The Science of Happiness, with Laurie Santos

How do you know you’re happy? How can you be happier? Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Negin Farsad, and Laurie Santos, PhD, psychologist and host of The Happiness Lab, investigate the science of happiness.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is a Cosmic Queries edition on a subject I think about which we all care, or should care, and that's the science of happiness. And we got one of our happy co-hosts to join me, Nagin Farzad. Nagin, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:37Negin Farsad?

  Hi Neil, I'm so happy to be here.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a happy face. You are host of the podcast Fake the Nation, and I recently appeared on that podcast. I enjoyed it, thank you for having me.

• 0:49Negin Farsad?

  Neil, you killed it. People still write me about that episode.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god, well, thank you. Thank you. And you're also the author of the funniest book title I've ever seen, it's called How to Make White People Laugh. So this is, for all people of color, this should be like at the top of their shelf, right? Because you don't want angry white people, that's some scary stuff, is that what you're saying?

• 1:12Negin Farsad?

  It's a useful guide, it's a useful, quick reference guide.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you get to say that because your heritage is not sort of European white, so what is your heritage in this?

• 1:20Negin Farsad?

  I'm an Iranian-American Muslim, like everyone.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, like everybody, yeah, yeah. You left out maybe two boxes you could have checked there, but, all right, so neither of us have expertise on this, so we bring in experts when we need them. And today, we've got our special guest psychologist Lori Santos. Lori, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me on the show.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So you're a professor of psychology up at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and you're head of Silman College. And now, just so people understand, in the Ivy League and in many other places, dormitories are basically called colleges, is that correct?

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of like Hogwarts, you know, they kind of steal from the Harry Potter, you know, we've got our Gryffindor, Slytherin.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yale is based on Hogwarts, okay, gotcha. So head, this is a title that, if I remember correctly, it was once called The Master of Silman College. So I guess that went out with the... With the movement this in the summer of 2020, right? You can't run around calling people master.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Especially since, you know, many of the heads of college are white men and, you know, a lot of our students are students of color. It gets a little awkward.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And at one time, they maybe actually owned slaves. Not this round, but earlier generations possibly.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you do? So you are the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale, and in particular, the K9 Cognition Center. So that's just fancy talk for dogs, right?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  That's exactly right, yeah. We're really interested in what makes the human mind special. That's kind of my day job when I'm not studying happiness and well-being, is this question of what makes the human mind unique. And we study dogs in part because we build them to be a lot like us. And so if we're expecting some critters out there to show human-like characteristics, it's probably going to be dogs.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's, I want to hear you say that again. We invented dogs. Just say that.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  We invented dogs. Well, we didn't really invent them, but, you know, we shaped them. You know, they're a lot different than a wolf. You know, most of us wouldn't be kind of curling up in the bed with the wolf, you know, in our house, right?

• 3:29Negin Farsad?

  Hey, speak for yourself.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Nah.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why Nagin only has three limbs.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The wolf got hungry overnight. So you also host the podcast Happiness Lab. This is a great title. Pushkin Industries, are they the sponsors of the lab? Is that?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Uh, sponsors of the podcast, yeah.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The podcast, sorry. Good, okay. Well, excellent. So let me just ask some general questions, just to start out here. So, um, isn't happiness, I don't mean to get sound all philosophical, but how do you know you're happy unless at some time you felt sad?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to know about happiness is I wish we had a more scientific approach to it, right? I wish we had us.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we have you.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  This is why we're trying, right? This is why we're trying. But, but even though you have lots of researchers studying happiness, we don't have great measurement tools for happiness, right? I wish we had a little happiness thermometer that we could stick in people's mouths and know, oh, you know, combining all their emotions of joy and laughter and sometimes anxiety, here's their happiness reading, right?

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there's a great quote, I think it was Logan Clendenning. If not him, it was someone of his ilk that said, "No science achieves maturity without a system of measurement."

• 4:42Speaker 02

  And so this is one of the things that happiness researchers have been working on for a while now. We have actually like two decades worth of data looking at this. And what they've converged on, which sounds not scientific, but actually is quite a good measurement, is simply asking people about their own happiness. Now, when I first started this, right, I study animals for a living. My work is in animal cognition, where we have these really strict measurements that come out of the history of ethology and things like that.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is ethology?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Ethology is sort of the study of animal behavior and things, right?

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a word.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  That's a word, yeah, totally a word.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know this word?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  I've never heard of this word.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Ethology, the study of...

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Kind of animal behavior and animal communication.

• 5:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the people who study ethics, it's not ethology, I guess.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess that's ethics, ethicsology. I'm not sure.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry, go on.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the point is that I was, when I first got to this work on the science of well-being and I saw that, you know, great studies were based on asking people about their own happiness, I was pretty worried. But what I realized was two things. First is that these measurements are actually pretty solid, right? They tend to be measurements that are relatively valid, so we can kind of like measure them over and over again. And they also tend to be...

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Repeatable.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  They're repeatable, right? You know, just like we really want in science, obviously, we measure you twice. We get the same kind of reading, you know, time one, time two. But the other thing is that these measurements seem to correlate with all kinds of things that we think must be relevant for happiness. So when we have good hormonal measures of people's moods, people's self-reports of how they're feeling correlate with that. People's self-reports of how they're feeling, whether they're happy or not, also correlate with like rich textual analysis of their journals. You know, so I grab your diary and I do all this machine learning on the adjectives you use. And that really hardcore analysis correlates with when I ask you, you know, all things considered, scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? And so in a bunch of different...

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So one of the things you listed there was, you say hormones, but we can just broaden that and say chemistry. You're saying if you say you're happy, that correlates with being chemically happy?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  That's right. I mean, the problem is that we don't know a lot about what chemical happiness looks like because even there we run in-

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it is. It's called marijuana.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Psilocybin. Psilocybin is the new school. The new school. But no, but even even those kinds of measurements are hard when we don't know what happiness is, right? Because if I measure your chemicals and I know I give you marijuana, say, and then I ask, then I have to measure, did the marijuana make you happy? But I'm still at square one. I have to ask you, hey, are you happy now after you, you know, smoked up a bit? And so, so, so what the science suggests is these relatively valid measurements might be tapping into the real thing we want to measure, which is, I don't want to know about your hormones. I don't want to know about your chemistry. I want to know how you feel right now, you know, Neil, you know, on a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling? So in some sense, if you tell me on a valid measurement that you're feeling pretty good, that's kind of what I want to maximize with any intervention I'm going to do on how you're feeling, right? I want you to think that you're feeling good.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a psychologist, this is a very important goal.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, especially, you know, you and I are talking right now in the midst of COVID-19, you know, right after 2020. This has been a really hard, a really hard year and a really hard time. A lot of people are feeling, you know, much more depressed and anxious and uncertain and lonely than they've felt in a really long time. And so, if we could find good interventions that work across people's individual differences to boost up their well-being, we'd be doing something really good for the world.

• 8:08Negin Farsad?

  But can you translate it into like cups or quarts or like milliliters for people who don't like the king's measurements? Is there, can I get like some just easy, because I want to bake it, you know what I mean?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Totally, totally. What I can tell you is that social scientists are interested in two aspects of happiness. That's what people tend to measure. So one of those aspects is sort of how you feel in your life, right? Which is the kind of emotions you have. We don't want to get rid of negative emotions because that's, you know, part of a rich, fulfilling life. But we want, on average, there to be more like laughter and joy and positive things than, you know, anger and sadness and, you know, anxiety and things like that.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, Laurie, when I, when I was growing up, I grew up in New York City, and so I had exposure to theater, right? As just as a New York resident, it's just part of the life of, of growing up there. And- I remembered seeing these, this pair icon of a smiley face and a sad face. And I thought, why is there a sad face there? Oh, because theater takes you both places. And I say, why ever take someone to a sad? I just did not understand why you would glorify making someone sad in what you wrote. Why is this? And I, I could, I was a full, I might've been 40 before I came any sense and understanding of this. So, so that's kind of back to my early question.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What role and value does depression play? I don't mean clinical depression, but just I have a bad day. I feel sad. Tomorrow I feel great. Cause I've been to LA and the fricking sun is out every day and it's 72 degrees. And a little cloud comes up, oh, it's a cloudy day. It's like, shut up. You have no idea what anything other than a sunny day is like. Because, and so they're sad because they started in a whole other place. So how does that factor into all of this?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Well, there are kind of two reactions to that. So one gets to the other kind of measure of happiness. So I said, the first one is how you're feeling in your life. But then there's a second thing I really want to maximize, which is how you're feeling with your life. You know, that's the answer to the question, how satisfied are you with your life right now? And those two things, like how you're feeling right now, whether you're happy, joyous, sad, whatever, and how satisfied you are with your life, those, those things can vary a little bit, right? You know, I think, you know, sometimes when we're doing our best work, when we're getting the most meaning out of life, you know, I think back to grad school and I was like feeling really fulfilled career wise. Those in the moment weren't necessarily the best times, you know? My dean who lives with me in the college right now, she and her wife have a new baby. And they're kind of in the midst of this too. You know, they're so satisfied with their life, you know, they brought this life into the world.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  It's so meaningful, but day to day, it kind of sucks, like not sleeping, dirty diapers, right? Like, that's bad news, right? And so, so I think you can have these dissociations, right? So it's important to measure both kind of in general, in a big picture way. How satisfied are you? What meaning do you have? You know, do you have a sense of purpose? And also kind of in the trenches, are you mostly feeling good? Again, we're not trying to get rid of negative emotion, but the goal is that when you're having it, you're learning from it or it's serving a purpose or it stands in contrast to some other kind of emotion that you had.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You also study, you also study dog brains and all the people who have, what do they call the, the? The dog they carry on airplanes with them.

• 11:24Negin Farsad?

  Emotional support animals.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thank you, thank you. The emotional support. Again, I saw a comedian, I forgot which one. I think it was Sebastian Maris.

• 11:33Negin Farsad?

  Maniscalco.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maniscalco, thank you. Um, where he said, he saw, he saw the actor who plays Superman carrying an emotional support dog onto the plane. And he said, no, we have to stop somewhere.

• 11:48Negin Farsad?

  Will, you haven't, you haven't seen mine emotional support wolf on the airplane. That's where things get interesting.

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's how to make everyone scared so you feel better about yourself.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you study dog brains, the soothing effect that a, that a, that a very comforting dog can have, I guess there's some kind of symbiosis there, right?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, most of the work that we do in the dog lab is a bit separate from the happiness work, but there is a growing body of work about what's called human animal interaction, right? Just this idea of kind of socially connecting with this other creature that seems not judgmental, maybe not even as judgmental as some of your friends or some of your family members. Like, it can be a powerful.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You hope not.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  You hope not, yeah.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nagin, you look terrible this morning. Go back to bed.

• 12:35Negin Farsad?

  My dog did not like this outfit, you guys, and it was a tough one.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  No, but what they're tapping into is one of the necessary features for happiness, which is some form of social connection. Ideally, we're getting that with other homo sapiens, right? But, you know, if that's not happening, then sort of having a nonjudgmental connection with the animal can give us a lot of the same pleasures that we get out of connecting with other humans, too.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And before we go to the break, because we haven't gotten to any questions yet. Nagin, I assume you have questions lined up.

• 13:05Negin Farsad?

  Oh, my God, so many.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out there, right, right. So what about, I don't want to derail where we're going here, but I can't help but think about emotional support robots, either for people who can't interact with other humans. Which is a big part of what you're describing. But a robot might provide that. So what about robot happiness?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's actually lots of work trying to use, you know, soft, fuzzy, cuddly, kind of almost animalistic robots as kind of emotional support critters. I think in COVID-19, I've seen lots of tweets of like, "The last person I talked to was my Roomba." You know, like a lot of people are finding some support.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you make furry Rumbas, that'll change the whole ecosystem.

• 13:46Negin Farsad?

  By the way, my therapist told me, because not to brag, but I've experienced some anxiety in my life. And my therapist had me pet my dog meaningfully for like a few minutes every night to like help bring down my anxiety.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why are you bragging? Where's the bragging in that?

• 14:05Negin Farsad?

  Um, anxiety is a very elite experience.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mean to brag, but I was so anxious, I had to pet my dog.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Did it work though?

• 14:16Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, in general, a lot of those things that a lot of the questions actually are going to touch on, a lot of stuff that she had me do have helped with my anxiety.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait a minute, Nagin, you just solved something. Laurie, let me get your fast opinion before we go to break. The James Bond villains who are always petting a cat on their back, they have high anxiety.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  They're on to something. Yeah, they're on to something.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  James Bond has none of them.

• 14:45Negin Farsad?

  You need a monocle and you need a dog or a cat. And you need to have some nice petting motions.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Petting motions.

• 14:52Negin Farsad?

  You can be as evil as you want, but also calm.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to blow right through our cosmic queries on the science of happiness with Laurie Santos when we return.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries, a topic which is on all of our minds, especially coming out of the Corona-verse. It's the science of happiness. And Laurie Santos, this is one of your professional specialties, is thinking about this as a psychologist and professor up at Yale. I say "up at Yale" because we are in New York City, and that's north, and so up is north. That's what I mean by that, for those who have no clue or don't really care what that means. So Laurie, you have a podcast. That means you probably also have a Twitter handle or an Instagram handle. What are they?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I do. On Twitter, I'm just my name, @Laurysantos. And you can check out the podcast, The Happiness Lab, anywhere you download your podcasts.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, excellent. Very good. Okay, so Nagin, you've got questions for us, culled from our fanbase.

• 16:28Negin Farsad?

  Oh my God, Laurie, you've got so many amazing questions. And the first one is-

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's code for saying, "When you answer, keep it short."

• 16:35Negin Farsad?

  We've got a lot. So this first question comes from Patreon, from Augusta Suresh, in, sorry if I mispronounced that name. "In a recent episode of StarTalk, Dr. Tyson mentioned that he chose to have comedians on the show because if people smile and enjoy the moment, they're more likely to remember it. Can you give us some scientific insight on how happiness can lead to stronger memories?"

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, love that question.

• 17:01Negin Farsad?

  I love that question. Also, as a comedian, I especially love it.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It also puts you on the spot, Nagin. If we don't laugh, you're gone.

• 17:10Negin Farsad?

  You know, but please, please give me reason for being, Lori, please.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, can we justify Nagin's existence, Lori?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, well, one thing is like, you know, people remember the things that they're talking about because jokes are funny, right? And funny things are the kinds of things we want to share, right? You know, so if they hear a good joke on StarTalk, they're going to want to tell their friends or get their friends to listen to the podcast so they can hear it too. But we also know that memory requires-

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the spreading of love.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  It's the spreading of love, yes. Sharing StarTalk with your friends, full spreading of love right there. That's that, and that's happiness. But also, we know that memories really require some emotional experience, right? That helps us tag kind of the things in life. You know, if I asked you, what are some of your earliest memories from childhood? My guess is that they're tinged with like, strong affect or strong emotion. You know, that time you got lost at the grocery store and you were scared, or that time you got the present you wanted and you were super happy, right? Those are the things that tend to stick out. And so, you know, if we want to make things memorable, you know, giving someone a pleasurable experience is a really good way to do it.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Nagin, you didn't grow up in New York City, but I did. And it's, I don't know if it's still a thing, but the most terrifying prospect-

• 18:17Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -is getting lost in Macy's.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? I haven't heard much lately, but when I was growing up, that was the thing. Because we've all been to, Macy's is the single largest store in the world, at Herald Square. It's where the parade ends and they dance. That frontage is an entire block.

• 18:38Negin Farsad?

  It's a whole universe.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's nine floors up and the floor is down. Yes, it is, it's the Macy's universe. And you're in there like, holding your parents' hand, and you just, you worry that if they just let go, and it's always so crowded and so many people, and you're little. So that was a fear factor. I just want you to-

• 18:57Negin Farsad?

  It's also like, it's like the Vatican. It has its own, like, it's its own nation. It has its own rules.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Own zip code.

• 19:06Negin Farsad?

  And for some reason, you always walk out with like, three extra handbags and you smell like 12 different types of perfume. A lot happens at Macy's.

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'd like that, that you need an emotional connection. And so what you're saying, Lori, is that laughter and joy is an emotional connection to the learning. But you're also saying that Nagin could also make us angry and have the same effect.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  That might have other consequences. That might have other consequences for StarTalk. You know, we want this show to be memorable, but not, you know, anger provoking.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not angry. Okay. So Nagin, don't piss us off. Okay?

• 19:45Negin Farsad?

  Uh, well, that's when I bring out the wolf. So as long as he's, he's in the, you know. Um, should we go into another question?

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Keep going. Keep coming.

• 19:54Negin Farsad?

  So this is from, it's also from Patreon. It's a 12 and a half year old astrophysic kid, Violetta, writing in from Birmingham. Professor Santos, is there any scientific truth to the statement ignorance is bliss? Does processing more general knowledge make us more or less content? I love this question.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  This is a badass question from a 12 year old astrophysicist.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it'd be badass from an adult. So.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Yeah.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's double badass coming from somebody who's still in her tweens. Okay?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, Socrates said the, you know, the unexamined life is not worth living. Right? And I think he was kind of, I think he was sort of on to something in a certain way. I mean, one thing that we know is that there's a lot of happiness boost that comes with learning something new, especially learning something new in a challenging way. One of the coolest concepts in positive psychology is this concept of flow. This time when you're kind of so entrenched in something that you're like losing track of time. And it can happen in lots of like sports activities and things, but it can also happen when you're learning something really rich.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's called being in the zone, right?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Exactly. Being in the zone. But that's the kind of thing that can happen when we're learning something challenging. You know, if you're doing like a hard math problem, that's like taking all of your cognitive energy, but you can still do it. It's not like so devastating that you kind of can't get through it.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nagin, that happens to you all the time when you're doing the hard math problem, right?

• 21:15Negin Farsad?

  I'm doing a calculus theorem right on the side right here. You guys can't see it.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Or even a hard, a hard puzzle, you know, like, like a good jigsaw puzzle that's like taking all your attention, right? And I think that's a sign that when we're learning, especially when we're learning right at the edge of our ability, that is something that our brains tag as joyful, is so immersive that it's very fun.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where does the phrase ignorance is bliss come from?

• 21:39Speaker 02

  I think the phrase ignorance is bliss comes from when you're getting bad information that you might not want to know. I mean, I think this is something, you know, if you find out some terrible factoid, or your friends were talking about you, or you learned some awful truth, like, that can kind of stick with you, right? And so I think that's where the ignorance is bliss comes from. But I would say, you know, maybe ignorance is bliss, but learning is definitely bliss, too.

• 22:00Negin Farsad?

  Can I, can I push back as someone who knows nothing?

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you can't push back, you can only just raise your hand. There's no pushing here. You can't say, I don't know anything, but I'm gonna push back? No, those don't go together in a sentence, okay?

• 22:14Negin Farsad?

  Okay, one of the things that has reduced my kind of like general unhappiness, which has made me more happy, is turning off the notifications on my phone. I used to get all the news notifications all the time. And so not knowing things when they're happening, I have found to be particularly blissful.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you, but you, built in, you know you will learn it later, so it's just a delay.

• 22:38Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a total abject ignorance, right?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  And that's one of the reasons, I mean, so another thing that really we require for happiness in some sense, is the ability to attend, to notice stuff, to be in the present moment. And one of the reasons that notifications suck away our happiness so much is they steal us out of that. You know, I might be in the middle of watching, you know, like, doing a really great puzzle, and like, looking at the pieces, or learning something new, and then I hear like, bing, like, you know, some Facebook friend posted some dumb thing about politics. And now my brain is sucked out of that moment that was giving it joy. And I'm kind of like, wait, what happened? And it takes me a while to get back. One of the things we don't realize is how much these attention grabbers are negatively affecting our happiness, even if the information we're getting is good. And so one quick happiness inducing strategy you can do is to shut off lots of those

• 23:26Speaker 02

  non-urgent notifications on your phone as soon as possible. It'll keep you more in the moment, and that being in the moment will boost your well-being a bit.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm old enough, older than both of y'all, to remember when it was policy for the medical doctor to not tell you that you were diagnosed with terminal cancer. They sew you back and say, oh, you're fine, you're fine, don't tell grandpa, don't tell... And there was this, even in fact, I think it was a cat on a hot tin roof. The major running theme in that is that the big daddy, I think it is, has cancer, and he said, I'm fit as a fiddle, and everyone knows he's about to die. So who was giving that advice at the time? Or did medical doctors need more psychologists to come in and run the show?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tricky. That's actually one where ignorance might be a little bit more blissful, or a specific kind of ignorance, which is, you know, one of the problems that comes with knowing about your medical diagnoses is that in addition to doctors telling you more information, they also give you more choice, right? You find out some bad information and the doctor says, "Okay, do you want this kind of treatment or this one?" And the research shows that another thing that can be a real hit on our well-being, something we don't expect, is actually having too many choices.

• 24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Too many choices.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Too many choices, so, which is shocking, right? You know, if you give me a choice, "Hey, do you want Netflix where you have three movies?" Or do you want Netflix where you have like Netflix number of movies? I would choose the Netflix number of movies, right?

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That number is infinity, just in case you wondered, yes.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  But haven't you all had the same experience where you plop down and you say, "All right, I'm gonna watch a movie," and it's scroll, scroll, scroll, and then my husband comes and he's like, "You've been here for like a half hour," like scrolling through.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an hour later, right. And you finally get to the end of the scroll and they've made new movies to add to the list.

• 25:03Negin Farsad?

  Never mind that. I just found out there are 14 flavors of Triscuits on the market now, and I found that to be very stressful. I mean, you can't have too many snack options. It's demoralizing.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jell-O invented that, okay? Jell-O, a wall of Jell-O flavors. So Lori, what you're saying is the high school senior who says, "Oh, I got into 15 universities and I don't know which one. I'm sad." It's like you just want to punch them out.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  But he might be on to something. I mean, what the data suggests is more choices make you sad, and even when you do choose, that you have more regret, right? You know, if you had 50 colleges to choose from and you pick one, you're kind of like, "Maybe one of those other 49 might have been pretty good." And so, I worry about this with so much, you know, we have so much choice in movies, we have so much choice in dating partners. Look at Tinder, right? You know, but I met my husband before online dating was a huge thing, and I think, you know, I love him a lot, but...

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, again, that could have happened in that sentence. You know, "I met my husband before Tinder, you know. Had I known..."

• 26:07Speaker 02

  People can't see my video now, but they're thinking, "She must be old."

• 26:10Negin Farsad?

  By the way, for people who can't see her, she's sepia-toned. She looks very old.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, back in the old days.

• 26:17Negin Farsad?

  The edges are kind of frayed of the image.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you're saying is you selected your husband from a smaller pool of choices.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, one that didn't feel infinite, right? And I think that, you know, people on the dating market, this can get depressing. Again, this isn't, one of the themes of the, of the work and happiness, and that I talk about a lot in my podcast, is that our minds lie to us about what makes us happy a lot, right? You know, we think we want more choices. If we had to pick, we'd pick something with lots of choices. But in fact, that makes us kinda unhappy, you know? We, and another is in our leisure, you know, we were just talking about flow and picking things that are challenging. If you give people a choice, many people will choose like easier problems or something that's not as challenging, especially when they're kind of choosing leisure. But in fact, we kinda enjoy it when puzzles are kinda tricky and hard. I think this is why so many people gravitate towards astrophysics is because, you know,

• 27:08Speaker 02

  we don't have answers. And actually, people sort of like that stuff when we don't really know.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I kinda like being steeped in ignorance, but I just have to make it clear on this podcast that you have told your husband, darling, I'd love you even though I had fewer choices at the time we got together. Just, and, and I've justified that by my own research. I'm hap- I'm happier that way.

• 27:33Negin Farsad?

  You're great for the limited pool you were in. Wait, but this really makes a lot of sense because I did do a lot of Tinder dating, and I did do a lot of OkCupid dating, but I had really strict rules. So I didn't get overwhelmed by the options, like I would only allow myself to like browse for a certain number of minutes. I only reached out to people who I reached out to. I never responded to people who thought they were interested in me because they were always wrong. And so I had-

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so is your husband a product of Tinder?

• 28:01Negin Farsad?

  And then the hilarious thing is even though I was very successful doing the online dating, and I had like multiple boyfriends from that, my husband was an IRL. We met it up, like we had the same acting coach. So it was a real showbiz connection.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay. All right. Just wondering there. Okay. Well, give me some more questions.

• 28:20Negin Farsad?

  Also, from Patreon, Woody asks, is there a difference between beers by a campfire happiness and holding your newborn child for the first time happiness? Or is happiness just an out of 10 scoring system?

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, I like that.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think if you get back to the definition of happiness we talked about before, where it has these two components, like happiness in your life and happiness with your life, you might get some differences there on the, you know, beer by the campfire versus newborn baby, right? Newborn baby, hopefully they're cute and they're cuddly and you're really excited and happy, but you're probably exhausted.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cute to the parents, not to anybody else.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Cute to the parents, yeah. It's your baby, right? Holding your newborn baby, right? Cute, but, but, you know, a lot of complicated emotions, uncertainty, maybe some fear and anxiety, definitely lots of exhaustion and so on, right? But with the, how you're feeling in your life, oh my gosh, so much meaning of the holding the new baby. You know, around the campfire, that kind of feels good and that's great, you know, feeling good and having some beers and it's warm and fuzzy and social connection, that's all great, you know, but that might not be contributing as much to the meaning side. And so, when I think about maximizing my own happiness, I kind of want to bump up both. You know, I want joy and good feelings in my life, but I also want to make sure that they're serving a bigger purpose and, and a lot more meaning in my life, too.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I were to layer some math on this, I would say then that the, the axis of happiness that is the inner fulfillment is not the same axis as the one that's happiness in the moment. And so, to combine those, you want to move along both axes to get some combination of both that might be perfect for yourself. Is that a fair way to think about it?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right. I mean, you can definitely point to people who have, you know, every comfort and happiness on the, in their life, kind of thing, right? You know, like, you know, rich folks who are, you know, social media folks who have the best wine and the best food and, you know.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the yacht, yes.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  And they feel empty, you know, they feel empty, right? And they, you know, report feeling lonely and so on. So, so, yeah, so you want to kind of move up both, both, you want to move up the line at once, maximizing both.

• 30:21Negin Farsad?

  So you're basically, what you're both saying is, you should have more beers and more babies.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To go up both axes?

• 30:29Negin Farsad?

  Translate all of this for the listeners.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  The simple, deep platitudes of life, exactly.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Nagin, for just making it basic. Okay. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll come back with more Cosmic Queries, the science of happiness.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Oh, you know what time it is. It's time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Victor Sanchez, Austin Douglas, and Sarah George. Thank you all for supporting us. Without you, we could not do this show. And if you are listening and you'd like your very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Startalk Cosmic Queries, the science of happiness. Happiness. And Nagin, you've taken us through these questions, but we gotta go into lightning round for Lori. So Lori, lightning round means we want one-word answers to these questions. Okay, can you do that?

• 31:47Negin Farsad?

  I'm on it.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're totally on it. Okay. All right, let's go. Nagin.

• 31:51Negin Farsad?

  Okay, here we go. From Patreon, Gordon asks, hello, what does science say about the relationship between happiness and lifespan? And happiness and money? I'm from Asia and my culture believes money brings happiness.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. And just, is that Gordon? Does Gordon have a last name?

• 32:04Negin Farsad?

  Sorry, Gordon Vu.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gordon Vu, okay. Excellent. So yeah, I'd like that. Do happy people live longer?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Happy people do live longer, and happy people are wealthier. In other words, there's some studies that show that if I measure your cheerfulness at 18, that predicts how much money you're gonna be making in your 20s, your late 20s, and your 30s.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  So they're related, they're correlated, but the causal link seems to go backwards. We think when you get rich, you get happy, but the data seem to suggest if you're happy, then you might have lots of other stuff that get you to be higher salaried and stuff.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Or people like having you around, and then opportunities are greater.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. Maybe you're more creative, so you're better on the job. And so, so we kinda have it backwards.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So when I was in high school, I had friends who'd nickname me Chuckles, because I was always making jokes and having fun. So I had a nickname of Chuck in high school. So, but I didn't become a comedian. Nagin, I lost, did I go the wrong way here?

• 33:03Negin Farsad?

  I know. I don't know what happened to you along the way, because you do seem like you could have naturally gone in that direction.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, damn.

• 33:10Negin Farsad?

  I mean, you know what? I think you ended up okay.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, good answer. So keep them coming, Nagin.

• 33:19Negin Farsad?

  From Instagram, Nick Dorflinger asks, "What drug gets me there safest?" Edgy question, but I want to hear the answer.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Laurie, why worry about stuff in your life if you could just do it chemically? Come on.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the most legal drug, I think, is gratitude. Taking time to...

• 33:37Negin Farsad?

  Come on!

• 33:40Speaker 02

  The best illegal drug probably psilocybin is what the data suggest. You get a boost and a real kind of connection with other people and everything in the world. And the data seems to suggest that even once the drug wears off, some of that connection still holds. Lots of new, like, this is like, super ongoing research stuff right now. But the data suggests that work is going to be super interesting in five years.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So does psilocybin have a street name?

• 34:02Speaker 02

  It's basically like, just like, taking acid or a bunch of psychedelics, basically.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Psychedelics, okay.

• 34:07Negin Farsad?

  Mushrooms and stuff as well?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because I can't imagine someone saying, "Hey, you want some psilocybin?" You know, generally drug dealers don't use a chemical name.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, lots of forms of psychedelics, basically.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Psychedelics, okay.

• 34:19Negin Farsad?

  Okay, write that down, Nick Dorflinger. Okay, this next question is really close to my heart. Melanie Munz on Instagram asks, "Why do we get depressed when we're not able to socialize with our friends? This happens to me."

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's up with that?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, there's one of the most famous papers, published papers in the history of social psychology, suggests that social connection, being around other people, physically being around other people, is a necessary condition for high happiness. That was like, the big tagline of this paper. And so, you're just like, you know, showing off human nature. That social connection is really required for high happiness. Now, this is tough during COVID because we have to get very creative about how we get our social connection. And often involves screens, like the one you and I are talking over now. But the great news is it suggests most of the connection we get in real life, we can get across a screen too.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So communication is what is really happening there, right? Which is a fundamental part of what it is to be human, that we can communicate information.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we're social primates, right? You know, if we got one thing from our primate ancestry, it's the fact that we like being around other critters and grooming them and sort of getting information from them. So it's not such a surprise that natural selection built in.

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Nagin pulls lice off of her husband's hair. And eats it. Don't you do that. The grooming, you groom him this way, don't you?

• 35:37Negin Farsad?

  No, of course, and it's delicious.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And high in protein. Okay, another question.

• 35:45Negin Farsad?

  From the ALOAlex10 on Instagram asks, does happiness fall under schedules of reinforcement or is it innate?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Ah, that's a good one. And that implies a certain dichotomy that those things are different. I guess I would say there's some, there's research suggesting that some aspects of our happiness are heritable. In other words, there's some maybe genetic or epigenetic components to our happiness. But there's also lots of research suggesting that you can build in your own happiness, that through your own habits, things like being more social, taking time for gratitude, taking time to be in the present moment. Even if you're kind of naturally a like five out of 10 on a happiness scale, you can probably move it up through your own behaviors to like eight out of 10.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have to want to do that. You have to want to do that.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  And you have to put in the work, right? I mean, that's one of the messages is like you can, just like all good things, like, you know, being fit, you know, learning astrophysics, you can do it, but it's going to take some time and some energy.

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, one of my favorite lines in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is when Ferris Bueller's describing his best friend who's always miserable. And he says, I don't understand him. He's only happy when he's sad.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when I first heard, I said, what? And I said, oh, my gosh. These are people who go out of their way to put themselves in a sad place. And that somehow seems to be their equilibrium point. So, so there are those who are five on your scale who want to boost it, but maybe there are those who are five who are just happy, stay happy at five.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely get, most of the emails I get asking questions about happiness are, you know, my spouse, my child, you know, someone in my life is so unhappy. What can I do to make them happier? And the answer is, you know, there's lots of stuff they can do to make, to become happier if they put in the work, but they kind of have to want to do it.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so what you're saying is you, we don't, we don't have as much power as we believe we have over making someone else happy?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Well, we do, I think, honestly, a strange thing, one thing we can do that's quite powerful is to make ourselves happy. One of the, another big powerful effect in this field of positive psychology is the power of emotional contagion. You know, we, we are chameleons, we suck up the emotions of other people. And that's why people listen to StarTalk, right? And hear you and the comedians laughing, right? And they're probably getting a little joy out of that themselves, even if they weren't feeling it before.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you would have to use the word contagion to describe it. Okay, is there another word you can use?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  It seems like it works.

• 38:08Negin Farsad?

  It's a tough word in a pandemic, Neil.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. How about catchy happiness?

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pandemic words are jumping into our communication here.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Happiness, happy catchiness.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catchiness, there you go. Not happiness.

• 38:20Negin Farsad?

  I was gonna say infectious, but then, no, again, it's a tough word.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Infectious pandemic happiness, right?

• 38:25Negin Farsad?

  But also, is it unethical, Lori, this is a question, to slip like a teaspoon of psilocybin to the one you love? Just in a cup of coffee?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure that's against the law in most places.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the happiness universe, it is completely ethical, yeah, for sure.

• 38:44Negin Farsad?

  We have another question from Amy McCormick on Instagram. Can you explain the science behind seasonal affective disorder?

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good one.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, seasonal, yeah, sad. Seasonal affective disorder is, is just part of the many environmental things that affect our happiness. So we were just talking about one, right? Being around other people that are happy can make you a little bit happier. But we're really affected by our environment, and many of us are really affected by light, right? Just the sheer amount of light that you get in. We're also affected by kind of walks outside in nature. There's this wonderful Japanese concept of forest bathing, where you go out in the forest and it's thought of as a big booster for your happiness, but there's some empirical evidence suggesting that simply getting outside and being around nature can be a really powerful boost for happiness.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But why, why does light matter? I mean, I, I say that only because, all right, the sun doesn't, you know, in different parts of the world, you have very different amounts of sunlight, all right? And winter nights can be very long in the northern and very southern climates, southern, south of the equator, of course, because it's symmetric in six-month shifts. So, so what I don't understand is, when you come indoors, there are lights everywhere. You turn on the lights. We don't, we're not walking around with candles. You have like, you know, halogen bulbs, not anymore. We have very bright LEDs. So why does the sun matter at all?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  You're such an astrophysicist to be defending darkness right now.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  It was dark for so long. The light doesn't even get here that fast.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. No, no, but I think, so I think a couple of things. One is we can fake it, right? You know, this is one of the treatments for seasonal affective disorder is to just get yourself some light and make sure you're surrounded by light. But another reason that the wintertime affects us so badly, if you're in the northern hemisphere, that is, right, is that you tend to behave differently. You know, think of the number of social connections you make in the summer. Think of how much like nature bathing you do in the summer when you're walking around outside. What happens when it's cold out and it's dark? You know, it's me in front of a screen, right? You know, not paying attention to, you know, my health, right? And so I think it's partly the light, but it's a lot our behaviors that depend on different light states.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha. Okay, so that's a, that's a factor that's not otherwise described because that saying is just light, but you got a whole matrix of elements that plug into that, which make much more sense to me.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  And this is, this is the big problem of human, you know, human behavior. You know, I wish as a psychologist, we have, you know, we talked about, the people talk about physics envy or astrophysics envy.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yup, it's there because you guys can't isolate your, your variables.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  We can't isolate anything, you know? It's like, I'd love to be able to put somebody in a box and be like, okay, you get this amount of light versus this amount of light and not mess up their emotion levels by having them inside a box, but they're people, not particles.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Her husband is still in a box.

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How come, why do we only see Lori but not her husband?

• 41:32Speaker 02

  This is real shady, Lori. This is shady. To be fair, he's actually a MIT physicist, so, you know, he puts up with my physics envy in a different way.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, give me some more on the game.

• 41:43Negin Farsad?

  Okay, so from the handle Tyrell Nekuan on Instagram, are there long-term scientific methods to generating happiness? This is the quintessential question, actually.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that because long-term implies I don't need to be happy just in this moment because I had a great meal. Give me something that really I can translate to my lifespan.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so I think the biggest ones are gratitude. So taking time to count your blessings, all kinds of evidence that gratitude in the moment and in the long term can really help you, right? Sort of forming a habit about gratitude, social connection.

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the same thing as when all else fails, lower your expectations?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  It's actually different. People think that grateful people are more resigned of like, oh, I'm so grateful. I'm not going to change the situation. Turns out gratitude-

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, I'm grateful that I have two legs, you know? No, can you up the bar on that a little?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, what the evidence really suggests is so grateful people tend to be more interested in changing the status quo. It's kind of like you have some emotional resilience. So you're like, I can put in the work to do things. This comes out a lot. One big question I get when I talk about gratitude with my students, who are very interested in social justice and things, you know, they often ask like, well, if I'm grateful, then I won't, you know, fight for the changes that we want to see in the world. And that evidence suggests the opposite. When you're grateful, that's when you work really hard, right? Because you have some emotional resources to help people who are not yourselves.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, you know, I forget about that because you're going to make a change. You've got to reach into yourself in your fuel tank, right? And start applying that emotional energy to affect change. That's interesting.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. All right, again, we had time for maybe one and a half more questions.

• 43:21Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give it to me.

• 43:22Negin Farsad?

  So Sarah Style asks on Instagram, do we want to be happy or do we need to be happy? Is it luxury or a survival instinct?

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. Oh, my gosh, which is it?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remember, lightning round.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think need to be happy. Happiness affects our immune function. Happiness affects our longevity. Happiness affects how we interact with other people. My students sometimes joke that happiness is a first-world problem, but all the data suggests that happiness matters more, matters for the fundamentals.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, okay, okay, very good. Keep going, Nagin.

• 43:52Negin Farsad?

  You started to answer this one, but this question kind of came up a lot. From Edixona on Instagram, can we fool ourselves into being happy? Can we convince our brain into releasing dopamine? You mentioned gratitude. Is there another trick?

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, other tricks are having more social connection, being around other people more. Another easy one are like healthy habits like exercise and sleep. One study shows that a half hour of cardio can reduce symptoms of depression as well as one of the leading antidepressant medications. And then a final one is presence. Just try to be in the present moment. Like, notice what is happening in your body right now. Follow your breath. It sounds kind of cheesy and hippy dippy, but the data suggests it can really boost well-being.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, science can support hippies. There's nothing, no law against that, right?

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes they're right. They're reading the latest scientific journals.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me, let me end with one. I'll take host rights and end with a question here. So, let's say I'm fabulously rich and I have servants and I sleep in the most comfortable bed all and I can detect that there's a pee underneath the bed, like the princess and the pee, and then I have to sleep on a cot, okay? And I'm miserable. Meanwhile, as a homeless person who's been sleeping under an overpass, and then you put them in a cot and they say, oh my gosh, this is comfortable. So, it seems to me you cannot speak of happiness on absolute terms. It's always going to be just relative to the person. And if there's no such thing as an absolute scale,

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  then how do you sink your teeth into what is and is not true in what you study?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think one thing to know is that's definitely true. Everything we know about happiness suggests that it's relative. It's relative to where we were before. It's also a lot relative to other people. So, one of the worst things you can do for your happiness is look at lots of happy people on Instagram or social media. That makes you compare yourself and feel kind of crappy.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a word for that. What do they call that?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Uh, social comparison.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know. Okay, but I was thinking.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  FOMO, FOMO, there's fear of missing out.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fear of missing out, which affects you emotionally.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  But the whole point is that those things, it's not happiness in the universe not being objective. It's for me, it can be very objective for me. I have my one to 10 scale, you know, and as I go up, you know, if I get more luxuries in life, then going back down to the cot might make me feel kind of crappy. But the key is that what you want to be having is positive changes for yourself. And so another kind of happiness tip is, you know, not to always have the best things in life. You know, when you start flying in first class every single time, that one time that there's no seat available and you have to go and coach, you know, you're hate in life, right?

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  But if you just occasionally with high variance, get the first class, that's a way to kind of boost up your happiness. So there's a, there's a mantra called split your gains and combine your losses in, in the field of psychology. And the idea is you, you want those really great things to happen only once in a while, because that's when you'll get the sort of biggest happiness transition.

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So what you'll feel most is how big the change was between where you were and what you then experienced.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's what you then record.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. All we're, all we're recording mentally

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are differences.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  are the changes in the transitions. And so I, I joke with my students, I don't know if you know this DJ Khalid song, All I Do Is Win. And I joke with them, I was like, that would be the worst for a happy life. Because if all you did is win, there's no transitions. You're just like at ceiling.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And your life would suck.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't worry. Have you seen the Twilight Zone episode on this?

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. There's a, there's a criminal who gets like shot. And then he shows up and he's like a gambler, womanizer, criminal type, and he gets shot and dies. Okay. And he shows up in this place and this man appears and says, hello, you must be, you know, Johnny Smith. You right on time. Oh, wow. What is, where am I? Oh, no, don't worry about that. Okay. And he says, oh, my gosh, it's a pool hall. Can I go play pool? Yeah. And so he, he goes and hits the ball and all the balls get sunk at once. And then he bets on the roulette table and he wins every time. And then all these women come in and they just throw themselves at him and It's, and he says, "Doc," you know, I forgot what his name was, but, "Doc, you know,

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think I deserve this place. This is, you know, everything's going to, you know, take me to the other place." And, "This is the other place." It was like, "Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh." So there he was, with every single thing he fought to get, risked his life to get as a criminal and as a thing, now he has it on command, and he is the most miserable person for eternity.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is why happiness requires the ups and downs. This is why we require the happy emotions and the sad emotions, right? We want a life filled with both.

• 48:33Negin Farsad?

  So maybe the mantra isn't, "More beers and more babies." Maybe it's like, "Split your babies and ration your beers."

• 48:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Nagin, for that bit of wisdom to end the show.

• 48:45Negin Farsad?

  Oh, you're welcome.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, anytime. All right, we gotta, we gotta stop it there. So Lori, great to have you on. This is such a fertile topic, and I'm sure we can find other angles into this, and we're gonna call you back, because you're just up the street in New Haven, Connecticut. And Nagin, always great to have you on here. It's fun, and your book is hilarious, and I'm delighted in being a guest on your show. And Lori, I don't know, I have anything to contribute to your podcast, but if you need, I've been happy my whole life, I think, so if you need some, if you need some data points, call me.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Fantastic.

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, for me, I have a lot of hobbies, and hobbies bring, they help re-center me when I go back to them, and they, they reassess where I am in life and then take the next step. So anyhow, okay, guys, we're calling it there. This has been StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, the happiness edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, bidding you to keep looking up.