Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. You know that I often like to share the conversations I have with interesting folks on other podcasts, and today I've got one that I think you'll really enjoy because I had the pleasure of taking part in a live recording of a new podcast called IMO, hosted by former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson, and for their first live show ever at south By Southwest, the siblings had Yours truly on as a guest to discuss
a very tough happiness question, how can we fight hopelessness and scary times. I hope you enjoy our conversation and be sure to check out IMO wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, Hey, south By Southwest, Wow, Boston.
Hi, Craig Robinson, my big brother. Yeah, he's so nice.
You all are nice. How about my sister Michelle Obama?
Yeah, you know, I'm not used to being up here with somebody. Usually when i'm speaking, I'm speaking on my own. But I got company.
I appreciate it.
When was the last time we were on a big stage together?
You remember It's been a while. Yeah, remind me, what do you think I am thinking.
About the two thousand and eight convention and that was a big moment for me because that was Barack's first campaign. In that campaign, people didn't know me, so I got accused in the press of being angry and combative.
Because of the way I spoke.
So I found that I had to use this speech to reintroduce myself to the country. So this was a big speech, major speech at the DNC, and my big brother introduced me and we were.
On stoge an honor.
Yeah there, it was quite an honor.
But in his introduction, when you're on stage and you're doing a big speech, you have teleprompters. So you have prompter in the front, have prompter on the left, prompter on the right. Because you're reading from the prompter. Because it's timed, you got to hit it right. It's national, it's live.
Let me cut in here. She had to read from a prompter.
I memorized, Oh, well, mine, here we go, favorite child.
He memorized everything.
Memory.
Well, my speech was a little longer, a little more impactful, so I needed the teleprompter, right. So he does this beautiful introduction of me. It's all action packed, and you know he says, and ladies and gentlemen, the next first Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama and I come on stage and they're cheering, you know, and we do this greet in front of the prompter where I think that my big brother is gonna lean down and give me a hug and say, you got this, girl.
I love you.
I'm so proud of you. So I go out there and we're on national TV. And do you remember what you said to me.
I do.
I'm leaning down to my ear and you said, left prompter out.
And he walked off. I was looking out for left prompter out. I was looking out for you. I knew you hadn't memorized it, so I didn't want you to be surprised, but you know, I mean, and that wasn't working.
So now I'm thinking, what was he talking about?
So I'm wa eving, trying to play it off, and I'm walking up to the stand and what he meant was the left prompter was out, and I was like, okay, good looking out. But anyway, that was my brother looking out. But that was the last time we were on stage.
That was the last time. And look at us.
Now we are here, our new podcast, I amo.
Yeah, well, what we've been doing. We're gonna chat a little bit so you guys will get a sense of our dynamic and sort of some of the lessons we learned growing up. And some of this podcast was started because you know, this last year was pretty I won't say completely rough, but we had some We lost our mom this year for those of you who don't know Marian Robinson. And as a result, yeah, yeah, my mom.
She she and our dad were some amazing people. And I think as a result of that lost Craig and I you know, it brought us even closer together.
We were already close.
But I don't know about you, but there's just something about losing what was our last parent, and anytime in your life when you lose a parent, it's tough.
You think you're going to be ready for it as.
An adult, but I think, you know, part of losing mom, it kind of puts us in the position where we are we're the wise ones in the family.
Hard to believe, I know.
I mean I talked to Malia and Sasha about this all the time as they are becoming adults. I know, Malie always says, well, when do you actually feel like an adult, and I was like, never, not really ever do you feel like you know what you're doing? So I said, the fact that you're in your twenties and you feel like you are clueless, it's like you're right on schedule. Because I remind her that even now at sixty one and how old are you.
Sixty three, Let's be very clear, he's my big brother.
Although it's all over people because she's so iconic, people think I'm her little brother.
If you can believe that.
Well, that's because you're bold and you have younger kids.
That is true. I think that helps.
Because he's to set of older kids and he's got a set of younger kids as well. So I called him the head of the ODC, the Old Dad's Club.
He is president and CEO.
But even at this age, it's a little daunting to think that now we kind of have to step up in our family and be that wisdom.
Yeah, and we're always doing it at home with our families, answering questions. So we're going to be doing that with our listeners. So as more as we get going, you'll see we'll have a listener questions and we'll have one later today.
So stay tuned.
Yeah, yeah, so you know, our goal is to share some of what we learned. We know people are going through some tough times, and I don't think Craig and I are feeling any different than anyone out there. You know, we're dealing with a lot of uncertainties. I for one, feel for folks who are struggling and will continue to struggle in these uncertainties.
I worry about folks being out of work, you know.
I worry about how we think about diversity and inclusion. I think about how we treat one another and the voices that we hear, and what that does, what models that's setting for the next generation. Who do we want to be as a country. All of that keeps me up at night. And I know that a lot of people are struggling with some of those things. But I find in those moments that it is better not to
try to figure that stuff out alone. And for me and Craig and our family, you know, we always try to step outside of our loneliness and talk as a family and as a community and to share those concerns. And I hope that our listeners are pushed to do some of the same things too. That you know we're not going to figure this stuff out on our own, and that we need each other and we need to step out of our loneliness and start talking to each other.
So hopefully this podcast will spark some conversation, but more importantly, I hope it leads people to seek out their own communities of trust and conversation. So we're not sitting alone in these feelings. So that's my hope. Oh, go ahead and clap.
Yeah.
See we're not used to a live audience yet, so no, I absolutely agree with me. To her point, we talked about not having all the opinions.
Or all the answers, or all the answers. We got plenty of opinions, but not all the answers.
We're going to have a guest with us on most of our episodes, but sometimes it'll just be the two of us, ye, kind of chopping it up. But before we bring out our special guest today, I thought i'd pose a question to my sister. It's interesting now that we're doing the podcast, we talk all the time, but now we save our talking for when we see each other.
Now, don't say anything. Don't say anything, David, don't say anything.
But do you remember how mom and dad taught us how to handle adversity.
Yeah, yeah, I talk about this in both of my books. For those of you who don't know our story, our dad, who Fraser Robinson, he developed MS in the prime of his life.
You know, he didn't always have it. He grew up as a boxer.
And athlete, a swimmer, and like in his early twenties, he contracted MS and he couldn't walk without the assistance of a caine and the disease progress. So we only knew our father as someone with a disability, and I think that growing up with a parent with a disability, looking back on it, we were always kids that were growing up with a real sense of vulnerability right before us because our father was the sole breadwinner, our mom stayed home. He was a city worker, so that salary
was important. I think we knew that. But to know that the person that you lean on most is vulnerable, I think it always made us clear about adversity. I think we lived within adversity to a certain extent, and it sort of made us both a little wary in interesting ways. For a kid and Craig, I don't know if you remember little things that we didn't at the time tie to our dad's disability. But Craig was always like doing disaster preparedness stuff around the house. I mean,
I kid you not this little boy. And he was about ten, and I was always his willing sidekick, running behind him like what are we doing now? And he came home one day and said, you know, how are we going to get out if there's a fire? So he made us all do you remember I do I tell your little worries?
So I was. I was worried about it.
And you know, back in the seventies there were a lot of house fires.
I don't know about you.
Guys were smoke detectors.
There weren't no sprinkler systems.
We're talking young people back in the Stone Age.
So I was always worried that we lived on the second floor and our dad couldn't get around, so how would we get out if there were fires? So I coming home from school and having done a fire drill at school, I set up a fire drill for us at home.
But it wasn't just that.
He had to make sure that he could drag our dad to safety.
So he made I made my dad get on the almost. He had to be humiliated.
But he humored you.
He because I had him stand up, and I grabbed him from behind and put my arms under his shoulders and then just leaned him back and I dragged him through every room of a house to make sure that I could get him around.
And he let me do that.
Yeah, yeah, God bless yeah yeah. But that indicated this little boy was worried about some stuff that probably a normal ten year old wouldn't worry about. And that wasn't it. You know, he would tie his left hand behind his back. Right, oh, your right hand because he was right handed, because he was worried that he would lose the use of his right hand, so he needed to know how to do everything with his left hand. There was one week that you walked around blindfolded just in case you lost her,
I mean his eyesight. And I'm there like little me, going no to your left, right, to your right?
No, wait, she was right there right there.
I was like, I don't know why we're doing this, but my brother says we're doing it, and our parents would just humor us. But while we lived with probably that underlying level of uncertainty, I think when you talk about how we learned to deal with adversity. I think we learned it by watching our father persevere, you know, because let me tell you, our father, despite his disability, was a man who got up every day.
And went to work.
I mean, I don't remember a time in our life that our dad missed a day of work.
Blue collar worker.
He took pride in the little things that I think we take for granted, like paying your bills on time, not being house poor. That's those a word that we don't want to be house poor. But my father would never let.
A bill go by. He was resilient and he.
Was positive in his life. He was a joyful man because I think he adversity was relative in our house. You know, if you could walk, if you could, you know, hold down a job, if you could take care of your family, if you could love your kids, if you could live with honor and decency, well who cares if you couldn't walk, you know who? He saw the blessings. So I think for as I look at it, for me, we learned to I mean.
Adversity was relative.
Diversity was a part of life, but it wasn't everything. You know that you'd have to just work your way through it. And the other thing I think Dad taught us was gratitude, immense gratitude. I mean our fathers you could tell from the stories, was a kind, gentle man. He rarely raised his voice or got angry. But you know when he was disappointed in us was when we
showed a lack of gratitude for what we had. You know, if we had a bowl of ice cream and we were looking for the second scoop before we finished our the first group, what.
Would he say?
Never satisfy, never satisfied.
That would be the one admonistion, never satisfied.
And hate the those two words to this day.
Yeah, And when I face adversity, his words, you know, sit in my brain, It's like, what do I have to complain about? What is it that I can't overcome? Because of the model that my father set for me. You know, why wouldn't I be happy? Why wouldn't I be able to get through this? Because we saw a man do it every day and do it without complaint.
Because if anybody had a reason to complain, would be my father, who was a black man growing up in Chicago, raised in desegregation, who was an intelligent man with ability to do art, but couldn't live up to his promise. I mean, there were a whole lot of reasons for our father to be upset and angry and not happy and to feel disappointed, to feel sorry for himself, but he was the exact opposite. And so that's what I think about when times get hard. It's like, look, my dad would push through it.
Right, right, and I would. We could.
We could talk about our dad for two shows, right, but we've.
Got the perfect yes, we do yes.
To talk about happiness and adversity and all that kind of stuff. Doctor Lori Santos is a Yale professor. Oh you guys, all right, all right, yeah good. She's host of a wildly popular podcast called The Happiness Lab. She's also the teacher of one of the most popular classes at Yale.
Wish we had this when we were I.
Wish we had it.
And that's psychology and the good life. And she's just an all around great person. So can you welcome doctor Lori Santos.
Everybody, Well, hey, professor, hey Michelle, thank you for being on here.
Thanks so much for having me. Yeah yeah, yeah, little intimate group, this is a little.
Bit intimate chat. So how did you come to teach the course.
I know you've answered this question a million times before, but what led you to understand that young people today need a course on how to be happy?
Yeah? Well, I took on this new role on Yale's campus, where I became what's called the head of college. Yale's one of these funny schools where there's like colleges within a college, like Harry Potter, like Gryffindors Lytherin kind of thing. Yeah, so I became head of a college on campus, and that meant that I was like living with students, like eating with them in the dining hall, hang out with
them up close and personal. And I just didn't realize the college student mental health crisis was as bad as it was. You're right now, Nash. More than forty percent of college students say they're too depressed to function most day. More than sixty percent say they're overwhelmingly anxious. Like, this was a real crisis that I was seeing, and that felt really frustrating because like, my field has all these strategies we can use to feel better, experience more resilience,
feel less stressed. And I was like, let me just develop this class. And then it got very very big, not as big as this. But you're listening to a live recording of me on Michelle Obama's new podcast, I AMO.
We'll be back after a quick break.
We've got a live question. We have a person, James. Are you here?
Oh? There he is, James. James, you stand up, all right? I'm standing all.
Right, Janet, all right, great, many so excited to be here.
My question is I'm twenty eight and I live in LA. The fires impacted people close to me, and it feels like that's only going to become more frequent. And everything that's been happening politically, domestically, and globally, it feels like a version of the world is ending.
And when I talk to.
Friends, they say this is the new normal, And my immediate instinct is the push back. You know, we can't accept this, but personally, living with the inevitability of it, it also forces me to rethink what I always assumed adulthood would look like, you know, buying a house, starting a family. So my question is, do you have any advice on how to plan for a future that feels so different from the one we were promise without becoming apathetic or just resigning yourself to things getting worse.
Thanks so much. Cool, Thank you, James.
Yeah, that's an aim in from everybody in this room, right, everybody's feeling like that a bit lor You want to start by taking any a but an answer, I.
Mean, yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to answer, the first thing to say for that question is that this is normal. Right, You're not the only person in the room that's going through that, And I think that normalization is critical. All too often we can get into this like toxic positivity vibe where it's like, I'm feeling kind of embarrassed that I'm so upset and frustrated and
overwhelmed sad about what's going on in the world. But like we're supposed to feel that negative emotions are normal in an abnormal world, and I think it's fair to say that we are, you know, not it's not great, but we're in an abnormal world right now. And so I think that's kind of point number one. The other reason that normalization is so important is that psychologically it can help us when you realize that these negative emotions are a common human experience, that there are emotions that
are there to help you. They still don't feel good, but it can allow you to get through them a little bit better. Even here in Uti Austin, there's a researcher, Kristin Nef who studies this process of what she calls common humanity right recognizing like we're all going through it right now, and what she finds is that can actually
help you get through tough times. She does this cool research with Afghan and Iraqi veterans and finds that those that give themselves self compassion realize that everybody's going through a tough time here, they wind up coming out with less evidence of PTSD and other related disorders. So like when you give yourself a little grace for feeling those negative emotions, realize they're normal and bad times, that actually helps you get through the negative emotions.
The other thing that I want to get your take on, Laurie, is what's happened to the bar on happiness? Because it really feels like these days that the expectation of young people are so high, and some of that I think is our fault as parents. You know, when we were growing up, I mean, life was a lot simpler, you know. I mean, just to give you an example of excitement in our house was getting pizza on report card day if we got good grades, you know, I mean at Christmas time.
We could ask for three gifts.
That was it.
You know, go through the Sears Roebucks wish book you could pick three.
Things out and that was it.
What that?
Oh yeah?
Or first of all Sears and that was the only store you go to. You get your car tuned up in a washing machine, and your school clothes all in one place. And they have a catalog. And you know what a catalog is young people. It's the thing you look through for items and you pick it out. Well, that came out each year and that's where all the toys were. So you know, our parents just you know, they weren't happy that we got good grades. You know, I can tell you. Did my our parents push us
to go to Princeton. No, they were just like ghosts. Do something with your life as long as you're a good person. But when I think of young people today, this standard for happiness is like gone through the roof.
I mean, you.
Don't just go to college, but they're like seven colleges you can go to or it doesn't matter or you know, people you look on house hunters and everybody's looking for you know, marble counters and trade ceilings, and you know a man cave and there's a certain car and you know, and you're not supposed to be successful, but you're also supposed to be famous because social media tells you that
that's what it means to be happy. So I guess that's the long way of asking, is some of this, you know, not just the world, because the world's been bad and it's been worse than it is right now, but people, young people are more unhappy than I think we ever were with a lot less.
That's right.
And we have data on this right looking across time, and those rates of depression, anxiety and stuff I just talked about, they're worse than there are young people right now than ever since we've recorded them, right like, and it's much worse. And I think you're exactly right. I
think it's a lot our expectations. Right. We have tools that allow us to see those fancy houses, those fancy vacations, those fancy schools, and they're just in our pockets, dinging all the time, giving us a comparison that makes us feel kind of crappy, right, And what we know from the happiness science is that it's not what we objectively have that makes us happy. It's what we're expecting, it's
what we're used to, you know. That's why I love the story of your dad, right, you know, just getting a little bowl of ice cream like that should be enough, right. And so I think that, especially in young people, the definition of enough has changed. There's lots of reasons for that. But I think getting to a better point of accepting and what our expectations are that'll help a lot.
And that's different from being complacent, right, because I think we were taught that you don't need everything, and you're not entitled to everything.
You're not.
We were taught not even entitled to happiness exactly. Our parents didn't think they were responsible for our happiness.
For anybody in our generation.
You imagine a parent who worried about whether your child was happy, and we didn't come from that. It was like, you're not happy, to get over it, read a book, get out of my face, move along, go outside, you know, and our generation of parents and mean, we lose sleep if little person is sad today, and it's like sadness and anxiety that's all a part of life.
But we as we parent our children.
I sometimes I think we've made them a little less resilient. And again that's not to say that people aren't dealing with real anxiety and mental health issues. But I think one of the things I try to think about as a parent, and I think our parents.
Did to us.
They tried to prepare us for what the world was going to be, which was oftentimes disappointing, most of the time hard, and there would deep anxiety that you'd have to get through at all times.
So they gave us those tools much.
Earlier than I think some parents today are willing to let their.
Kids go through some of those tough feelings.
So then they get out in the real world and they're confronted with a whole lot of emotions that nobody ever told them what's coming.
That's right, and I think it leads to mental health crisis, not just in our young people, but also in parents. The former Surgeon General vveck Murty talked a lot about parent mental health and parent stress. He actually issued like a public health advisory on the fact that parents are
going through their own tough emotions. But the biggest tough emotion that parents reported is guilt, as though you know they're not doing enough for their kids happiness, They're not doing enough to kind of give them everything they need. And I think that reflects exactly what you're saying, Laurie.
I want to get James question sort of deals with a little bit of hopelessness there, and I was just trying to figure out what does it mean for us our culture with so many people feeling hopeless?
Yeah, was bad, as you probably guess, not great to live in a completely hopeless culture. And we really do live in more of a hopeless culture than we ever have before. Your researchers go out and study this, and they have over time. One of the best questions for this is they just ask people, on average, can you trust the other people around you? Right in the nineteen seventies, when they asked polksact question, around fifty percent of people
said yeah, on average, most folks can get trusted. When you ask that same question in twenty eighteen, it's down to a little less than a third. That doesn't sound like a big drop, but if I was plotting that, that's basically how much money we lost in two thousand and eight when the financial crisis happened. Right, So this is a like complete like off a cliff decline in people's sense of trust, in people's sense of hope, and it's bad for lots of reason. It's bad for us personally.
People who experience less hope experience more depression, experience more anxiety, experience more loneliness, which is interesting, hope seems to be connected to our social connection. Also bad for our bodies. People who are more sick report experiencing more diabetes, experiencing more heart disease. And it's probably bad for us as a society because when you don't experience hope, what you
think is like, stuff's never going to get better. And when you think stuff's never going to get better, you don't take action to make it better. Right, You don't vote, you don't do things pro socially to help other people. And what you find research wise is if you study people who are cynical, they self report not voting, they self report not donating to charity, not doing the stuff
that you need to do to make things better. So, yeah, it's really bad, and it becomes a vicious cycle, right because as more people get hopeless, then they look out in the world with this hopeless lens. They post on social media with a hopeless lens. We get podcasts that are very hopeless, and it just becomes this cycle where we reinforce each other's bad perception of the world, one that might not even be really accurate.
Yeah, and you talk about that transference, the ability for us to you know, export our bad energy onto other people, and we naturally, as humans we pick up those those cues. Can you talk a little bit more about that transference that.
You Yeah, I mean, we know for sure that emotions are contagious, right, They're just like COVID and we know this. Right, you go into an office and you hang out with somebody who's feeling hyped up and optimistic and excited, you kind of catch that. Right. You go into the same office as somebody who's down and not feeling it like, you catch that too, right. These days, we don't just
catch emotions from the other people we're around. We have this transfer system online where folks are catching emotions globally. You know, I hop on some social media platform, I'm catching some emotion from somebody on Instagram that lives in a different country and a completely different time zone. But I catch that too, And that's made worth by the fact that these social media companies obviously have algorithms that thrive not on us catching each other's positive emotions, but
I'm catching each other's anger and outrage and sadness. Right, that's what gets eyeballs on our phones. And so all these things together means not just that there's transference, but there's particular transference of the bad stuff, of the hope blessness.
You know, our mom and mishe will remember this, But obviously we didn't have social media growing up, but we had friends who had stuff or friends who said things, and our mom was always why do you care about what they say? And I find trying to give my kids that advice is hard with social media, and I think a lot of parents find it hard. How do
we balance that these days with social media? Because you know, we recently were talking with someone else who was telling us, you just if you take social media away, you got to replace it with something. But my question is, how do we help help folks find a balance here?
Yeah, I think one of the ways to find a balance is just to realize that what we're exposed to affects us. Right, you hop on Instagram and you start scrolling through that feed, you might know that some of the stuff you look at as photoshopped. You might know this, some of the stuff you know these companies are they have algorithms that are sort of pointing you in a bad direction. But that doesn't enter psychologically. You're just soaking
in the emotions and then the stuff you see. Right, But I think that knowledge can be a little bit of power.
Right.
You can even ask yourself, like how do I feel after that? Scroll through Reddit or through social media and ask yourself the question, do I feel more empowered, more hopeful, or do I feel kind of gross and like in despair? Right? You can make the choice to put that away. Right. You can kind of notice mindfully how it's making you feel, and you sort of choose to stick it back in your pocket. Social media companies wouldn't have these algorithms if
all our eyeballs weren't on phones anymore. And we actually have more agency than we often remember in that fight.
People always ask me and Barack how do we stay hopeful in the not just the eight years that we were in the White House, but beyond, Because let me tell you, there was a lot of negative energy float in our way, a lot of rumors, a lot of gossip, a lot of you know, my husband wasn't born in this country. We didn't care about we weren't patriotic, you know. He yeah, he didn't get into Harvard. I mean, you know, I don't know if you all remember, I certainly do.
He wore a suit, wore a.
Tan suit once. I mean, you know the level of scandal that occurred.
But through it all, what kept us saying, and we tried to instill this in our daughters, is you know you cannot you know, you cannot live through social media. I don't think I have ever once looked at a comments section period and at all ever.
And I know it's difficult.
For this generation, but you know, I would implore young people to stay don't let that negative energy enter into your space. These are people who don't know you. A lot of this stuff is made up and it does not feed you. And I you know, I mean, I can't do it, and we never do. Now that doesn't mean you don't stay informed. But staying informed has nothing to do with the comments section, you know, it has everything to do with the content of the stories that
you take in. And I think, you know, we cannot get so trapped by social media that we feel so caught up into the one way we get information. We've got to broaden our spectrum, and we have to get off the phone, you know, which is another thing, and I would love for you to talk a bit about that as a tool. I know you've got a lot of tools, but there are a lot of people here of all ages who are trapped by their phones. And when you talk about us being disconnected and not talking to each other, I am.
I am not out in.
The world like a normal person anymore.
But when I am, people don't even recognize me. You know why, because they're on their phones. Nobody is looking at each other. I can walk right past somebody with a hat on, you know, and I'm just a black woman in a cap.
But I don't know. No, I've done it. I don't know about it. I have done it. I fly commercial.
I am out there with the people, and folks are not paying attention.
I fly commercial.
So okay, okay, see the thing.
I'm here.
Walking around flying commercial. How's Michelle tell Michelle? I said, Hi, how she doing? They? Okay?
Anyway, strategy strategies.
I'm going to get a mute button for.
Yeah.
No, but strategies. I mean, I think awareness is really key here. One of my favorite strategies for sort of dealing with your phone and being on your phone all the time comes from the journalist Catherine Price. She has this lovely book How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues you don't have to break up with your phone so much as you need to take it to like couples counseling so that you can be a
wait better. But she has this really handy acronym that she uses whenever she finds herself on her phone is WWW, which you can think of because you're probably on the World Wide Web rye. But this is not Worldwide Web. WWW stands for what for? Why, now? And what else? So what are you on your phone for? Maybe you're checking your email or looking at a map, Maybe you're just deep in some TikTok dive? Right? Was there a purpose?
Right?
Why? Now? This is an important one because you notice your emotions? What drives you to your phone? Were you bored? Were you anxious? Right? What's your cue that gets you there? What's that craving coming from? And then finally, what else? Right?
What's the opportunity cost of being on your phone right now, you might be missing Michelle Obama on your flight, Like there's just saying right now thanks to you need to notice, right, you might miss the beautiful scenery, you might miss the opportunity to talk to someone who has interesting stories, interesting ideas. Right that what else question is critical because what studies show us is that because we're on our phones, we're
less social than we could be. A lovely study by Elizabeth Dunne at the University of British Columbia had people with their phones or without their phones sitting in a waiting room. They weren't even using their phones. It was just like present or not, and she just measure the amount of smiling that people did. You know, casual, somebody's in your room, you just smile at them. She sees
thirty percent less smiling when phones are present. Right, calculate that by all the phones you know, on planes in Austin and so on. So we're really missing out. But that strategy of WWW, I think what it gets us towards is like we just have to be mindful, We just have to notice. These are good tools, right, we know even from COVID times they were so useful. But we just have to use them in a healthy way.
Yeah, I love that.
Time perty quick Break, But there'll be more of me on Michelle Obama's new podcast IMO in.
Just a Moment, Laurie.
What can we do to find hope when things are tough, like in Jamee's situation he's looking at his friends who have lost things in a fire or you know, other personal disasters.
What can we do?
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things right. One is making sure you have the right definition of hope, because I think sometimes when we think of hope, we think of what at least psychologists might call optimism. We're just like, everything's gonna be fine. And I think that everything's gonna be fine. Is like I mean, look at the new like, look at X, like anywhere is not fine, right, And so I think it's important to like call it the way it is. It's not fine. But hope isn't
that hope says things are not fine. But I can actually see at least a few paths for things to get better. Why is that psychologically so important? If you think things are fine right now, are you going to act? You're going to take agency, You're going to do anything? About it now, because you're just kind of things are fine right now. You know the world's not on fire. When you experience hope, what you feel is things are not fine right now, but there is a path. What
does that path do? It gives you agency, It gives you a sense that like something can be done, and probably I can be a small part of what needs to get done. And that small part is key because I think when we think we have to be the only one out there fixing everything, that also makes us feel a little overwhelmed and sad. But when you realize
that you're a small action. You're checking in on someone, you're donating five bucks to a cause you care about, you stepping up in any way to make things better, that actually matters. And one of the things we know psychologically is that it also helps us feel a little bit more hopeful when we take action. So you show up at that cause you care about, or go to protests, right,
donate some money. Psychologically you start to feel like, oh, we're even getting closer to a solution because I stepped up. Maybe other people step up. You also see good social evidence that you're not the only one. You show up at a protest, You're usually not the only one there. You get a whole room like this, full of people who care. Now, all of a sudden, your beliefs start to change. So you can, instead of being that vicious cycle of hopelessness that we talked about before, you can
become part of a virtuous cycle of hopefulness. And that's the kind of thing that can also be socially contagious.
And as somebody who has seen all kinds of power at work, you know, I've been at some of the most powerful tables, one of the things I remind people of is, yes, there is large power. You know, there are a handful of people in the world who can do a few things that can impact so many. But the truth is is that the small power that each of us has to do something right in front of us, if we're all doing that, outweighs anything that you know, some big leader somewhere can do.
I mean, if you just think about.
Yeah, just think about as our parents did you know, marrying and Fraser Robinson who didn't go to college, you know, mother stayed at home, father was a city worker. And let me just stop and and and give a big shout out to city and federal workers, people who are the lifeblood of this country. Also, those jobs helped to create an entire middle class of people like our fathers, our father our parents, and they do the lion's share
of the work in this country. You know, if we're going to start asking who's doing what, I would from my experience the folks who are working on the ground and picking up our garbage and making sure that our you know, schools run and that our air is clean, and that our flights stay up in the air. That those people are the true heart and blood of this country.
But that power is what changes things.
You know.
Those parents, with a little bit that they were able to do with their power, raised two of us, you know. And if you just think that if everybody on this planet was valued and had an opportunity to have a job and to take care of their kids and to raise them with some level of honesty and kindness and with humanity and taught them to love everybody and to be inclusive. You know, just imagine if everybody did that
little thing right in their plate. You know, if you're going to have some kids, you know, if you can have the courage and the power to exercise that small thing of raising them with some truth and some honesty. Just imagine where we would be right now as a country, you know, imagine what our leadership would look like and how we would ask them to speak and to act and to model that.
That is the that is the beauty of small power.
You know.
So, as James, you know, thinks about what to do. You know, I hope that retreating into hopelessness is not on the list, because shoot, if my dad didn't, this is how I fail. My father, Frasier Robinson didn't retreat with all that he could have retreated from in times a lot tougher than this, because he wanted to lay a foundation for us that we have that obligation, all of us to do the same thing. We can't afford to be hopeless. I would say, yeah, And I love.
The U share the story of your father, because it's also one of the strategies that we can use, tiny strategy we can use individually to do better, which is sharing these positive social stories like the world and social media. All these aglorithms are filled with terrible stories, but you can actually see the good ones. You can say, you know, my dad in the midst of experiencing this terrible disease was hopefully you taught us gratitude, right, And you know
it doesn't even have to be Michelle Obama's dad. Right. You can find these little examples of moral goodness, but don't just keep them to yourself. Share them. And I think if you're a parent, this is one of the best things you can do to your kids, right, because they're maybe don't even have as much kind of frontal low power to go out there and find those good stories over the dinner table. What moral goodness did you see today?
Right?
What was something that delighted you that kind of made you happy, specifically about what somebody else was doing. We don't share these enough. But the sad thing is like they're out there, we just don't hear about them enough. And so that's one of the reasons I'm so glad y'all are doing this podcast. There's there read way more stories than that that come out that allow for what researchers call social savoring or sort of savoring the goodness of other people.
And that's also a way, I'm sorry, creative for people to use their social media.
You know, you know it's there for a reason. There's power in it, you.
Know, but we have to resist the notion to use it to harp on each other, to diss and to you know, spread gossip into you know, I mean, each of us in our world can encourage the people within it to use the tool for good. You know, it is a choice that we can make right now, everybody in this room, everybody listening to this podcast, who hears us, you can make a choice to either, you know, use these tools for good, or use them for evil, or
to use them to appease your frustration. Because remember, as Laurie said, we pass on that energy. You know, we're passing it on our anger. Our rage, you know, is one of the reasons why you know, when our household we use the model going high is important, because going high is the model, especially if you have a platform like we did for eight years. Yeah, it's easy to get on a big platform and rile people up and to say hateful things and to make fun of people.
Of course, anybody could do that.
Any leader can do that, right That's the easiest way to lead because you're sort of tapping into your easiest basis, you know, core, and you lash out. You share that anger, the strength and the power comes is when you can harness that you know and understand that if you have a platform, if you're going to be on social media, that you now have an obligation not to spread hate and bitterness and anger.
And if only because I want to give.
James some takeaways, but this is Craig's job, we also have we also have the happiness doctor here, So how can we and and let me back up, because our mom used to say, you're responsible for your own happiness, and that was some of the most empowering advice she ever gave us.
How can we help.
Those out there who don't have a Marian Robinson or a social group, how can we help them work through making themselves happy?
Well, your mom might have been a better happiness scientist than yeah, because she's like reading the evidence out there, because that's what the evidence really shows, is that it takes some work, but you can do things to feel better, even in a horrible situation. Right, even in a horrible situation, there are things you can do to feel a little bit better. And I think one of the biggest ones
is really to connect with other people. You know, you talked about the problem of phones leading us away from each other. You talked about the loneliness crisis, Like, you're in a room with lots of other folks right now, you're probably in lots of rooms with lots of other folks. Just talk to them, right, check in on your friends, reach out to them. These things sound silly, they sound like such a tiny thing to do, but they allow
us to get towards more civic action, right. They're really like, in at very time anyway, the basis of democracy, right, just talking to people and getting to know them, right, And so in your own small world, do that and reach out to the people that you care about. We often assume again that that's kind of a silly thing to do, but what the studies show is that when you're reaching out to other people, when you're checking in
on other people, that boosts your happiness too. So you're ultimately, by doing nice things for others, growing the pie, and you're giving yourself a little bit more of a sense of hope because whenever you take action, you're like, oh my gosh, I have some agency. Things can't be that bad. I can make it a little bit better.
Well, And I know, Craig, you're a coach, you've coached, you've.
You know mentored.
I know that.
You know, mentoring isn't just about giving, you know, it's about what you get in return.
You want to talk about it, Yeah.
I I you know, I started out in corporate America and moved into coaching, but I always felt like I wanted to be a coach or a teacher because I was coach and mentored by my dad, my mom and really good coaches. And I thought it was really the reason why I got to do all the wonderful things I got to do, and I felt like I needed to share that with all these other young people out there.
And to Laurie's point, it makes me feel fantastic and it just is just such a wonderful, warm feeling to be able to help folks.
Yeah, and I think another thing that we can do again kind of channeling your parents, because I think they were on top of this stuff, is what your dad said, right, find something to be a little bit grateful for that can feel big in the situation that James is in right when it feels like everything is collapsing around you. It's hard to be living in la in the midst of these fires and be like, well, I'm grateful for if that feels hard, choose a lighter version of that strategy.
Look for just something that's a little bit of a delight in the world, like just a delight, something great. This is a practice I heard from the writer Rosquee. He has this lovely book called a Book of Delights, where he decided every day he was just going to go out and find some small wonder in the world that delighted him. And they're tiny things like you see somebody on the train and give each other a fist bump. You walk into a cafe and it's playing El DeBarge
like Rhythm of the Night. It's just like a great song and boss days like that's the delight, right, And what it does is it allows him to train his brain away from something that our brains do naturally, which is what researchers call a negativity bias. We instantly notice all the bad stuff. You scroll through your feed and your brain is locked onto the bad information. But to find the good stuff, to find the delights, you gotta
put a little energy into it. And when it becomes a game, when you know you're sharing them with someone else or writing them down, now all of a sudden you find them a little bit more quickly. And one of the reasons I love Ross's book is that he actually shows that this power of delight can help you fight all kinds of stuff in lots of ways. It's a book that deals with a lot of the bad
stuff that's going on. It talks really explicitly about racism, it talks really explicitly about cultures of violence and things like that. But when you find the delights, you're able to kind of get through it. You're kind of patting yourself with some positive emotion to deal with the negative stuff. And this is one of the reasons I think we
need to find our light a little bit more. Is the other thing that research shows is that if we want to make changes, we kind of need the emotional bandwidth.
To do that.
And one of the ways you do that is finding your light right focusing on positive emotions. There is researcher at Constantine kush Lef who works at Georgetown, and he asked the question, who's out there doing the work to solve the problems right, who's showing up at the protests, who's engaging like climate justice? And what he measures is
people's positive emotion and he finds it. The more you self report having more positive emotion versus negative emotion, the more you're going out to that protest for a cause you care about, the more you're donating to kind of fix the things out there in the world. It's kind of like putting your own oxygen mask on first, so you can help others, but it's not just like others. It's like helping the whole world. And so that pit of research has helped me because sometimes it can feel
bad to not be hopeless in a hopeless world. Like if you're going through what James is going through, it's like should I experience delights? Should I get happy? Because El Dubarge is on in this cafe?
It feels like weird.
But his research helps me because it's like, no, it's almost your responsibility to find positive emotion because it actually allows you to get towards the actions that can fix stuff.
All right, So for James, we've got five minutes for some fakeaways, and that was a great place to start. You find your light, all right, I'm looking toward Lori for a couple of takeaways.
Yeah, let's do it. I think a big one is to notice how you feel when you're participating in the twenty four to seven news cycle. Right, the news cycle didn't used to be twenty four to seven. We all probably remember there was the day when you get the paper in the morning, you read it, you were very informed, but you put that thing away, didn't walk around with you in your pocket.
Right.
I think there's you can probably be informed with like eighty percent less time on your phone, and you'll still know all the terrible things that are happening. I promise they'll still be covering them. You know, it'll be twenty three hours later, but just kind of give yourself a little bit of a break. Why information is good. You'll still have that, but you'll kind of protect your positive emotion a bit. I think the second one is just
one that we've talked about already. Social connection. Reach out and try to help someone else every especially if you're feeling vulnerable, especially if you're feeling in a crummy place, Just ask what can I very small thing can I do for somebody else? For a friend, text them, just say hey, thinking about you donate three bucks or something whatever. You can finally afford a little tiny thing to a charity.
All of a sudden, that will start making you feel good and you'll be doing good in the world.
Too, And I absolutely thank you, and I just want to throw a mom hat kind of peace on there for James is that you know your physical health is directly tied to your emotional status. And I know, young people, you aren't at the point where you believe what we've been telling you that you gotta get sleep.
You really do. It absolutely matters.
You know why are old people but probably a little bit happier because I take a nap and I go I will go to bed, and I love nothing more than going to bed early. Now if you're in your twenties, that sounds really crazy, but you know it absolutely matters. And what you eat and whether you move your body. You know, we've got Lori here because like there is real evidence.
We still live in a world where science matters.
Well please please.
As we wonder what is wrong, you know, and how we fix it. You know, we can't ignore the fact that they're really smart people who have done really important research to come up with the whys and to give us answers. So this stuff actually matters, and when you're sixty plus it all makes sense. And taking care of yourself, getting outside, making sure you get a little bit of fresh air, how you move your body, what you put
in it matters. So if you're young and you you don't feel it yet, because when you're our age, you will feel it if you start some of those habits. Now, you know it doesn't change the world for sure, you know it is not it is.
Voting still matters.
But in the meantime, you know, not partying every night of the week and thinking that you're going to wake up in a good mood that helps too.
But I think I think you're like, not only does it You said it doesn't matter if voting, it doesn't matter. For I think it does. Right, If you take care of your body, you're gonna be You're going to have the bandwidth and the resilience to fight, whether that's fighting at the voting booth or fighting in other ways. And you also channel something else that I have and talk to my students about. You mentioned. We mentioned gratitude, right,
and gratitude is really changing your thought patterns. It's noticing the delightful stuff and trying to move away from the negative stuff. But there's other ways we can use our thought patterns to feel good. I think one of them is just thinking back right, getting a little bit of psychological distance. As Michelle said before, things have been bad before, right, and when you remember that, you're like, oh, we came
back from it. We've come back from really awful stuff. Historically, especially if you look in long history, We've come back from really awful stuff. And what does remembering that do? It makes you realize, oh, things could be different even in a bad situation. I can see a path to something being better. What's that? That's hope, that's fighting your own cynicism right there.
And one more thing, one more thing, one more thing, you know, for young people out there, I just encourage us all to sort of right size our happiness meter, yes you know, and take a little pressure off of ourselves and not to measure joy and happiness by the wrong things. And let me tell you, look, we are successful, we got degrees, we make money. There's nothing wrong with
that at all. But it is I will guarantee you that having stuff or money, or all the things that right now seem to be so important, you know, extolling the virtues of how much stuff you get, and my experience that really truly is not the key to happiness and finding out what your purpose is. You know who you are helping and why over how much money you
have in your bank account. You know, truly, I know a whole lot of these billionaires, and not all of them, as we can see, seem happy, you know, because that's not ultimately if that's your only goal is to have more than you need, to never be satisfied.
If you get on that path and that's.
What you're going after, you know, there will be a whole in your heart and it may feel like it's the world, but it may actually be our misguided sense of what it means to be human. And truly, what it means to be human isn't whether we get to space or how much money we have in our bank account. It's really how we treat each other. How do we make each other feel? How how do we you know,
care for one another? You know, and I guarantee you if you spend your life doing that, you know, really reordering your steps to be that person in the world.
I can tell you that's.
What makes me feel better and hopeful, is directing my energy at a real purpose. So I would urge James to make sure he's driven by that and not by some other artificial goals that we've been told are important.
It's a great point to end on me. Please help me. Thank doctor Lorie Santos.
Thank you, thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
As you can see, we do have a lot of opinions, and we could keep this thing going on and on, but listen and subscribe.
Thank you all for being here.
Thank you guys.
Thanks Lori