No Stupid Questions

But the quote I remember was something along the lines of, With knowledge comes memory, for knowledge and memory are one and the same.

Stephen thought that the quote came from Helmrich's 1976 book, Wake Up, Wake Up, to do the work of the creator. But he was actually thinking about Israeli historian Saul Friedlander's 1979 Holocaust memoir, When Memory Comes.

There's a similar-ish book by Robert Reesh who is a Stanford political scientist called Just Giving Why Philanthropy is failing democracy and how we can do better.

the way Reesh talks about it is that you convert private assets into public influence. So it subverts in a way the democratic process.

There's a similar-ish book by Robert Reesh who is a Stanford political scientist called Just Giving Why Philanthropy is failing democracy and how we can do better.

I don't regret anything I've ever done in my life any choice that I've made but I'm consumed with regret for the things I didn't do the choices I didn't make the things I didn't say we spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection but regret is the thing we should fear most because failure is an answer rejection is an answer regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to

Trevor Noah, who's the comedian, wrote one of my favorite books, his book Born a Crime.

Bob Putnam who wrote Bowling Alone and whose work I think you know of.

Bob Putnam wrote Bowling Alone about how as you know I guess like that Americans are spending time alone that they used to spend with friends

is that American adults spend time alone that they used to spend with others and he would I think say that what churches do and what pubs do and softball leagues for adults and volunteering for the Salvation Army and a lot of other institutions.

the grass is always greener on the other side seems to have originated in a line from Mrs. Miracle a 1996 book by best-selling romance novelist Debbie Maycomer

It's a memoir and it's like a philosophical treatise in one.

What I've come to realize after reading Man's Search For Meaning, really the meaning of life is not from pleasure and it's not from distracting yourself with entertainment. It's having a purpose and making something of your life where you can say, this is how it connects to other people.

And in fact, there are several theories of happiness and all of them have in common that there are multiple kind of like building blocks of happiness and meaning is a really important building block.

And if you don't have that building block, if you don't feel like your life is part of something greater than yourself and serves some larger purpose, it's very, very hard to be happy.

So let's say you live in an environment that is not under threat of war or extreme poverty and et cetera, but that you are feeling existential dread. How could you potentially interpret that signal in a fruitful way? In a Frankel way.

It's a memoir and it's like a philosophical treatise in one.

What I've come to realize after reading Man's Search For Meaning, really the meaning of life is not from pleasure and it's not from distracting yourself with entertainment. It's having a purpose and making something of your life where you can say, this is how it connects to other people.

And in fact, there are several theories of happiness and all of them have in common that there are multiple kind of like building blocks of happiness and meaning is a really important building block.

And if you don't have that building block, if you don't feel like your life is part of something greater than yourself and serves some larger purpose, it's very, very hard to be happy.

So I believe that Frankel said that you can find meaning in work, as I suggested, do something productive. The second was relationships. Many people find meaning in their close relationships with family, their friends. And then the third is to find meaning in suffering, which is of course so directly relevant to his personal experience in the concentration camps.

What were those famous books called? Oh, Twilight.

I read the Twilight series in a week, Steven.

I remember being in the train station in Philadelphia, which is called 30th Street Station. And I remember it was like being a drug addict. I was frantically hunting through the Hudson News racks and I was like, oh my God, they have to have New Moon.

If they don't have New Moon, I mean, Amazon can't get it here until tomorrow. I need it right now. So, yes, I loved that series. I've read it more than once.

I will of course choose Choice C, the new Twilight which by the way there are no more to make because they finish the whole series just in case you were wondering.

By the way, I don't know if you're a Twilight fan. I assume you are not. Correct. Do you know what Twilight is? A series of books. A series of books and movies starring Rob Pattinson.

But you know what? I don't think he has the chops to be a sanitation collector or citizen number one, so don't get any ideas.

Look, because we're on a twig of a branch of a digression of whatever. But here's Stephen why I think this question is so perennially popular.

He has the ability to read minds in Twilight.

He's not a professor or psychologist, but he's incredibly intuitive.

So maybe I should call him a psychologist.

it's a pretty gosh darn good book.

I know the book Self-Help, which I believe was the origin of the phrase.

Yeah, so I remember coming across this book and reading it.

This began with Thomas Carlisle.

I mean, the sociologist Mickey McGee has written about the idea that the Bible is one of the first and perhaps the most significant self-help book in history.

Think about the Bible. It is the most read book in the history of the universe.

But I think that's true. Among. And whenever you're uncertain, you say among the most. Among, yeah.

Including The Millionaire Next Door.

It's like this is how you actually earn money, save money, spend less, invest more, all that stuff.

I do think about some of the things that I've learned from actual self-help books, including The Millionaire Next Door.

So one of my brothers gave that to me when I was in my mid-late 20s, when I had my first real-ish jobs and started to earn a little bit of money. And that was a huge eye-opener for me.

I have recently been slightly fascinated with the biography of Richard Taylor for a variety of reasons

So his story and how he became an economist and not a psychologist I think two paths diverged and yellow wood and there he the weary traveler stood and looked down one as far as he could To where it bent in the undergrowth and he took the economic path But I think he could have actually has easily become a psychologist

Honestly, that's why he did win the Nobel Prize for developing the discipline of behavioral economics, right?

So anyway, I've been on that rabbit hole and I think This is a good rabbit hole to be in now that we're coming out of a pandemic

But also I think there's another reason why all of this, you know nudging is a good is a bad What's beyond nudging?

I think of Richard Thaler the economist the University of Chicago are famously lazy Nobel laureate.

He loves I shouldn't say he loves to brag about being lazy but when other people talk about him being lazy he does kind of love it.

He does talk about himself as being lazy in the first person.

I would describe it as conserving attention and energy for things that you really care about and everything else you just say no to.

No, but I read about thin slicing in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, Blink.

No, but I read about thin slicing in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, Blink.

In one book, David and Goliath, he talks about how dyslexia can actually make people more successful because in the absence of one ability, like reading, people can develop other abilities like creative problem-solving, acting, listening, rule-bending, etc.

This is like this Steven Pinker hypothesis.

Yes. Yes, Pinker wrote a book about it.

I think he did a really good job summarizing it, but there are a lot of people who've been writing about this.

So, well, I'm familiar with the work Better Angels of Our Nature, which I think preceded Enlightenment Now, right?

He's the co-author of a book called Connected, The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

He's the co-author of a book called Connected, The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

I found one of the most wonderful books ever written about this was Susan Cain's book Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

Which is a massive bestseller, yes?

Yes, it was the number one New York Times bestseller.

It was a while ago.

2012, I believe.

But she talks about, and this is what I loved about it so much. She talks about the rise of the extrovert ideal and how it's permeated our culture in a way that in her words may be dramatically under values, introverts and what introverts have to offer the world.

And she gave an incredible TED talk on this.

She herself is a lawyer. And this is one of the things I love that she said. She said, I became a Wall Street lawyer of all things instead of the writer that I had always longed to be partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too.

I should say that I didn't know Susan when she wrote that book, but I know her now. And she's not kidding when she says she's an introvert.

But the thing that I think my acquaintance with Susan has taught me is that introverts like Susan Cain are not not relationship oriented. It's just that when they relate to other people, they don't necessarily want to do it in quantities and at scales that extroverts are happy with.

So they also want best friends and to share intimacies, but they don't necessarily have this orientation towards what psychologists call sociability, which is just like many people, many conversations going out to the bar after the dinner and then maybe another bar after that.

So Susan Cain is a very relationship oriented person.

But I think that's maybe one of the things that she wanted to correct as a misunderstanding.

Right?

It's not that introverts are misanthropes.

Right.

In fact, she this is one thing that I had not understood before. She talked about the difference between being shy and being an introvert.

And she says that shyness is about fear of social judgment.

But introversion is about how you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation.

And to your point, it's not that introverts don't want social stimulation. It's that they value relationships in a more maybe intimate way rather than this massive group setting.

But it's not the same as being shy.

I wonder again, just going back to what Susan Cain has written on introverts, that if the world is so geared toward extroverts, like in school.

My oldest brother, Peter, said when he read Quiet, Susan Cain's book, these are his exact words. He said, it was the first time I understood myself.

He wrote this book called The Sweet Spot and it really was, I think, a kind of like manifesto on how there is a sweet spot of discomfort.

The reason why he wants to say sweet spot is it's not more is always better. It's not like a little bit of discomfort is good and if you cut off your left arm, it's even better. It's really that there is this sweet spot that we should be looking for in life where there's like some challenge, that there's like some amount of discomfort.

I'm looking here from something that Paul Bloom wrote. You know Paul Bloom obviously.

His most recent book is called The Sweet Spot.

He wrote about a 2016 paper looking at the happiness levels of people with and without children in 22 countries.

So where do you think he falls on the spectrum?

He's very famous for his work on children, on development of moral emotions.

I remember when this book came out because I was talking to a friend about empathy and I got into an argument.

But here's something I thought was really interesting in Paul's book.

He talks about the negative implications that can come from empathy.

Empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality and that far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices.

Empathy he writes is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.

Our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others. It is corrosive in personal relationships, it exhausts the spirit and can diminish the force of kindness and love.

I do know a little bit about the work of the psychologist George Valiant. I'm sure you know much more. I love George. So George wrote about Aging Well. That was the name of the book.

So when I read that list of George Valien's seven factors that do predict positive aging, it makes me think that the question of retirement or aging generally for Pat or you or me is really nothing more than a continuation of everything that we talk about on this show about how every decision we make, every behavior we take up is a trade-off to some degree.

Here's what he says are seven factors that do predict positive aging, not being a smoker or having stopped smoking young, adaptive coping style, mature defenses, absence of alcohol abuse, healthy weight.

And especially the decisions and behaviors you've been making all along. I do know a little bit about the work of the psychologist George Valiant.

But then here we go, stable marriage, as you referred to, exercise, and years of education.

There's a really interesting author of just been reading a book called Permission to Feel.

Oh by Mark bracket yes yes I know mark are you literally reading that book he's going to be so happy I'm going to text him.

I am a dear friend recommended it so I tweeted out a year ago to my 17 followers just kidding but I tweeted out and I just said what is a book that changed your life like I don't want a book I like or here's a fun book that I read what's a book that legit changed your life and dear friend who I admire deeply wrote back and said it was Permission to Feel.

I think Mark would say on behalf of emotion researchers and Mark does run the Yale Center for emotional intelligence I think he would say on the topic of fear that we do have to have the Permission to Feel fear as well as these other negative emotions and since you bought up Mark I'll just say that he has this mood meter it's actually not just his the field of emotion has said that look you can think of any emotion jealousy pride calm bliss board of frustration like any emotion and you can place it somewhere in one of four quadrants so you can think of a horizontal and a vertical axis and the horizontal axis is often just negative on the left positive on the right the vertical axis is a rousal so high rousal emotions to at the bottom like not a lot of energy now that gives you four quadrants and I think where most people especially Americans want to be is the upper right quadrant like high arousal positive right right excitement giddyness but where we don't want to be is high arousal negative like fear and we might not even want to be in the low arousal negative right that's like boredom and then the fourth quadrant is low arousal positive and that's things like calm and anyway the reason I asked permission from Mark for use of the mood meter is that I wanted to start every single class with these four quadrants so it's just you know the first slide that is in my PowerPoint and what the students do is they put themselves somewhere on the mood meter and it's kind of auto populated so you can kind of see where their little dot shows up on the screen in real time and as I say to the students every time as you can see all four of these quadrants are populated maybe not equally I know where you want to be you want to be in the top right so do I I want to be there all the time but that's not life so I think this Permission to Feel fear and to reckon with its function in our life and even to like embrace the fact that like really high achievers super achievers the most gritty people they are sometimes driven by fear of failure for me it was like surprising but also very enriching I was like oh this is a much more complex view of emotion and even achievement.

Also there are books like Permission to Feel by Mark Brackett from Yale. And the whole point is read this book, you can become a little more emotionally intelligent by the end.