I mean, I suppose there are a few songwriters, poets, and I've got some friends in those domains of life, and they do seem to derive a lot of insight and inspiration and have done amazing things through the kind of depths of unhappy human emotion. We can get back to that later because I do think there's something about them that's kind of intriguing.

The depth of unhappy human emotion, we can get back to that later because I do think there's something about the contrast of moving from these more painful emotions to happiness that's very different than moving from a state of immense happiness to slightly less, but we can get back to that.

But most people would like to be happy as much as possible. I certainly would. Who wouldn't? And one, of course, can ask, "Well, should I work on my feelings? Should I think about my feelings, try and shift my feelings, let my feelings move through me in a cathartic way?

Should I work on the thought patterns? Should I work on the behaviors?" I'm a big believer from my own experience that behaviors are powerful in setting the general trajectory of thought patterns and feelings, but I've also experienced it going the other way too. So what does the research say about this, and what can we do because everyone wants to be happier?

Yeah. That's another thing you're not supposed to do. You don't have to change your circumstances. And that's great because, like, quintupling your income is tricky, you know, moving is tricky, you know, switching your life around all over the place is hard, right? And the good news is the science shows you don't have to do that.

That doesn't work as well as you think. But you can hack your behaviors and your thought patterns and your feelings to get some good results, right? Let's take behaviors, right? One of the biggest behavioral changes you can make to feel happier is just to get a little bit more social connection.

Like, psychologists do these fun studies where they look at people's, like, daily usage patterns. So how much time are you spending sleeping or exercising or at work or whatever? And the two things that predict whether or not you're happy or not so happy is how much time you spend with friends and family members and how much time you're just physically around other people.

Like, the more of that you do, the happier you're going to be. And you know, that's just a correlation, right? So your savvy listeners are thinking right now, like, well, is it hanging around with other people causes you to be happier or do you tend to, like, hang out with other people more if you are happy?

Like, which direction does the causal arrow go? And here we have these lovely studies by psychologists who do these kind of funny experiments where they offer people, like, a $10 Starbucks gift card to just talk to somebody, usually talk to a stranger, like, that they don't know on the train.

Some lovely work by Nick Epley and others have done this, because you force people to get social. And what people predict, especially with strangers, is like, ooh, that's going to feel awkward and kind of weird. But what you find across the board, and this includes an introvert and extroverts, is that talking to somebody actually feels good.

It increases your positive emotion. It gives you a sense that your life is going better. You feel less lonely. It just has these positive outcomes that we don't expect. I love social connection. The problem I have with social connection is that if I drop in with somebody for, you know, 30 minutes or a couple of hours, when that's done, I usually have so much that I need to tend to that I end up staying up later than I need to in order to complete that, diminishing my sleep.

And then I feel like there's an underlying kind of like sinking ship sense to my physiology, and then I have to recover my sleep. So, you know, everything's a trade-off. What's interesting about the study you just mentioned is that it's just a brief coffee, presumably. So maybe one doesn't need to spend quite as much time with people.

But I think, you know, I think, like, even years ago, actually, he's dead now. But there was a – I guess it's okay to say even though he's dead. He was a somewhat eccentric professor at UC Berkeley. I took a class from him when I was a graduate student there named Seth Roberts.

He's known for some kind of bizarre theories about eating and if people want to look this up, I mean, like, really kind of different stuff. But I applaud his bravery and just, you know, being out there. But he was an eccentric guy, and he told us in this class when I was there that it was very important to see faces at least once a day, real faces, not on a screen.

This was before social media. And that it was important at some point to leave your apartment and, like, see the barista and say hello and thank you and see people on the street. And now knowing what we know about these dedicated areas of the brain, like the fusiform face gyrus and Nancy Kanwisher's work and about these brain areas, like, we are hardwired for seeing faces and recognizing faces.

Now, that alone doesn't mean that seeing faces is a requirement for being happy on a consistent basis. But I think they were onto something. I think Seth was onto something, even though he had some also just, like, completely crazy ideas. This idea doesn't seem crazy. This has been my experience.

Even though I spent a lot of time alone, if I go a few days without seeing a face, something happens inside that shifts the way my internal kind of set point for well-being. And then you see somebody and it's, like, delightful, even if it's just a hello kind of thing.

Yeah. I mean, I think the reason why social connection matters so much is it's building off this basic neural circuitry, right, for seeing faces and so on. And I think that gives us real insight into the kinds of social connections that work best, right, which has been characterized in the field as sort of in real time social connection, right, which we're kind of moving away from.

So what do I mean by in real time? You know, you and I are sitting in a studio right now chatting, and we're kind of chatting in real time. I can see your face. We're live. But we might have been able to do this, like, over some sort of video chat.

It wouldn't be as good, you know, but it's pretty good. And the reason it seems to be pretty good is we're doing it in real time, right. Our auditory system, our visual system, all these systems that are used to, as primates, processing things with other folks around you, it works reasonably well.

What doesn't work so well is how we often communicate, which is, like, over Slack, over text. I text you. Vroom! A few minutes later. Vroom! It comes back. Like, our primate brain's just, like, that's just not the way communication is set to work. And so I think sometimes when I bring up social connection, people think, like, oh, I've got to see people in person, and my friend's going to live far away, and I'm, like, at work all day.

It's like, no, no, no. You can connect, not necessarily live and in person, but as much as possible, try to do it in real time. And I think that's in part, and if possible, try to do it with video, I think, for the reason that you were just talking about, is that faces activate us.

But, you know, we're primates that are also really good at language and paying attention to the voice. I think it's one of the reasons that, like, an old-school phone conversation, no video chat with your friend, can be some of the most emotional connective conversation, sometimes better than in person, because when we're in person, we're pulling out our phones and checking and paying attention to other stuff.

But we've got to get back towards in real time. The other stuff just doesn't have the same psychological oomph. Is there any evidence that texting actually drives more of a desire for more social connection and thus leaves us feeling less well than prior to a text exchange? Yeah. Because I realize it's very hard to separate out the variables about what's the nature of the text exchange, how often do you see this person in real life, et cetera.

But I could imagine that texting, the whoop, I don't do the sound effect as well as you do. I like that. But that texting could be the equivalent of getting crumbs of nourishment, not full nourishment. I could also imagine that it's like putting nourishment just out of reach. And I'm asking this really at a neurological level.

Do we know? Is the reward circuitry that's triggered by in real life social connection triggered but to a lesser degree by text exchange or by Zoom exchange? This would be an important study to do, I think. Yeah. There's a lot of evidence for it. But my intuition is that the way it works is almost like texting is sort of the NutriSuite of social connection.

I was feeling this motivation for social connection, and I did it, and I got something that was sort of social. I got some information. But psychologically, I'm missing the nutritious part of it. So it kind of fakes you out into thinking that it's social connection, but it kind of doesn't really work.

And I worry that that's what we're all getting a lot of right now. It's just so much easier to participate in the NutriSuite version of social connection because as political scientists and sociologists and others have pointed out, it's harder to meet with people in real life. We don't have these so-called third spaces where we can get together easily anymore, right?

There's so many draws of just being on your screen, being alone inside. I think we're kind of missing out. And so a lot of us are kind of starving nutritionally when it comes to social connection because we're going for the wrong stuff. So schedule some, if possible, in real life time with somebody.

Or in real time, right? You know, call that friend that you haven't talked to. And recognize, because this is clear from the psychological research, that your brain is not telling you to do that. Probably even when you're listening right now, you're like, "Yeah, I guess that would be helpful for me." But you're not kind of having a craving to talk to your friend.

And I think this is the problem with a lot of the behaviors that map onto happiness is that if you think of the evolutionary pressures for those behaviors, natural selection never had to build in, like, the goal of feeling social, because we were just like in these small bands.

It was really easy, right? Natural selection had to build in a kind of craving for sweet, fatty food because those were hard to find. It didn't have to build in the craving for, like, you know, a bunch of greens because they were everywhere. I think the same thing is true with social connection.

We just don't have a strong motivation to seek people out because it was just kind of there. And I think our motivation and our reward systems don't cause us to kind of crave it. But in the modern day where there's so many substitutes and we're kind of more isolated, I think many of us are kind of experiencing the negative effects of loneliness.

But then when we think, "Well, what could I do to get out of it?" There's not this, like, "I'm starving for connection." We don't have this sort of motivational goal to go out and get it. And so what that can lead to is people making the prediction in their head of, like, you know, "I just heard Laurie say that this is a good idea, but, like, I don't know, probably not for me or maybe not as important." I think we just don't have systems that tell us to go out and get this stuff.

So even if your brain is saying, "That's not that important," try it. Do your own personal experiment and get a little bit more in real time social connection and just take a moment to notice immediately after how it made you feel. And I bet it'll be like, you know, all the kind of fitness hacks and nutrition hacks that you talk about on the show where you're like, "Oh my God, that made me feel so much better than I really expected it to." If seeing faces, and I don't have evidence for this, but if Seth Roberts was right and what we're talking about here is clearly based on existing data, if seeing faces somehow triggers the reward system in a healthy way that reinforces the social connection thing, if it, like, fills the vessel that, like, we're connected because we no longer live in small village and tribe type formats, most of us don't anyway, that if we plop down onto the couch and kind of, like, assume the classic C-shaped position of somebody who's about to go on their phone and you can scroll and see faces, you talked about that as a bit of, like, an artificial sweetener giving the illusion of some sort of nourishment, and then, you know, you see some stuff, you respond to stuff, you can see someone kind of dunk on somebody, maybe hear a joke, maybe make a joke, and then go into your DMs and, like, read a few, check a few.

And then you basically got no real social connection. Correct. You didn't have to move to do it. And in a lot of ways, this has parallels to the ease of highly processed foods or something like that. And I think we're starting to understand this a bit through Jonathan Haidt's work and other people's work, including your own, but I don't know that it's anything but really dangerous and bad.

I don't wanna sound alarmist, but I am really concerned that certainly for the younger generation, that if we don't have an intrinsic drive to go do something... We stop doing it. We stop doing it. And then the brain is pretty plastic throughout the entire life, especially for these low-grade, like many times repeated behaviors.

I mean, we can just slowly, you know, it's like there's drift. And then we wonder why we don't feel so good. Yeah. I mean, you know how the dopamine system works, right? Like it has these mechanisms to crave stuff that's quick, quick hits, right? Our instant... You know, when we go on Reddit or go on Instagram and scroll through a feed, we're getting these kind of quick hits.

And another thing that is rewarding is new information. You know, your Stanford colleague, Jamil Zaki, has done these lovely neuroscience studies that just finding out some interesting social information feels rewarding. And kind of for the first time, we've been able to separate the reward value that comes from interacting with live human people and faces and social rewarding information that comes at us quickly at this dopamine hit that we crave a lot, but we don't have the craving mechanisms for the in real life connection.

And yeah, I think that's causing a lot of problems. And it means we're kind of building more tools to do just that. I had the musician David Byrne on my podcast. Talking heads. Talking heads, David Byrne. Cool. Who cares a lot about these issues. He wrote a really cool article called Eliminating the Human, where he made the claim that pretty much every technological invention of the last 20 years has been, you know, dealing with actual people is kind of friction-y.

So let's just get rid of them, right? We'll, you know, have Uber or Lyft or a car company where I don't have to talk to the driver. I just plug it into the phone. We don't have to have a conversation. We go away. Right? We have music and streaming mechanisms.

I don't know. Andrew, you're like my age, so you probably remember that you used to have to go into a record store to flip through CDs or tapes even if you're really old school to figure out music. And often when you do that, you'd run into humans or talk to the cashier guy or somebody would see you flicking through like, "Oh, you like talking heads?

I like talking heads." Now we just go to an algorithm, right, from food delivery apps to kind of education, right? I have an online course where students don't have to sit in a real classroom with other students. They could watch it directly. So many of our technological innovations are assuming that what we want to get rid of is the friction part.

That's what we're kind of motivated to get rid of. But ultimately, we're getting rid of the human in these interactions and our primate brains are left with the little NutriSuite dribbles of connection when what we really need is something in real life and in real time.