonable person would say it Okay, so what particular skill of yours That you picked up in psychology Did you bring this history Of running lots of experiments? Yeah, the projects that we do Are all over the place in a sense There's some themes to them But we really look at all sorts of different stuff Which is why the job is super fun actually But the real thing was Trying to cultivate observing the humans That's the skill that people like me have Where you can look at what people are doing And get something out of it That somebody else would notice And then you do a little research To kind of figure out what's going on under the hood Okay, so let's be very frank How confident are you though That our social science experiments Are really yielding much? I've become more and more skeptical Over the years to be honest In some domains they have a big impact In other domains They might not move the needle that much For me what's interesting Is the learning from them In my lab I train my students To look at the humans As though you're an alien And observe what the humans are up to And try to take that mindset about it As if they're ants or something That sounds insane But just to really have an outsider view of them It's a skill that you need to develop It's not a natural habit of mine Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth The people who are amazing at this One of the things they're amazing at Is they look and they say Aha, I know what's going on there Right, feel free to add this We have the same analogy Monica and I talk all the time about the aliens But we always say the aliens are watching the monkeys Because if you even start calling us monkeys It gets even more objective We were overlooking a wedding At a hotel We were on our balcony Like six of us watching this great wedding And I said Oh the aliens like when the monkeys do this The monkeys come from all over the country In their little boxes And then they sit in a row And the monkeys cry Mine was I live right next to the Charles River Between Cameron and Boston On a certain day every year It's usually in March or April Suddenly people emerge from their homes With new weird clothing on And they run to the river And run around in a circle on the river And then go back in their house And they do it like in lockstep You'd be like This must be some powerful religious ceremony That affirms their faith in something Well an anthropologist Definitely concluded it was rites of spring We're blessing the coming crops And these people are like I look terrible after the winter I gotta get out there I always think of aliens watching a football game Some of these monkeys are running into each other And then all these other monkeys are cheery So many of the monkeys don't participate in this In fact it seems to be 99,000 to 12 And most of the time nothing's happening at all How did you land on humble bragging?

And this is a great thing to expose If you start to notice humble bragging In yourself by the way I'm never pointing fingers at anybody else It's always something I do also It's just the most common thing that people do And we're studying bragging actually Because we don't like to brag But we like to say positive things about ourselves So the question is How do you do that without looking like a jerk? And people think that humble bragging Is a nice way to do it You get away with it And in fact it makes people so, so angry When you do it Well now it's two things right? It's deception and bragging Completely And in fact we like people better who just brag Than humble brag At least they're being genuine I think I'm amazing Is better than I'm amazing But I'm not gonna admit You know I think I might be guilty of the complaint brag The victim-y? Yeah I think you mainly just straight up brag I try to Because I do think it's more offensive to humble brag When you were saying that I think I have been complaining about something But implicit in it That I was doing something spectacular Right I think you do It's not because of a brag though You're trying to Maybe subconsciously You feel bad that what you're doing Is actually spectacular So you're trying to make it not so bad There's something bad about this Don't worry That's how I've explained it Like I got a really nice car once And some people knew And when they would ask me about the car My first thing is I would say Like oh my god You have to put this fucking clear coat over it And it costs so much money And that's just because I feel very guilty I have the car and they don't Completely One version I love is When a band or any artist Get popular Their second or third album Many of the songs are about How difficult it is to be so famous And it's like an industry-wide humble brag Where you only have an album About how hard it is to be famous And you're famous You know that's so hard to be on the road We played 80 gigs Well that's kind of a humble brag Yeah but you know what This is true I don't think it's ever what people Thought it was going to be And you're kind of like Not allowed to say that See they've been straight to it And they're like Look I really wanted this More than anybody I cheated I stepped in front of people in line I was unethical And I got it And I don't like it Would that be okay?

As long as you owned a lot of your shittiness Along the way I made a huge mistake Does this interest in humble bragging It must be the direct result of Twitter Actually there was a book on humble bragging And now I forget the comedian's name And he passed away actually Which is sort of tragic But he also just collected off of Twitter I think the book is called Humble brag or humble bragging Totally worth Oh was it? I remember that Oh he oh Harris Whittles Harris Whittles Harris Whittles Systems of power in check And so this is a part of Gus We can shame people into gross behavior we think Is we gotta get rid of a pair out Is that what we're doing by exposing it? It's funny there's a psychologist named Tom Bielovich Who's an amazing psychologist Who's the nicest person in the world So he shows silly things that people do all the time But you always feel with him That he's rooting for them Right And I try to take that from him Which is of course we're completely ridiculous And by we all of us and everyone That's never pointing fingers It's not bad It's just look at this guy doing this thing again You know what I mean? Yeah yeah yeah You might not want to change it But you see it now You might make some different decisions In certain places Yeah And just try to skin the cat a different way Also because also this is very cultural right This isn't the same in Japan as it is here But we are selling ourselves To your point You want to tell people good things about yourself Completely Because we're like any other item In this commodified capitalist thing We're a product And increasingly so on the internet The best way to do it by the way Not my research but research shows Is just to have somebody else say it about you Yes It's a brilliant workaround In fact people will pair off and say I'll say nice things about you She'll say nice things about me in the meeting And then we can get something going with the boss I say to my daughter all the time I'm like let people brag for you It'll happen Trust me You're doing spectacular stuff And it'll happen Yeah I just went on a double date It was a double blind date Everyone Double blind friends No so it was like me and my friend And then Yeah no one knew each other That would be incredible They're going to get hard to find out I'm sorry were we paired up Well that was kind of confusing But anyway So my friend was getting set up with this person It was a blind date And she told him I'm going to bring my single friend You should bring a single friend too So this is how it all happened My main takeaway was Oh man it's so much easier to talk about yourself Because you don't have to Because I was like talking about my friend And telling them Oh Liz has a book She's so good And I was like trying to tell this story And I was like oh I was in India And they're like why are you an Indian And I was like um She was with Bill Gates And I was like oh boy yeah I could never have said that But I also wanted it said Of course So it was kind of a good hack I see a hype man right next to your dinner It's amazing We all need that Okay so you tackling this book From Habit to Ritual You're talking and exploring ritual And I think what's maybe most interesting From the jump is that You were skeptical of ritual Completely I know that you're an anthropologist That's our stock in trade is ritual Because it's what we're doing all the time And we're doing a ritual right now I started studying them Because I thought they were fascinating What ones keep your interest To get you on the path What was the gateway ritual One of the first things was I just came across this I told you I was a nerd An infographic Which really struck me Hit me hard as a rock Exactly It completely blew my mind But it was a color coded wheel That had in different cultures The color that they use for different things Like what's the color for love In all these different countries And it's red in some But different in other countries Always in the red family though Because of the heart Not always And one of them was for grief I guess Russia was black Everything was black For Russia Oh no That'd be Ireland To make them healthy But it would be very dark It would be for Ireland But there was one that was grief What's the color for grief Blue And there's so many different colors All over the world Including just black and white When you're in a culture You say hey somebody died We should get a color right And for whatever reason This group was like I have some black pants You know and it's like A thousand years later That truly just blew my mind It is random in a sense Like how does that happen And then maybe even within it Informed by the environment What dyes do they have access to Royal blue You see when new colors are available Humans are like let's use that now That's very special and rare Wait so I was wrong about blue It was black Or America Grief It depends on the religion actually Well I guess you could split it up What do people wear to the death ceremony It's black It's black here But yes we associate blue with being blue But it'd be interesting On the other hand When you think about what that culture is signifying It makes perfect sense That you would use green Because they view death As differently than someone in another culture Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert If you dare You had a life event though And I can't imagine it was this infographic The most impactful thing That happened to me in my entire life Was that infographic I also had a daughter So I've been studying rituals for a while In my mind I wasn't using them My wife and I had our daughter And you go to the hospital And then the child is there And then they're like Take this home with you Forever And you're like Can you come with me And they're like no You have to just go to yourself It's extremely obviously stressful And you're completely incompetent You have like 36 hours Where they teach you how to operate the thing And so much information is coming This comes out of there This comes out of there This is Mercomium This will pass In three weeks you're going to see This kind of turd This is going to tribble up eventually Don't worry about it And now when are we supposed to Feed people food?

11 months-ish Nobody knows Avocado? That seems fun Yeah, very stressful And if you're talking to new parents We are annoyingly talking about sleep All the time Are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping? How's the sleep?

How do you get them to sleep? Is pass by? I mean it's just like never ending And what many people do If I had a kid I would have studied this Is they develop very elaborate Bedtime rituals for their kids And what my wife and I started doing But we didn't sit down And say let's develop A sleep ritual for the child Well you probably call that a routine And then we can get into The nitty-gritty What's the difference? Totally And what happens with parents Is they start small And then it gets more and more elaborate So it's these two books in this room And then you sing this song And I'll sing that song My daughter had gray bunny And brown bunny Sorry, she would say gray bun And brown bun And both needed to be there But actually gray bun was more important Than brown bun It was like a hierarchy Typical Oh my god They extend longer and longer and longer And if you can't find the bunny You're panicked You can almost argue all parenting Is for yourself Under the facade of for them My daughter just reminded me That we used to say goodnight to the stairs When we walk up the stairs I would be carrying her And she would say goodnight stairs And I as the stairs would say goodnight And then she would say What do you need stairs?

I don't know where that came from And I'd be like I don't need anything And she'd be like Okay And then it was bedtime I mean what the You know there's no 2,000 year old text That says When you bring the child to the bed Make sure the stairs are safe Engage with the stairs You won't be forced to play the role of stairs And then they will sleep perfectly For the rest of their life Oh you're still bringing me back And you're right It grows to a preposterous out of control Because you would remember too I'm thinking of Atlanta in particular We had to sing wheels on the bus But there was three extra verses Because we had to get TT in there Everyone that was in her life Oh that's right Yeah the TT's on the bus The daddy on the bus says ha ha ha And then that would grow And then at some point You're like man this wheel on the bus Is like nine minutes long Also do you remember There was a bath every single night And then we haven't bathed our kids in years And we're like We thought that was so essential And then one day you're like Oh it's not part of this routine I don't need it anymore Hey take a shower when you feel dirty I teach a seminar on rituals actually To freshmen One of the first classes they take When they get to Harvard They're 18-ish years old I say your assignment this week Is to ask your parents About the bedtime ritual When you were little And they're like Yeah I asked my parents They both started crying They knew it Beat to beat They knew the books The thing about that is You can remember what it was like When your kids were little But these kinds of rituals Bring you back in a way That's hard to get to Otherwise you're really there with them I think about saying goodnight to the stairs I'm on the stairs with her And I remember how heavy she was They really unlock a lot of things for us And anyway from skeptic to These are great They do all this stuff for us You start thinking about What direction all these cultural elements move in When we think of this kind of Increasingly thrown away Binary paradigm of nature and nurture And then you look at two people Independently coming up with something That everyone else is Independently coming up with It's not like you're talking to your friends About like so hey How many books are you reading What order and where are you putting stuffies Everyone did the same thing And then you start wondering What direction is it flowing in It's so fascinating And it's really no different than People deciding on black for funerals And white for funerals It has this sense of Everyone is doing it But the way that it's built up Is so variable And so interesting because of that What's maybe even more interesting Is not ever the specifics But what situations or context Do we see predictably produce a ritual And there's a bunch I mean it's so interesting Think I were not Maasai Send out a spear to kill a lion Oh no thanks I'll say a boy There's a culture where you wear A glove of bullet ants Bullet ants is the most painful sting And the rite of passage is to withstand the pain You know the variability is so fascinating We're jumping ahead But fuck it we're here Yeah rites of passage to me Are probably the most fascinating one Because yes they're something To symbolize the transformation From childhood to adulthood And what's insanely common For boys at least Is these acts of bravery And like once you learn about them And if you're an anthro And you go through every single known culture There isn't one without the rite of passage So you go oh these are standard And then you look at our own modern culture And you go well we don't really have anything To offer boys So every time I see boys doing something insane I go what else did you expect Like they're supposed to go out And hunt a lion Or fucking get stung by ants Yes they jump the bonfire On their bicycle and caught them But you didn't give them any other option It's almost dangerous That we don't have any agreed upon rituals Yeah and they really do mark Not only you're not a kid anymore You're a grown up But in most cultures And that means you're expected To be a full member of the society Which comes with Don't jump your bike over a bonfire You don't have a lot of responsibility Yeah yeah so I think losing those Can be problematic really Although I will say So people often like I don't do any rituals I don't have any rituals And I'm like Have you ever worn a weird robe And a square hat And walked across the stage And grabbed a piece of paper And everybody clapped And then you threw your hat And they're like Well yeah that's graduation You don't need to walk across the stage To graduate from college But we decided that We need to get the family together And so that it's official That you're no longer that Now you are this It needs to be neat Costumery Make it an event Tassels Oh the pride with which I had that time for honors More tassels than other people I just strutted around campus It felt so good With just the tassels on Exactly fuck this world I don't even get distracted From the tassels Okay so let's first Differentiate ritual from habit And maybe compulsion And then I think I'm interested In the fact that you incorporated A few different disciplines And how they might look at Or study ritual But let's first just say What is the difference between a habit and a ritual. Can I ask you a very silly, trivial question, both of you? Did you go to the bathroom? That's not trivial.

It's do you like me? No, the question is in the morning when you're getting ready or maybe even at night when you're getting ready for bed, do you brush your teeth and then shower or do you shower and then brush your teeth? I love this question. I brush my teeth in the shower.

That's disgusting. I do too. Both of you? That's got to be anomalous, right?

That's got to be low percentage that does that. I have told my people that I don't do interviews with people who do that. So I'm not sure how this got through the screen. I've got enough.

Do you know when you started brushing your teeth in the shower? Did you always? You know, it's a big, huge bummer and I hate to admit it here in front of you. You know what it is.

I'm a guest. I think I adopted it from them. Ah, interesting. I mean, guys, how fucking inefficient do you need to be to be splitting that task up?

I think that is what I saw. You're in the shower already covered in water. Brush those teeth. Do you also go to the bathroom in the shower?

Number one, for sure. If you don't, you're a liar. I don't think about you. That's your cool accent.

I mean, that's not what I know really what's happening with it. It would be as preposterous as getting out of your shower to urinate. Okay, but before I adopted, I brushed after the shower. And do you know why you did that?

I guess it's like, that's the end. That would be the last thing before bed. So people who brush their teeth first and then shower, the opposite of that, they think that you're disgusting. How can you get in the shower with a gross mouth and not have brushed your teeth?

If I do this in an audience, first off, half of people do it one way and half do it the other way, which is so weird. And then a tiny percentage, but apparently everyone in this neighborhood doesn't... Holly weird. Everyone in Holly weird.

That's right. We've learned something about the culture today, having the efficiency. My next tweet's going to be like, ah, wrist so sore from brushing my teeth in this shower. I like it because then everything's done at once.

It's very nice. Would you do it differently if I asked you to? Or how would it feel if I said, hey, can you separate them tomorrow morning? It's funny because we're cross-pollinating here, but again, maybe I'm lying to myself.

It's the efficiency thing. It's like, go before, go after. This is a net zero gain or loss of time. But this scenario you're pitching is like...

You're asking to take extra time. Yeah, so what's so interesting to me is that about half of people are like the two of you. If I say, can you switch the order, you're like, what kind of question is that? I mean, that's like the dumbest question.

And half of people are like, no. Oh, you could never. No. No one says yes, is the point.

No, people who say yes are like, I don't care, I can do whatever you want, do whatever I already feel like. Because it's efficiency. It's like, these are things I need to get done. I'm going to be efficient.

I've got to check them off the list. And to me, they're a little bit like habits. They're things that we've got to do or we want to do, but they start to get rituals. So if you ask people, will you switch?

And they say no. If you say why, they say, I would feel weird. I would feel uncomfortable. I would feel off all day because they had to do the opposite order.

And so for those people, it's the same task. It's like brushing your teeth. But for them, it's becoming a little bit of a ritual where how they do it starts to matter. I don't mean ritual like people in robes with candles.

I guess further down the continuum. But even just in that little example, it's got meaning. It's got emotion. There's a right way to do it.

Your way is wrong. And it'd be very disruptive to your emotional core. And the positive side is they say, and when I do it my way, I feel really good. I feel ready to start my day.

I feel ready to go. So they're like a risk-reward where if you do it your way, I can feel really good. But you know, kid comes in and interrupts it. You might be worse off because now your ritual's been disrupted.

So I don't super identify with that one because it's not a huge thing for me. But you've never met some of the fucking more complicated ritual in the morning than me. So many things have to happen. One of them would be I brush my teeth after I drank my first coffee and then I've got a whole explanation for that.

But it's immediately negated by the fact that I'll walk directly in here and have another cup of coffee. But that first cup of coffee would have been disgusting to have if I had already brushed my teeth. It tastes gross. I'd rather make my teeth green than clean them but then I'm ignoring the fact that five minutes later I'd make another cup of coffee with the clean teeth that doesn't bother me at all.

But in a different place. Yes, different setting. So you left the old coffee and tooth brushing over there and now you're new you over in this other room. So I get to start over.

Tack the day back and now I'm going to have a coffee. I can't stop thinking about the brushing teeth, the order. We shouldn't stay here. But if I'm showering in the morning I do brush my teeth first.

But if I'm showering at night I brush my teeth last. In the shower. If I'm not doing it in the shower. The whole thing's a mess.

It makes no sense at all. Now I understand if you're like shit everything's clean but my mouth is skanky and I laugh I feel like I didn't really get clean I'm with you. Okay, we clean that up. I mean we see couples who haven't realized that they do it differently and I can see them look at each other like what the f*** this whole time and they really, really care.

What kind of a human would ever do it in that order? The other person, of course same thing. But really quick because we're contrasting with habit. So some part of the morning routine might be habit and people wouldn't have any kind of what would be an example of a habit.

I think when you're checking off stuff to get done I mean even something like putting their shoes on. Some people it's like I put my shoes on every morning I have to do that to leave the house because that's what you do and other people are like let me tell you about how I put my shoes on. Do you have 20 minutes? Yeah.

And if you talk to like athletes they're like let me tell you about how I put my shoes on. It's just shoes but for some people some of the time it gets really built into something that's way more meaningful way more emotional. That's a good thing if it feels good if you do it but it's not always a good thing because if the shoelace breaks you're like I'm doomed the whole day is ruined now because I couldn't do my shoe tying. Oh yeah.

Oh man I'm reminded of I have such an also cumbersome sleep time ritual because I have a hard time falling asleep we were based in Sedona I was filming in Flagstaff we got up there we went so long and we were going to start so early that basically it was decided guys you have to stay in Flagstaff and I hadn't brought any of my sleep aids I hadn't brought the thing I left my book on tape on I was like oh sleep is not going to be possible tonight it was like going to the World Series with brand new socks and shoes Did you at least have a great bun with you? Any of my snuggies Oh my god oh my god It was a miracle I went to sleep I worked it up into such a discomfort I hit the bed going like we're fucked and I think that's actually really important because the research we did it's not that rituals are good if you do more of them that's terrific and the seven secret rituals it's not that they're emotional which can have really positive effects on us and like in your example they can really mess with us as well they're not just great they're complicated and we use them all over our lives and so they play these very strange interesting emotional roles They work both ways because we're offloading our own responsibility in some bizarre way we're kind of hiding behind the routine and distancing ourselves from our own responsibility from it but then that goes the other way if you don't have it you will be incapable without it because now you left your own devices and that's not good and we already decided I can't handle it to start with economists There are some topics that just everyone interested in humans eventually stumbles on and rituals are for sure one of them and then the way you study it is very very different from discipline to discipline and almost the orientation speaking of are you rooting for the humans or are you trying to show they're making mistakes you could study rituals to say what are people doing this crazy we're irrational that would be the thrust of that right and you're wasting effort you're wasting time and then of course another view is if everybody's doing these things all the time they must be doing something for them let's understand it rather than say it's good or bad behavioral economics which is something that I dabble in a bit sometimes the lens there is is it rational or not and that can be very useful if you're saving in the wrong savings account we can just say don't go over there because it's going to be better but most of life is not a lot of these economic models and tasks play these games where if ultimately they lose or it's a disadvantage to themselves it's kind of easy to observe and we would label that irrational because it's against their best interests right but unclear compared to what if I had done a study where I showed that the way to fall asleep immediately was to snap twice and you were like no no what I like to do is these 19 things I would say you know what you should do snap twice it works for everybody but most things for humans we don't have to snap twice compared to what are these rituals a waste of time or irrational or whatever else because we don't have the solution in place that would solve it often that's when we turn to these kinds of practices nor do we generally have a great control group who's not doing any rituals and measuring the outcome of their actions there's no human that's never taken place in at least one ritual it's just impossible to avoid involuntarily they arrived and someone handed someone a cigar it's tough shit you're part of a ritual completely okay so the economists where would they tend to there's a paper that I love and I forget the author because I'm terrible but we'll find it but they look to see the frequency of rain dances of rain rituals and cultures and so what they're trying to see is what are the conditions in which these emerge because rain rituals have occurred spontaneously in cultures over human history it's not like one came up with another people like let's do that and of course from one viewpoint what the because that does not make it rain so why would all of these different groups so again like one viewpoint what a waste of time but what you see actually is that one of the predictors of whether these emerge or not is if you live in a region not that has drought but that has unpredictable drought that's the key and if you think about unpredictable drought where society is fraying everybody starts looking out for themselves what are you supposed to do if we had a thing where we could shoot at the sky and make it rain I'd be like hey you know what you should do it's easy to do but we don't have it and so you see these things emerge it's not going to make it rain probably but when social fabric is fraying how do we stay together as a group well we've been doing this rain ritual for like a thousand years our grandparents didn't remember that it shows you two things one is we have a shared history and also they got through doing this as well it's possible to get through this period and stay together so they're wrong in a very narrow sense of there's not rain coming from it but they're perfectly rational to try to think about how do we solve this problem that the weather has caused in our group and it's an antidote to the selfish compulsion during scarce resources it forces them to be communal at a time when they're probably inclined to be every man for themselves exactly what do we have in common not to get too voodoo-y about it but I think they all do do something yes they might not be answering the thing that they expressively are trying to but they are answering something even our parenting our sleep rituals actually they're helping kids sleep but sure we're doing something for us when we're going through it yeah but they get sucked into it and it is all comforting because they know what's coming next and the world is full of uncertainty and just knowing what comes next is very pacifying we'll control in a world that there is none there's a super old study B.F. Skinner who was a psychologist who founded behaviorism as a field he studied pigeons and reward how do you reinforce the behavior and make pigeons more or less likely to do it and mainly he did if you click the thing six times to get a treat does that work better than clicking five times I'm saying it's dismissively the guy's like a legend he's amazing research but he did this one experiment where there was like a food box with knobs and levers on it and stuff and so you could train the pigeons to turn that one and click that to get a treat and what he did in this particular case was he made it so that none of the knobs or levers did anything the food just came out randomly oh jesus what a mindfuck for this what you should do is not do anything in other words it's coming out randomly don't bother with the levers and what do even pigeons do they're like you know what makes the food come out when I tap that three times and each pigeon comes up with their own so even pigeons are looking for control superstition over something that they have no control over but also they're drawing a spurious conclusion because it does come out once and whatever preceded that becomes it irregardless of how successful it is in the future we have a very hard time updating because we think at least it worked the one time you know what people do so you do it again and it doesn't work and they say I must have done it wrong exactly I have a friend who's a fellow addict we were sitting around talking about all the insane things we've been addicted to that aren't even addictive we both had a Hall's menelopolis phase where we were eating family sized bags of Halls and he said who was an athlete and she went one step further so she had her ritual that she would do I think she was a runner actually so before a race she had her thing with the tying shoes and she said sometimes what I do is I purposely do one of the steps slightly wrong and that way if I lose I can blame it on the fact that I did it wrong I mean if you think about the psychology of what we're doing with rituals I mean that is like third level thinking and yet it kind of makes sense Jordan would be furious so she built in an excuse to lose maybe she was less confident in that specific race you know it's also conscious it's like I might not win here so I can't handle that or she built in an explanation for failure that relieved enough pressure that she performed it I don't know who knows and then how about neuroscientists what have they seen if you look at the research on you mentioned compulsions earlier and that's a case where again many people study compulsions because they're so ubiquitous in what humans are up to but that's a place where neuroscientists and psychologists have used their methods to try to figure out what are compulsions what's the neuroanatomy of them why do they develop how do we try to break out of those compulsions fascinating research and very difficult as we all know to stop a compulsion once it started and I think speaking of rituals aren't just good or bad but the other version of rituals of course is you're trying to use them for control over a situation they can come to control you eating disorders completely often what you're doing a ritual for in the service of something else I'm doing my shoe tying thing so that I'll do well in the race I'm doing the sleep thing in order that the baby will sleep and even something like you know every time I leave in the morning I double check to make sure the door's locked you're doing that in order to then go to work and have a good day what happens with compulsions sometimes you lose the link between the behavior and the in order to and you get stuck on the behavior so you're not checking the lock again so that you can go to work and have a nice day you're checking the lock so that you are checking the lock and one of the ways to diagnose it of course if it starts to interfere with other goals we all have compulsions of course but if they don't interfere with other things in life we tend to say that's an okay one but as soon as they start to get in the way of other things that's when we might say that maybe has gone too far I mean even athletes if they kept doing their rituals through the entire game they'd lose the game we're aware as humans you gotta do them in a time and place in order to do the other thing you wanted to do but we're very sometimes quick to lose the link and get in this other path the league had to just step in actually funnily enough this is good timing like I guess I don't follow baseball but I told two years ago they enacted the pitcher can only freak out on the mound for like 20 seconds they finally put a time limit on it yeah look over there all the shit they do and it got so insane some people's thing it was you know 45 seconds between pitch and they said you gotta tighten this up and the game started moving way faster so being outside Boston Nomar Garciaparra was a player for the stocks and just googled him he had an insane not before every at bat for every pitch every step out batting gloves tapping I mean you know like a whole whole thing not anyone and he was an amazing player so you're like cool you're amazing but at some point that's taking much too long there's an interesting psychological experiment there though too which is we have a tolerance for it if it produces great batting but if you're the worst batter on the team and you're doing that people go fuck this they start yelling at you get it together Michaels we have a different tolerance based on outcomes we just allow it yes rock film and doll serena williams have pre-served rituals are very very complicated and we're like oh that's cool but if I did that before I started teaching a class people would be like you're not allowed this isn't that hard man if you're uber driver connected and disconnected his or her seatbelt 17 times not to mention these rituals are also used for intimidation as soon as serena starts doing her thing whoever the opponent is is like oh no you hope she fucks up her yeah you're like oh my god here it is like it's happening she's gonna go do her thing now I'm doomed the hawk is the best it's totally organized in rugby did you study the hawk? yeah the new zealand all blacks do the hawk before their games very synchronized very loud very menacing very intimidating you want braveheart before the battle started you do the exact same thing to freak out the other side they're doing it in a slightly less deadly profession of rugby but it really has an impact on it just like serena williams an individual thing here they come yeah I happen to be making a movie in new zealand for a few months and the all blacks were really dominant at that time I got super sucked in I watched every single game and what I found is what was great is that the opposing team is out there on the field and when it first starts they're all almost unanimously like this is so silly look at these idiots and then by the end it has worked they're like these fuckers are psycho and then that's when they play Fiji because they do the hawk too you're just terrified watching them scream so good stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare so the neuroscientists have they had someone in an fMRI I guess you can't be actively doing your ritual but then also be in an fMRI or has the brain been observed in states of ritual yeah we've done some research on kind of the underpinnings of ritual so for example this is actually in a group context we can give people a brand new ritual to do and we say do this for a week it's a little bit like a hockey clapping or something and then we bring them to the lab and we have them observe other people and if they observe someone who's doing the same ritual as them they're like I like that guy and we're like hey you want to share money trust them yeah sure do but if they see somebody doing a different one I don't like that guy just because of the ritual and what we see actually when we use EEG is that when you see somebody doing a ritual that's different from yours one of the reasons that gets activated is a region associated with punishment so like at a very basic level if you're doing the thing wrong meaning just different from me I'm at a very basic level like get him we made these up on purpose so you can imagine with cultural history when you're doing it wrong it's not just like I want to share the money in the lab but you can see how it gets to be so extreme well this would be a great opportunity for you to tell us about the link between identity and ritual because that's also what's happening right their ritual is now outgroup and it's so fast sometimes when I give a talk if I can divide the room so that one side of the room sees one screen and the other side sees another screen and there's a barrier in between so they don't know that the other side sees something different it's like clap three times stop three times it's a ritual so I say everybody stand up and get going you start clapping and stopping and you synchronize with the people around you because obviously we're cool but you can hear on the other side you can hear them doing the same thing as you for a while you can hear them clapping and stopping and you think oh my god those people are great over there and that's out of the barrier and then of course what I do is I give different instructions at some point we yell one thing and then you hear them yell the other thing and what people on both sides do is they look at the barrier in disgust they're doing it wrong and I say what's wrong and they say they messed up they're doing it wrong and I say doing what's wrong you've never done this before in your life and right there they say and it's not steps towards anything at the end of this sometimes the last steps I'll have people put their hands in the air and yell let's go and then louder let's go and then louder let's go by the end they're standing with their hands in the air screaming let's go and then I just look at them and they look at themselves like what just happened I have a feeling that if I ran out of the room they would come right with me and here we go you've completely organized them they're all on the same page they can work as a unit and now you have no task and it's a made up ritual and I'm just some nerd professor you can think of the emotion that you're getting in that group from these very in a sense trivial things yeah so anthropologists obviously have been on this from the get go so what were you learning from anthropologists the variability so if you think about rituals today if the only rituals we could do are ones that have a long history then we're a little constrained I mean imagine a ritual has to be around for 500 years or it doesn't do anything for you then they'd still be incredibly important in our lives but we wouldn't be able to use them and make up our own and so when you see the variability across history even the color of grief it means that different humans at different times came up with them they're not from somewhere they're from us and from that in anthropology what I took was I wonder if people make up their own all the time that we think of rituals as the wedding and the funeral and religious and those rituals play incredibly important roles in our lives I don't mean to dismiss them but I got interested in the oh my god people are completely freelancing this stuff all the time there's no history there's no anything they're just very creatively coming up with them and that kind of got me on my way of studying which is more like an individual level as a psychologist what are people doing and how does this impact them well what it says to me is that we are very hardwired and evolutionarily incentivized to have them and so the software's there and then we just do it all the time I'm not an anthropologist so please correct me but one of the ways that you can determine if a group of early humans had a culture is by the burial site so like dinosaurs you know the ceremony just bones all over the place humans at some point when you uncover a grave it's very carefully laid out there's sacred objects placed very carefully around it and you say this group of people obviously cared about each other in a different way so it's the remnants of the ritual that tell us that there was a culture there that's how deep I think rituals are in us that's also why some zoologists have argued that elephants have culture right because they have these burial sites and they go play with the bones and they reminisce yep they have them stand in a circle and make sad noises in unison which a lot of human funerals were kind of standing in a group and making sad noises you know what I mean it's strikingly similar if you're a woman you're allowed to don't you dare if you're a woman do you mean a woman elephant or a female that'd be great if we call them female elephants women female elephants what is emo diversity?

this is something we started a few years ago so I used to study happiness we did lots of research for many years on how to help people be happier over the course of their day mainly with spending their money differently the biggest insight was just if you spend money on yourself it's not bad that just doesn't do much for you if you spend money on other people it tends to result in more happiness and we did things like five dollars you know if you're a billionaire you give all your money away we're not studying that we're studying people with small amounts of money and got very interested in like what could you do today to change your happiness over the course of the day but at some point happiness is kind of limited we all want to be happy but if you were a perfect hand happy every minute of every day of your life I don't know if that's an amazing life or like a really one note kind of life and we started to think about it's the richness of emotions it's the diversity of emotions the variety of emotions that's what make life interesting we got a little hung about happiness for a while and then the Kahneman work is really interesting too because if you're asking people hour to hour in their day it'll have one measure of happiness and then their narrative self is reflecting it's a completely different number so you got to figure out too which one of these we're even servicing what's one more important is the other tricky thing and increasingly we're thinking the narrative self I feel like that's where the winds are blowing purpose and sacrifice and all these kinds of things so specifically this emo diversity it's incorporating other metrics to evaluate if you think of biodiversity on an island what you do is you kind of count the number of species and their relative abundance if there's 9 million snakes and one rat not good they're in trouble so you need the balance of these things so we use the same metric but we use it on emotions in your mind so if you think of joy and sadness and fear and anger and happiness and all of these things we count the number of them and then their relative abundance and what we see is that same metric predicts actually your feeling about your life overall it's true that having a happy day is good but we learn and grow often through different emotions than that we learn fear and overcoming fear and sadness makes us grow in ways that are quite different just this idea that we should be thinking more about the mix if we think about having a rich and interesting life less about the one note we go to see horror movies which is super weird in one sense like why would we just add fear well I think it's related right we want this diversity of experiences in our lives yeah I've been trying to bring much of my daughters when they have a nightmare or they're afraid of something you know the gift of a nightmare is it tells you what you care about you are afraid we're going to get divorced that means you really like having a mom and dad that's kind of sweet it can be a road map to what you really value it's useful there's amazing research on the nightmares of kids as a function of their age that's super predictable oh they go through nightmare phases at a certain point they're like something breaking the house Monica stayed a long time there oh yeah I pretty much still I haven't really grown out here there's some arrested development in that but also happiness exists because of the others and the others exist because like I don't think you can just even have happiness what does it even mean without sadness but then ultimately what I figured out is I was at one spectacular place after another and the fifth cool trip I took in 2022 I was like oh all of this is now meaning nothing I've absolutely spoiled it and I've got to actively reset even though I don't have to I've got to choose to fucking tighten all this up and make things special again there's this research by Liz Dunn and Jordi Koidbach on amazing experiences basically and it's a nice problem to have as you said but it is a bit of a curse which is that if you go to Copenhagen and it's your first European city you're blown away but if it's your 19th European city you're like huh that's nice here I've seen something like this so we do have this thing where we get accustomed even to the extraordinary yes okay really quick how do rituals work in relationships and how can they strengthen them so the funny thing about studying rituals is the way that it unfolded over time was we'd be studying them in some domain and then we'd talk to somebody about it and they'd say hey did you ever look at them in teams and we'd say no we'd do a project on teams did you ever look at them in families no we'd do a project on that and at some point my former student Jimena Garcia-Rado who studies decision making in couples which is I mean talking about an amazing goldmine topic but she said what about rituals and couples and of course we should I mean first on weddings but again it wasn't the received thousand year old kind that we like it wasn't the kind that people come up with themselves so we just ask couples and we don't say do you have a ritual because they're like no we don't have weird candle ceremony but we say if there's something that the two of you do that's special that you make sure to do every so often regularly that's unique to the two of you about two thirds or three quarters of couples say yes and then they have the most adorable one of my favorites is this person said when we kiss we always kiss in threes we've been doing it for 22 years and we don't know why it started and another one that I completely loved is this person said every time before we start eating we clink our silverware together oh man I like that look at the monkeys look at the monkeys those two monkeys like each other and this is how they show it do you think part of that is this is our special thing it's special because we invented it together so what we see if you break up with somebody which happens in life you might not like it but they're allowed to date other people they're allowed to get married they're allowed to have a family they're allowed to do all that but they are not allowed to reuse your ritual the rage that people feel when you look at this the rage that people feel like if you looked over and you saw your ex clinking the fork with the new it is such a betrayal of the relationship in a way that's very different than other kinds of things that happen in relationships so you're exactly right people say that's us yeah it's an act of creating the shared identity that you have which is so special because there's a third person in the relationship which is the relationship one of the things that is interesting about these is we see that couples that have these report higher relationship satisfaction but another thing they report is a higher sense of commitment to the relationship so when you get married there's a ceremony and then for 50 to 60 years you're supposed to be with that person but there's no other wedding that's over so what do you do every day to show that you're committed and you can buy property you know I mean there's stuff you have a case like that but what we see is that these little rituals we've been kissing in threes for 22 years how do we know that we're committed to each other well you know what we've been doing this thing every day for 22 years without missing a beat I have a feeling we're going to be doing it for 22 more years I mean they really have this very deep resonance for us that is just different from other types of commitments that we might make yeah it's like a tangible commitment it's not just a theoretical it's action is what it is there's this painful episode of this is us where Miguel was explaining when he knew his marriage was over I'm going to butcher the details I apologize but he said every morning he used to bring her coffee in bed and one morning I just didn't feel like doing it which is extremely sad and then he said but the worst part was she didn't even notice so we're done it's just coffee it's just silverware these aren't big huge things but they're everything what are the four lessons of relationship rituals do you still have them memorized who knows I remember one at least you might be shocked how many people I interview that have books and they're like I don't fucking know what are the seven principles they said tell me the story about something you write in here Tabitha in her what happened with her funny story about Tabitha one is very related to what we were just talking about so we ask couples we can interview them separately we can say do you have something special that you do and then the other one say do you have something special that you do and most couples agree so they'll say yes we do and they'll tell you we clink silverware some couples don't have them but they agree they say no we don't have anything like that the saddest couples in the world to me are the ones where one person's like oh my god we have this adorable thing that we do all the time where we kiss and treat and then we go to the other person and they're like no we don't have anything like that so the consensual nature of these is one of the key things and then it's not that if one of you has it and the other doesn't you're halfway there you're nowhere you've got to create it together you've got to both endorse it in order for these kinds of effects that we see to emerge we have to talk about the exclusivity one which is you may not use ours as anybody else I get very fixated on things that are just mine and somebody's and if I see it starting to happen in other places I get very upset make names too like Schmooper Bear you know it's like you're going to call this new person Schmooper Bear in fact when we ask people do you have a ritual in your current relationship and then we ask you have one in your previous relationship they're more likely to say they have one in their current one than in the previous one now that could be because they didn't have any with the person and they were doomed but it could also be they're not willing to admit that they had ritual with this person who they now hate they've like taken it out of their memory in order to not paint we had one but it was fraudulent do you guys have one or multiple I think we have multiple but they're not as consistent and I don't think some of these ones I don't know that we have daily ones you should ask your kids yeah they might notice it when people say I don't have any rituals they say ask your partner ask your kids ask your co-workers and they're like oh my god she totally does yeah yeah yeah we had a thing for years and if we travel we still do but we have identical crossword puzzle books and we challenge each other to erase and we shake hands and there's like a bunch of other words that have to follow it good luck to you buddy and then we go off and do that so doing crossword puzzles isn't what makes us closer affirms our bond but it's the stupid pageantry especially if we're seated I've got one kid on one side of the airplane and she's got and we've got to reach across the aisle and do the whole thing we would never start the crossword without doing that how would you feel if you looked over and she'd already filled one of them out without telling you I would immediately lean over and ask the person next to me do you have the name of a good divorce you've observed I'm sure we have a good divorce I'm sure you do we had a thing too when we were first dating we were in Hawaii and we watched this movie that was so terrible and it was so terrible but I paused it like 10 minutes in and I said what do you think of this movie she goes it's terrible and I love it and I go me too I can't wait to watch more and it's so bad and so we declared that date September 1st is the name of the movie I'm not going to say it out loud but every September 1st was like it's the blank name of the movie and we had to watch it I love it there's a family that every Christmas someone's in charge of making a completely disgusting thing that everyone has to eat so it's not necessarily like let's make a wonderful cake that's delicious it's let's do our thing which could be the grossest thing in the world but you know it's so identity it's like we're going to do something that no one else does it's almost specifically and intentionally abnormal because that's what's differentiating you from the family next door people literally say I know that there's no other family in the world that's doing this right now and that's really important to them I am really susceptible to ritual because I think I have a lot of anxiety so I do think it's about control but also just fun like me and my friend do pig day and it's always the Saturday after Thanksgiving and we get the Christmas tree and we kind of do the same thing every time wait I'm sorry you're not going to explain why it's called pig days oh sure is this like a thing that's happening in the world no we invented it completely we're the only ones doing it this is such a silly we were playing a game he used to call me babe and he was trying to get the group to get the word babe that was the movie someone said you call Monica this and he was like pig which made no sense and it was totally random so then we started calling each other that so now that's pig day because that's our day together but I love that I love things like that we have Christmas Eve Eve McDonald's we try to commit to eating an insane amount of McDonald's on Christmas Eve Eve one of my colleagues just told me his wife's parents are immigrants from Russia and when they came here many years ago the first place they wanted to go when they came was McDonald's and so every year they take the whole family to McDonald's and he said they don't actually like McDonald's they don't eat the food anymore they just make sure everybody goes to McDonald's to honor that tradition so I mean the way that they stick and matter so much I just want to ask you a couple more from the book why should someone never say calm down before going on stage speaking of snapping twice and nothing works to try to calm down with anxiety one of the most common things that people do when they're nervous is they'll say to themselves in their head calm down just calm down it's not a big deal and what happens when you do that so if you've ever experienced anxiety let's say you have to give a presentation or something like that at work and you're anxious about it you're anxious about the presentation and then what happens with anxiety unfortunately is it starts to spiral so then you think the presentation doesn't go well I'm probably going to lose my job I'm going to lose my job or I'll let you get a divorce I'll probably have to resort to a life of crime I'll probably end up you know what I mean we really spiral anxiety all over the place and telling yourself to calm down all that does is now you're anxious about the thing and you say calm down and you can't now you're anxious about the fact that you can't calm down and you told yourself to calm down here comes the spiral the only thing worse than telling yourself to calm down is telling your partner that they need to calm down I highly, highly don't recommend so absolutely it feels like a good thing to do which is like oh I'm good but it turns out it can be really, really kind of productive I think people think they're one step ahead of it so they'll just say take a deep breath that too can be a very triggering bit of advice because if you think this should have worked by now and I know why they're saying take a deep breath because I'm clearly panicking and they've observed it there must be personality types that overindex in ritual is that kind of predictable we did surveys where we ask people about different domains of life we even developed a quiz that people can take where you can see different domains of life you do them or not like your morning and your relationship and your family at work you can think about all the domains of life and what's interesting to me is that there don't seem to be ritual people in other words like if I'm somebody who has a really big morning thing that I need to do if we ask you like what about your nighttime routine sometimes people are like oh I have one of those too and just as often they're like I don't need anything at night I absolutely need to do this incredibly elaborate thing for this purpose before meetings I have to do this thing and then we're like what about your partner and I'm like no we don't have anything like that so it's often domain specific it's like where you need them is where people bring them to bear like if you don't get nervous before a presentation don't bother with a ritual you don't need it in that case because you're not nervous but if you get nervous before a first date well then we see people oh yeah of course I use them over there I just don't use them at work so I do think we're oddly sensitive to the idea that we use them where we think we must need them so what is the prescriptive message of the book so we learn all about from habit to ritual harness the surprising power of everyday actions what's the prescriptive element there's two things one is just to take an inventory of where they're currently happening in your life already when I chat with people about rituals they start like I don't do anything like that and you keep chatting like oh yeah I do that you recognize them and then people say now that I recognize it it has a little more resonance when you click the fork next time this is our thing it shows you what you care about because you're not doing rituals around shit you don't care about exactly remember your bedtime ritual with your kids when they were little it's like a very nice thing to do just taking stock of how they play a role and then the other thing prescriptively is to experiment with them if you're not nervous before meetings i don't think that you should bother experimenting with them but if you are i mean you can take medicaid you know there's lots of ways to deal with anxiety but because we don't have a magic solution so many people when they are anxious including serena williams and all these other people they turn to these why not try them yourself and see if it in fact helps you feel i feel like i'm more ready to go so freelance with them a little bit because we can see that they can still have an effect on us even when we make them up ourselves that means we've got some latitude in using them and trying them out in different domains it's a cool tool really cool well michael this has been really fun yeah rituals are cute i just i know you're right it's got to be the biggest head scratcher for the aliens watching rituals i mean i'm sure we have some here there must be some work ones that we have that we don't even consider necessarily i don't know what the line between superstition right but that building that you walked in front of that's just newly completed was supposed to be a new studio for this show and monica was like what are we doing trying to monkey with something that has worked so well and literally can't work outside we've decided yeah now that's just decided to add a door there and i'm pissed i really don't like it yeah it's been a big well it hasn't been i've been keeping it to myself well i know about it well okay well i have kept quiet but i really don't like it and i think it's gonna ruin everything so good thing you got in that again like what does better mean is a nicer building better sure it's better is it actually better totally clear that's actually gonna be better yeah dr michael norton this has been a blast i want everyone to check out from habit to ritual harness the surprising power of everyday actions and start monkeying around with some rituals and see how it impacts your anxiety and everything else i think it's fun yeah i'm actually excited to now be moving through the rest of my week looking yeah clocking the rituals i have me too all thanks for coming thank you bye hi there this is army of army and what do you like that you're going to love it back to me how was father's day oh man it was a raging success sure a riling success it was a major rager i'm sore as fuck today yeah you play a lot of games yes it was an all-sports father's dad at the sports complex of low speedless yeah it was really really fun my brother arrived in town at 12 30 yes david robert jr big bro and kevin zegers came over of course eric of course matthew sweet matthew yeah father to be first father's day celebrating and then jake johnson oh fun yeah i was delighted he accepted the invite because he's not in that little bubble of people yeah in fact it was coming together a few different friendship circles and family yeah which of course i get anxiety about i'm sure everyone gets along and all that but it was great so first up was volleyball and i know from experience that david and i have to be on the same team if we're not on the same team they'll be a terrible fight so we've learned through history we make great teammates and we make terrible opponents that's nice yeah of the two there was like one version we had to have i'm glad that we have to be teammates yeah so we were teammates and eric is admittedly the least interested in volleyball he'll be the first to tell you it's not his sport yep i was like perfect we'll put eric with david and i because we're both ball hogs and we're maniacs and then so zegers matt and jake were on a team none of those three know each other no oh yeah right i mean maybe zegers tangentially knows jake from bumping into my events or something from being an actor but anyways it was so fun and they started really gelling as a team but they were doing bump setting and spiking now they were fucking that up enough times that i was confirmed to just get over the net is my policy okay but i was on fire i was just running from end of the court diving but i had done a workout in the morning that was solely to warm the joints up so 200 jumping jacks a lot of lightweight shoulder work okay i was wearing two knee braces and a right elbow brace oh my god it looked like i was about to go like 10 goalie for the fucking flyers or something and it was great it doesn't even matter who won two it doesn't matter it doesn't even matter it doesn't matter but listen were you ever jealous when they were all like chatting and laughing no no no i was really happy because my anxiety was that these people don't know each other very well are forced to hang out they became a team and even jake kept saying like yeah it just works it works like you start playing something yeah i don't know i play volleyball and then first of all it's just fun moving your body and then we're joking and then it's competitive yeah exactly and then the fire took off that's fun yeah you're not a very jealous person yeah it's good oh thank you i think it's good i would not want to be a jealous person i had in high school i was jealous over girlfriends and i hated it yeah i hate it what was the worst thing you ever did when you were jealous you know this story my girlfriend and i was probably in 12th grade and she was in 11th grade she went on spring break and a bunch of kids from my school had gone to the same location to cancun and you didn't go i didn't go no because you didn't want to go i think aaron and i were going we had a mission to go to every spring break in the continental usa in one trip so like we drove a car and we went to panama city then we went to daytona then we went to virginia beach then we went to myrtle beach okay yeah so we had a whole different game plan and um when she returned i learned she had slept with a dude in my school and that is a dude he was literally the biggest i think he's the center on the football team so he was like probably six five and 260 he was enormous and i she was big enough god bless her i can't even imagine doing this maybe because maybe she had a hunch other people were gonna it was gonna get out whatever she got home i went over to her house and say hi to her after she got back she told me oh i was very cruel to her so regrettably cruel oh wow shamefully cruel you were a kid and also i was really hurt by it yeah that's more common than not yeah i just boil boy it's not who you want it's not who i want to be it's very regretful what'd you say oh just all the stuff you say i'm not gonna commit to those words but what fucking sea word no i left in a huff uh she was crying and i drove directly to his house and i was going to knock on the door and punch him and he's again enormous yeah and uh i got there i knocked on the door his father answered i said is so-and-so home he said no he should be home in 10 or 15 minutes i go okay i clock in that moment the dad's also six seven enormous so i sit outside of his house for 10 minutes and i'm growing crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier and more and more angry and i know i'll tell you the story because i see his car pull up i want to say he drove a ford probe windows down i get out of my car as i get out of my car now walking to his car my vision has reduced by like 80 i'm seeing like two saucer dishes worth of information as i approach his windows down and i just swing i miss him i punch the steering wheel oh i don't know because i can't see yeah and the dad was in the window the whole time wondering like what is this guy who came over now he's sitting in front of the house so the dad watches me walk up to the car and throw a punch through the window and now he's out of the house as the boy's getting out of his car and i'm now backing up prepared for two on one well first i'm preparing for just the one-on-one which uh my odds are very low i'm gonna win at that point because i really am not doing well yeah now all of a sudden the dad's on the scene by the time the dad is yelling at me and getting in between us my vision was down to a pinhole i look like i felt like i was looking through a pinhole of like a fucking video of this you're like rubbing your eyes i mean gracefully the father didn't they should just beat the shit out of me probably another neighbor they're a little more upscale than some of my other neighbors maybe he knew he was like oh yeah yeah let's have something to do with the recent trip to cancun right i got out of there without having to fight either of them somehow and drove away with very limited vision yeah and i was just like you know post all of that like laying in bed that night i'm like what a horrible several hours of feelings yeah i hated how i felt at her house i hated how i felt at the kids house i felt you know yeah i'm like you know what's tomorrow at school look like he'll tell people i came so you know sure but were you were you done being mad at her um no i broke up with her right yeah but like were you mad at her for the rest of your life no i'm friends with her currently oh wow i apologize to her that's nice yeah oh i can't believe i'm gonna admit this part out loud do it this most sickening part of this is i had cheated on her i just hadn't told her that's what's that's evil that makes more sense as to all of this yeah because if you i was so shame-ridden that i had uh mind you in the moment i genuinely am hurt i'm not of course thinking like well i cheated so this is no big deal i'm devastated yeah because what i didn't mean anything but what she did meant everything yeah this is growing up you live and learn but yeah so regretful so shameful did you tell her later i cheated on you yeah yeah she was rightly so like how dare you she's like you're such a slutty bitch she called me the c-word yeah so and then another girlfriend uh that lived with me who cheated on me and that was equally i was completely devastated i was mean to her about it and so i was like i don't like this i don't like this this emotion at all i do not want it yeah i've got to figure out how to not have it because i don't like it huh i wonder what that did to you because like i think there's a ton of good that came out of that and yeah jealousy is a bad feeling but being affected by other people's actions is life right like we are we are supposed to be affected by people and not live in a vacuum and just feel on our own necessarily i wonder if that had sort of an impact totally i agree but also if you contrast that reaction with like aaron weakly so aaron weakly would have other friends and he'd have sleepovers at their house and there were even periods where i'm like oh i think he he's definitely with marky actually more than he's with me but the difference there is and that's why it's an internal job is that i felt deep confidence in aaron's love for me yeah and these girls i was dating i didn't i had insecurities that i wasn't enough and i wasn't all these things so yes it's i think you should be impacted by people and not live as a robot but also it is really telling of what you're just your own self-esteem and confidence is in that relationship because again i'm not getting jealous over aaron having other friends i'm not getting jealous of carrie once i start dating carrie and we're like so in love and we're together for four and a half years i'm not jealous there's two things because one is jealousy this is the predominant problem with jealousy is the feeling of worry it's like it's an anticipation feeling of i don't like that person because they could be better than me or they might be better than me or my boyfriend might start liking this thing for me exactly or they they might cheat but you felt jealous when you were betrayed i wasn't suspicious of either of them exactly i was never really like a controlling boyfriend i don't think which is then for me the reaction of being hurt is appropriate yeah and then it's okay to feel hurt when people hurt you like it's it's part of life it is it is it is there's so many layers to it i don't know i just feel like there's a level of love and connection i desire and that version of love and connection isn't really vulnerable to anything yeah and i've had that with a handful of people in my life yeah and when i have that i'm not very worried ever yeah interesting yeah i feel like there's truly something foundational and substantive and real yeah then i'm not worried i'm not worried well it's kind of like yeah i guess it's kind of like you're not worried if she has a new best friend no i'm not if the friends parallel is harder because we're allowed to everyone's allowed to have multiple friends in fact you're like supposed to be okay with that like that's how we've built our society so it would actually be failing on my part if i was like you can't have another best friend like that's my issue but in a romantic relationship you know we've all agreed to these terms where you can't do that yeah so the feeling but again if you start peeling back what that really means and you go like okay so in a romantic relationship is my partner not allowed to have friendships with the opposite sex and you go well no of course not of course they're allowed to okay so they're not doing anything physical with them okay but would i rather have them be in love with the person they're friends with not acting on it than getting fingered by a stranger in a bathroom in atlanta one night you know but then you're it's a i don't think that's a smart choice to pick the one over the other because you've made that arbitrary thing the definition of the loyalty well i think people will feel betrayed in all of those circumstances yeah but do you agree that maybe the most self-actualized person in the world would understand that someone they love or at least would grant someone they love whatever experience i'm planning and just know in their heart that nothing is threatened yes i think the goals is the way when you talk about your love for your children right or like yeah the highest self i guess would be okay just knowing the love you're giving uh-huh and not be so wrapped up in the love you are or aren't receiving but that can be taken from you yeah yeah but i mean good luck yeah we're human i think yeah great like it'd be so good to just float through life just being like i love them doesn't matter nothing else matters but then you do run the risk of getting taken advantage of you do it gets slippery it can get slippery in practice it can get murky yeah and then if you got introduced kids to it all yeah like what did i say oh we were talking about ryan gosling oh this is really funny lincoln goes oh my god i just found do you know ryan gosling is like 40 and he has two kids and i'm like yeah i know that and she's like i thought he was in his 20s oh my god well i don't know i mean that's so funny that he and kristen i think are virtually the same age they're close yeah he's probably in his yeah he's gonna be 40 something like three probably 43 bingo yeah that's that's exactly like kristen's age currently yeah yeah so here's their mom is like a mom and she's clearly in her 40s and ryan gosling was not right yeah and i go i go he's the same age as your mom and she's like i know it's crazy and i'm like yes it's almost a shame your mom's not with him think what a gorgeous couple they would make and she's like i don't like that like even a joke like that she's very sensitive she's very sensitive to that so yes there could be some understanding that two parents have the kids would never i don't know how kids i don't know these poly relationships that have children i'm not sure how all that goes but yeah it's so it's funny too because i gotta say oh is it my own vanity what is it i'm like long for her to be past that isn't that silly like i'm i want her to understand life's more complicated than that yeah yeah i know you know and like mostly i don't want her to be judgmental of other people sure that some of the people we love the most it is it is it's like very simple yes i mean i know a lot of adults who have no they don't think it's complicated i have to imagine almost everyone knows a couple that survived infidelity it would say at this vantage point thank god they did they're a great couple involved i think if you live long enough you're at least going to have one example of that yeah i agree but she's 11 but it's also everyone's individual fears i know people who are just like that's that's the worst thing anyone could ever do to someone the end of conversation yeah well i already told the story like we were watching the scene where crosby cheats on jasmine oh right and like lincoln was so mad about the shape of crosby and delta was like of course he did she's so much nicer to him and i was like yeah but also do you think maybe lincoln watching that is part of why she ruminates on this like maybe she's equated me and crosby yeah well who knows maybe it's underestimating it is weird that her parents go to work and kiss yeah like maybe we're underestimating that like for us we're like yeah this is our job and it's not a thing but yeah i guess most i didn't see my mom go to work because anyone works my knowledge yeah but i think actually it's more a symptom of the primary thing and and i try to tell her that this is like a beautiful thing which is like it's just that she wants us to be together yeah and so that's a threat but there's other things it's like oh okay it could be any number of things that could result you know her nightmares tend to be about us getting divorced sometimes they involve infidelity but sometimes they involve others. Yeah. If I start drinking again while we get divorced, you know. That's a fair fear.

If she's going to go to Broadway, you know, am I going to move in Nashville? You know, there's a lot of different. Yeah, I wonder if also maybe someone has firstborn stuff. I do too, because that was so free of all that.

They don't care at all. And my brother didn't either. Yeah. But I was so hyper aware of them getting divorced.

I was so nervous they were going to get divorced. They were always like, are you going to get divorced? I know. What I'm tempted to do with her all the time, well, I do say a lot of stuff, which is like, there's no distraction either.

If there's fights and you're there, there's no other kid there. That's very scary. You don't have a buddy to like survive this. It's just you then.

Then you're alone. Yes. Scarier. It's scarier.

I remember what I was going to say. What I'm tempted to say to her, which I don't do, because I think it would feel like I'm minimizing her fears. But what I want to say is like, girl, you don't even have any idea what most married parents are like. Like you, you're so afraid of this and we don't even fight.

Yeah, that's helpful. No, it's not helpful. But part of me wants her to go, I want her to know like, you're seeing one of the lightest, like a lot of people are dealing with their parents are arguing nonstop. Right.

And there's a legit reason for some fear. But I'm like, there's not even really anything happening. We don't meet each other. I think you saying we'll work through anything is helpful.

Yeah. Because my mom said, we are never getting divorced. And she said it in such a matter of fact way. It wasn't like, don't worry, we love each other so much.

It wasn't. It was like, we're not making that decision. Whether we want to or not. It was that.

That was the subtext. Doesn't matter what happens here. We're not doing that. And I was like, oh, got it.

And I did. Did that alleviate your fears? 100%. Okay.

It was fights and stuff. But I didn't. I was done thinking they were getting divorced. Oh, that worked.

By that point, I didn't trust adults too much. Like if they had said, this will never happen, I didn't put a lot of stock in that. By the time I was 11. Was your mom?

I love her. She was just here. I want to talk about that. We had such a great time.

But you know, when we kicked Greg out, there was a declaration, we're never doing that again. It'll just be us three. You know? So yeah.

Yeah. And I knew like, well, shit, here we are again. Yeah. Yeah.

That's fair. But on the upside, Gaga was here. And a few nice things have happened. We're in Delta's class, end of the year thing.

We're pretty to the council. I was there too. It was so sweet. And like you get a, your birthday was this day or that.

You could end up with a stone. And if you had a stone, you could make a shout out to somebody. Yeah. And so Delta was really excited to give one.

And I did not see this coming. And she said, I'm so grateful that my grandma's here. I'm going to dedicate this to my grandma. So happy for my mom.

Yeah. It was really sweet. It was so sweet. Yeah.

I told Delta later, I'm like, you make me so proud sometimes in ways that I can't, I'm like, if you're good at math or reading, I only care so much. The fact that you made that dedication to your grandma, that's who you are. That's who I'm proud of. Not these accomplishments.

I know. Yeah. She said, I want to dedicate this to my grandma because she came along. She's something like, she came along to be here.

I don't get to see her very much. And I'm happy she's here or something. Oh my God. It was so sweet.

Anna was crying. That whole thing was really cute. The council. I loved it.

I loved it. It was painful. No, I had this whole like thing happen where the day before was Lincoln's graduation. Yeah.

And Anna was like, are you going to Lincoln's graduation? And I was like, no, I'm not. I wasn't invited to Lincoln's graduation. She's like, well, I mean, I'm sure you can come to this.

I don't have invites one out. Right. Exactly. But then, you know, I am thinking about everyone's boundaries and I don't know what everyone's boundaries are.

Maybe there's a reason that, you know, maybe it's just family. Maybe it's whatever. You know, so I didn't like insert myself. I didn't ask like, Hey, can I come to Lincoln's graduation?

But then I was sad that I missed it. Oh, I'm sorry. And then the next morning, the next morning I wake up late. I wake up at nine and I look at my text.

There's one from Kristen and she says, Delta's graduation is today. Can you come? And she has this council after. And it's really important to her that you're there.

And I was like freaking out because the graduation is underway at this point that I'm even seeing it. Right. And then the council thing, she's like, it starts around 10. I was like, Oh my, Oh my God.

And so I just like jump out of bed. I mean, there's not, if you say it's really important to Delta that I'm somewhere, I'm going, it doesn't matter. And I was so stressed out. I thought I'd come to you in the hallway and you looked a little frazzled.

I was so stressed out trying to get there. I don't like, the parking's a beat down. Yes. Yes.

I barely brushed my teeth. So it's kind of like, Oh, this is like a lot. And then it was so, so sweet. And I was so glad.

Yeah. You were there for the good part. Okay. So that was Wednesday.

Then I did a car day on Friday with my surrogate father, Tom Hanson. Yep. His friend from Jackson Hole, Sutton and my mom and two different cars. He's got this really cool old 1967 Alfa Romeo.

That's the only 200. It's so freaky looking. And so him idiosyncratic, kind of James Bondy. He's so handsome.

His hair's so thick. And at a certain point they swapped cars. And my mom was up with Tom Hanson. And I was like, good luck sister.

You're going to get out of that car head over heels in love. I mean, how could anyone? He's very charming. Go back and listen to our episode with Tom.

Yeah. And they're, I think they're almost the exact same age. Hello. Yeah.

Anyways, we had a blast. My mom loves driving fast. So we were up at Angeles crest just flying and having a blast. So many old cars out.

So many collector cars. It was really, really fun. Then Saturday I took her to the Hollywood bowl for the jazz fest. And that was a blast too.

We rode on the motorcycle. Now I will say this about Laura. She's very confident in the car flying through the canyon. She did not like that motorcycle ride.

She wasn't complaining because that's not her style, but she was so tense on the back. She was. Mom, you've got to like breathe and let your body relax a little bit. I can't, I can't.

Just go. Just get there. So we rode the motorcycle and we had a big barbecue dinner and we watched jazz and it was like heaven. Wow.

And I sent her on her way. Ding, ding, ding. Because in this episode you talked about taking the kids to drag bingo. And I went to drag bingo this weekend.