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Start your free trial today. Life expectancy's been declining in the last few years. How do we reverse that trend? These are the five safest things to do.
Dr. Dacker Kiltner, a renowned expert in the science of human emotion, discovering ways on how we can improve our happiness. He's also to all their several books, including the Power Paradox. I read that someone touching it can make you a little longer.
And be less stressed. Is that true? Yeah. There are all kinds of findings that speak to this.
You have premature babies. They used to just put them in these little units that warm them. And they would die. And then they figured out they needed skin to skin contact like they need food.
And they lit. They gained 47% weight gain. You know, the deepest craving we have is to be appreciated by other people. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
And if you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If I am kind to you, my act of kindness makes you more kind of downstream. And then that person you felt actually is kinder to another person. And they're proving that.
Yeah. So that calmer is a very real thing. That will save 8-10 years of life. You've got to find a few moments.
Just to be kinder. Are we worse people than rich and powerful we become? Yeah. Do you have to do experiments, right?
You know, it's a movie about a child who has cancer. And four people go activation to vagus nerves, which is part of compassion. Well, do people less activation. The wealthier you are, the more you navigate it for.
Serious economic policies that hurt the poor. Jesus. And this is where it gets really worrisome. Could you stop by giving me your professional academic resume?
Wow. Well, that. It begins early with my parents who were, you know, very important in my education and my dad is a visual artist. And my mom taught literature and poetry and romanticism and got me interested in, you know, all kinds of things about the human mind.
And then I said, you see Santa Barbara as an undergraduate. And then went to Stanford for a PhD subsequent to that. Work with Paul Ekman as a postdoc who's kind of a pioneer in the study of facial expression and inspiration for the show, Lydomy. And then became a professor Wisconsin.
And then you see Berkeley for 27 years and helped run the Greater Good Science Center, which is about disseminating kind of the new knowledge of meditation and compassion and stress to a broad audience and have taught at Berkeley, which I love for 27 years. You referenced the Greater Good Science Center. Yeah. What's the mission of the Greater Good Science Center?
Yeah. Thanks for asking. You know, 20 years ago, post 9-11, you know, we were in a world much like post Trump and Boris Johnson and others, you know, like, are we fragmented? What happened to humanity?
What happened to community? Why are life expectancy in the United States dropping the last two years? What's going on? Yeah, striking.
Right. If you have strong social ties, it adds 10 years of life expectancy to your life. Right. If you practice kindness, it quiets down the threat regions of the brain.
And so we at Berkeley, in partnership with the Journalism School, kind of had the sense early, like if we can get this knowledge out, right, in actionable prose, where you read it and you say, I could teach breathing to my medical team or I could teach an awak to my neighborhood friends. That would be good for the world, you know. I'm super compelled by that. Thank you.
Great to get started. Let's talk about some of the things that you've given away in terms of knowledge and some of the discoveries that I think would surprise most people. You mentioned some of them in passing there about breathing and awaks and how you can add 10 years to your life. Give me some of the top line, more detail on some of those top line findings.
This really comes into focus from you, Stephen. When I speak to medical audiences, I do a lot of work with healthcare providers, you know, teaching medical doctors, residents, helping programmatically with kind of the spirit of hospitals and the like. I talk about awe, that the feeling of awe reduces activation in the inflammation system in your immune system. Your immune system is all these cells distributed throughout your body that helps you protect against dangerous elements on the outside, viruses and bacteria.
And the feeling of awe sort of reduces the activation of the cytokine system, which heats up your body. And if your body is always hot, that is bad news for your heart, it's bad news for your diabetes. And awe helps moderate that. I, you know, I teach the work on compassion that, you know, 65 year olds who practice altruism and compassion have greater life expectancy.
You know, and you can go on each of these, what used to be thought of is kind of new age, soft things, like awe or compassion or breathing benefit us. You know, just simple breathing. If you breathe in and out, counting the fours you breathe in, counting out to four actually increases neural density in this part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, which helps you handle stress. What is, oh, for some, yeah, awe is just feeling an emotion you have when you encounter something big or vast that's outside of your frame of reference, right, of reality that you don't understand that I think I like the word mystery.
You know, wow, who I can't figure this out. And then that emotion of awe stimulates wonder, right? Like, how do I, why do people, why do rainbows exist? What, you know, how are they produced when water, when light bends through water molecules?
So it's, it's an emotion that drives wonder and creativity. What is the positive net impact on humans of experiencing or other than, because when I think of all, I think of going for like, Machu Picchu and seeing those big mountains and going, what the hell is this? This is insane. And I think of that as being like a memory.
Oh, that's fun. That's amazing. I take the picture. Yeah.
Put it on Instagram. Go home. Yeah. Yeah.
There's something deeper going on, right? Even when you're, you know, is, when you study this complicated realm of emotion is we have these words that we all use to talk about an emotion. And they're much as we have words about, you know, ethnic categories or class categories. Oh, he's lower class or he's African American.
Those are just words and concepts that may not capture reality at all. And awe suffers from this, which is when people talk about awe, or they share it on Instagram, they share it on Instagram, they share the big moments of like the Grand Canyon or, you know, it's in the Lake District or by this cathedral. But in point of fact, you know, there are a lot of ways in which we feel awe all the time, right? Encouraging somebody who's really kind in the streets.
And like, wow, that was really generous. So yesterday on the train, the team were coming up to Manchester where I was speaking. And an elderly lady overheard them saying that they were going to climb a mountain for charity. The elderly lady got up, walked over, gave him five pounds and said, I climbed that once.
His five pounds put it towards the charity. And for all of us, it went into our company chat, but that happened. It was a real moment of like an affirmation of what it is to be a human and the kindness, I guess. Yeah.
Yeah. And what's stunning to me, and this is a digression, is your story just gave me the chills. Yeah. And that's amazing.
It is incredible, isn't it? It is incredible that I wasn't there. I've just got the chills myself. It's amazing.
And that we don't understand scientifically the contagious power of chills and awe, but you know, awe, it's not the stereotype that we are led to understand or think about with words. It's around us all the time, right? The generosity and the train, the beautiful clouds, a piece of music, a visual design, you know, driving here to your studio, all the incredible design of London. It's around us.
And so it's there every day. And you know, Stephen, I'm not a, I don't know why this happened to me, but I've taught happiness to hundreds of thousands of people online and in classes. And I was like, I was a grouchy kid, stressed out most of my life, terrible meditator, but I was forced into this job and, you know, serving the science of happiness we've been talking about. Man, two minutes of awe every other day is about as good for you as anything you can do.
You know, it calms stress, calms stress regions of your brain, talks about inflammation, reduces inflammation, activates the vagus nerve, which is a spindle of nerves. The wanders all throughout your body and calms your heart rate. It's good for digestion. So, you know, it's good news for the human psyche.
And when we talk about giving a little stressed out 12 year old, young 12 year old, some awe each moment in a classroom, we know that's really good for health and creativity. So, it's good news in terms of what it can bring to us. Talk to me about some science then, and that supports that assertion where the science shows that every day awe, so like accessible awe, the awe that I could go get out on the street or that I could actively go practice after listening to this conversation has proven to have a positive physiological impact on humans or their emotions or their behavior. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, this was one of the most exciting developments of the science of awe. When we started to get this picture of the health benefits of awe of less stress, a sense of time, reduced loneliness, right?
Loneliness, 40% of people in globalized cultures feel lonely, right? That is hard on the body. We started to think about awe interventions. And, you know, one of my favorites that has compelling health data, if you will, is a lot of people go for regular walks.
The UK is famous for its walking traditions. You know, it's one of the great cultural strengths, you know, just paths and, you know, and walks and, you know, and set, et cetera. And so we just added one element to people's regular walk and we called it the awe walk, which is when you go out, pause, take some breathing, deep breathing, get synced up with your footsteps. This is a classic kind of walking meditation approach and then look for awe, right?
Look, take a moment to look at small things, look at the reflection on this Google mug, then pan out and look at, you know, the vastness of where you are, city or nature of the sky. That was it, right? And that gets you into this awe mindset. And our participants were 75 years old or older.
At that age, a lot of data suggests you start getting more anxious and depressed, right? Your people you love are dying. Your body's falling apart. You are facing your mortality.
And the awe walk over eight weeks, once a week, compared to a really rigorous control condition, led our 75 years old participants to feel less distress, less pain, and more awe and joy in their lives. So it's just this simple addition to a daily walk, right? Listening to some music, do it more intentionally. And a lot of the studies of awe are really simple.
You know, just watch an awe video, share an awe story which you shared to me that just gave me the goosebumps. You know, that goosebumps is a register. There are multiple muscles around hair follicles that are part of what are called your parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, which calm you down. So share stories of awe.
So there's a ton of ways in which you can build more everyday awe into your life. What's the evolutionary basis for this? The, you know, in 1978, I think Richard Dawkins published Selfish Gene. Massive book, right?
You know, if you read that, the argument, which is true, is that we have these genes that are replicating themselves through us. We are these machines that replicate genes, right? And all of our characteristics are ways to do that. And it's all, the language is very aggressive and adversarial.
These genes are competing with these genes. I'm competing with other people in the game of evolution. And there's been this massive shift in evolutionary thinking in the past 40 years where, you know, we're just starting to discover, you know, around the world, people share 40 to 50% of a resource with a stranger, if asked, just like as a default. That's our intuition.
We have neurophysiological systems like oxytocin, parts of the brain and the vagus nerve, which help us sacrifice and give. We readily are contagious in our feelings. Your story gave me the chills. And then my chills bounced back to you and you got the chills.
So we're united and connected. And now, you know, the thinking is we're very cooperative alongside violent and rapacious and the like, and collective. We're hyper collective. We synchronize with each other physiologically.
We mimic each other. We collaborate, unlike any other primate. That's just who we are. It's probably our big strength.
I think because in part, hyper vulnerable offspring needed a lot of care, right, to live. Food scarcity, warming in the face of cold. And we need emotions and social practices that make us feel like we're collective. And awe is it.
When, you know, it's so striking, Stephen. I don't know if you've had an awe experience in nature recently, just being outdoors. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah.
So I went to, I went to Bali in Indonesia to write my book in Uber. And that's one of the places where, I mean, you're in a vast jungle. And also when you get to top a mountain, you look out across the jungle. And I remember one particular moment looking out across the jungle.
So on this platform, that was awe inspiring. Yeah. But also, it's quite weird that my awe inspiring experiences in that country are always just being on the moped and going to the countryside. Yeah.
Because it feels like the essence of nature. There's something about, I don't know what it is. There's this realness to it that makes me feel like I'm at home. It's hard to explain.
And that's feel like you're at home, right? And it's striking. Think about it conceptually. Like, here I am on a moped in nature with, you know, the, the ecosystem is kind of moving into my body and my brain.
And out of that comes the concept, I'm home. And that's what awe does is it says, I'm part of this people, right? The other time was actually last week. I was at Soho Farmhouse, which is a sort of like a, like a hotel village they constructed where you can go on the weekends to be in nature.
And it was actually walking back to my cabin. I looked up for the first time. And also when you're in the countryside, you get to see the stars in London. You don't have that luxury.
No. And I looked up and I saw the stars. And I started talking, like having a mental conversation about what that is, like what I'm looking at. That is a, I mean, that one over there is a bigger than planet Earth.
And it's, I'm basically this tiny little, seemingly insignificant piece of irrelevant dust. And that made me feel a sense of awe. The feeling is really, because I am so small, I am part of this bigger thing. Yeah.
You know, when you don't look up and when you're looking down, let's say figuratively, there's sort of an individualism. Yeah. It's me. I'm the center of the universe.
When you look up, you realize that you are irrelevant, but therefore also part of this greater thing, I guess. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. And one of the simple, actionable things that we've been teaching a greater good, we have a practice on this, look at the sky.
Just like, look up, take a minute. If you ask the average citizen in a city like London, when's the last time you looked at the sky? Yeah, I can see it. Yeah.
And it's powerful. Yeah. You know, one of the paradoxical qualities of awe and is this shift, this transformation and sense of self that you're talking about. It's profound, which is, you know, in one of the early writing traditions around awe, which is spiritual journaling.
A lot of people, early accounts of awe and the Bhagavad Gita and Julian of Norwich and, you know, the great Christian writings, almost every spiritual tradition, the Buddha. It's just like, God, I'm having this ecstatic, awe, mystical experience, what's it like? And they write about the self just like vanishing, you know. Psychedelics has a rich tradition of ego death in it.
Carl Sagan, it has this great statement about space like yours. Like, man, when I think about the universe, look at me, I'm just listening. Yeah. I'm a little speck of dust, you know, but the self is huge in our minds.
Yeah. And our quiet set, it puts it into perspective and what's striking, Steven, which, you know, took us a long time to figure this out scientifically is it actually feels liberating. You know? Oh, it's the, do you know what?
When I'm stressed, I remind myself of how insignificant I am because stress is often the, like, the fatal decision to overestimate the significance of your universe. Like relative to, you know, to whatever. But the other day I was a little bit, I was a little bit, I was thinking something a lot and I can feel myself getting a little bit stressed. And I reminded myself of looking down on a plane over a country and just how irrelevant I am in the grand scheme of things.
Because of, you know, I became a dragon on Dragon's Den and, of course, became bigger. You know, it's easy sometimes to fall into the trap of when there's a lot of people talking about you all right and about you to think that this is the center of the universe in some respect. I'm leading a movement of 2 million people. Yeah, but whenever I go up in a plane and I go, nothing that I do is really math matters in a good way.
Yeah. It's funny because it's a paradox. It's like, I want to be empowered and I want to think that I matter. Yeah.
But at the same time, I like to realize that I absolutely don't matter in any respect. And I love saying this to people because you can see that kind of ego square. Yeah. When you go, when you put in context, we are as an individual, we absolutely don't matter.
You know, in the millions or whatever billions of years that the universe has existed. We are just this blink and I'm just this irrelevant speck of dust. And once I'm gone, you know, give it another million years. Not even going to remember.
Yeah. Or whatever, probably cut with a couple years. But that's what's really about all the human mind, right? We need the ego and the self and we need to maximize our interest and desires and reproductive possibilities.
It's out of status, you know, all that obsessive stuff. But man, we have this great realm of transcendence that awe is part of that. You know, in our studies, you know, we literally, we took students up to this tower on the UC Berkeley campus. They got to look out at the, and they no longer felt stressed about things.
We had students look up into trees and just admire these. We have a lot of tall trees on campus. I hope you visit at some time that are beautiful and tall and make you feel like, you know, we have redwood trees that are 1000 years old, you know, that, oh, this little moment of consciousness that is so self-critical or, or stressed or, or ego maniacal is just a moment in time of 79 billion people. It's, you know, for me, personally, it was liberating to find this in awe.
Like you're saying, like, this is all, this is just one human's effort. So why did you write this book? Of all the things you could have written about, you're a very smart individual. You've studied so many things relating to sort of social sciences and how humans behave and why we, why we do what we do.
But to commit your life to writing a book about this subject matter is writing books. It's not easy. It takes a long time. A lot of effort to promote them, et cetera.
Why this book? Why now? Yeah. Thank you for asking that.
Yeah, you know, it is hard to write books and we had done a lot of research on awe. And, you know, one of the reasons I wrote the book was, you know, I'm now at an age where I've been following how we're doing his cultures and a lot of the things that have surfaced here, Stephen are true. Like, you know, people feel lonely. They feel adrift.
They're searching for something more meaningful than elevating a paycheck. And I felt that awe was part of that story, that awe gets us to what is meaningful to us as individuals at a moment in history. And then my younger brother died and he was, he was born, I'm one year older. We had this wild childhood, you know, born in Mexico and raised in the late 60s in Laurel Canyon in a very experimental place, wandering the foothills of this era.
And he was my source of meaning in many ways in life. And he got colon cancer and died. And he was brutal and horrifying. And at the moment of his dying, the last night he was sitting by his bed.
And he was my moral compass in life. You know, he really, he was very courageous, super kind. Really only cared about like devoted his career to the least resource kids in the country, these four poor kids. And when I was watching him die, I had an awe experience.
I was like, you know, what is going on? He seems really calm. He's heading into a space I don't understand. I saw like pulsating light, you know, that was uniting everyone around him in this sense of reverence and the sacredness of his life.
And afterward, I was knocked into a really profound state of grief where this is about five years ago, I couldn't make sense of the world. I could do my work, but I just didn't, I was lost because he was a very important voice to me. You know, and I was waking up, wasn't sleeping panicky. And I, like a lot of people in grief, I was like, you know, hallucinating.
Like, I would see him, follow a guy in the streets. Like, and he wasn't him. I'd wake up thinking he was there. I felt his hand on the back a couple times.
And it was weird. I was, I had this epiphany in this really bad state of mind. The worst I've ever felt. Like, I got to find awe again.
You know, I have to, my brother, you know, he and I went dancing and wild things and backpacking and, you know, just live this life of awe. He was my source and he was gone. And so I wrote the book, you know, and I dug in and just started writing about him. He features prominently in the book, you know, what he meant to me and how I read his loss and then worked up the science too.
So in many ways, you know, what we're observing in our, our globalized culture is this, the problems of capitalism, the search for meaning, you know, rising, the reduced life expectancy, US rising anxiety depression. And I was kind of in that state, you know, suddenly like, how do my career is good? But, you know, and so knowing a little bit about the science, I was like, I've got to do this myself and go get it. Did you find that Oregon?
I did. It, it, it took a lot of work. You know, I was in a really tough place. And, you know, I, I just, I just started anew.
Like, where do I find meaning? And I find meaning working with prisoners. I don't know why, you know, but just, you know, being in prisons, volunteering, helping with the formerly incarcerated. I challenged myself to find awe in places.
I wouldn't ordinarily find it, like just to open my mind. Like, well, I met a symphony, you know, I love African music and so much about it. And, you know, and here I was in the symphony, not understanding it, but starting to feel it, you know, nature is easy for me. I've always backpacked and gone into the mountains.
I had a lot of spiritual conversations. You know, like, I'm not a religious person. And I was like, what is this? You know, why, why mystical awe?
So, and what it gave me, I think, with respect to my brother's death is an openness. Like, we don't know what life is. We don't know where it goes. We don't, you know.
And it opened my mind to a lot of new sources of all. There's almost an injustice I heard in that story because of the way you characterized your brother and his behavior. Yeah. For him then to have passed early from cancer.
Yeah. Feels in many respects to me like the opposite of war or, you know, the universe being compassionate or fair or whatever in that. Yeah. Yeah.
It hit me hard. You know, it was, and that's well put. Like, for the first year, you know, you ask these questions, like, why would a guy who teaches speech therapy to the poorest kids in the United States go with a teenage daughter and a young family? Come on.
You know, come on. And Donald Trump is indestructible and you're like, the world is fucked. You know, and I grappled with that. Very hard.
And then I was, as you well put, I was in this antithesis state of awe. I was like, nothing meant anything. You know, it was all pointless. I could sense nothing bigger about life that mattered.
And that's why, you know, that's why I said, all right, I have this career that allows me to do these investigations and we're all investigating. We're all searching for these things in music or moral beauty or being in collective or sports. And I just threw myself into it and, and, and, you know, frankly, it, you know, the idea of everyday awe, which is very important in the book, we can find it anywhere, you know, on the train with the active generosity that is now, it just feels alive all the time. What's kind of the three lines of gratitude?
Because when you were talking about the whole thing, when you picked up the glove, this mug, the silver mug we have in front of us, and you started admiring it, it almost sounded a bit more like gratitude to me. Yeah. And even the study where you had the elderly participants do the walk and then sort of self report, I'm guessing, how they felt. Yeah.
It sounded like nature also gives us a sense of sort of gratitude for our lives for the world of him. Yeah. Yeah. What's the distinction with difference if there is one?
Yeah. What a terrific question. And there's a deep philosophical tradition of David, David Hume, Scottish philosopher, Charles Darwin, Martha Nussbaum, or recently a Chicago philosopher that we, and it really animates a lot of this conversation. The work I've done is like, we have these amazing emotions that are like deep intuitions about the world that are good for us and good for the world, you know, compassion, take care of people who are vulnerable, awe, you know, connect to others to face-fast mysteries and gratitude.
Adam Smith, the great economist, felt like this is the emotion that holds societies together, gratitude, the feeling of reverence for things or like, wow, this is really important and sacred of things that are given to you. And that is key. Like, oh, my friend helped me with my work. My work colleague brought me lunch, you know, my, my child did the dishes tonight, you know, whoa, I feel grateful, gratitude really close to awe as you into it.
But it tends to be different in that awe tends to be about vaster things, like, you know, you almost get into a car crash, or you get into a car crash, you almost die and you're like, oh, I'm just, I feel awestruck that I'm alive, you know, and then awe has more mystery to it. You can't understand it. Like music. Cool.
Right. Like, yeah, exactly. You know, music rushes into you and you start crying. Right.
And you're like, oh, my God. So what's the recent experience of that for you? Of music. Yeah.
It would be where you just start sobbing. Or chills. It would be, we do this live show. It's called the drive to see a live and we toured the country last year, we had three nights at the plate and then we took it to all these theaters and I'm stood and there's a house gospel choir about 40 people behind me for the whole two hours, you know, speaking and I mean, yeah, basing a lot of like songs as part of the message that I'm conveying.
I mean, every night I'm, you know, I'm crying. It's funny because I rehearsed it. I rehearsed. I practiced it.
But then with the people there, the audience of 2,500 people and the choir there, I would cry every night. Yeah. Which is, which is strange. Isn't it striking?
It's a sense of connectedness. And there's thousands of people that then I feel the most intense emotions. Yeah. That's a complicated question.
But your examples tell us, you know, that you, the vastness of that experience of like, wow, there are sound waves that I'm producing that are moving bodies. I see this pattern of movement and I am part of that. And as the poet, Raski says, these boundaries between self and other become very porous and like, well, we are one organism. That's all vast.
And I don't understand why gratitude is more, you know, you're at the show and, you know, somebody looks you in the eye and smiles and you feel like they're grateful for you. It has this more readily understood economy to it almost. And why, you know, in writing about awe, the, you know, there's some things that are intuitive, like, oh, nature mixes, feel awe and people's moral beauty and kindness, your story on the train. But how in the world, music, sound waves hits our ear, produces a neurochemistry in the brain.
And the next thing you know, you're crying, you know, and feeling one, that's amazing to me. And we still, I don't know if science will ever answer it, you know, it's just the transcendent power of music and you're lucky to share it. Do you have any insight into the positive impact that gratitude has on us based on any sort of studies that have been done? It's huge.
You know, Stephen, like when following and teaching the science of happiness literature for 25 years, you know, at UC Berkeley, I started teaching a happiness course and he was Harvard and us for the first 25 years ago tracking like, what are the, what are the things you can count on? You know, and when I go out and teach happiness, it's very humbling, like you asked me in some sense, a related question to have a parent come up to me and say, you know, my son is massively depressed and suicidal. What do I do? You know, and obviously you go see a therapist and you consider medication, but the happiness literature can point to like, these are the five safest things to do, social connection, develop some way to use your body to calm down, breathing, yoga, sports, whatever, and gratitude as a winner.
And I think all is up there now too. But you know, gratitude, practicing gratitude benefits the cardiovascular system. It helps people who have heart, heart vulnerabilities, patients, they do better. It is very good for your place in social networks.
Like I joined a group, I'm worried, I'm socially anxious, what do I do? You know, say thank you and show a little appreciation of people. You will have stronger social ties. We did research showing it's good for romantic bonds, you know, that if partners simply say on occasion, like, hey, thanks for doing the dishes or I appreciate how you, the jokes you tell or I love your music selection, it helps, right?
So it's, it's a safe bet for a happier life. You know, this, I've come to learn that there's so many forces in our daily lives that act against gratitude and stifle its presence, but in the context you've given there, whether it's in a social group or at work or in a relationship or even with yourself, I've come to learn how important it is to not rely on gratitude just showing up, but to try and create a system for frequent gratitude. Yeah. Now, one of the things that's been a real unlock for me, my companies over the last couple of years is in every company that I run, we have a gratitude chat.
Yeah. So it's just a channel. Yeah. And it's open.
There's really no instruction. But it's funny that we created the channel first at social training and then in my current companies. And when you just create the channel, what happens is gratitude pulls in. Yeah.
So today there'll be, I can guarantee at some point today there'll be a message in that says, thank you so much Ross for going and getting me that cup of coffee that I didn't ask for, but you know that I needed or whatever, well, thank you Jack for helping me lift that box upstairs. And it pulls in and it's such a simple thing to do, but it creates this insane, hard to understand a amount of like, connectiveness and appreciation. I imagine for the individual on the receiving end of the gratitude, a sense of like worthiness or respect or, and it's such a small thing to do. It is.
I think every company should consider which is having a system to move gratitude friction-free across your organization, to bind it together, but in your personal relationship the same thing. Yeah. You know, you're part of helping you with the bags or helping you with packing or whatever, but it's great to also in relation to have a system for gratitude. And when I love about your system, Stephen, you know, I taught gratitude in a lot of organizational contexts and sometimes people force it like, okay, let's say what we're grateful for each person in this, you know, this meeting is like, oh God, you know, that's tricky, but to allow it to be spontaneous and intuitive, like you did, right?
And let it flow. That's, that's the strong source and manifestation of gratitude. And it reminds us, you know, in Western European thinking, probably largely Western European male thinking has been so hostile to emotion. This is what I was saying when I said this and we force this acting against it.
Yeah. And it's just like, why would you ever say thank you? It makes you weak. It makes you vulnerable and the like, et cetera.
But there are a lot of great thinkers from David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, you know, early, a lot of the East Asian, you know, contemplative philosophies, like our best human tendencies come out of emotions of gratitude and express them. And I think that your example speaks to sort of a big shift culturally and what do we do with these emotions that work? They're really vital to our sense of connectivity and community. Makes me think a lot about relationships.
I know this is something you've written about extensively, the role that a romantic relationship plays in health outcomes, et cetera, et cetera. But then I also was, I was pondering this idea of monogamy broadly. Yeah. Whether my kind of question is kind of twofold is, are we meant to be monogamous?
Yeah. And also this, I'm thinking a lot about how the relationship dynamics of the algorithm is changing in some ways eroding, eroding some stats around marriage and how people getting married less, you know, having less kids and all these kinds of things. So what's your thoughts on all of that? Are we meant to be monogamous?
You've done a lot of research on apes and talk to a lot about them in your work. Yeah. But are we meant to be monogamous? And if so, how does that relate to the fact that being in a relationship extends our life?
What a terrific question. Well, you know, anytime that you pose these questions, right, you have to remember, you know, and I was approached things from an evolutionary framework, which is humans are many different kinds of individuals. So there's massive individual variation. And when I, you know, and there's cultural variation, so some cultures will be less monogamous, others more.
Yeah. I think that I think that the safest answer we can offer, and it's disparity, and I teach it to my young students at Berkeley is, you know, I hate to tell you this, but you're in love right now, but odds are very good that that's not going to be the last relationship you're in. And so we tend to move from one semi-committed relationship to another. So serial monogamy is what many believe to be kind of our default orientation.
There's variation around that. Some are more polyamorous, others are really fiercely monogamous given genetic makeup and cultural makeup. My belief is, and your generation is really bringing this to the fore, which is that the old model of single monogamous relationship for 60 years probably is not working. When you look at divorce rates, 50%, those people who stay together, half of those marriages are really pretty unhappy, so it's not working.
You look at certain cultures, I was struck, even recently, as, you know, the Scandinavians always do really well in happiness measures, right, and I was like, and I just googled like, you know, what is the sort of living configuration, romantic relationship configuration in Sweden? Sweden has really high rates of people co-parenting, but not living with the parent, right? And that may be a model to be not living with a partner, sorry. And so I think that we have many kinds of love, one of them being a monogamous love, it puts a lot of pressure to, with this old kind of romantic, chivalrous, Victorian ideal, like that's the only person, I don't think that works, right?
And so we're moving towards more flexible arrangements where we express many kinds of love and it comes with a lot of complexity. So I, when I teach love, I say there are all these kinds of love, right? Walt Whitman, love friendship, you know, I mean, friendship love and a lot of the data friends give you more happiness than any kind of relationship, right? Oh, I should say, I should say I agree.
My girlfriend is somewhere upstairs. You know, I understand. Yeah. So the, I think this, this model of like, you know, singular, devoted, all consuming romantic love is misled us and we need varieties of romantic love, which your generation is creating, which is exciting.
And then we need to remember the other forms to, to have the rich life. And then you get at that, you know, I got the right social configuration to give me those ten years of life expectancy. I've always been going back and forward about marriage because I understand some people say marriage is a system that allows for the rearing of kids. It's a, it's a full of commitment, which changes things in the relationship.
But I've always wondered if there's another way. Yeah. That's more, you know, where, which kind of, I don't know, is there another way, like, I'm not even sure me and my partner would get married, but I'm sure we'd make some kind of commitment to each other. But, you know, I'm not sure involving the law and church and all these things in the process is necessarily conducive to productive outcome.
I know, not only that, but just think about like, you know, I'm going to be, wait, I'm going to do everything from physical exercise to streaming movies to cooking food with one person, right? You know, it's interesting to even the, there's this really striking literature, you know, one of the raw facts of our evolution is our offspring are very vulnerable. They're the most vulnerable offspring of any mammal on the face of the earth. They take seven to eight to 20 years, just to, I even say like 55 years, you know, to even be semi functioning as an individual.
But what that meant is love in our, our hominid evolution was distributed in communities, right? And there's this concept called aloe parenting, which is we all kind of take care of young ones, even if they're not our own, we're all affectionately related to each other in that work. We're all, there's much more sexual fluidity in that dynamic that probably reflects the truth of today that we don't face with this Victorian ideal of singular romantic love. And maybe your generation is moving us toward that, that sort of more communal approach to love of, and it's complicated, right?
It involves different ideas about sexuality and different ideas of caregiving, but probably healthier. And I hope it happens. Why, why won't it work? And why doesn't it work?
Because, you know, when we think about polygamy or popping polyamorous, I don't know the difference, I'm going to be honest. Yeah. They sound similar. Polyamorous multiple people you love.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It seems impossible in the one world to execute a poly situation without jealousy and other bullshit.
Yeah. And you know, I grew up raised around hippies. You know, my parents are counterculture. I grew up in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, very wild place.
And I saw a lot of this as a young kid and it was comical. You know, it's like, who you're fighting over the dishes and I don't get to sleep with my wife tonight. That's you. He gets my roommate does.
You know, it's hard, you know. Yeah. You know, and a lot of things get in the way. I think that, you know, I forgive me, but you know, I think of the US and how much of United States culture is designed around, you know, the nuclear monogamous family of, you know, single homes, suburbs, driving in a car, you know, really structured around that and maybe that's poor design.
It doesn't seem to fit our evolutionary past of being in these, you know, these collectives that are sharing in the raising of offspring and sharing and to a certain extent in romantic partnership. So are you married? Yes. You've been married for a long time?
Yeah. I think it's 33 years. Wow. Geez.
Yeah. Yeah. Some people might, you know, think that you were like anti-marriage or anything like that, but you're clearly I can see from the room in your future. Yeah.
But I grew up around a mom who, you know, she taught women's literature and feminism in the 70s and, you know, that early feminist critique of marriage is right, you know, early on it, women did a lot of the work, it constrained them, it cost them in terms of job mobility. And so I've always questioned it. And then I think the evolutionary literature we talked about is like, wait a minute, maybe love is more distributed, it comes in many varieties and that's how we get this love work done. So I'm glad you guys are questioning it.
Yeah. Good luck. Yeah. Good thing is we're really like, we're really open to new things.
As in we're open to like building new systems for our relationship in modern worlds based on how we feel, we're very good at being resistant to like social pressure to follow a conventional path. Yeah. So even with Valentine's days and things like that, we have a conversation about like, does this make sense? Like why would we do this?
What's more important? Yeah. Which a lot of people don't. I've been relationships before where you don't hit the perfect like a social cube to show up or give flowers or whatever and you get like an essay and you're, you know, going back to one of the points you said, you're talking about how men in particular struggle to show express those emotions.
Yeah. And, you know, stereotypically, we're not as affectionate and kindness as our female counterparts. One of the things that you talk about is the difference in social class. Yeah.
And how things change. Oh man. Oh, are we worst people richer and more powerful we become because your research seems to show that. Yeah.
I would say yes. And I'm sorry to say that. You know, it's, you know, we, I got interested in social class, actually living in England, you know, I lived in England in 1978 and United States is very blind as social class. We're now more aware of it, Bernie Sanders, et cetera, rightfully so, 1% critique, you know, 80s, 90s were just blind to it as a more egalitarian time and I lived in Nottingham, England, very working class town in a very tough time in England's history of, you know, Colestryics and the like and it was tough and, and the English had this just much more sophisticated understanding of class and differentiations between on the dole and working class and posh and, you know, all these categories.
I was like, wow, classes everywhere. It affects how people speak and dress and eat and so forth. And so we started to apply social class to what we've been talking about, like the compassion or gratitude and empathy, kind of sharing altruism and just, you know, across studies and, and, you know, largely in the United States, I think you could question whether this applies to Holland or UK or Japan, whether there's less inequality, I might add, you know, as you rise in wealth and privilege, you share less, you feel less compassion to images of suffering. You know, you see an image.
This was a striking study to me of, you know, it's a movie about a child with cancer and poor people show activation to vagus nerve, which is part of compassion, you know, causes you to like want to help welded people less activation, they feel less awe as you rise in the social class hierarchy in the United States are more impolite. And so that was part of my power paradox book was that story about the class. I, you know, I hesitate, I worry about like in my worst person and I'd rather use your earlier language of like, what are the structural conditions to get in the way of this? And you think about, you know, rising in wealth and privilege in class as introduced, you create a life that makes it harder to be kind.
You know, that your people are assisting you with things and you don't come into contact with suffering, you know, you live in a neighborhood in the United States or probably UK where it's like, you don't see it, you know, and so it doesn't train those tendencies. And you know, frankly, Stephen, I, you know, I think this is increasingly true in the UK, but in the United States, you know, with one in six people impoverished, life expectancy is dropping, you know, six, 700,000 unhoused people in the United States where I live Berkeley, California, everywhere you go, you're bumping into somebody who doesn't have a home. I think it's our central failure in the US is how privilege has short circuited our better human tendencies. How do we know that it's the increase in wealth and social class that is causing us to become less kind, less empathetic, less compassionate, or it's just our souls go further.
Yeah. Like there's distinction there, like maybe these people were always our souls and that's why they became successful or rich or wealthy or whatever or in a higher social class. Yeah. I mean, there are two, and that's a critical question, right?
And people have long championed this idea that, well, maybe all of this, what it really tells us is you, if you practice our compassion, you don't rise in the ranks and you don't gain wealth and the like, and there are two rebuttals to that idea, the first, which I chart in the power paradox, which people still don't believe too much, but on balance today, people who practice empathy, who listen and share resources, practice gratitude, rise in the ranks, they do better in social hierarchies. And that replicates in a lot of contexts. And really what happens is, this is why I call it the power paradox is once I have everybody's respect and, you know, wealth and the like, then I tend to misbehave, right, in the ways we've talked about through a lot of different forms of unethical behavior. The other rebuttal is we've actually done experiments, right?
And you can take a middle class individual and you can get them into the mindset, like, hey, you're actually have a lot of advantage vis-a-vis most of society through simple manipulations, right? Just think about how you compare to a lot of poor people and they're like, oh, I'm doing really well. And that simple shift in mindset leads to reduced compassion, reduced empathy. So you can actually move people around where you give them the sense that they're privileged and it tends to undermine these tendencies.
Jesus. I know. It is. And, you know, I worry about it.
I worry about it a lot. But, you know, the kind of poor distribution of privilege in the United States and increasing UK and other countries is doing to the social fabric. It's problematic. It's interesting because there's kind of a long prevailing stereotype that rich people are like bad, like less compassionate, less empathetic.
And I always wondered whether that was just, I don't know, was it true? Was it people being jealous? Was it just too much of a poor generalization? Was it based on the acts of maybe a few?
Yeah. But you're telling me that the science supports the fact that generally the more rich you are and the higher you are in terms of social class and the less compassionate, less empathetic you are as human. Yeah. And, you know, and it is.
I mean, that's the broad argument. I've given you a couple of findings here. There are all kinds of other findings that speak to this. Jesus.
You know, one, this is one of my favorites is, you know, in these epidemiologists who are studying broad trends in social behavior discovered this accidentally, they're interested in who shop lifts as a teenager in the United States, you know, a basic unethical tendency really costly for businesses in the United States. Is it the rich or the poor? Well, you know what he would assume it would be, but I feel like I'm wrong. It's the rich.
Rich high school kids in the United States are more likely to shop lift, right? And that's striking. They've got their parents' credit card. They can buy whatever they want and they violate that social rule.
This is where it gets really worrisome. My former student, Michael Kraus, did really nice work on US senators and US policymakers. You know, American politicians are rich. They, uh, increasingly so and he was simply interested in does your degree of privilege or wealth predict regressive policy preferences, like let's not give resources to schools for the poor, let's not fund, you know, Medicare, let's really move wealth through taxation policies to the well to do.
And the wealthier you are, the more you produce, you preferred and advocated for, you know, serious economic policies that hurt the poor, uh, and benefit the well to do who already have, you know, in the US, the 1%, they have enough. They have more than enough, right? Why not share a little? So it's deep.
And I think, and then you look across history, European aristocracy's and, you know, the popes and so forth. And it's, I think it's one of the, you know, frankly, Stephen, and I hate to say it, you know, Lord Acton, uh, you know, power leads to abuse and absolute power, absolute corruption, power, power is corrupting. Um, it's a pretty safe law in human behavior. I hate to say it because you're rising in prominence and facing a new life and you better watch out.
Yeah. I was thinking most of the time you're talking, which is like, how do you avoid that? How do you avoid the, how do you avoid the, uh, that scientifically supported tendency to become an asshole with, with the more wealth and power, your crew? Um, I guess my, my assumption was just being conscious of the fact of the first day, but also just like, there's probably act things you could do actively to remain, uh, aware of your own insignificance, maybe not the worst, but like the fact that everything is exactly the same.
Yeah. I mean, I think that there's an awareness dimension to this that you've suggested. There's an ethical practice of like, how do I create more gratitude in an organization? If that's what we care about, et cetera.
Um, how do I counteract my biases then as well? So how do I put people around me who represent and we're thinking here, I'm thinking here about governments that represent the entirety of the population, not just the rich private school colleagues that I might surround myself with, which has often been a case in government. And that is hard to work against, right? That is a deep sociological process that like you appoint the cabinet member from Oxford or whatever.
Yeah. And you're in trouble. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, uh, it is, uh, you know, a lot of economists, a lot of the work coming out of, um, you know, spirit level UK, this is a central challenge of the structure of our society state is this, this increasingly unequal distribution of religion wealth and all that goes with it.
People that are wealthy and in high social class live longer because I say that because the, the attributes of becoming less empathetic and really things seem to be the antithesis of social connectedness and all of these things. You even said earlier that, you know, wealthier people experience less or all of those things are, um, uh, are associated with living longer. Yeah. So I'm going to assume that if you become rich and powerful, then there's also then also a risk to your life expectancy.
Yeah. That's terrific. That's a really striking question. And we don't know.
Um, and I think the reasoning is right on the point, which is how you have less friends, right? Privilege knocks out these, these, these important tendencies that help with inflammation and vagal tone and the like, um, rich people do live longer. Um, that's robust. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And food you eat and so forth. Um, you know, opportunity for health, you know, yoga, all the things that benefit us.
Um, uh, rich people, this is interesting. Um, surprised me rich people are less likely to experience anxiety and depression in the United States. Yeah. Interesting.
Isn't it? We think so lonely and anxiety producing to be at the top. No mental health issues are really concentrated in the poor for obvious reasons, working two jobs, writing the bus, you know, schools are under resource, et cetera. But to your point, and it's interesting, the effect of wealth on happiness is much smaller than people think.
People think, you know, in particular in a country like the United Kingdom or, you know, Great Britain or US, like, um, oh, once I make a lot of money, it'll be bliss and happiness and content. That turns out not to be true. It's a weak relationship. And I think part of the reason is, you know, when you, you gain in resources, you don't have these raw feelings of compassion as often or God, I'm grateful for that gift, right?
That you gave me or this is awesome. This person's courage or how they overcome overcame obstacles. And so that diminishes how wealth could make you happier. So I think it's at play in some of these phenomenon, maybe in others.
You talked about how life expectancy has been declining in the last few years. Why? Yeah. You know, in the United States, and I don't know the data in the UK and it's, it's really related to inequality and opportunity and the poor distributioner of opportunity and resources is there have been these amazing findings related to what's called death by despair and certain populations in the United States.
Very poor white people, large group of the large subculture in the United States are often forgotten in the cultural discourse. They're poor. I grew up around these people. Very poor.
Don't eat good food. Schools are not that good. You know, work is uncertain and they, and they feel disrespected in some sense. And those that subculture in the US has been killing themselves, you know, with opiates and, you know, drinking and drug addiction and suicides and the like, and it's a serious problem.
And it's part of that statistic. And then I think that, you know, if you think about the problems of contemporary culture concentrated in the United States of lack of civility, rage, self-focus, a lot of things that undermine our physical health through the mind, that probably is part of this story too. Too much stress, too much loneliness, not enough music and joy and shared communal experience. We are struggling and that's part of probably that statistic too.
And so that's why, you know, as I mentioned, like the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, a very smart team, looking at these kind of processes and saying, how do we build community? You know, and they've got a big program now. So it is alarming and that statistic is important for thinking about where we are. I looked at the life expectancy on Google a couple of years ago and I can see that it was basically going up every single year.
Yeah. And then there was these two years. I think it might have been last year or the year before. This was, I think, before the pandemic.
There was these two years where it had dropped both in the UK and the US in a row. Yeah. And I was trying to understand why that was. And I heard some social commentators say that there's this epidemic of purposelessness.
Yeah. Yeah. But also suicides and all these other behaviors. Yeah.
Is that is not going to wait in your view to define it like this epidemic of purposelessness? Yeah, it is. You know, thanks for bringing that up and, you know, purpose. A lot of people now call it meaning.
Yeah. Right. What vague term has many different definitions, but it's, you know, I as an individual, how do I connect two things that are larger than self that don't have to do with income or status or directly? But like, what's my point here in my brief life on Earth, you know, what am I going to serve?
What's the big cause that I'm part of? This is really emerging in the science of happiness as a central focus of, you know, you know, we, we know well how to find income. We have good ideas about sensory pleasures. What's good to eat?
How do I drink wines? What's the great coffee and the like? But we've lost sight of meaning, you know, churches and religions used to give that to us, you know, and religious participation is on the decline in the West dramatically so for people your age where they gave us a big picture of life. And now, you know, young people are hungry for it and they're challenging a lot of the, the approaches to happiness that, that don't give meaning, you know, new conceptions of work.
Like, I don't have to stay at one career if it isn't meaningful, new conceptions of romantic relationship. And so I think, you know, I think a lot of different perspectives are saying this is one of the crises of our times is meaning is what will be the big thing you're devoted to. If you want to answer that question, which question? What are you devoted to?
I'm devoted to so many things. I'm devoted to this, this podcast in the show for so many reasons, for very selfish reasons, but they're selfish reasons happen to be selfless, you know, I mean, like doing the podcast, I know helps, helps the people, some of the people, some of the people, some of the things they come up to me in the street, they tell me all the time wherever I go. And the stories they tell me are like, I remember, I was at an old Trafford two days ago, the Manchester United Stadium. And a guy who was the, he said he was the nearest survivor to the Manchester terrorist attacks, approached me in his wheelchair and told me that of the impact this has had on him.
Yeah. And I literally had to walk, like, I took the fact with him walked, like two meters out, out into this balcony. And I remember feeling just overwhelmed with emotion. And it was this wonderful reminder of like, how, why I do this for both the listener, but also for me.
So this is something that I'm increasingly devoted to because of those experiences. And thank you. And he tweeted me about doing that because I needed, I needed the reminders. I feel like you need the reminders sometimes often.
I'm devoted to my relationship with my partner, my dog, my family, yeah, my team. And I'm, I'm devoted to myself, I'm devoted to like my, my health, my, you know, of both my body and my mind. Yeah. I think that's what I'm devoted to.
And I think I'm devoted to the, yeah, probably answer this in the first piece, but the greater good of like the collective. So, you know, yeah. And, you know, it's so interesting, you know, Stephen, one of the reasons that I got really excited about awe as an emotion to study a brief state that, you know, you go out and you see that the moment of generosity that you saw or look at the sky or, you know, think about a big idea that I give space or infinity is it does bring people, it kind of moves people away from transactional considerations. So in one of our studies, look up into the trees, you feel all you're less interested in money, you're less focused on the self and you're really more focused on the greater good.
Like what, how do my actions promote healthier societies? And I think that, you know, a lot of young people are raising questions of meaning right now with climate crises and economic inequality, the state of democracy. Like, what is the point, you know, when, you know, you think about conversations from the last century in the centuries before, you know, reading for all people would use words like the soul and spirit and like, this is what I'm really about in life and we've lost sight of that, you know, and so hopefully with this book, people, however, whatever language they want to use, they're asking questions like, what am I devoted to? What's sacred?