Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itg00I2q8lk
saw a video that you made it punched me in the face the reason why my TED Talks went viral was because Dr Robert waldinger a Harvard psychiatrist and director of the longest study ever done on what makes humans live happy or unhappy lives is Ted Talk is one of the most viewed of all time for 85 years we've tracked the lives of 724 families through their entire adult lives looking at mental health physical health to see what really keeps people happy and healthy some of the participants donated their brains they have we know so much about them in life and now we get to examine their brains most surprising finding in the study was that it's our relationships that keep us healthier and happier there is research that shows that actually people who are married men live 12 years longer and women live seven years longer that said it's it's not the marriage license it's about starting in the 1950s we stopped investing in other people being lonely is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day isolation can break down your coronary arteries your joints the brain declines sooner my mission now is going to be to bring this science that we've worked so hard to develop and bring it to people in ways that they can use looking at that research what are the factors that made those relationships most successful well most surprising finding in the study was that would you like to go for dinner with me and my guests here on the diver CEO we are holding dinner parties all around the world over the coming months and our subscribers on this YouTube channel are invited we're inviting 20 subscribers to every dinner so if you'd like to come for dinner with me and my guests here on the Diary of SEO I have a favor to ask you all you've got to do is hit the Subscribe button and I hope to see you at dinner somewhere around the world very soon [Music] Robert who are you and what is the mission that you're on I am a psychiatrist I'm uh a married father of two grown sons I'm a Zen priest and I'm a researcher and the mission that I'm on is to relieve the suffering that's optional in the world that's the vow I
took as a Zen priest what is that optional suffering you're referring to well there's some suffering that's not optional right there's pain there's there's so many things that we can't control that hurt that that we suffer from but then there's optional suffering there are all the the stories we tell ourselves about things that turn out not to be true things that I worry about that turn out to amount to nothing um Mark Twain had a wonderful quote that I love he said some of the worst things in my life never happened and and that's the optional suffering that we're talking about the all the ways that we imagine things that make us suffer a great deal so let's go down those two paths psychiatrist and Zen priest what does it mean to be a psychiatrist what does that mean practically in terms of your work it means working with people who are struggling with mental illnesses with conditions for which we have help and some of the help is medication some of the help it's talk therapy um I became fascinated by how the mind works that was what was most exciting for me when I was a medical student and I realized that it was going to keep me interested most of my career and it has because everybody's so different I mean I realized that if you treat one case of high blood pressure you sort of know what the next one's going to look like but when you talk to a new person it's never the same as the person you talked to last week so being a psychiatrist for me is getting to take deep Dives into people's life experience there's a there's a through line here to the third pillar of um what I find so absolutely fascinating about you and it's also the thing that introduced me to you many years ago I was a young man who was incredibly I would say I would say addicted to some degree to work I was pursuing money at all costs um I was that sort of typical Millennial I think you've referenced in the book that had his priorities and all the wrong orders particularly at that point
I'd sacrificed so many things the stuff that you write about that makes life so meaningful presence I you know my happiness was off somewhere in the future behind some future imaginary goal and I was sat in a room in Manchester I think I was in a region of I'm gonna say somewhere between 18 and 20 years old and then I saw a video that you had made a TED Talk you had done it's one of the most watched TED talks of all time and it was about it was the longest study on happiness ever done it was the Harvard study of adult development I think it's called and it it punched me in the face and it punched me in the face because I've never forgotten it and I've talked about it frequently you know every quarter or every couple of months since then but it punched me in the face because it made me confront something that I think I knew at some deeper level I was maybe getting wrong and that was the nature of what really makes us happy as humans yeah um can you tell me about the Harvard study of adult development what what the aim of it was and how you in particular got involved with it sure um the study is the longest study of human life that's ever been done as far as we know of the same people going through their entire adult lives that's what's so rare about it most research is snapshots in the moment or over two weeks or a month so this is over 85 years 724 families it was started in 1938 it started as two studies that actually didn't know about each other one was a study of Harvard college students 19 year olds young men who were thought by the Deans to be fine upstanding specimens and this was going to be a study of normal development from adolescents into young adulthood I mean now we smile because you know if you want to study normal development you study all white males from Harvard you don't do that it's so Politically Incorrect but at that time that's what they were doing and the other study was started at Harvard Law School by a law professor and his wife a social worker who were interested in juvenile delinquency and they were particularly
interested in how some children from really troubled backgrounds managed to stay out of trouble and stay on good developmental paths like how how could that be what were the conditions that allowed these young people to thrive so they chose boys from the city of Boston in 1938 whose families were known to on average five social service agencies for domestic violence parental mental illness physical illness and they studied all those boys again looking at what makes people thrive and so both of these studies were studies of good normal development instead of studies of what goes wrong most of what we study is what goes wrong so that we can help people so these were Radical in that sense and then nobody expected the studies to last more than five or the most ten years and the founders of the study would never have dreamed that you and I would be talking about this study today and the fact that we're still collecting data even as we speak from the children of all of these original 724 families wow you're still collecting data from the children of the participants yes and are the founders of the studies still alive oh no they're long gone um I'm the fourth director um wow and the third director was my teacher when I was a medical student he lectured to my class about this study of men who were then in their 50s and I thought this is amazing and then about 15 years later he took me out to lunch one day and said how would you like to inherit this study and I was flabbergasted but very excited to be able to do it what was the study aiming to to answer it was looking at the big domains of life it was looking at mental health physical health work life and relationships and what the study has done is looked at all of those same domains over and over again year after year for 85 years what's exciting for me about it is that we've changed our methods so initially there were interviews and medical exams and people went to their homes and talked to their parents well now we draw blood for DNA I mean DNA wasn't even imagined in 1938 we put people into MRI scanners and watch their brains light up
when we show them different kinds of images and you know that was that would have been science fiction to scientists in 1938 so what I love is we're studying the same subjects but we're studying them using very different methods over time I read that some of the participants of the study that have passed away have donated their brains they have we have about 30 brains sitting on shelves in a laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and and what's rare about them most brains are collected because there was a big problem in life for example Dementia or a brain tumor or something these are normal brains and so what's rare is that these are brains about which we know what their life was like when they were 20 years old when they were 30 years old we know so much about them in life and now we get to examine their brains so this study you became the director of it um let's start top level then how did this study sets out to answer some of the big questions in life the most important things about what makes us happy what keeps us healthy socially healthy physically healthy you've got the longest study of of humans that anyone thinks has ever been done you've been studying them for decades upon decades looking at that research and being a first party to all of that that information how has it changed you it's very much made me take care of my own relationships so because the biggest most surprising finding in the study was that it's our relationships that keep us healthier and happier you know I'm a Harvard Professor I could work non-stop until I drop dead I mean that's just the way Academia works and what I realized was particularly once my kids weren't there pulling me away to go take them somewhere or do something with them that I could just work all the time and so what I've started doing is to be much more intentional about calling my friends about saying let's go for a walk let's go out to dinner let's make sure we get together I never would have done that before particularly as a man I think women are much better my wife is much better at calling friends on the phone at making sure they get together I had
to teach myself to do that I had to make myself do it I had to take my own medicine if you will based on what I was studying in my work life what do we what do we get wrong about the the subject matter of Happiness like if you were to ask those participants what they thought would cause happiness in their lives or you were to ask I don't know a millennial what are the answers that we say and how wrong are we and are we good at knowing someone asked me this yesterday at an event they put their hand up and they said we're talking about remote working and this whole change disruption that's happened in the workplace and they put the hand up I think they're a CEO and they said do my employees actually know what they want and it was a really curious question I ended up answering and this is maybe a little bit controversial but I ended up answering that most of us don't know what we want in most facets of our life yes and we're bad at knowing what's going to make us happy I'll give you an example and it's in the book um there was a study in the city of Chicago where they were studying commuters people who were about to get on the train and take the train to work like they did every day and so they they took a random sample of people in one group and they were assigned to do what they always do on the train it could have been listening to music or reading the news on their phone whatever they did the other group randomly was assigned to talk to a stranger on the train which none of them had ever done and they asked them beforehand how much do you think you're going to like this assignment we've just given you and the people who were assigned to talk to strangers said I'm not going to enjoy this afterwards after they completed their assignments the people who had talked to strangers were much happier than the people who had done their usual staying on their phones or reading the newspaper so it's an example of how we're not so good at knowing what's going to make us happy and particularly when it comes to connecting with each other that there's something about these
kind of small conversations that we can have with strangers or even with someone we barely know that turn out to be very energizing more of the time than not but we're always afraid we're afraid someone's going to think we're strange if we strike up a conversation or we're gonna get stuck talking to someone who who we don't like but what we find is that that the culture gives us these messages about what will make us happy that turn out not to be the truth um a lot of the messages are about consumerism you know we're told if you buy this car you're going to be happy if you you know if you serve this brand of pasta you're going to have Blissful family dinners you know and even though we sort of know that this isn't the truth the the advertisements really do inculcate this sense that if we consume the right things that will will be happy and what we know from from our research and many other studies is that's just not so um and that these these connections with each other actually do make us happy I mean for example you and I are talking now and your questions and your interest in my work is actually energizing for me it's actually making me happier than when I walked in the door today why I think there's something about wanting to be seen like you're actually saying I want to know you I want to know what's going on with you and and that there's something about that that that makes us feel like we belong that makes us feel like we're connected and so what we notice and and what we talk about in the book is this idea that uh that when when we actually are curious about another person it's giving them a gift it's giving them a way to be seen a way to tell about themselves that we all really yearn for at some level or almost all of us do and so it's something we can give to each other every day when you compare and contrast the two lists list a which says what we think we want and B what your study on happiness has shown that actually leads to happiness however we Define it what are the things just in order that we're most wrong about probably the three big ones we're most wrong about fame fame and wealth yeah
and badges of achievement if I win this prize right uh if I if I get to be CEO that kind of thing um and because the culture tells us all day long that these will make us happy and because they're measurable I think one of the things you know if you think about Fame I mean it's likes it's how many downloads of a podcast it's how many people read a book right and it's measurable it's quantifiable wealth of course is quantifiable and achievement but what we know is that those things don't do it now meaningful work can make us happy can be fulfilling that's different from getting the prize getting the badge foreign by contrast you can't measure relationships they're they're kind of messy and you know complicated and and and they're often full of ups and downs and conflicts um and so so you you can't quantify it you can't hold on to it it's always changing and so by contrast these these relationships that actually turn out to make us happy are not you can't get your hands around them as easily as you can you can get your hands around these these these things you can kind of grab for these shiny brass objects you can go for so why do we why do we you know outside of the media influence why are we do we have or sort of proclivity to strive for things like Fame is there like an evolutionary basis for wanting to be famous or rich or High status I guess can I get into zen a little bit of course you can please okay there's a writer named David Loy Loy who writes about this and and I think he's really on to something that in Zen philosophy that if you really look for the self if you sit down on a meditation cushion and you look and I look for Bob like who's Bob I can't find him I can't find a me anywhere I can find a swirl of thoughts and ever-changing Sensations coming from my body and but I can't really find a fixed thing that I call Bob and that if at that what David Lloyd argues is that all of us at some level know this that there isn't really a fixed self that's going to go on through time and it's going to last after I die and that it's at some level scary
to know that right and what David Lloyd argues is that many of us are grabbing for things like wealth and fame and dominating the Earth and dominating each other in this kind of wish to make ourselves feel more real more permanent more fixed like we really exist and I think he's right I think it's something think about all the ways you know I think about all the ways I've been preoccupied with you know am I going to be remembered when I'm gone well I'm probably not you know 50 years from now nobody's gonna really remember who I was and if I really let that sink into my bones that's scary and so I'd I'd rather write a book with my name on it I'd rather you know endow a building that'll keep my name on it for a while until the building falls down do something that makes me last longer that makes the the Bob self feel more real so that's the that's the Deep Zen dive that I didn't mean to take you on but but that's I think for me the most helpful explanation at why we all myself included get preoccupied why these buy these Badges of achievement if you will with that comes a ton of suffering right the desire to be permanent yeah and significant and to compare ourselves because with that comes comparison and we know that when we compare ourselves to others more frequently during the day we are less happy even if it's a positive comparison I.E we're doing a downward comparison even it's a even if it's a positive comparison because there's always the threat of falling short you're deciding to play a game which is yeah it's like a psychological decision to play a game which sometimes you'll win but sometimes you'll you'll lose exactly it's better not to play the game of comparison altogether well what I find is when I put the comparisons aside which I can sometimes I'm so much more at peace um you know when someone says to me do you know that so and so got this many views or so and so you know had this many likes on social media I can feel a little part of myself get anxious or close off or or start making that that comparison that that almost physically hurts a little bit and when I let that go if I can just sit and and look at a tree for five minutes I
get a sense of equanimity that I can't get when I'm doing these small comparisons the brain engages in these comparisons um quite naturally you know it's trying to make snap decisions so it doesn't have to expend too much energy about the value of things and what things mean so it kind of Compares One thing to another I've read about the studies in restaurants where they add an expensive stake to the menu and now because there's a really expensive one people will assume that the low price stake is not good and they'll avoid that one they'll go for the middle one yeah their decision changes based on the the frame in which they see the options or the choice and it's the same with humans we're trying to figure out the value of ourselves by snap comparisons when you hear about these things that the brain is doing these like comparisons you go why does the brain hate me exactly exactly the other thing is when I look at the animal world I think you know think about all the ways that we get preoccupied with do I look right or you know do am I dressed right or have I achieved enough right and then I look at birds and I think I bet they're not showing up worrying about those things and what a what a relief what a what a wonderful thing not to be worried about those things and I do find that this practice of mine can get me there some of the time not all the time but some of the time I used to you know I used to wonder on that point of like why why does the brain hate me I know the brain doesn't hate you like I used to wonder with weight loss for example until I sat here with dietary experts why when I have some sugar I then get sugar Cravings yeah and they explain to me that your brain is actually on your side it's trying to help you to survive once upon a time when we didn't have fridges and supermarkets and ubereats and whatever else coming across some sugar was a would Advance your chances of survival it would give you energy Etc and even with the comparison it's a tool that helps me make quick decisions my brain doesn't hate me but the world we live in was not designed for my brain exactly I wasn't supposed to be able to look at a billion
people on a glass screen and so the suffering is really a byproduct of a changing world not a not a brain that hates you and I see that throughout your work is the world has changed to make us unhappy in several ways yes what do we do about that we can't leave the world no we can't leave the world and and the world is always going to keep changing and so for example if we sometimes we can we can demonize screens and we can demonize the digital Revolution that's not going away you know and so really it's about being as adaptable as we can but I think for me the question is how can we be as intentional as possible that that our brains evolved as you're saying they don't hate us but they evolved in certain ways and so they need correctives similarly the digital world has evolved in certain ways and so the digital software is designed digital media is designed to grab our attention and hold it to exploit that right to exploit that brain so then how can we be intentional enough to turn away from that software when we need to right when we need to turn toward each other it'll need to have real time contact with each other that's so nourishing emotionally and psychologically how can we keep from going down the rabbit hole that social media has evolved to keep us hooked on not because social media is evil just because that's how they've developed in order for people to make a living it is quite exhausting I think sometimes I think because you're right industry and um business and even the High Street if you walk down the High Street you know outside everything is designed to exploit the brain you like the shops are selling sugar and carbs and or you can go to the gambling shop and that will exploit your brain and you know it's dopamine response to flashing lights and pulling that lever on the um it's difficult it is difficult and and that's where suffering comes in you know one of the things I see as a psychiatrist but we all see this is that people often want to change their state they just want to change how they feel there's this great cartoon I like this
is there's this meditator sitting on a cushion and there's a thought bubble over his head and what he's thinking is I really do want to be in the moment just not this moment and if you think about all the ways in which we want to change our state by gambling the excitement of gambling or the the sugar high we get when I when I get some delicious ice cream or you know that it's a way of changing that kind of sense of malaise that comes over us moment to moment and I think one of the things we can do instead is simply be present for that malaise and then watch it pass which it does eventually right so basically by and large we're trying to get rid of some of the Less Pleasant experiences of our momentary life but they'll pass all by themselves if you just pay attention does that require this thing called discipline yeah it does if we come to watching and not grabbing on for the next thing to make my feeling go away I was um I was reading through the chapter in your book about time and attention and death um cheery right yeah it's one of the subject matters that I'm really compelled by and I I've actually been writing a lot in my upcoming book about the topic of death and the order in which I wrote was um I started by talking about time and and death because I think they're sort of intrinsically linked to understand the importance of time you need to understand that you are gonna die which I don't think many humans really understand and then I was going to deliver some time management techniques in my book because I thought right I've I've set up the conversation that time is important so now give the reader some time management techniques I've researched all the time management techniques I looked at the ones that I use and I realized there were thousands of them now there's thousands of them for the same reasons that there are thousands of fad diets because none of them work unless you have this thing called discipline yeah and this is what you know as a Zen priest you know it's all well and good knowing the techniques about meditation but if you can't have the restraint to not get on ubereats at 1am in the morning and order that KitKat
right because you don't have the discipline it doesn't matter I can know it but doing it is another thing right my question is about discipline how how does one even if you're looking at your own life where does one find that discipline you know often it's it's not the Nancy Reagan strategy of just saying no right you know if you think about that that discipline can't just involve saying no it has to involve having something to turn toward and I think that's where we may be able to help each other find things so you know if you if you don't want to order the KitKat on ubereats right what could you do instead that that might help that might feel okay um and I think it's that you know if if we think about Alcoholics Anonymous the one of the reasons why it works is it doesn't just say don't drink it gives you a whole social network of people to support you and it gives you activities to do and people to be with every hour of the day right and so what it does is it gives you something to put in place of that drink that you want to reach for and even so it's really hard and so I think what what we need to say is let's put in place some things to help us manage so that we don't reach for the candy when we're trying to lose weight right but when our body is just saying I gotta have it and one of those things which you write about and you've seen I've seen in the study is as you said earlier is connections and relationships yeah how important can you quantify to me the importance of having a romantic partner in your life as it relates to health outcomes well unfortunately I can and because I I just want to say that you do not need a romantic partner to get these benefits because some people have said to me well if I don't have a romantic partner should I just walk in from the bus now and end it all right no no it's fine it's fine not to have a romantic partner but there is research that shows that actually people who are married uh men live 12 years longer on average if they're married and women live seven years longer on average if they're married this is some studies in the United States um that said it's it's not the marriage license it's about an intimate
connection and you can have an intimate connection with somebody who's not a romantic partner could be a good friend could be a sibling could be a an adult child uh so many things you know so many ways to have this what we think is that everybody needs at least one person to whom they feel securely attached um our original participants in our research at one point we asked them who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared list everybody and most people could list several people that they could call but some people couldn't list anyone and some of those people who couldn't list anyone had romantic partners yeah so you can be lonely in a romantic partnership right you can be isolated uh in an intimate relationship so all that is to say that it is really the quality of a secure connection that we're talking about that we think everybody needs at least one of in the world to get these kinds of benefits what is the physiological or spiritual or Zen reason why um having a intimate relationship with at least one individual is causing us to live longer yeah so there are a lot of theories about this but the best theory for which there's some good data has to do with stress the idea that good relationships actually help us manage stress and help us manage negative emotion so you know stress happens all day long right and like if I if I leave here in something upsetting happens my body will literally change my blood pressure will go up my heart rate will increase I might start to sweat right that's normal the body goes into something called fight or flight mode we're supposed to be able to do that because we want to prepare to meet a challenge you know evolutionarily it's a good thing but then when the stressor is removed the body's meant to return to equilibrium you know so if I have something upsetting happen and I go home and complain to my wife I can literally feel my body calm down you know if you have a friend you can call and you can talk about what was upsetting you can literally feel that return to equilibrium what we know happens is that people who are lonely people who are
socially isolated don't have that and what we have been able to demonstrate is that they stay in a kind of fight or flight mode so higher levels of stress hormones circulating like cortisol higher levels of inflammation and and that's how um we think we're pretty sure that isolation loneliness or toxic relationships through stress can break down your coronary arteries can break down your joints can make it more likely that you'll get type 2 diabetes so that's how the same mechanism can affect lots of different body systems and stress is really intrinsically linked to poor nutrition right so if I'm stressed I'm more likely to reach for the KitKat exactly exactly you're more you're more likely to go to the casino or to place that bet or buy short-term decisions and not delay gratification exactly maybe explains why men live less long as well because they are less likely to open up according to the data and be vulnerable and and therefore that stress is not um reduced by the insulating effect of having supportive relationships that's right they are less likely to open up in fact when they've done studies of how couples argue with each other they videotape them what they see is that men are more likely to withdraw during an argument and women are more likely to pursue to say look I want to talk about this and the man is likely to kind of clam up and literally sink back in his chair and and so we feel attacked yeah exactly exactly exactly yeah yeah yeah and so so it literally involves a process of learning sometimes for many men to to learn to to say it's okay and one of the things we know is that men often have an aversive physiologic reaction during arguments that make them want to withdraw um so that so that the same kind of fight-or-flight mode for men make them want to may make them wanna hang back and for women may make them want to engage and that that's a little bit trickier the science is a little trickier in that regard but there's some idea that that's part of what's what goes on for us gender wise I understand how men
might end up in that situation from maybe watching movies or I don't know stereotypes that are portrayed in media of what a man is right but are we also inheriting that from our parents oh yes absolutely we get socialized all the time um in fact there's some research on adolescent boys and the research suggests that younger boys have close friends and they they emotionally confide in each other and then as those teenage boys get older they stop doing that and there's some idea that it's not considered manly to do that so the boys stop doing it the girls continue to do it because they've been socialized that it's okay that it's feminine it's perfectly reasonable for a girl and a woman to confide in other people whereas manly men don't do that and that's that's one of the stereotypes of the in the ways that we're raised that hopefully is subsiding that there are more ways to feel like a real boy a real man that include emotional engagement with other people what is the cost then on the other side of the coin what is the cost of um of being lonely I was reading some studies I think maybe similar to the ones you described about the gradual decay of connection that's going on in the world so we're getting lonelier and lonelier as a as a species yes um have you seen that in your studies over the years you've seen as you ask these participants how many people they've got to turn to in that moment of Crisis are you seeing a decay in the amount of people they think they can call it to him in the morning we haven't seen that decay but there are many other studies that have and in fact there's a sociologist named Robert Putnam in at Harvard actually who wrote a book in the 80s called bowling alone in which he studied what he called our investment in Social Capital like how much do we join clubs go to churches and mosques and synagogues how much do we invite people over to our homes and what he found was that starting in the 1950s all of those indices dropped off we stopped investing in other people and it seemed to coincide in the U.S with the introduction of Television into the
American home and then he went back in the early 2000s and did the same survey again all of those parameters had dropped off further so what he's shown is that we're becoming much more isolated certainly in the United States but also in the UK and in the developed World particularly and it seems to have a lot to do with social Mobility it seems to have a lot to do with digital media and forms of entertainment many different causes but the the net effect is that we are becoming more isolated and to your question there's an investigator Julianne Holt lundstad who who studies loneliness and what she has estimated is that being lonely is as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or of being obese and so what we know is that there are these very real concrete effects of social isolation and loneliness that that damage us as we go through adult life I've read that there was a I read a new book that there was a link without simers as well yes there is that the brain declines sooner and the onset of Alzheimer's is earlier in people who are lonely you're twice is more likely to develop I believe that that was in the um marmalade trust study said you're twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's if you're lonely it could be and we think that has to do with stimulation of brain Pathways so the thing that that makes relationships a little scary and risky because people are unpredictable it's also the thing that stimulates our brains so when I came in here you and I had never met so I was going to talk to you I didn't know what you'd be like right I didn't know what the questions would be like but that's good for my brain because you've got my brain running on a lot of different circuits and that's stimulating my brain circuits that's a good thing you I think are preventing me from becoming demented earlier so thank you very much you're welcome yeah are we are we good at understanding you know I think I think back to that kid me sat in that room in Manchester just absolutely focused on building a business and becoming a CEO and all of those things the monetary upside I was particularly bad at if you'd asked
me what the value of a relationship was I would have I would have said I probably would have just pointed to the costs I would have said it's gonna have time and arguments and yeah in the research that you've done are people good at understanding the value of a relationship no they're not they're not um partly because relationships are the background I mean if you think about it we've we've never known the world without relationships most of us most of us do not live in solitude and so we've all there have always been people around which means we tend to take relationships for granted and it's only when you pull back and you look at you know thousands of lives that we saw these powerful effects the differences between people who had good relationships and people who didn't most of us are you know it's like that old joke about the the two fish swimming along and the older fish swims by and says hey boys how's the water and one fish turns to the other and says what's water and you know we're in this swirl of relationships all the time that we take for granted and so it's it's particularly difficult for us to understand that this is something that we need to pay attention to nurture cultivate throughout life what if I'm in a toxic relationship what if my partner is an [ __ ] is it do I stay because of these physiological benefits insulation from stress or whatever it might be um or do I dump them and go out alone in life well as with so many things one size does not fit all there's a huge amount of discernment involved so if you think about it one question for a toxic relationship is how much is at stake how much do I have invested so let's say you're married and you have children together then the idea is to work really hard to see is there a way to salvage this relationship if only for the children but also because the partnership could have benefits and so what we what we would say is if there's a lot invested then we work harder to see is there any way we can find ways to work out our differences sometimes there isn't and those
relationships need to be ended but but I want to point out that most relationships of any consequence have conflict and so the real issue is not are there conflicts the real issue is can we work out conflicts regularly in ways that make us both feel okay about ourselves and about each other if we can't do that then those relationships often need to be stepped away from when you looked at all of the relationships that are beneficial um and are successful as a relationship what are the factors that made those relationships most successful if there are any one of the things people talk about a lot is being able to be themselves to be authentic meaning not to have to hide important aspects of who I am in a relationship and it's not that we're bearing our souls all the time but but do I have to pretend that I'm someone I'm not that's exhausting and depleting and so the idea is to be able to be yourself in a relationship of any consequence um I think the other thing we find in good relationships is that people allow each other to change over time I mean we're all constantly changing we're all moving targets and so if we can allow each other to change and maybe even celebrate that change the relationship is stable and is likely to last I mean I think about you know my wife and I are about to celebrate our 37th anniversary we are so different than we were 37 years ago I mean I I I had never heard of Zen 37 years ago and now it's a big part of my life my wife had to figure out what do I do with this guy now who practices Zen my wife has has developed in ways I never expected what we've had to do is learn about each other as we change and and and accept those changes and hopefully support each other in changing which I think mostly my wife and I have been able to do but it's part of its luck I mean it's not like we're such wonderful people we've just been lucky to be able to support each other in those changes but part of it is intentional and and so I think that the best relationships involve being able to support each other in exploring new things taking risks um one of the things that inhibits all of that is we have these expectations on our partner we have an expectation of
the role they'll play of who they'll be Etc how does that impact our chances of being successful in relationships yes I mean I don't know if you remember this old Billy Joel song I love you just the way you are in which the lyrics are saying don't ever change don't ever I just want you to be exactly the way you are right now and that's completely unrealistic um and so we do we have these expectations of who our partner is going to be parents have this of children I mean sometimes sometimes I'll catch myself telling one of my sons who's in his 30s are you sure you don't want to wear a warmer coat when you're going outside and he looks at me and says Dad you know I mean he lives on his own he's lived on his own for years it's like come on but I have to get out of this mode of being his parent in this in this helicoptering way right so we're always having to readjust our expectations of each other in order to make relationships work if I was your one of your kids and I said Dad give me one piece of relationship advice for how you and Mum have managed to stay together for those 37 odd years but just I just want one piece of advice dad catch each other being good instead of catching each other at doing the things that annoy you right right I'm really good at noticing when my wife does things that annoy me and I I'm not good at remembering oh my gosh you know she just made this great meal uh she just made sure that I was on time to this meeting she just reminded me to take my medication you know it's like all these things that oh my God if she weren't here I would be a mess right and so what I would say is it's it's really practicing gratitude gratitude practice is really just flipping flipping our negatively biased Minds on their heads and and essentially uh finding what's good what's going right with the partnership and when we do that there's there's usually so much to find that's that's not wrong that's right about the relationship and if you do that you you find that I find that I'm happier in the relationship even though there are plenty of times when it's boring it's predictable it's annoying as any long relationship is
there's so much to be grateful for the the other thing you talk about a lot in this book is about the use of our time and how we spend our Time chapter five kind of goes back to what we're talking about a second ago about time management and discipline and all these things um one of the alarming things I got from chapter five was just how much time we waste unknowingly and I think maybe this is something that's quite pertinent your Zen practice but I think you said that we spend half of our time in waking moments thinking about something other than the thing we're currently doing yes yes and and that people that do that are more unhappy so people that spend more time ruminating about um or with a Wandering mind as you called it are the most unhappy yes there's actually good research on this from a different research group where they they would actually ping people throughout the day at random times and say are you thinking about what's right in front of you now are you thinking about what's current and that's where they get this uh data that says most people will respond no I was thinking about something else the the future of the past whatever and and then they would also ask at the same time how's your mood right now how happy are you and they found that the people who spent more time thinking about what's right in front of them Were Far and Away happier so a Wandering mind is a less happy mind in that chapter you talk about multitasking as well we all think I mean I'm you know this is one of the problems I had when I was writing my book as I like to play music yeah with that has lyrics in it so it'll be I don't know like r b music or something yeah and I want to write at the same time and I eventually come to learn that my brain is incapable of doing two things so it's not actually listening to the music um I can't listen to music and write at the same time in chapter five you talk about this there's research that shows our brain is not capable of doing one more more than one thing at a time that's right you're you're really
switching back and forth really quickly and it's super inefficient it's incredible it's an incredible waste of energy because your brain takes a moment to get back into gear in the thing you've switched back to and then it's and then it's switching off again to something else and so what we this idea of multitasking oh I can do so many things at once is a Fool's errand basically Flow State kind of link to that yeah is is it a thing it is a thing is it a good thing yeah it is a good thing prove it well I don't know if I can prove it but uh well actually there's been some good work by uh chicks at me high he's a that's his that's his name and I can't spell it it's this long name he's since passed away but a very brilliant psychologist who did research on Flow States you know so I'm a meditator and many people say to me when they find that out say oh I should meditate and I often say no you shouldn't you should see if meditation feels good to you and if it does do it if it doesn't feel good find another state a flow state if you will find another Pastime that for you makes the time just fly by so my wife is not a meditator she has no interest in it but she loves music and she's a an avid pianist she can sit for an hour and just be transported playing the piano that's her Flow State for some people it's skiing down a ski slope for some people it's working in a garden for some people it's being on a soccer pitch it's you know um so what I My Hope for people is that they find a flow state or maybe more than one and that they allow themselves those experiences of flow from time to time where they're just in so in the activity that time passes by effortlessly without noticing that's so nice to hear I'm refreshing for people who have struggled with meditation which I imagine is most people lots of people and you know even on this podcast when I have guests on they often talk about the um positive upside of doing meditative practice there must be so many people that listen and go I've tried it I can't I can't it doesn't work for me but to know that like your hobby that thing that just as you said that makes the time fly by is is an equally effective potentially form of meditation
exactly making music or painting or whatever it might be running really nourishing I mean it and it gives us energy it gives us a sense of peace and Equanimity to be in that kind of state quick one as you guys know we're lucky enough to have blue jeans by Verizon as a sponsor of this podcast and for anyone that doesn't know blue jeans is an online video conferencing tool that allows you to have slick fast high quality online meetings without all the glitches you might normally find with online meeting tools and they have a new feature called Blue Jeans basic blue jeans basic is essentially a free version of their top quality video conferencing tool that means you get an immersive video experience that is super high quality super easy and super basically zero fast apart from all the incredible features like zero time limits on meeting calls it also comes with High Fidelity audio and video including Dolby voice which is incredibly useful they also have Enterprise grade security so you can collaborate with confidence it's so smooth that it's quite literally changing the game for myself and my team without compromising on quality to find out more all you have to do is search bluejeans.com and let me know how you get on over the last couple of how long maybe four months I've been changing my diet shall I say many of you have really been paying attention to this podcast will know why I've sat here with some incredible Health experts and one of the things that's really come through for me which has caused a big change in my life is the need for us to have these superfoods these green Foods these vegetables and then a company I love so much and a company I'm an investor in and then a company that sponsors this podcast and I'm on the board of recently announced a new product which absolutely spoke to exactly where I was in my life and that is huel and they announced Daily Greens daily greens is a product that contains 91 superfoods nutrients and plant-based ingredients which helps me meet that dietary requirement with the convenience that hewell always offers unfortunately it's only currently available in the US but I hope pray that it'll be with you guys in the UK too so if you're in the US check it out it's an incredible product I've been
having it here in La for the last couple of weeks and it's a game changer on the subject of work um what did you notice in the study about the type of work that leads to the most happiness I've really tried to distill I think over the last couple of years what are the like fundamentals of what we need in work to be happy and obviously because of this like real tectonic shift in how we work in digital screens and remote working things are changing and I sometimes wonder if we're kind of sleepwalking into a a world of work that we haven't properly considered just because we can do something doesn't mean necessarily we should yes again that that path of least resistance you know that um so we do know some things about this from um some good research coming out of business schools they do a lot of this kind of research on on the conditions of work but also the Gallup organization they did a survey of 15 million workers all over the world all ages all cultures all ranks in the in a workplace and their main question was do you have a best friend at work only 30 percent of those 15 million workers had said yes I have a best friend what that meant was I have someone who I talked to about my life about my personal life you know it might be my my child is struggling with math or it could be anything you know but just to talk about what's going on in your life those 30 percent then they they did all kinds of Assessments of those people and talked to their bosses they were better workers they earned more money they were better with customers they were less likely to leave their jobs for a better offer because they had people they wanted to show up for every day and so what many uh leaders in the workplace think of as a distraction socializing at work turns out to be a hugely powerful factor for increasing productivity and increasing wellness and happiness at work those 70 of people who said no I don't have a friend at work 11 out of 12 of those people said I'm pretty much disengaged from my job
11 out of 12. 11 out of 12. so maybe all of them nearly all of them whereas the 30 were much more engaged in their jobs so if you have friends you're also more engaged in your work there's something about those connections that is energizing and livening and it spills over into the work itself it's so interesting I sat with our head of culture at um my marketing company flight story and we were talking about the kpis that a head of culture and people should be tracking in the modern era um and one of the kpis which I had in my last company and we've introduced into flight story is the amount of communities that exist outside of the office so how many football team you know do we have a women's football team do we have a reading club yes do we have a an are they active communities because it's really clear to me that like in terms of retention satisfaction engagement in the work if people are bound by this community in various different ways everything is going to be better exactly and you people don't necessarily think about that in the modern world of work that you should be as an employer doing everything you can to create a got a new flight story football club or a Diary of a CEO a reading club or running club it will have huge positive impact for of course health and all of those things physical health and all those things but psychological Health and Social Fitness as you call it in the book will go up um as employees we don't think that's our business right right we don't think it's our business and it turns out to be so much our business the other thing is we most of us spend more waking hours at work than we spend doing anything else in our lives for most of our adult life I mean so if you're not going to get the benefits of good connections with other people at work you are missing a huge part of your life experience but it didn't used to need to be our business so much either if you know what I mean like we used to have other things within Society like even pubs have started shutting down because the economics don't work out in churches and these sort of social
institutions outside of the office and then you you look at what's going on with this kind of remote working situation post pandemic where the the in social institution of the office or working around people is also in Decline what's your view then on remote working and what would your message be to a CEO or leader or employer that's has this maybe potential social pressure coming from wherever to say everyone should be able to work from home at all times that's a really good thing versus the research you've done that shows the importance of in real life human connection yeah yeah well we don't know enough yet about the difference between remote work and in-person work we don't know for example what gets filtered out on Zoom you know what what aspects of emotional communication get filtered out we don't know um and so we're going to learn more in the next few years because people are studying this but then the question is what do we do and and what do we know I think we well what we know right and what do we know well we we know that some things are filtered out and if you think about it when when you were locked down and you were just on screens with people and then you saw people again in person you I felt this upsurge of like whoa this is so great it's so good to see you in real life right and so we know that there's some there's some truncation of the interpersonal experience we just don't know all the elements of it um by contrast so I'm a psychiatrist and I do Psychotherapy that's my specialty so every day I see people in talk therapy if you had told me I could do talk therapy remotely that was meaningful I would have said you were crazy Well turns out you can and most of my colleagues are doing it so there are aspects of remote work of remote connection that are much better than we thought we're having to learn about this but to your question of what advice would I give to CEOs first I would say that the culture of of fostering social connection needs to start with the CEO it needs to start with leadership it can't just be something you delegate to your human resources department
um but then I would say also be intentional structure it and that can be structured even on Zoom so the Surgeon General in the United States that's the kind of head doctor he's like the the figurehead of Medicine of Public Health Vivek Murthy is his name his platform has been emotional well-being and decreasing loneliness particularly in the workplace so what Vivek does is he has a staff meeting every week where the first five or ten minutes are devoted to one staff member talking about something in their personal life that they'd like everybody else on the staff to know and people love this meeting it's their favorite and it's their favorite part of the meeting right they again to they get to know about each other I didn't realize you were into fencing or you were you were into magic tricks or you know whatever it was you know people just talk about their lives and so I think what we can do even with remote work is structure ways of knowing each other better the ways that we used to be able to take for granted you know like you come to a meeting in an office and you spend a moment or two chatting with the person you happen to sit next to and you might find out something about their life how do you do that remotely how do you do that on zoom and that's what I think we have to figure out in some way if we're going to have any hope of having meaningful Connections in the workplace one of the things that has been um really really positive about the shift we've seen in the worlds of work over the last two years it feels like people have more control on autonomy and controlling autonomy is quite clearly a predictor of Happiness right yes huge predictor in fact in the UK they did the first study of this Michael Marmot you know who did this amazing study the white hole studies where he found found that the people who had more control and more autonomy stayed healthier they were under less stress and they stayed healthier that always really really stood out to me that this physiological Health implications you're less likely to get things like heart disease if you feel like you have a greater control over
your life and work absolutely and people that are working in jobs that where they don't feel like they have autonomy have physiological um consequences they're more likely to get disease feels very very Stark well and it it goes back I think to the stress hypothesis that there's something about having no autonomy being confined and constantly frustrated that keeps I suspect keeps the body revved up in a kind of chronic stress mode that then breaks it down in your work as a psychiatrist what is the like reoccurring thing that us as humans just seem to struggle with on an ongoing basis you talked about at the start it was um things to do with like you know permanence or our identity whatever else are there other things I remember sitting here with Marissa peer um and she talked to me about how we like fundamentally live with the patients she sees suffer with a feeling like they're not enough yeah that seems to be a consistent theme for her what are the consistent themes in your in your practice as a psychiatrist well I would say that sense of not being enough is is a very important very common one um and and it it speaks to a sort of larger problem of self-criticism that many of us are quite critical of ourselves for just any number of things all of us have a different set of things we're critical about but a lot of what I work with with people is first showing them the self-criticism because often it's like the air they breathe so I come into your practice and what is a typical symptom of someone that might come and see you and why would they have come to see you they might come with depression okay they might come with anxiety they might come with a sense that uh life is meaningless and they're not getting any joy in life they might have come because a spouse has died or a child has died and they're not able to cope they are just finding life life isn't doesn't seem worth living anymore and what's your process from there once they say their symptom I'm depressed let's say we talk yeah um so I'm I am a psychiatrist
but I tend not to reach for my prescription pad right away I do use medication when we need it but first we talk and often if I can help somebody just to tell me what's wrong um a lot of the symptoms will ease um and yeah I mean you can if somebody is is a is if it's life and death I will often use medication right away to make sure somebody stays safe but many times people will come and after two or three meetings they will feel less depressed because they've been able to unburden themselves and to talk about um something they feel is so horrible or so shameful and I can help them understand it and often normalize it a lot of what I do and a lot of what my research does is normalize things and say yeah this is part of Being Human um and for many people you know a lot of times one of my teachers used a phrase that I find so helpful he said we're always comparing our insides to other people's outsides you know I'm always comparing the me that some mornings wakes up feeling kind of lost and you know like I don't know what I'm doing with my life or down with the the curated lives that we see on social media or the game faces that we put on for each other I mean you know we're you and I are trying to look okay for each other you know I'm not we're not telling each other about our miseries right now because we have a job to do we're doing this interview and that's fine that's good we need to do that but it can leave each of us with the impression that other people are always fine they've got it figured out and I don't so a lot of my work as a psychiatrist is to help people see oh you know no this is actually part of being human that you know yes when you lose a loved one this is a trauma and that yes many people feel like they don't want to get out of bed in the morning many people feel like they can't go to work and let's talk about that let's talk about your loved one let's talk about what the loss is like and when you really take people through that and take through people through what's hurting so much A lot of times the pain will ease tremendously sometimes we use medication to help and
that that's good but many times it's not needed what are the factors of somebody that can be helped from from all you've seen in your work what are what are the things you go well if they exhibit this this and this then I think we can work with them and I'm saying this it's worth saying because I want to build the bridge we all have people in our lives that we want to help you're right someone that's struggling with something I'm not saying it's our job to help them or to be a fixer assignments and it taught me not to be um but it I do find it useful to know um that's kind of the question I'm trying to answer here is like that person we all have in our lives you know maybe they're struggling with something maybe it's a recurring issue which ones of those can be helped what are the cool factors the ones who can be helped are the ones who are willing to look inward so some people will never go for help right they'll never want to be curious about themselves often because it's scary at the deepest level who who are saying this is my story and I'm sticking to it this is my world view and I am not going to inquire about my own role in my difficulties right the people who can be helped are the people who sooner or later get to a point where they say okay maybe I'm making some contribution to my troubles and if so what is that responsibility there is some responsibility some responsibility for some people it's humiliating it's impossible to even imagine that I am the architect of some of my own misery actually many times a couple will come for couples therapy and if one person says the only thing you have to do is fix the other person you know that it's not going to work because the any couple is has learned a set of dance steps they've developed and well you have to help the couple to do is look at their dance steps and then modify them and it's always two ways it's always both people contributing to difficulties in the couple just as both people contribute to what goes right it's the person who says no way am I any part of
the problem here that's the person who can't really be helped by these means is the reason why sometimes we don't want to take responsibility because confronting what the inward perspective might show us as you said is really uncomfortable for a self-esteem which is already on the floor yes yes that's it I mean so I'm playing defense I'm playing defense and the defense has to be so complete so think about the people who are so self-aggrandizing and have to tell you with every sentence how wonderful they are who can never apologize who can never admit doing anything wrong those are often the people who feel the most vulnerable and who put up this this rigid defense because to entertain that they're fallible that they can make a mistake that they can do something wrong is is is threatens a total collapse of the self and so those at many times are the people who just can't can't at all entertain that question of what could I be doing that I might be able to change to make things better do you have a framework for how I've heard you talk about how precious time is in your book and about attention do you have some kind of framework that you use to decide how to invest your time like why to come why did you come here today versus being somewhere else you know you live in Boston right yes so you've flown over to the the UK to Europe you've been doing some you know appointments in Europe how are you deciding to deploy your time is there a framework there's definitely a framework um for me it goes back to that vow of service so this study I've been going for 85 years we've published hundreds of scientific papers but we published them in academic journals very technical no one reads those journals literally almost no one and so what we found was that people were hungry for this kind of information I mean the reason why my TED Talk went viral was because I was speaking about things that we know from science that we haven't told anybody in the wider world so my mission I said look I don't have that many years left in my career my mission now is going to be to bring
this science that we've worked so hard to develop and bring it to people in ways that they can use to bring it in understandable form rather than highly technical geeky form which is what most of my scientific papers are why not do something else I because relieving suffering is one of the most meaningful things I can do with my life and given that I'm not going to be remembered 50 years from now uh easing some suffering right now is the best thing I can think of to do what's it doing for you it makes me feel like my life has some purpose um that and being with my family you know my my wife and my kids and my friends those are because the the question that Zen keeps asking and making me ask is well what's being human about I mean it's so unlikely to to be born first of all right and then to live a life and so what why am I doing this and so that's that's the answer I have given myself it's not by any means the right answer God knows it's not the only answer it's just my answer and it's my answer for now is is life is there a point to life in your view the point is what we make of it there there is you know this is the evolving of the universe the universe is constantly changing it's morphing and changing our species is gonna morph and change probably be extinct right every species eventually becomes extinct so do we matter then if we're going to be extinct I don't know we matter for the moment and we matter to each other I mean that's another reason why I've spent so much of my adult life prioritizing relationships and studying relationships because I think what do what can we do well we can matter to each other what have you gotten wrong and what do you calling I've gotten so much wrong where do I start but okay okay top of the list top of the list is I've worried too much about what other people thought so one of the things I've done is I've for example I was in a job that was very prestigious when I was young I was director of a training program at a prestigious program for for psychiatrists and I hated it I realized I and I was on
a track to to be the chair of a Psychiatry department at a fancy academic institution and I realized I just hated the work I just hated being an administrator to me it was like washing dishes the same problems came up over and over again and I would sit in these meetings with people who were obviously very engaged and I'm glad they were engaged but I just didn't care about it and I finally had to say to myself first and then to everybody else I don't want to do this this is not my path and it took me longer than I wish it had but I'm glad I did it and I had to learn that lesson in order to you know that was one of those badges of achievement right and so I've so for me what I've gotten wrong is is thinking that the badges of achievement were going to be satisfying and realizing that they're not I mean for me a conversation like this is actually satisfying I'd rather do this um and I don't even care how many people listen to your podcast although I'm I'm sure it's a lot of people I understand it is right but but I don't care what I really care about is having this conversation with you that that feels like a really good use of my time I if I make you um if I made you prime minister or president of the world no please no no we need you okay Robert um and I told you to redesign Society in a way that would lead us all to having greater levels of fulfillment and happiness what are some of the this the first things you would do in terms of the design of the way Society operates at the moment what would you ban what would you introduce and enforce what I would introduce is massive support for children and the people who take care of children because it's the best long-term investment that actually they've done some studies of this there's a James Heckman is a an economist at the University of Chicago who who published a paper in science where he analyzed hundreds of studies of when we invest in in an age group where do we get the biggest bang for the buck right if we invest in zero to four years old or five to eight or all the way up what what happens when people get into adulthood who's
the most self-sufficient you know who's the healthiest and what he found was that for every dollar we invest in age zero to four that we get a huge payoff compared to every other age group that doesn't mean we shouldn't support people in other age groups but it means if we could invest in children in young children and child care ah so much uh so much less poverty substance abuse misery down 20 years 30 years down the line it's a long-term investment and what about on an individual level so if you were to give me advice then on an individual level maybe we'll put this in the frame of one of your children turning to you and saying again Dad I'm off to live my life what is the the way you would recommend I design my life at a very fundamental level for it to be a fulfilling life what do I need to know Robert dad invest in people really invest in all kinds of relationships including casual peripheral ones uh which is what you've had to do following your involvement in the study right yeah that intentionality of like pouring into relationships even though it doesn't feel natural yeah yeah because so many benefits come back it's not you know they see us through hard times they you know what they what they find for example is that um your most peripheral relationships are the people who are most likely to find you your next job not your closest friends right so even these peripheral relationships are of Great Value to us and that happens to be because they're not in your social network they know many people who you've never heard of and can connect you with people you would have no other connection with I'm definitely one of those people that like has a bias towards being on my own being isolated just working on my own and I'm not good at watering my peripheral relationships I'm like you know five out of five at nurturing my like close relationships but outside of that it's like it's like a concrete wall um I think a lot of people are like that I think a lot of people really struggle I I don't know like struggle with especially again we talk to everyone about men struggling with um social interaction because of their
inability to be vulnerable and open does it really matter like does it really matter for me that I you know I'm 30 years old now do I start hitting people up that I've not spoken to in a couple of years and start asking them to go for coffee it doesn't matter if you don't feel a lack how do I know if I feel a lack uh just check in with yourself okay I mean seriously the reason I say that you know it gets to this kind of introverts versus extroverts spectrum that you know some people have said well if you're shy does that mean you're screwed that you're you know you're not supposed to be shy and no it doesn't what it means is that all of us are on on some kind of spectrum temperamentally from shyness to extroversion and that some people don't need many people in their life at all and in fact having a lot of people around is stressful other people get their energy from lots of people and they want they want more people in their life so there is a way that you really can check in and say what what do I need more of what do I have enough of maybe what do I need less of right now and people thought a neurodivergent have sometimes different social needs to those that are sort of neurotypical I think the phrases um which goes to show that there's not a one-size-fits-all approach to I say this in part because I was I've hit my friends up the other week and I said after reading your work and reflecting over the years and the importance of social connections I was like why don't I try and get all of my friends to live in the same place you know yeah worth a try some of them live one like of my five six best friends one of them lives in Dubai one of them is traveling around the world with this baby from Tulum to wherever a couple of them live up north in the UK if connection and social connections and social ties are the insulating for my health if they are you know the number one cause of Happiness why don't we make an effort to try and organize our lives as communities I hit them all up I said hey guys let's all move to London [ __ ] off Steve and I'm joking no it was like you know life happens they get one of my work over here and I yeah yeah
well that's what you know we're seeing this that that actually these social Fabrics are breaking down in more traditional societies where people did stay in the place they were born so India people are really worried about this in India now certainly in China where people are leaving their Villages so in a typical family there would be the grandparents and maybe even great-grandparents and the the parents and the children right and the grandparents job was to take care of the grandkids while the parents went off and worked now what's happening is that people are leaving their villages to seek Economic Opportunity elsewhere like in Dubai or in the big cities and in China and and everybody's losing their social Fabric and their social role and so I think there's a great deal of worry about this you're noticing this and you're saying wait I want I want to knit this fabric back together I want my friends to come together and let's all hang out together and support each other my wife and I are saying you know we should like like develop this old people's home as we get older and we should get all of our friends who are getting old to get together and live together but it never kind of works out that way because everybody's kids are moving to a different place and you know and so it's this question of how do we how do we manage these social Fabrics that are fragile that once they're torn it's really hard to put them back together but they provide so much benefit are you hopeful you know are you your reaction then told me you weren't hopeful you're right I wasn't in that moment you weren't I could say just the I wanted to tell you I was hopeful I could see exactly that but I'm not um about the social fabric stuff I'm not hopeful either I mean there is evidence that sometimes we need to feel the pain before we change but I I think there is so much influence that is driving us towards prioritizing other things and not the social fabric stuff that we've talked about that will probably win out over the long term I think so I think so and the problem is you know we evolved we think to be social animals that it was safer to be in groups and
that's why you know we passed on our genes more often if we hung together in groups and so the problem is that the way we evolved it's a stressor to be alone it's a stressor to be more isolated but life is taking us in these directions of Greater isolation so I'm not hopeful um and you called me out on it you could see it flicker across my face and then I think I was trying to hide it okay I'm gonna ask you the question the diary this is the question left by Our Last guest for you but then I am going to ask for a call of optimism okay so the question left for you is if you could go back to one era in Civilization what era would you pick why and what would your job be oh interesting I would go back to 9th century China and I would be a Zen Monk why because it it was the way to know about life in a radically different way than uh Society was going at the time and I would just like to know I just just because I've studied Koons and I've studied ancient Zen literature and I'd just like to know what it really feel would feel like to be one of those monks in one of those monasteries with a teacher and I can Envision it in my mind but but I'd really love to experience it so if I could time travel that's where I'd go if you could only say one last thing to everybody that was listening if this was maybe your last day on the earth and you know you you've got this mission that you've been on for the last couple of decades to serve others and to help them with their suffering if you only had 60 seconds to leave a message with them based on your work as a Zen priest and a psychiatrist in the studies that you've done what would that message be it would be make your default setting kindness just go back to that whenever you have a choice whenever you're at a point where you're trying to decide how to take the next step make that your choice why
it's what tiknot Han the zen teacher used to call nourishing healthy seeds that if you nourish those seeds that's what grows if you nourish other seeds like the seeds of power or dominance or anger that's what'll grow foreign thank you thank you for giving me your time today thank you for doing this interview I know you've done many of them but this one um was except this was really a wonderful conversation thank and you know I really mean what I said where you talked about seeds there you your Ted Talk plan to the seed in my mind that just grew slowly over time and it I was never able to shake it and it's funny because I was I was a young man who would I think that was probably the thing that had the biggest impact on me reassessing my priorities in life because you provided irrefutable evidence from a huge group of people with the with the study that you're you're the director of um over a long period of time that as I said at the start of this conversation just like stared in the face of the way I was living my life and because of that because that seed was planted in my mind I gradually nothing happens overnight once I think through confirmation bias once the seed's been planted you then find things as you go on that confirm that seed and kind of water it and mean that it flourishes into being a tree or a plant or a flower and that's what happened I realized that relationships and connections and investing there having a partner um would be profoundly valuable and beneficial to my life and my work and most importantly of all my North Star which is happiness and that just nudged my life in a slightly different direction but then think about it Robert I then have this podcast I then write quotes I then speak to people on the internet and social media and on the Telly and that slight nudging and that new Direction has made me nudge other people in that direction and that started with that video for me so thank you because um you know that's I'm sure you know I'm sure the The Dominoes falling has caused other people to be nudged slightly in that direction as well and that starts with you so thank you so much well what
you've just told me is a real gift because that's what I would hope that's you know when we talked about what what my mission is right now it's it's hoping that this this kind of information and these ideas move people to to to shape their lives differently and so it means a lot thank you so much thank you [Music] foreign