Michael Norton (on rituals) 02:00:34

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by the Minister of Mayhem. That's a new one. Yeah. Try it on. See if you can get into a little trouble. You know what it sounds... Capital T trouble. It sounds like...

Sure. Or, yeah, some kind of a metal collective. Yeah, exactly. Not really my style. No. And not on topic either for our guests. Nope. Any which way. Well, that's not true. Okay, thanks for correcting me. Because there's a lot of rituals that happen at these Screamo concerts. True, true, true, true. Everyone screams at the same time, I imagine. I mean, I've never been to one, but...

Michael Norton is a, well, first he's our guest today and Michael is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School. He has a previous book everyone loved, Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending. He's also written a lot and we talk about it on Humble Bragging, which I think is lovely. Yeah, it was fun. It's a fun topic. But he has a new book out right now called The Ritual Effect, From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of

of everyday actions. And what's really fun about this episode is I think like us, many people enter it thinking they don't have any rituals.

- And we all do. - And we do. - This is also the answer to an Easter egg we were talking about on some fact check about teeth brushing and order of things. - And some people actually in the comments sounded off that they totally disagreed with me and that they agreed with me. A lot of people were like you, like, "Tooth brushing in the middle of the skincare routine is sacrilege." - Bad, bad, bad, bad. - And then other people were like, "I do the same thing while I let my serum set in."

Really? And they're not worried that the toothpaste is going to get into the serum and make a sludge? Apparently not. Wow. Oh, this isn't the place for it, but I didn't do it in the fact check and we already did the fact check. But I felt obligated to explain the full situation because while we were interviewing Amy Poehler, I had mentioned that Righteous Gemstones had reached out and that I wanted to do it.

Yes. And a lot of people were like, definitely take that job. And they were excited to see me, which was so flattering. And I would love to be on it. And when they don't see me on it, I don't want them to think I didn't take that job. They just never called back. They said, are you available? And I said, I am available. And then they never called back. Okay. So I just want to be very clear. Right. Come next season when you don't see me, don't think I got high on the hog. I would have been there in a second. Right. Okay. Maybe not a place for it, the intro, but here we are. That's fine. I just think timing didn't work out. It wasn't on my side. Yeah. Okay.

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Hello! How you doing? Nice to meet you. Hi, Dax. Nice to meet you. So sorry I'm late. Have you been offered all the beverages? I have, thank you. You have the famous cream top. I was talking to someone yesterday and they said that they like Maru. We need to ask. Or do you know for sure? Okay. I make the jokes, see you tomorrow.

Of course you do. And they make it back to me now. Did you make jokes like that before you were a dad? I find mine, yeah, mine have gotten a lot worse. He's a pun master. Well, and we can talk about this. It kind of dovetails into your research. He is increasingly having impulse control issues with his puns. Compulsion has perhaps entered the chat. I did a dad joke the other day and my daughter's eight. I said the joke and she went,

And then my wife said, oh, Delia, that was a joke. And she goes, sadly, I know. Burn. Oh, it's good. That's what they're there for, those children. To humble the shit out of you. Completely. Do you have more than one? Just one. And you were smart. You were like, this is a lot of work. Let's cap it here. One and done. She was right.

Because zero to one is a completely different life. Yeah. But then one to two is just more of a thing. Yeah, someone said wisely, it's not twice as much. It's exponential. The second one's like four times as much. Well, my brother's eight years younger than me, so we're not ruling it out for you. True.

You never know. We don't know anything about your wife. We don't know about your vasectomy or not. We're not going to ask. We're not going to start there. I'll start. I had one. I sent all the paperwork. Did you not see the paperwork? How old are you? 49. Me too. Oh my God. 1975. 75. What's your birthday? April 17th. January 2nd.

So I am your elder. I want you to treat me as such. I shall. Obeisance? Is that how you say that? Where are you from? From outside Boston. I'm Irish Catholic. There's only like two places you can live. I have to ask. Yeah, go ahead. Because you're of the appropriate age. A little young, but yeah. Do you know my boyfriends, Ben and Matt? No. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon? No, I know who you mean. Okay, good. Believe me, I know who you mean. But you don't know them. No, I don't. He went to a competing college.

He went to Princeton, right, Princeton? Oh, ouch. Yeah, but he now teaches where they went to school, which is much more impressive than going there. I agree. I don't think so, because I didn't get in, so. Oh, shit. Did you take a certain joy in becoming a faculty member there? Every grievance you've had, you just visited on the, you know what I mean? It's so fun. It's so fun.

You can resent all these incoming freshmen. So you grew up outside of Boston. Like how far out? 45 minutes such that we never ever went into the city. Once a year, it was kind of a big thing. But otherwise, we just lived on a block that was a circle and we would just kind of bike and walk in a circle all year in the suburbs. And what did mom and dad do? They owned a Hallmark store. Oh!

Oh my goodness. It's very novel. Which was very, very interesting as a kid. A lot of gift stuff in my blood. I used to work security. Oh. At the Hallmark? Yeah, because this is a surprising thing. People really like to steal cards. Yeah, of course. Oh, I could see that. Because they're so easy. I mean, they're flat. Put them anywhere. And also, nobody wants to pay for a greeting card. It sucks to buy a greeting card. Exactly. Well, when you know you damn well could have made one out of paper at home. That's right.

Now, was most of your concentration on the employees? Because we had a prompt for one of our shows and it was tell us about a time. What was it? Oh, mall stores. Mall stores. And we had two people that had worked at greeting card stores. And one of them had just robbed the place blind. And then we had a bunch of people in the comments saying like, I too worked at a greeting card store. And yeah, we stole every little knickknack and shotski. I wonder if it over indexes and thefts among the employees. Can we follow up with them and see if they worked at my parents' store? Because is there a way to recoup them?

She did want to stay anonymous. Ask if it was the Dedham Mall in Massachusetts, and then we'll know. Well, that's kind of exciting that mom and dad had a store at the mall. It was interesting. I'm the youngest of five, so most of us at some point cycled through working at the store. Now, when you're in high school, you probably want to be working at the Gap or Merry-Go-Round. The shoe store. No, it's really cool actually to work at a card store in a mall. Everybody's like, that guy's cool. He's secure.

We should hang out with him. I'd ask his number, but I'm sure it's already taken. What kind of guy were you in high school? I would say a nerd. Your four older siblings, were they boys, girls? Brother, three girls, and then I'm the youngest. Oh, okay. I was, according to everyone except my mother, an accident.

She's still keeping strong. She'll never go there. And were the sisters in school with you at the same time? One was. And was she protective and helpful or did she distance herself from you? She's four years older than me, so she wasn't as cool. And so she was nice, but not let's hang, which I completely understand. And what was your B.A. in? Psychology and English, which my father said, I don't know which one of those is more useless. Minimally, you could have gone into law with your English degree.

I was thinking about being a lawyer and then I worked at a law firm as a paralegal. I was applying to law school and to PhD programs. And this lawyer there, I said, will you write me a recommendation letter? And he said, I will write you a recommendation letter if you promise me that you will never become a lawyer. Sure. Wow.

Because lawyers hate being lawyers. He hated it. Yeah, as soon as you become friends with a few lawyers, you realize the entire field hates their job. Maybe more than any other field. It was amazing. He had a great job, but he just was really miserable. He was like, work all the time on hard, sad things. Yeah, and it's all about hours.

It's billable hours, right? Completely. So you're just a slave to the hours. Okay, so why psychology? I believe that as the youngest of five, you're automatically an observer of kind of the chaos. Large families are a lot going on. Actually, I was talking to my...

sister about this. So we have seven, obviously, with my two parents. So the number of possible permutations of coalitions, you know, like two versus five, three versus four, all of the different ones. I'm not good at maths or somebody's like, oh, that's easy to do. But it's got to be. There's so many. Today, it's us three against those four.

but in an hour it might be one against six. I think it was just this fascinating shifting landscape. And you have the least amount of power and control in the dynamics so you're probably the most incentivized to figure out why it works the way it does. Completely. How can I get somebody to drive me to where I need to go? Right. And the parents have stopped parenting probably two kids ago. It's a miracle you did good in school and stuff. It really just must have been an innate drive. Were they on you? If things went wrong

they would show up. Otherwise it was, if we don't hear anything, let's just let him do his thing. Yeah. Let's not fix what's not broken. The wheel's not squeaking.

Then even when applying to graduate school, what tips you to psychology? Other than the lawyer saying, this isn't for you, it's not for anyone. My randomly assigned freshman year college roommate is still one of my best friends, and he's smarter than me. He was one of those people, even in college, he had it figured out. He was probably the firstborn. Yeah. Oldest of three, totally. And he applied to PhD programs in psychology. And I was like, I don't know what I want to do. So I applied also. That is the actual...

true reason why I applied is that I was like, this guy is going places. He's a professor at Tufts now, actually. I was like, he's going places. Maybe I'll just do what he's doing, at least for a little while and see it. And then what was the master's in? Also psychology. So once you get into your PhD program, you're getting, I'm imagining a much more specific...

thread of psychology and what was that? Social psychology, which used to be the study of groups, but it ends up being really just how people think. That was just really fascinating for me. What's going on in social interactions, but also just full stop, what's going on with the humans. Yeah, because throwing social in there makes me confused. Like, are we talking about a hybrid of sociology and psychology? Kind of, yep. Far from clinical. I think I would be very bad as a therapist. And so it was more the academic side.

And did you want to run experiments? Oh my God, I did. It's very fun to design experiments and see how people react. That's just the most fun thing in the world. Yeah, what was one you did in your doctoral pursuit? We created a game. You know the Guess Who game? Yes. Where you're like, do they have a hat on? That kind of thing. It's a great game. We were studying...

racism at the time and we made a version of that where we made new faces for the game and we varied the age and the race and the gender of the people in the game and we saw how people played the game and basically people will say is the person old or young that's fine the hair color's fine eye color's fine no one would ever say is the person black or is the person really you're

They avoided it completely. And we did it so you made money if you won the game. And people were like, I'm good. I don't think I need to say that. And so we were really thinking about it's difficult to have conversations about race. And this is even one step before, which is you can't even say the word. How can you have a conversation if you can't even use the word to begin with? Wow. Well, I'm also thinking of a lot of kind of ancillary or contributing factors. One is they know they're being observed, right? So if they're at home playing with their wife, they would have said...

are they black? So that's interesting. And then also where in the country you are is relevant. There's a million studies within the one study that could have been looked at, right? It reminds me, we did one where the person you played with was either black or white and they either went first or second.

And what happens is if you're playing with a black partner and they ask about race, then when you go, you ask about it. Because they've shown that it's okay to ask, but they got to go first. But if I'm playing with you and you ask about race, I still am like, I'm still going to stay away from it. Yeah. It's like getting permission from the minority group. Completely. That's so interesting.

What can bleed out of that? Like once you discover that. This was with grownups. We did this to see those dynamics. But then we did a version with little kids. And one thing we can do then is we can see at what age do kids start to realize that they maybe shouldn't say this. Yes. Because if you've ever had a four-year-old, they point at people and say, why does this person, you know, whatever it might be. And so it turns out it's eight to ten-ish where five-year-olds are like, are they black? And eight-year-olds are like, are they wearing a hat? Right.

You know, they'll do anything except. Do they not have to apply as much sunblock in the summertime? I'm surprised though that they don't even say, like, I get the inclination to not straight up say, are they black? I'm surprised they don't say, are they white? Because that feels less

scary maybe just but then you've gotten rid of all the black players then you feel guilty but it's still a way no it's just the way to figure that out without calling out the minority it's actually calling out the majority i'm just surprised i guess that wasn't even on the table completely it's funny i noticed my 11 year old has a lot of interesting things so like we were just at a restaurant and i didn't see the child but she said as this little girl left the dining room at

the hotel oh did you see that little girl that's going to Swifty and I go no and she goes yes beautiful girl and I was like this is so weird she's never commented on a girl being beautiful and so now I'm like I gotta figure out what you know she's saying I'll spare you all the many steps before it was a girl with like a shaved head from going through cancer treatment clearly and she was in a wheelchair and

And my daughter was being so kind, but it was funny how she just kind of instinctually or innately decided she didn't want to say the girl with cancer. Right. She was rooting for her. She wanted to say how beautiful she looked. It's sweet, but I know what you mean. It's really... Opaque. Beating around the bushes to what she really wants to ask or talk about, probably. Yes. And then some other weird cultural pressure, too. I think the most honest thing would be like...

I saw a little girl and I'm so sad she has cancer. I'm glad she's at this Taylor Swift concert. I'm glad she's having fun. Yeah, but there's something about just saying, I saw this, it was sad, I feel bad, that for some reason you're not supposed to say. But you could. It kind of focuses the thing on you and your feelings about things rather than, you know, the other person.

We just had an experience. This is a total brag. I'm going to virtue signal. And you wrote about humble bragging. I mean, you just bragged about your daughter, so you mean this is another brag? Okay, I'm just checking where we are. How many were the B, I guess, is what I need to know. Okay, we're at this restaurant we eat at all the time. And on Wednesday nights, they have Drag Queen Bingo.

So we're sitting there and it's just me and my two girls and the drag queens are setting up and then the littler one goes to the bathroom and the older one says to me, Delta knows not to point, right? I said, I don't know if she does or not, but drag queens in particular, they put on a show. They want attention. They might not mind pointing. And then it became this kind of, should I be calling her she or not? And I said, well, this is tricky. Now the eight-year-old's back. I'm like, drag queens aren't necessarily trans. So just because this current drag queen is a she doesn't mean she identifies as a she. I

I'm about midway through. And now, of course, I'm now guessing at a lot of stuff. So the drag queen walks by and I go, excuse me, we're so interested in the drag queen, bingo. And we would love if we could ask you some questions. And the drag queen was like, oh my God, I'd love to. Sits down. And now there's just two little kids. And it's like, how'd this start? This drag queen knew the history from the 1600s. Then we get a Stonewall education. And then she's not a she when she's not, you know. And the

And the drag queen was delighted. We were delighted. And I just thought like, God, I wish that was easier for folks to do because everyone was delighted. People usually respond well to genuine curiosity. Exactly. You can read intention. Yes. These two kids, they just have real questions. Humble bragging. How did you end up? No, no, that's too far ahead. How do you end up at a business school? You have this in common with Adam Grant, right? So he's organizational psychologist, teaches at a business school.

How do you end up teaching business administration? It seems like they just hire bald white men. Okay. Just me and Adam Grant. There doesn't seem to be a type. I got a PhD in psychology. The normal thing would be to go and be a psychology professor. I was not super interested in that.

for various reasons and I quit academia after I got my PhD for a little bit then found that I was completely unemployable with a PhD in psychology. Right. And so I came back and was at MIT for a little bit at the Media Lab at MIT which is a super weird, fun, cool place. Technology and social life completely broadly defined meaning

voting machines and online dating and artificial limbs totally blew my mind to be there. That hooked me back on academia. And then I applied for at least a hundred jobs all over the country and world. And I got one job offer. Wow.

Wow. And it was from Harvard Business School. And so people are like, well, why did you choose Harvard Business School? And I'm like, that was it. I was either unemployed. So I wasn't like, I got to go to a business school. It kind of happened a little bit randomly. And then it turned out to be great. Well, it really shatters my fantasy of how Harvard's selecting people. My thought is like they have 6,000 applicants. Every professor in the country wants to work there. Yeah. And then they sift through and

whittle it down, but no, they grabbed you. No one else wanted you. That's so interesting. It's fascinating. I've asked the people who hired me and they're not sure what happened. Yeah, they don't know either. They really don't. I mean, they like me now, but they go, what process were we using where this guy, I was in the marketing group. They're like, he doesn't know anything about marketing at all, which is true to this day. Now, one thing that seems kind of new, tell me the history. It does seem that as corporations got more and more methodical, I guess you have like

Welch, what's his name? The old GE. Jack Welch. He's applying like a system that's really, really fleshed out and thoughtful. And I imagine they're starting to think of new ways to get more out of businesses. And obviously culture starts to become something they think about. And then at that point, I guess it's the gateway to let's invite psychology into this. What is the history of that? Exactly. Always companies have brought in

social scientists very broadly, but I think the testing and experimentation that really became huge in the 90s, but really even more the 2000s, business schools and companies thought we should get some people who do that because we can learn things from them. Their incentive at that point is they might be able to select in the interview process through a personality test, something that could reap rewards. There's all kinds of ways. Designing opportunities

product services, advertising for customers. Testing is really, really great because rather than just put an ad out, you make four and you test them and then you say, oh, that's the one that works. Let's use that one and save a lot of money. So it really became, at many companies, a culture of experimentation. And the internet, which I'm not sure if you've heard of, but the internet allows experiments at huge scale.

So Google does hundreds of experiments all the time. They just very little things about the website. We're not even sure what they're doing to us, but they're just checking. What do people click? What do people not click? Let's rigorously test all these different options and see what we learn. Yeah. I remember hearing an NPR or some podcasts talking about how Facebook had originally, when you wanted to ask for a photo to be taken down that you were in, it had a dropdown menu and it said, it's not me. There's all these things. One of them, I'm embarrassed.

- Amazing. - And no one ever checked it, and then there was other, and they would write in there,

It's embarrassing. And they figured out that if they change it from I'm embarrassed to it's objectively embarrassing, that all of a sudden people click that. So that's like a social experiment. No one even designed. It was a total accident. But again, talk about the scale of it. And someone had to have that insight to make the change, right? Right. That this word and then they could probably reverse engineer all these other things they had had. Yeah. People don't like to say they're a type of person. And it's vulnerable to say I'm embarrassed to say it's embarrassing is not. Yeah. That's just the facts. Yeah.

The facts are that's an embarrassing photo. Any reasonable person would say that. Okay, so what particular skill of yours that you picked up in psychology did you bring to this history of running lots of experiments? Yeah, the projects that we do are all over the place in a sense. There's some themes to them, but we really look at all sorts of different stuff, which is why the job is super fun, actually. But the real thing was trying to cultivate observing the humans. That's the skill that people like me have, where you can look at what people are doing and

get something out of it that somebody else wouldn't notice. And then you do a little research to kind of figure out what's going on under the hood. Okay, so let's be very frank. How confident are you, though, that our social science experiments are really yielding much? I've become more and more skeptical over the years, to be honest. In some domains, they have a big impact. And in other domains, they might not move the needle that much.

For me, what's interesting is the learning from them. In my lab, I train my students to look at the humans as though you're an alien. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And observe what the humans are up to and try to take that mindset about it as if they're ants or something. That sounds insane, but just to really have an outsider view of them, it's a skill that you need to develop. It's not a natural habit of mind. Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, the people who are amazing at this,

One of the things they're amazing at is they look and they say, aha, I know what's going on there. Right. Feel free to add this. We have the same analogy. Monica and I talk all the time about the aliens, but we always say the aliens are watching the monkeys. Because if you even start calling us monkeys, it gets even more objective. We were overlooking a wedding. Yeah.

At a hotel, and we're on our balcony, like six of us watching this great wedding. And I said, oh, the aliens like when the monkeys do this. The monkeys come from all over the country in their little boxes, and then they sit in a row, and then the monkeys cry. Mine was, I lived right next to the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston. At a certain day every year, usually in March or April, suddenly people emerge from their homes.

with new weird clothing on and they run to the river and run around in a circle on the river and then go back in their house and they do it like in lockstep. You'd be like, this must be some powerful religious ceremony that affirms their faith in something. Well, an anthropologist would definitely conclude it was rites of spring. We're blessing the coming crops. And these people are like, I look terrible after the winter. I gotta get out there. I always think of the aliens watching a football game except

Some of these monkeys are running into each other and then all these other monkeys are cheering.

So many of the monkeys don't participate in this thing. In fact, it seems to be 99,000 to 12. And most of the time, nothing's happening at all. How did you land on humble bragging? This is a great thing to expose. If you start to notice humble bragging in yourself, by the way, I'm never pointing fingers at anybody else. It's always something I do also. It's just the most common thing that people do. And we're studying bragging, actually, because we don't like to brag, but we like to say positive things about ourselves.

So the question is, how do you do that without looking like a jerk? And people think that humble bragging is a nice way to do it. You get away with it. And in fact, it makes people so, so angry when you do it. Well, now it's two things, right? It's deception and bragging. Completely. And in fact, we like people better who just brag. Oh, wow. That's interesting. Than humble brag. At least they're being genuine. I think I'm amazing is better than I'm amazing, but I'm not going to admit.

And for my trigger, yeah, like I'm going to deceive you into thinking it occurred to you I'm amazing. So there's a nefarious plot afoot as well. The example that really got us onto it actually was a celebrity said, by the way, if ever you see someone say ugh, whatever comes after that is a humble brag. UGH, they say ugh. This person said, ugh, my hand is so sore from signing so many autographs. Oh!

And we thought, what is... So there's actually, there's the humble brag and then there's the complaint brag. These are the complaint kind. The victimhood. A model was like, oh, I'm just no makeup and sweats and everybody's still hitting on me. Look for the hug. I think I might be guilty of the complaint brag. The victim-y.

Yeah. It's hard to know. I think you mainly just straight up brag. I try to because I do think it's more offensive to humble brag. Yeah. When you were saying that, I think I have been complaining about something, but implicit in it that I was doing something spectacular. Right. I think you do. It's not because of a brag, though. You're trying to maybe subconsciously, you feel bad that what you're doing is actually spectacular. So you're trying to make it not so bad.

That's how I... It's like, there's something bad about this. Don't worry. That's how I've explained it. Like, I got a really nice car once and some people knew. And when they would ask me about the car, my first thing is I would say like, oh my God, you have to put this fucking clear coat over it. Or maintenance or something. And it costs so much money. And that's just because I feel very guilty I have the car and they don't. Completely. Yeah.

One version I love is when a band or any artist gets popular, their second or third album, many of the songs are about how difficult it is to be so famous. And it's like an industry-wide humblebrag where you only have an album about how hard it is to be famous if you're famous. You know, that's so hard to be on the road. We played 80 gigs. Well, that's kind of a humblebrag. Yeah, but you know what? It's also true. This one's true. Totally. Like, I don't think it's ever what people thought it was going to be. And you're kind of like not allowed to say that. See, if they went straight to it and go like, look, I really wanted this.

more than anybody. I cheated. I stepped in front of people in line. I was unethical and I got it and I don't like it. Would that be okay? As long as you owned a lot of your shittiness along the way. I made a huge mistake. Does this interest in humble bragging? It must be the direct result of Twitter. Actually, there was a book on humble bragging and now I forget the comedian's name and he passed away actually, which is sort of tragic.

But he also just collected off of Twitter. I think the book is called either Humblebrag or Humblebrag and totally worth. Oh, was it? I remember that. I wish I could remember his name. Harris Whittles. Harris Whittles. Harris Whittles. And he wrote on Parks. He did. Yeah. But a brilliant book. Very funny. He was so funny. And do we hope by exposing it? Well, to bring up to speed, I have an anthropology degree.

So I'm not quick to judge what we do. I think like, oh, I wonder what this is servicing. So like gossiping, this is kind of well studied in anthropology. And there's so many great aspects of gossiping. It's kind of how we keep systems of power in check. And so this is a part of gossiping. I like it's like we can shame people into gross behavior. We think is we got to get rid of or pair out.

And is that what we're doing by exposing it? It's funny. There's a psychologist named Tom Gilovich, who's an amazing psychologist, also the nicest person in the world. So he shows silly things that people do all the time. But you always feel with him that he's rooting for them. Right.

right and i try to take that from him which is of course we're completely ridiculous and by we all of us and everyone that's never pointing fingers it's not bad it's just look at this guy doing this thing again you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah and you might not want to change it but you see it now you might make some different decisions in certain places yeah and just try to skin the cat a different way ultimately because also this is very cultural right this isn't the same in japan as it is here but

But we are selling ourselves. To your point, like you want to tell people good things about yourself. Because we're like any other item in this commodified capitalist thing. We're a product. And increasingly so on the internet. The best way to do it, by the way, not my research, but research shows is just to have somebody else say it about you. Yes. It's a brilliant workaround. In fact, people will pair off and say, I'll say nice things about you if you say nice things about me in the meeting. And then we can get something going with the boss. I say to my daughter all the time, I'm like,

Let people brag for you. It'll happen. Trust me. You're doing spectacular stuff and it'll happen. Yeah, I just went on a double date. It was a double blind date. Everyone. Double blind trial. No, so it was like me and my friend. Okay. And then. Everyone. Everyone.

Yeah, no one knew each other. That would be incredible. It took like an hour and a half just to find out who was who. Yeah. Exactly. I'm sorry, were we paired up? Well, that was kind of confusing. But anyway, so my friend was getting set up with this person. It was a blind date. And she told him, I'm going to bring my single friend. You should bring a single friend too. So this is how it all happened. Mm-hmm.

My main takeaway was, oh man, it's so much easier to talk about yourself because you don't have to. Because I was like talking about my friend and telling them, oh, Liz has a book. She's so good. And then I was like trying to tell this story. And I was like, oh, I was in India. And they're like, why are you in India? And I was like, oh,

Liz was like, she was with Bill Gates. Amazing. And I was like, oh boy, yeah, I could never have said that. But I also wanted it said. Of course. So it was kind of a good hack. It's like a hype man right next to you at dinner. It's amazing. We all need that. It was good. Okay, so you tackle in this book

From habit to ritual, you're talking and exploring ritual. And I think what's maybe most interesting from the jump is that you were skeptical of ritual. Completely. Now I know that you're an anthropologist. We'll have to. That's our stock and trade is ritual. Because it's what we're doing all the time.

the time and we're doing a ritual right now. I started studying them because I thought they were fascinating. What ones piqued your interest to get you on the path? What was the gateway ritual? One of the first things was I just came across this, I told you I was a nerd, an infographic, which really struck me. Had me hard as a rock. Exactly. It completely blew my mind.

But it was a color-coded wheel that had, in different cultures, the color that they used for different things. Like, what's the color for love in all these different countries? And it's red in some, but different in other countries. Always in the red family, though, because of the heart? Not always. And one of them was for grief. Let me guess, Russia was black. Everything was black for Russia. That would be Ireland. To make fun of my own people, everything would be very dark and dim for Ireland. But there was one that was grief.

What's the color for grief? Blue. And there's so many different colors all over the world, including just black and white. When you're in a culture, you say, hey, somebody died. We should get a color, right? And for whatever reason, this group was like, I have some black pants. You know, and it was like a thousand years later, that truly just...

Blew my mind. It is random in a sense, right? Like, how does that happen? And then maybe even within it, informed by the environment, what dyes did they have access to? Royal blue. You see when new colors are available, humans are like, let's use that now. Yeah, that's very special and rare. Wait, so I was wrong about blue. It was black for America. Grief. It depends on the religion, actually. Well, I guess you could split it up, right? What do people wear to the death ceremony? It's black. It's black here. But yes, we associate blue with being blue. Yeah.

But it'd be interesting because that's actually a linguistics thing. Right. We have named that emotion blue. Or did we name it blue because we associate the color? Yeah.

Michael? I wasn't there when they decided. It was a while ago, I think. Some cultures, it's green. It means that it's death, but it's also life. Oh, that's nice. You might say green, but on the other hand, when you think about what that culture is signifying, it makes perfect sense that you would use green because they view death as differently than someone in another culture. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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You had a life event, though, and I can't imagine it was this infographic. The most impactful thing that happened to me in my entire life was that infographic. I also had a daughter. So I've been studying rituals for a while. In my mind, I wasn't using them. My wife and I had our daughter, and you go to the hospital, and then the child is there, and then they're like, take this home with you.

Yeah. And you're like, can you come with me? And they're like, no. You have to just go to yourself. It's wild. It's extremely, obviously stressful and you're completely incompetent. You had like 36 hours where they teach you how to operate the thing. And so much information is coming. This comes out of there. This comes out of there. This is merconium. This will pass. In three weeks, you're going to see this kind of turd. This is going to shrivel up eventually. Don't worry about it. Yeah. And now when are we supposed to feed it people food? Yeah.

11 months-ish. Nobody knows. Avocado? That was stressful. It seems fun. Yeah, very stressful. And if you talk to new parents, we are annoyingly talking about sleep all the time. Are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping? How's the sleep? How do you get them to sleep? Is it pacifier? I mean, it's just like a never-ending. And what many people do, if I hadn't had a kid, I would have studied this.

is they develop very elaborate bedtime rituals for their kids. And what my wife and I started doing, but we didn't sit down and say, let's develop a sleep ritual for the child. Well, you probably called it a routine. And then we can get into the nitty gritty of what's the difference. Totally. And what happens with parents is they start small and then it gets more and more elaborate over time. So it's these two books in this room and then you sing this song and I'll sing that song. My daughter had Grey Bunny.

and Brown Bunny. Sure. Sorry, she would say Grey Bun and Brown Bun and both needed to be there but actually Grey Bun was more important than Brown Bun. It was like a hierarchy of stuffies. Typical. You know what I mean? Exactly. Oh my God, the racism starts so young. Exactly.

They extend longer and longer and longer. And if you can't find the bunny, you're panicked. Oh my God, what are we going to do? The baby's never going to sleep. And at some point I realized we completely developed a ritual without knowing it because we had to do it the same way every time. We deeply believed that it would work. If we follow these magical steps and listen to this James Taylor song or whatever it was, she will sleep. What I realized later was I'm not sure that it had anything to do with her sleep.

But it helped us have a sense of control over what was happening with the chaos in our lives. And I think often we think we're doing it for some reason. And in fact, we might be doing it for another need that we have in the moment. You could almost argue all parenting is for yourself under the facade of for them. My daughter just reminded me that we used to say goodnight to the stairs. When we walked up the stairs, I would be carrying her and she would say, goodnight stairs.

And I, as the stairs, would say, good night. And then she would say, what do you need, stairs? I don't know where that came from. I'd be like, I don't need anything. And she'd be like, okay. And then it was bedtime. And I mean, what the, you know, there's no 2,000-year-old text that says, when you bring the child to the bed, make sure the stairs are safe. Engage with the stairs. Anthropomorphize the stairs. You will be forced to play the role of stairs. And then they will sleep perfectly for the rest of their lives.

Oh, you're so bringing me back. And you're right. It grows to a preposterous out of control because you would remember too, Monica. I'm thinking of Atlanta in particular. We had to sing Wheels on the Bus, but there was three extra verses because we had to get Titi in there. Everyone that was in her life also. Oh, that's right. Yeah. The Titi's on the bus. Yeah. The daddy on the bus says, ha, ha, ha. And then that would grow. And then at some point, you're like, man, Wheels on the Bus is like nine.

Nine minutes long. Also, do you remember there was a bath every single night? And then we haven't bathed our kids in years. And we're like, we thought that was so essential. And then one day you're like, oh, it's not part of this routine. I don't need it anymore. Hey, take a shower when you feel dirty, basically. I teach a seminar on rituals, actually, to freshmen. It's one of the first classes they take when they get to Harvard. They're 18-ish years old. I say, your assignment this week is to ask your parents about the bedtime ritual when you were little. And they're like, yeah, I asked my parents. They both started crying. Oh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They knew it beat to beat. They knew the books. The thing I love about that is you can remember what it was like when your kids were little, but these kinds of rituals bring you back, back in a way that's hard to get to otherwise. You're really there with them. When I think about saying goodnight to the stairs, I'm on the stairs with her. And I remember how heavy she was. They really unlock a lot of things for us. And anyway, from skeptic to these are great. They do all this stuff for us. You start thinking about

what direction all these cultural elements move in. When we think of this kind of increasingly thrown away binary paradigm of nature and nurture, and then you look at two people independently coming up with something that everyone else is independently coming up with, right? It's not like you were talking to your friends about like, so hey, how many books are you reading? In what order? And where are you putting the stuffies? Everyone did the same thing. And then you start wondering what direction is it flowing in? It's so fascinating. And it's really no different than

people deciding on black for funerals and white for funerals. It has this sense of everyone is doing it, but the way that it's built up is so variable and so interesting because of that. What's maybe even more interesting is not ever the specifics, but what...

situations or context do we see predictably produce a ritual? And there's a bunch, or at least in anthro we believe there's a bunch. There's tons. Weddings, funerals. Between the ages of 12 and 16, most cultures and religions are like, we should do something. What it is is completely different from each other, but humanly

Humans independently are like, oh, are they already 12? Yeah. Across human history. We should all get together and do a thing. I mean, it's so interesting. They know we're not Maasai. Send out with a spear to kill a lion? Oh, no thanks. I'll stay a boy. There's a culture where you wear a glove of bullet ants. Bullet ants is the most painful sting ever.

Oh! And the rite of passage is to withstand the pain. You know, the variability is so fascinating. We're jumping ahead, but fuck it, we're here. Yeah, rites of passage to me are probably the most fascinating one because, yes, they're something to symbolize the transformation from childhood to adulthood.

And what's insanely common for boys, at least, is these acts of bravery. And like once you learn about them and if you're an anthro and you go through every single known culture, there isn't one without the rite of passage. So you go, oh, these are standard. And then you look at our own modern culture and you go, well, we don't really have anything to offer boys. So every time I see boys doing something insane, I go, what else did you expect? Like they're supposed to go out and hunt a lion or fucking get stung by ants.

Yes, they jumped the bonfire on their bicycle and caught up. You didn't give them any other option. It's almost like dangerous that we don't have any agreed upon rituals. Yeah, and they really do mark, not only you're not a kid anymore, you're a grown up, but in most cultures, and that means you're expected to be a full member of the society, which comes with don't jump your bike over bonfire. You know what I mean? A lot of responsibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think-

losing those can be problematic really. Although I will say, so people often like, I don't do any rituals. I don't have any rituals. And I'm like, have you ever worn a weird robe and a square hat?

and walked across the stage and grabbed a piece of paper and everybody clapped and then you threw your hat in the air and they're like, well, yeah, that's graduation. You don't need to walk across the stage to graduate from college, but we decided that. Yeah, yeah. We need to get the family together and so that it's official that you're no longer that, now you are this. We need some unique costumery. Make it an event. Tassels. Oh,

the pride with which I had that something for honors. You had more tassels than other people. I just strutted around campus. It felt so good. With just the tassels on. Yeah, exactly. Fuck this road. I don't want anyone to get distracted from the tassels. Yeah, we had different colored tassels. Yeah, didn't it feel good? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's amazing, right? Yeah. You know, I'm like, oh, God, a red tassel. Yeah. He's got another white weight. Shit. He's an assassin, dude. What'd he do? Yeah.

5.3 GPA? Where'd that color come from? Okay, so let's first differentiate ritual from habit and maybe compulsion. And then I think I'm interested in the fact that you incorporated a few different disciplines and how they might look at or study ritual. But let's first just say, what is the difference between a habit and a ritual? Can I ask you a very silly, trivial question, both of you? Do you need to go to the bathroom?

That's not trivial. It's do you like me? No, the question is in the morning when you're getting ready or maybe even at night when you're getting ready for bed, do you brush your teeth and then shower or do you shower and then brush your teeth? I love this question. I brush my teeth in the shower. That's disgusting.

I do too. Both of you? That's got to be anomalous, right? It's got to be low percentage that does that. I have told my people that I don't do interviews with people who do that. So I'm not sure how this got through the screener. I think we got enough. We've never had a 20 minute interview. We had that color wheel and all that. Do you know when you started brushing your teeth in the shower? Did you always? Do you know it's a big, huge bummer and I hate to admit it here in front of you.

You know what it is. I'm a guess. I think I adopted it from them. Ah, interesting. I mean, guys, how fucking inefficient do you need to be to be splitting that task up? I think that is what I saw. You're in the shower already covered in water. Brush those teeth. Do you also go to the bathroom in the shower? Number one for sure. And if you don't, you're a liar.

I know one thing about you, and that's you're full of shit. It could happen by accident. I mean, there's no way to know really what's happening. It would be as preposterous as getting out of your shower to urinate. Okay, but before I adopted, I brushed after the shower. And do you know why you did that? I guess it's like that's the end. That would be the last thing before bed. So people who brush their teeth first and then shower, the opposite of that, they think that you're disgusting.

So much judgment. How can you get in the shower with a gross mouth and not have brushed your teeth? If I do this in an audience, first off, half of people do it one way and half do it the other way, which is so weird. And then a tiny percentage, but apparently everyone in this neighborhood doesn't. Holly weird. Everyone in Holly weird. That's right. We've learned something about the culture today, haven't we? The efficiency. My next tweet's going to be like, right?

Wrists so sore from brushing my teeth in the shower. I like it because then everything's done at once. It's very nice. So efficient. Would you do it differently if I asked you to? Or how would it feel if I said, hey, can you separate them?

Tomorrow morning. It's funny because we're cross-pollinating here. But again, maybe I'm lying to myself. It's the efficiency thing. It's like go before, go after. This is a net zero gain or loss of time. But this scenario you're pitching is like... It's like you're asking to take extra time. Another tab. Yeah. So what's so interesting to me is that about half of people are like the two of you. If I say, can you switch the order? You're like, what kind of a question is that? I mean, that's like the dumbest question. And half of people are like, no.

No, like they could never know no one says yes is the point. There's no people who say yes are like you Yeah, sure. I guess carry and do whatever you want, you know, do whatever you feel like because it's efficiency It's like these are things I need to get done. I'm gonna be efficient I got to check them off the list and to me those are a little bit like habits They're things that we gotta do or we want to do but they start to get rituals So if you ask people will you switch and they say no if you say why I

they say, "I would feel weird. I would feel uncomfortable. I would feel off all day." Wow.

because they had to do the opposite order. And so for those people, it's the same task. It's like brushing your teeth. But for them, it's becoming a little bit of a ritual where how they do it starts to matter. I don't mean ritual like people in robes with candles. That's further down the continuum. But even just in that little example, it's got meaning. It's got emotion. There's a right way to do it. Your way is wrong. And it'd be very disruptive

to your emotional core. And the positive side is they say, and when I do it my way, I feel really good. I feel ready to start my day. I feel ready to go. So they're like a risk reward where if you do it your way, it can feel really good. But, you know, kid comes in and interrupts it. You might be worse off because now your ritual has been disrupted. So I don't super identify with that one because it's not a huge thing for me, but you've never met some of the fucking more complicated ritual in the morning than me. So many things have to happen.

One of them would be I brush my teeth after I've drank my first coffee. And then I've got a whole explanation for that. But it's immediately negated by the fact that I'll walk directly in here and have another cup of coffee. But that first cup of coffee would have been disgusting to have if I had already brushed my teeth. It would taste gross. And I'd rather make my teeth dirty than clean them. But then I'm ignoring the fact that five minutes later, I drink another cup of coffee with the clean teeth and it doesn't bother me at all. But in a different place. Yes, different setting. So you left the old coffee and toothbrushing over there. Yeah. And now you're new you over in this other room.

So you get to start over. Attack the day backs is now going to have a coffee. I never even consider the cleanliness of my teeth until nighttime. I can't stop thinking about the brushing teeth, the order. We shouldn't stay here. But if I'm showering in the morning, I do brush my teeth first. But if I'm showering at night, I brush my teeth last. In the shower. If I'm not doing it in the shower. You're being inefficient. If I'm being inefficient, I agree that you want your teeth clean as soon as possible.

Although I do want to push back on your students who said it would be disgusting to enter the shower with a gross mouth. I think they'd be more accurate to say it's gross to exit the shower because you're filthy. To say that you have an issue that one of the parts of your body is dirty as you enter, the whole thing's a mess. It makes no sense at all. Now, I understand if you're like, well, shit, everything's clean, but my mouth is skanky. Right. And I've left. I feel like I didn't really get clean. I'm with you. Yeah. Okay. We clean that up.

I mean, we see couples who haven't realized that they do it differently. And I can see them look at each other like, what the, this whole time? And they really, really care. What kind of a human would ever do it in that order? The other person, of course, same thing. But really quick, because we're contrasting with habit. So some part of the morning routine might be habit and people wouldn't have any kind of, what would be an example of a habit? I think when you're checking off stuff to get done, you know, I mean, even something like putting their shoes on.

Some people, it's like, I put my shoes on every morning. I have to do that to leave the house because that's what you do. And other people are like, let me tell you about how I put my shoes on. Do you have 20 minutes? Yeah. And if you talk to like athletes, they're like, let me tell you about how I put my shoes on. It's just shoes. But for some people, some of the time it gets really built into something that's way more meaningful, way more emotional. That's a good thing if it feels good if you do it, but

It's not always a good thing. Cause if the shoelace breaks, you're like, I'm doomed. The whole day is ruined now because I couldn't do my shoe tying. Oh yeah. Yeah. That part's. Oh man. I'm reminded of, I have such a also cumbersome sleep time ritual because I have a hard time falling asleep. We were,

based in Sedona. I was filming in Flagstaff. We got up there. We went so long and we were going to start so early that basically it was decided, guys, you have to stay in Flagstaff. And I hadn't brought any of my sleep aids. I hadn't brought the thing I listed my book on tape on. I was like, oh, sleep is not going to be possible tonight.

It was like going to the World Series with brand new socks and shoes. Did you at least have Grey Bun with you? I didn't have any of my Snuggies. Oh my God. Oh my God. It was a miracle I went to sleep. I had worked it up into such a discomfort. I hit the bed going like, we're fucked. Completely. And I think that's actually really important because the research we did, it's not that rituals are good.

If you do more of them, that's terrific. And the seven secret rituals that will, you know, it's not that. They're emotional, which can have really positive effects on us. And like in your example, they can really mess with us as well. They're not just great. They're complicated. And we use them all over our lives. And so they play these very strange, interesting, emotional roles. They work both ways because we're offloading our own responsibility in some bizarre way. Right.

We're kind of hiding behind the routine and distancing ourselves from our own responsibility from it. But then that goes the other way. If you don't have it, you will be incapable without it. It's fascinating. Because now you're left to your own devices and that's not good. And we already decided I can't handle it this way.

voodoo I do has to take over. Okay, so you talk to other social psychologists like yourself, and then economists, neuroscientists, and anthropologists. So I'm curious how these different fields think about ritual, and I would love to start with economists. - There are some topics that just

Everyone interested in humans eventually stumbles on and rituals are for sure one of them. And then the way you study it is very, very different from discipline to discipline and almost the orientation. Speaking of, are you rooting for the humans or are you trying to show they're making mistakes? You could study rituals to say, what are people doing this crazy? We're irrational. That would be the thrust of that. Right. And you're wasting effort. You're wasting time.

And then, of course, another view is if everybody's doing these things all the time, they must be doing something for them. Let's understand it rather than say it's good or bad. Behavioral economics, which is something that I dabble in a bit, sometimes the lens there is, is it rational or not? And that can be very useful if you're saving in the wrong savings account. We can just say don't.

Yeah. Go over there because it's going to be better for you. But most of life is not. A lot of these economic models and tests play these games where if ultimately they lose or it's a disadvantage to themselves, it's kind of easy to observe. And we would label that irrational because it's against their best interests. Right. But unclear. I mean, compared to what? If I had done a study where I showed that the way to fall asleep

immediately was to snap twice and you were like no no what i like to do is these 19 things i would say you know what you should do snap twice it works for everybody but most things for humans we don't have the snap twice compared to what are these rituals a waste of time or irrational or whatever else because we don't have

the solution in place that would solve it, often that's when we turn to these kinds of practices. Nor do we generally have a great control group who's not doing any rituals and measuring the outcome of their actions. There's no human that's never taken place in at least one ritual. It's just impossible to avoid. Involuntarily, they arrived and someone handed someone a cigar. It's tough shit. You're part of a ritual. Completely. Okay, so the economists, where would they tend to... There's a paper that I love and I forget the...

Author because I'm terrible, but we'll find it. But they look to see the frequency of rain dances, of rain rituals in cultures. And so what they're trying to see is what are the conditions under which these emerge? Because rain rituals have occurred spontaneously in cultures over human history. It's not like one came up with it and other people were like, let's do that. And of course, from one viewpoint,

What the, because that does not make it rain. So why would all of these different groups? So again, like one viewpoint, what a waste of time. But what you see actually is that one of the predictors of whether these emerge or not is if you live in a region, not that has drought, but that has unpredictable drought.

That's the key. And if you think about unpredictable drought, where society is fraying, everybody starts looking out for themselves. What are you supposed to do? If we had a thing where we could shoot at the sky and make it rain, I'd be like, hey, you know what you should do? Yeah, yeah. Fire the cannon. To make it rain. It's easy to do. But we don't have it. And so you see these things emerge. It's not going to make it rain, probably. But when social fabric is fraying...

How do we stay together as a group? Well, we've been doing this rain ritual for like a thousand years. Our grandparents didn't remember that. It shows you two things. One is we have a shared history. And also, they got through it doing this as well. It's possible to get through this period and stay together. So they're wrong in a very narrow sense of there's not rain coming from it. But they're perfectly rational to try to think about, well, how do we solve this problem that the weather has caused in our group? Right.

And it's an antidote to the selfish compulsion during scarce resources. It forces them to be communal at a time when they're probably inclined to be every man for themselves. Exactly. What do we have in common? Not to get too voodoo-y about it, but I think they all do do something. Yes, they might not be answering the thing that they expressively are trying to, but they are answering something. Even our parenting, our sleep rituals, it's not clear they were helping the kids sleep.

But sure, we're doing something for us when we were going through it. Yeah. But they get sucked into it and it is all comforting because they know what's coming next.

And the world is full of uncertainty. And just knowing what comes next is very pacifying. Well, control in a world that there is none. There's this super old study, B.F. Skinner, who was a psychologist who founded behaviorism as a field. He studied pigeons and reward. You know, how do you reinforce the behavior and make pigeons more or less likely to do it? And mainly he did, you know, if you click the thing six times to get a treat, does that work better than clicking five times? I'm saying this dismissively. The guy's like a legend. He has amazing research. He's got a clicker, dumb pigeons, and...

They deserved each other. Exactly. But he did this one experiment where there was like a food box with knobs and levers on it and stuff. And so you could train the pigeons to turn that one and click that to get a treat.

And what he did in this particular case was he made it so that none of the knobs or levers did anything. The food just came out randomly. Oh, Jesus. What a mindfuck for these pigeons. What you should do is not do anything. In other words, if it's coming out randomly, don't bother with the levers. And what do even pigeons do? They're like, you know what makes the food come out? When I tap that three times and I turn that lever twice, that's when the food comes. And each pigeon...

comes up with their own. So even pigeons are looking for control. Superstition. Over something that they have no control over. But also they're drawing a spurious conclusion because it does come out once and whatever preceded that becomes it, irregardless of how successful it is in the future. We have a very hard time updating because we think at least it worked the one time. You know what people do?

So you do it again and it doesn't work. And they say, I must have done it wrong. Exactly. Blame yourself. Let me do it again. I have a friend who's a fellow addict. We were sitting around talking about all the insane things we've been addicted to that aren't even addictive. We both had a Hall's menoliptus phase where we're eating the family size bags of Hall's. And he said, listen to me, man. One day I took two Motrin and had a Diet Coke and I felt fucking perfect.

And for the next five years, I had two Motrin and a Diet Coke. Never did feel like that again, but I just kept at it. Just in case. It's very core to the addictive brain, I think.

You know, I had a student who was an athlete and she went one step further. So she had her ritual that she would do. I think she was a runner, actually. So before a race, she had her thing with the tying shoes. And she said, sometimes what I do is I purposely do one of the steps slightly wrong. And that way, if I lose, I can blame it on the fact that I did it wrong. Oh, wow.

I mean, if you think about the psychology of what we're doing with rituals, I mean, that is like third level thinking. And yet it kind of makes sense. Yeah, but Jordan would be furious. She built in an excuse to lose. Maybe she was less confident in that specific race. You know, it's all subconscious. It's like, I might not win here, so I can't handle that. Or she built in an explanation for failure that relieved enough pressure that she performed better.

Who knows? And then how about neuroscientists? What have they seen? If you look at the research on, you mentioned compulsions earlier, and that's a case where, again, many people have studied compulsions because they're so ubiquitous in what humans are up to. But that's a place where neuroscientists, clinical psychologists have used their methods to try to figure out what are compulsions? What's the neuroanatomy of them? Why do they develop? How do we try to break out of those compulsions? Fascinating research and very difficult research.

as we all know to stop a compulsion once it started,

And I think speaking of rituals aren't just good or bad, but the other version of rituals, of course, is you're trying to use them for control over a situation. They can come to control you. Eating disorders. Completely. Often what you're doing a ritual for is in the service of something else. I'm doing my shoe tying thing so that I'll do well in the race. I'm doing the sleep thing in order that the baby will sleep. And even something like, you know, every time I leave in the morning, I double check to make sure the door is locked. You're doing that in order to then go to work and have a good day.

What happens with compulsion sometimes is you lose the link between the behavior and the in order to, and you get stuck on the behavior. So you're not checking the lock again so that you can go to work and have a nice day. You're checking the lock so that you are checking the lock. And one of the ways to diagnose it, of course, is if it starts to interfere with other goals. We all have compulsions, of course, but if they don't interfere with other things in life, we tend to say...

That's an okay one. But as soon as they start to get in the way of other things, that's when we might say that maybe has gone too far. I mean, even athletes, you know, if they kept doing their ritual through the entire game, they'd lose the game. We're aware as humans, you got to do them in a time and place in order to do the other thing you wanted to do. But we're very sometimes quick to lose things.

the link and get in this other path the leak had to just step in actually funnily enough this is good timing right like i guess i don't follow baseball but i am told two years ago they enacted the pitcher can only freak out on the mound for like 20 seconds now they finally put a time limit on it like how many times they can like yeah look over there all the shit they do and it got so insane some people's thing was you know 45 seconds between pitch and they said you got to tighten this up

And the game started moving way faster. So being outside Boston, Nomar Garciaparra was a player for the Sox. And just Google him. He had an insane, not before every at-bat, before every pitch, step out,

batting gloves, tapping, I mean, you know, like a whole, whole thing. Now then he went in and he was an amazing player. So you're like, cool. Yeah, don't argue with the results. Whatever you need to do, man, because you're amazing. But at some point it's like, that's taking much, much too long. There's an interesting psychological experiment there though, too, which is we have a tolerance for it if it produces great batting.

But if you're the worst batter on the team and you're doing that, people go, fuck this. They'd start yelling at you. Get it together, Michaels. We have a different tolerance based on outcome. It's strange, isn't it? That we just allow it. Yes. Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams have pre-serve rituals that are very, very complicated. Yeah.

And we're like, oh, that's cool. But if I did that before I started teaching a class, people would be like, you're not allowed. This isn't that hard, man. If your Uber driver connected and disconnected his or her seatbelt 17 times. Not to mention these rituals are also used for intimidation. As soon as Serena starts doing her thing, whoever the opponent is, is like, oh,

No. You hope she fucks up her routine. Yeah, you're like, oh my God, here it is. Like, it's happening and she's going to go do her thing now. I'm doomed. I'm doomed. The haka's the best one. Yeah. It's totally organized in rugby. Did you study the haka? Yeah. The New Zealand All Blacks do the haka before their games. Very synchronized, very loud, very...

menacing, very intimidating. If you watch Braveheart before the battle started, you'd do the exact same thing to freak out the other side. They're doing it in a slightly less deadly profession of rugby, but it really has an impact on us. Just like Serena Williams as an individual, you think, here they come. Yeah.

I happened to be making a movie in New Zealand for a few months and the All Blacks were really dominant at that time and I got super sucked in. I watched every single game. And what I found is what was great is that the opposing team is out there on the field. And when it first starts, they're all almost unanimously like, this is so silly. Look at these idiots. And then by the end, it has worked. They're like, these fuckers are psycho. Yeah.

And then the best is when they play Fiji because they do the haka too. Oh, yeah. You're just terrified watching them scream. So good. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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So the neuroscientists, have they had someone in an fMRI? I guess you can't be actively doing your ritual, but then also be in an fMRI. Has the brain been observed in states of ritual? Yeah, we've done some research on kind of the underpinnings of ritual. So for example, this is actually in a group context. We can give people a brand new ritual to do.

And we say, do this for a week. It's a little bit like the haka, clapping and stomping. And then we bring them into the lab and we have them observe other people. And if they observe someone who's doing the same ritual as them, they're like, I like that guy. And we're like, hey, you want to share money, trust them, stuff like that? Yeah, sure do. But if they see somebody doing a different one, they're like, I don't like that guy. Just because of the ritual. And

And what we see actually when we use EEG is that when you see somebody doing a ritual that's different from yours, one of the regions that gets activated is the region associated with punishment. So like at a very basic level, if you're doing the thing wrong, meaning just different from me, I'm at a very basic level like,

Get him. We made these up on purpose. So you can imagine with cultural history, when you're doing it wrong, it's not just like, I don't want to share the money in the lab. You can see how it gets to be so extreme. Well, this would be a great opportunity for you to tell us about the link between identity and ritual, because that's also what's happening, right?

Their ritual is now out-grouped. And it's so fast. Sometimes when I give a talk, if I can divide the room so that one side of the room sees one screen and the other side sees another screen, and there's a barrier in between, so they don't know that the other side's seeing something different. It's like clap three times, stomp three times. It's a ritual. So I say, hey, everybody stand up and let's get going. You start clapping and stomping and you synchronize with the people around you, because obviously we're cool, but

But you can hear on the other side, you can't see them, but you can hear them doing the same thing as you for a while. So you can hear them clapping and stomping and standing, but you think, oh my God, those people are great over there on the other side of the barrier. And then of course, what I do is I give different instructions. At some point, we yell one thing and then you hear them yell the other thing. And what people on both sides do is they look at the barrier in disgust. They're doing it wrong. And I say, what's wrong? And they say, they messed up. They're doing it wrong. And I say, doing what wrong? You've never done this before in your life. And right there, they say. Oof.

And it's not steps towards anything predictable. At the end of this, sometimes the last steps, I'll have people put their hands in the air and yell, let's go. And then louder, let's go. And then louder, let's go. By the end, they're standing with their hands in the air, screaming, let's go. And then I just...

look at them and they look at themselves like what just happened i have the feeling that if i ran out of the room they would come right with me yeah and here we go something you've completely organized them they're all on the same page they can work as a unit and now you have no task and it's a made-up ritual and i'm just some nerd professor if you think of the emotion that you're getting in that group from these very in a sense trivial things yeah so anthropologists obviously have been on this from the get-go so what were you learning from anthropologists

The variability. So if you think about rituals today, if the only rituals we could do are ones that have a long history, then we're a little constrained. I mean, imagine a ritual has to be around for 500 years or it doesn't do anything for you. Then they'd still be incredibly important in our lives, but we wouldn't be able to use them and make up our own.

And so when you see the variability across history, even the color of grief, it means that different humans at different times came up with them. They're not from somewhere, they're from us. And from that in anthropology, what I took was, I wonder if people make up their own all the time. That we think of rituals as the wedding and the funeral and religious and those rituals...

play incredibly important roles in our lives. I don't mean to dismiss them, but I got interested in the, oh my God, people are completely freelancing this stuff all the time. There's no history. There's no anything. They're just very creatively coming up with them. And that kind of got me on my way of studying, which was more like at an individual level as a psychologist, what are people doing and how does this impact them?

Well, what it says to me is that we are very hardwired and evolutionarily incentivized to have them. And so the software is there and then we just do it all the time. I'm not an anthropologist, so please correct me. But one of the ways that you can determine if a group of early humans had a culture is evolution.

by the burial site. So like dinosaurs didn't have a ceremony, just bones all over the place. Humans at some point, when you uncover a grave, it's very carefully laid out. There's sacred objects placed very carefully around it. And you say this group of people obviously cared about each other in a different way. So it's the remnants of the ritual that tell us that there was a culture there. That's how...

deep I think rituals are in us. That's also why some zoologists have argued that elephants have culture, right? Because they have these burial sites and they go play with the bones and they reminisce. Yep. They often stand in a circle and make sad noises in unison. Yeah.

Which a lot of human funerals were kind of standing in a group and making sad noise. You know, I mean, it's strikingly similar. If you're a woman, you're allowed to. Oh my God. Don't you dare if you're a woman making sad noises. Do you mean a woman elephant or a human? That'd be great if we called female elephants women. Women elephants.

What is emo diversity? This is something we started to study a few years ago. So I used to study happiness. We did lots of research for many years on how to help people be happier over the course of their day, mainly with spending their money differently. The

biggest insight was just if you spend money on yourself, it's not bad. It just doesn't do much for you. If you spend money on other people, it tends to result in more happiness. And we did things like $5. You know, if you're a billionaire and you give all your money away, we're not studying that. We're studying people with small amounts of money and got very interested in like, what could you do today?

to change your happiness over the course of the day. But at some point, happiness is kind of limited. We all want to be happy. But if you were a perfect 10 happy every minute of every day of your life, I don't know if that's an amazing life or like a really...

one note kind of life. And we started to think about it's the richness of emotions. It's the diversity of emotions, the variety of emotions. That's what make life interesting. We got a little hung up on happiness for a while. And then the Kahneman work is really interesting too, because if you're asking people hour to hour in their day, it'll have,

one measure of happiness and then in their narrative selves reflecting it's a completely different number so you got to figure out too which one of these were even servicing what's one more important is the other tricky thing and increasingly we're thinking the narrative so i feel like that's where the winds are blowing purpose and sacrifice and all these kinds of things yeah so specifically this emo diversity it's incorporating other metrics to evaluate if you think of

biodiversity on an island, what you do is you kind of count the number of species and their relative abundance. If there's nine million snakes and one rat, not good. They're in trouble. I see a collapse. So you need the balance of these things. So we use the same metric, but we use it on emotions in your mind. So if you think of joy and sadness and fear and anger and happiness and all of these things, we count the number of them and then their relative abundance.

abundance. And what we see is that same metric predicts actually your feeling about your life overall. It's true that having a happy day is good, but we learn and grow often through different emotions than that. We learn fear and overcoming fear and sadness makes us grow in ways that are quite different. Just this idea that we should be thinking more about the mix.

If we think about having a rich and interesting life, less about the one note, we go to see horror movies, which is super weird in one sense. Like, why would we just add fear? Well, I think it's related, right? We want this diversity of experiences in our lives. Yeah. I've been trying to brainwash my daughters when they have a nightmare or they're afraid of something. I say, you know, the gift of a nightmare is it tells you what you care about. You are afraid we're going to get divorced. That means you really like having a mom and dad.

That's kind of sweet. It can be a roadmap to what you really value. It's useful. There's amazing research on the nightmares of kids as a function of their age. That's super predictable. Oh, like they go through nightmare phases? Yeah. So at a certain point, they're like, someone's going to break in the house. Monica stayed a long time there. Oh, yeah. I pretty much still...

I haven't really grown out of it. You have some arrested development in that. But also happiness exists because of the others and the others exist because, like, I don't think you can just even have happiness. What does it even mean?

It's all relative to each other. Completely. There's a learning and going from one to the other that you don't get if you're just on one or the other. Yeah. To own all my privilege, I was lucky enough to step onto the hedonic treadmill in a way most people can't.

I would say it's a huge luxury, but then ultimately what I figured out is I was at one spectacular place after another. And the fifth cool trip I took in 2022, I was like, oh, all of this is now meaning nothing. I've absolutely spoiled it. And I've got to actively reset, even though I don't have to. I've got to choose to fucking tighten all this up and make things special again.

There's this research by Liz Dunn and Jordi Kooidbak on amazing experiences, basically. And it's a nice problem to have, as you said, but it is a bit of a curse, which is that if you go to Copenhagen and it's your first European city, you're blown away. Yes. But if it's your 19th European city, you're like, huh, that's nice here. I've seen something like this.

So we do have this thing where we get accustomed even to the extraordinary. Yes. Okay, really quick. How do rituals work in relationships and how can they strengthen them? So the funny thing about studying rituals is the way that it unfolded over time was we would be studying them in some domain.

And then we would talk to somebody about it and they would say, "Hey, did you ever look at them in teams?" We said, "No." Then we do a project on teams. "Did you ever look at them in families?" "No, we do a project on that." And at some point, my former student, Jimena Garcia-Rata, who studies decision-making in couples.

Which is, I mean, talk about an amazing goldmine topic. But she said, what about rituals and couples? And of course you say, of course we should. I mean, first off, weddings. But again, it wasn't the received thousand-year-old kind that we liked. It was the kind that people come up with themselves. So we just ask couples. We don't say, do you have a ritual? Because they're like, no, we don't have weird candle ceremonies. But we say, is there something that the two of you do that's special, that you make sure to do every so often, regularly, that's unique to the two of you? About two-thirds to three-quarters of couples say yes.

And then they have the most adorable. One of my favorites is this person said, when we kiss, we always kiss in threes. We've been doing it for 22 years. Oh, that is so cute. And we don't know why it started. And another one that I completely loved is this person said, every time before we start eating, we clink our silverware together. Oh, me.

I like that. The monkeys. Look at the monkeys. That's a good thing the monkeys do. Those two monkeys like each other, and this is how they show it. Do you think part of that is this is our special thing? It's special because we invented it together. So what we see, if you break up with somebody, which happens in life, you might not like it, but they're allowed to date other people. They're allowed to get married. They're allowed to have a family. They're allowed to do all that, but they are not allowed to reuse your ritual. Right.

The rage that people feel. We looked at this. The rage that people feel. Like if you looked over and you saw your ex clinking the fork with the new...

It is such a betrayal of the relationship in a way that's very different than other kinds of things that happen in relationships. So you're exactly right. People say that's us. Yeah, it's an act of creating this shared identity that you have, which is so special because there's a third person in the relationship, which is the relationship. One of the things that is interesting about these is we see that couples that have these report higher relationship satisfaction.

But another thing that they report is a higher sense of commitment to the relationship. So when you get married, there's a ceremony. And then for 50 to 60 years, you're supposed to be with that person. But there's no other wedding. That's over. So what do you do every day to show that you're committed? And you can buy property. You know, I mean, there's stuff we do. You can have a kid, stuff like that. But what we see is that these little rituals, we've been kissing in threes for 22 years. How do we know that we're committed to each other? Well, you know what? We've been doing this thing every day for 22 years without missing a beat.

Yeah. I have a feeling we're going to be doing it for 22 more years. I mean, they really have this very deep resonance for us that is just different from other types of commitments that we might make. Yeah, it's like a tangible commitment. It's not just a theoretical. It's action is what it is. There's this painful episode of This Is Us where Miguel is explaining when he knew his marriage was over. I'm going to butcher the details. I apologize. But he says, every morning I used to bring her coffee in bed. And one morning I just didn't feel like doing it. Mm-hmm.

which is extremely sad. And then he said, but the worst part was she didn't even notice. Ooh. So we're done. It's just coffee. It's just silverware. These aren't big, huge things, but they're everything. They're everything. Yeah. What are the four lessons of relationship rituals? Do you still have them memorized? Who knows? I remember one, at least. You might be shocked how many people I interview that have books and they're like, I don't fuck. I know.

We got to go, Rob. They're like, I wrote this a long time ago. Rob, what are the seven principles they said? It must be fun. You can just mess with people like, well, tell me the story about something. Yeah. It's not the book. No, I'm glad you asked about that. You write in here of Tabitha and her rabbit. What happened with her? Funny story about Tabitha. Yeah. One of them is very related to what we were just talking about. So we asked couples, we can interview them separately.

And we can say, do you have something special that you do? And then the other one would say, do you have something special that you do? And most couples agree. So they'll say, yes, we do. And then they'll tell you, we clink silverware. Some couples don't have them, but they agree. They say, no, we don't have anything like that. The saddest couples in the world to me are the ones where one person's like, oh my God, we have this adorable thing that we do all the time where we kiss in threes. And then we go to the other person and they're like, no, we don't have anything like that.

Yeah. So the consensual nature of these is one of the key things in them. It's not that if one of you has it and the other doesn't, you're halfway there. You're nowhere. You've got to create it together and you've got to both endorse it in order for these kinds of effects that we see to emerge. Right. We are talking about the exclusivity one, which is you may not use ours with anybody else. I hadn't really thought about that. Oh, that makes... I get very fixated on things that are just...

mine and somebody's. And if I see it starting to happen other places, I get very upset. Nicknames too, like Schmooper Bear. You know, it's like, you're going to call this new person Schmooper Bear. In fact, when we ask people, do you have a ritual in your current relationship? And then we ask, did you have one in your previous relationship? They're more likely to say they have one in their current one than in the previous one.

Now that could be because they didn't have any with the person and they were doomed, but it could also be they're not willing to admit that they had ritual with this person who they now hate. They've like taken it out of their memory in order to not taint. We had one, but it was fraudulent. I came to learn. Do you guys have one or multiple? I think we have multiple, but they're not as consistent. I don't think as some of these ones you're, I don't know that.

We have daily ones. You should ask your kids. Yeah, they might notice it. When people say, I don't have any rituals, they say, ask your partner, ask your kids, ask your coworkers. And they're like, oh my God, she totally does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a thing for years. And if we travel, we still do it. But we have identical crossword puzzle books.

And we challenge each other to a race and we shake hands and there's a bunch of other words that have to follow it. Good luck to you, buddy. And then we go off and do that. So doing crossword puzzles isn't what makes us closer, affirms our bond, but it's the stupid pageantry, especially if we're seated. I've got one kid on one side of the airplane and we've got to reach across the aisle and do the whole thing. We would never start the crossword without doing that. How would you feel if you looked over and she'd already filled one of them out?

Without telling you, she's got a head start. I would immediately lean over and ask the person next to me, do you have the name of a good divorce attorney? You've observed. I'm sure we have a bunch of them. I'm sure you do. We had a thing too. When we were first dating, we were in Hawaii and we watched this movie that was so terrible. And it was so terrible, but I paused it like 10 minutes in. I said, what do you think of this movie? She goes, it's terrible. And I love it. And I go, me?

- Me too, I can't wait to watch more and it's so bad. And so we declared that date, September 1st is the name of the movie. I'm not gonna say it out loud, but every September 1st was like, it's the blank name of the movie and we had to watch it. - I love it. There's a family that every Christmas, someone's in charge of making a completely disgusting thing that everyone has to eat.

That's the original. So it's not sort of like, let's make a wonderful cake that's delicious. It's let's do our thing, which could be the grossest thing in the world. But, you know, we've been doing it for 20 years or whatever it might be. It's so identity. It's like, we're going to do something that no one else does. Yeah. It's almost specifically and intentionally abnormal because that's what's differentiating you from the family next door. People literally say, I know that there's no other family in the world that's doing this right now. And that's really important to them. I am really...

really susceptible to ritual because I think I have a lot of anxiety so I do think it's about control but also just fun like me and my friend do pig day and it's always the Saturday after Thanksgiving and we get the Christmas tree and we kind of do the same thing every time. Wait I'm sorry you're not going to explain why it's called pig day? Oh sure. Right.

Is this like a thing that's happening in the world? No, we invented it completely. We're the only ones doing it. This is such a silly. We were playing a game and he used to call me babe. And he was trying to get the group to get the word babe. That was the movie. Someone said, you call Monica this. And he was like, pig, which made no sense and was totally random. So then we started calling each other that. So now that's pig day because that's our day together. But I love it.

I love that. I love things like that. We had Christmas Eve Eve McDonald's. We try to commit to eating an insane amount of McDonald's on Christmas Eve Eve. One of my colleagues just told me his wife's parents are immigrants from Russia. And when they came here many years ago, the first place they wanted to go when they came was McDonald's. And so every year they take the whole family to McDonald's. And he said, they don't actually like McDonald's. They don't eat the food anymore. Yeah.

Yes. They just make sure that everybody goes to McDonald's to honor that tradition. So, I mean, the way that they stick and matter so much. Yes. I just want to ask you a couple more from the book. Why should someone never say calm down before going on stage? Speaking of snapping twice and nothing works to try to calm down with anxiety, one of the most common things that people do when they're nervous is they'll say to themselves in their head, calm down. You're like, just calm down. This isn't a big deal.

And what happens when you do that? So if you've ever experienced anxiety, let's say you have to give a presentation or something like that at work and you're anxious about it. You're anxious about the presentation. And then what happens with anxiety, unfortunately, is it starts to spiral. So then you think, you know, if the presentation doesn't go well, I'm probably going to lose my job. If I lose my job, I'll have to get a divorce. I'll probably have to resort to life of crime. I'll probably end up dead. You know what I mean? We really spiral with anxiety all over the place. And telling yourself to calm down

All that does is now you're anxious about the thing and you say calm down and you can't. Now you're anxious about the fact that you can't calm down when you told yourself to calm down. Here comes the spiral. The only thing worse than telling yourself to calm down is telling your partner that they need to calm down. I highly, highly don't recommend. So absolutely, it feels like a good thing to do, which is like, I'm good. But it turns out it can be really, really counterproductive.

I think people think they're one step ahead of it, so they'll just say, take a deep breath. That too can be a very triggering bit of advice. Because if you think this should have worked by now. And I know why they're saying take a deep breath, because I'm clearly panicking and they've observed it. There must be personality types that, my favorite word, over-index in ritual. Is that kind of predictable? We did surveys where we asked people about different domains of life. We even developed a quiz that

people can take where you can see different domains of life, do you do them or not? Like your morning in your relationship and your family at work, you know, you think about all the domains of life. And what's interesting to me is that there don't seem to be ritual people. Oh, okay. In other words, like if I'm somebody who has a really big morning thing that I need to do, if we ask you like, what about your nighttime routine?

Sometimes people are like, oh, I have one of those too. And just as often, they're like, no, I don't need anything at night. I absolutely need to do this incredibly elaborate thing for this purpose. Before meetings, I have to do this thing. And then we're like, what about with your partner? And they're like, no, we don't have anything like that. So it's often domain specific. It's like where you need them. Pragmatic. Is where people bring them to bear. Like if you don't get nervous before a presentation, don't bother with a ritual. You don't need it in that case because you're not nervous. But if you get nervous before a first date, you're not nervous.

Well, then we see people, oh yeah, of course I use them over there. I just don't use them at work. So I do think we're oddly sensitive to the idea that we use them where we think we most need them. So what is the prescriptive message of the book? So we learn all about from habit to ritual, harness the surprising power of everyday actions.

What's the prescriptive element? There's two things. One is just to take an inventory of where they're currently happening in your life already. When I chat with people about rituals, I start out like, I don't do anything like that. And then you keep chatting like, oh yeah, I do that. You recognize them. And then people say, now that I recognize it, it has a little more resonance. When you clink the fork next time, you're like, oh, this is our thing. It shows you what you care about because you're not

doing rituals around shit you don't care about. Exactly. Remembering your bedtime ritual with your kids when they were little is like a very nice thing to do, just taking stock of how they played a role. And then the other thing prescriptively is to experiment with them. If you're not nervous before meetings, I don't think that you should bother experimenting with them. But if you are, I mean, you can take Medicaid. You know, there's lots of ways to deal with anxiety. But because we don't have a magic solution, so many people, when they are anxious, including Serena Williams and all these other people, they turn to these.

why not try them yourself and see if it in fact helps you feel, I feel like I'm more ready to go. So freelance with them a little bit because we can see that they can still have an effect on us even when we make them up ourselves. That means we've got some latitude in using them and trying them out in different domains. It's a cool tool. Really cool.

Well, Michael, this has been really fun. Rituals are cute. I think it's a cute thing the monkeys do. I know. You're right. That's got to be the biggest head scratcher for the aliens watching rituals. I mean, I'm sure we have some here. There must be some work ones that we have that we don't even consider necessarily. I don't know what the line between superstition and ritual is, but.

That building that you walked in front of that's just newly completed was supposed to be a new studio for this show. And Monica was like...

What are we doing trying to monkey with something that has worked so well? And literally, it can't work outside of this room, we've decided. Yeah. Now, Dax has decided to add a door there, and I'm pissed. A door to the bathroom. I really don't like it. Yeah, it's been a big... Well, it hasn't been a big... I've been keeping it to myself. Well, I know about it pretty well. Okay, well, I have kept quiet, but I really don't like it, and I think it's going to ruin everything. Okay.

So good thing you got in now. And again, like what does better mean? Is a nicer building better? Sure, it's better. Is it actually better? Totally unclear if that's actually going to be better. Yeah. Dr. Michael Norton, this has been a blast. I want everyone to check out From Habit to Ritual. Harness the surprising power of everyday actions. And start monkeying around with some rituals and see how it impacts your anxiety and everything else.

I think it's fun. Yeah, I'm actually excited to now be moving through the rest of my week. Looking? Yeah, clocking the rituals I have. Me too. All right, well, thanks for coming. Thank you both. Really appreciate it. Bye. Hi there, this is Hermium Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check with Miss Monica.

How was Father's Day? Oh, man. It was a raging success. Sure. A riling success. Oh, raging. It was a major rager. I'm sore as fuck today. Yeah, you played a lot of games. Yes, it was an all-sports Father's Day at the sports complex of Los Feliz. Yep. It was really, really fun. My brother arrived in town at 1230. Yes. David Robert.

Big bro. And Kevin Zegers came over. Of course, Eric. Of course. Matthew, sweet Matthew. Yeah, father to be. First Father's Day he's celebrating. And then Jake Johnson. Oh, fun. Yeah, I was delighted he accepted the invite because he's not in that little bubble of people. No, either is Zegers. Yeah, in fact, it was a coming together of a few different friendship circles and family. Yeah.

Which of course I get anxiety about. I'm not sure everyone gets along and all that, but it was great. So first up was volleyball. And I know from experience that David and I have to be on the same team.

If we're not on the same team, there'll be a terrible fight. Okay, great. So we've learned through history, we make great teammates and we make terrible opponents. That's nice. Yeah, of the two, if there was like one version we had to have, I'm glad that we have to be teammates. Yeah. So we were teammates and Eric is admittedly the least interested in volleyball. He'll be the first to tell you it's not his sport. Yep. I was like, perfect. We'll put Eric with David and I because we're both fucking ball hogs and we're maniacs. Perfect. Yes.

And then, so Zegers, Matt, and Jake were on a team. None of those three know each other. No, Zeke, oh yeah, wow. Right, I mean, maybe Zegers tangentially knows Jake from bumping into him at events or something from being an actor. But anyways, it was so fun. And they started really gelling as a team by the end. Did you get jealous? They were doing bump setting and spiking. Now, they were fucking that up enough times that I was confirmed, just get it over the net is my policy. Okay.

But I was on fire. I was just running from end of the court, diving, but I had done a workout in the morning that was solely to warm the joints up. So 200 jumping jacks, a lot of lightweight shoulder work. I was wearing two knee braces and a right elbow brace. Oh my God. It looked like I was about to go like 10 goalie for the fucking flyers or something.

And it was great. It doesn't even matter who won two out of three. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter. But listen, were you ever jealous when they were all like,

chatting and laughing. No, no, no. I was really happy because my anxiety was that these people who don't know each other very well are forced to hang out. They became a team and even Jake kept saying, he's like, yeah, it just works. It works. Like you start playing something. Yeah. I don't know. I want to play volleyball. And then first of all, it's just fun moving your body. Then we're joking and then it's competitive. Yeah, exactly. And then the fire took off. That's fun. Yeah. You're not a very jealous person.

Yeah. Which is good. Oh, thank you. I think it's good. I would not want to be a jealous person because I had a...

In high school, I was jealous over girlfriends and I hated it. Yeah. I hated it. What was the worst thing you ever did when you were jealous? You know this story. My girlfriend and I was probably in 12th grade and she was in 11th grade. She went on spring break and a bunch of kids from my school had gone to the same location to Cancun. And you didn't go. I didn't go. No. Because you didn't want to go? No.

I think Aaron and I were going. We had a mission to go to every spring break in the continental USA in one trip. So like we drove a car and we went to Panama City. Then we went to Daytona. Then we went to Virginia Beach. Then we went to Myrtle Beach. Yeah. So we had a whole different game plan. And when she returned, I learned she had slept with a dude in my school. And that is a dude. He was.

Literally the biggest, I think he was the center on the football team. So he was like probably 6'5 and 260. He was enormous. And she was big enough. God bless her. I can't even imagine doing this. Maybe because maybe she had a hunch other people were going to, it was going to get out. Whatever. She got home. I went over to her house and say hi to her. After she got back, she told me I was very cruel to her. You are. So regrettably cruel.

Shamefully cruel. You were a kid and also. I was really hurt by it. Yeah. That's more common than not. Yeah, I just, boy oh boy. It's not who you want to be. It's not who I want to be. It's very regretful. What'd you say? Oh, just all the stuff you say. You're a slutty bitch. I'm not going to commit to those words. Fuck you, slut. Fucking C word. No. I left in a huff. She was crying.

And I drove directly to his house and I was going to knock on the door and punch him. And he's again, enormous. And I got there. I knocked on the door. His father answered. I said, is so-and-so home? He said, no, he should be home in 10 or 15 minutes. I go, okay. I clock in that moment. The dad's also six, seven and enormous. So I sit outside of his house.

his house for 10 minutes and I'm growing crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier and more and more angry. And I know I've told you the story because I see his car pull up. I want to say he drove a Ford probe windows down. I get out of my car as I get out of my car and I'm now walking to his car. My vision has reduced. Sure.

by like 80%. I'm seeing like two saucer dishes worth of information as I approach. His window's down and I just swing

I miss him. I punch his steering wheel. Oh, I don't know this. Because I can't see. Yeah. And the dad was in the window the whole time wondering, like, what is this guy who came over? And now he's sitting in front of the house. So the dad watches me walk up to the car and throw a punch through the window. And now he's out of the house as the boy's getting out of his car. And I'm now backing up prepared for...

Two on one. Well, first I'm preparing for just the one on one, which my odds are very low I'm going to win at that point because I really am not doing well. Yeah. Now all of a sudden the dad's on the scene. By the time the dad is yelling at me and getting in between us, my vision was down to a pinhole. I felt like I was looking through a pinhole of like a fucking. You probably looked so weird. I can only, I wish there was video of this.

I would feel like rubbing your eyes. I mean, gracefully, the father didn't. That's nice. They should just beat the shit out of me, probably. Well, he. And another neighbor. They were a little more upscale than some of my other neighbors. Maybe he knew. He was like, oh, my kid probably did something. Must have plowed someone down. Yeah. Must have something to do with the recent trip to Cancun. Right. I got out of there without having to fight either of them somehow. He just said, we need to go. And drove away with very limited vision. Yeah. And it was just like.

you know, post all of that, like laying in bed that night, I'm like, what a horrible several hours of feelings. Yeah. I hated how I felt at her house. I hated how I felt at the kid's house. I felt, you know. Yeah. I'm like, you know, what's tomorrow at school look like? He'll tell people I came over. Oh, sure. But were you, were you done being mad at her? No, I broke up with her.

Right. Yeah. But like, were you mad at her for the rest of your life? No, I'm friends with her currently. Oh, wow. I've apologized to her. That's nice. Yeah. Oh, I can't even believe I'm going to admit this part out loud. Do it. This most sickening part of this is I had cheated on her. I just hadn't told her.

That's what's downright evil. That's evil. That makes more sense as to all of this. Yeah. Because if you. I was so shame ridden that I had. Mind you, in the moment, I genuinely am hurt. I'm not, of course, thinking like, well, I cheated. So this is no big deal. I'm devastated. Yeah. Because what I did didn't mean anything. But what she did meant everything. Yeah.

This is growing up. You live and learn. But yeah, so regretful, so shameful. Did you tell her later I had cheated on you too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was rightly so. Like, how dare you? She's like, you're such a slutty bitch. Yeah, she called me the C word. Yeah. So, and then another girlfriend that lived with me who cheated on me. And that was equally, I was completely devastated. I was mean to her about it.

And so I was like, I don't like this. I don't like this emotion at all. I do not want it. I've got to figure out how to not have it 'cause I don't like it.

that did to you because like I think there's a ton of good that came out of that and it's and yeah jealousy is a bad feeling but being affected by other people's actions is life right like we are we are supposed to be affected by people and not live in a vacuum and just feel on our own necessarily I wonder if that had sort of an impact totally I agree but also if you

Contrast that reaction with like Aaron Weakley. So Aaron Weakley would have other friends and he'd have sleepovers at their house. And there were even periods where I'm like, oh, I think he's definitely with Mark Yackley more than he's with me. But the difference there is, and it's why it's an internal job, is that I felt deep confidence in Aaron's love for me. Yeah. And these girls I was dating, I didn't. I had insecurities that I wasn't enough and I wasn't all these things. So

Yes, I think you should be impacted by people and not live as a robot, but also...

It is really telling of what you're just your own self-esteem and confidence is in that relationship because again I'm not getting jealous over Aaron having other friends I'm not getting jealous of Carrie once I start dating Carrie and we're like so in love and we're together for four and a half years I'm not jealous. There's two things right because one is jealousy This is the predominant problem with jealousy is the feeling of

of worry. It's like, it's an anticipation feeling of, I don't like that person because they could be better than me or they might be better than me or my boyfriend might start liking this thing from me. I love, or they, they might cheat, but you felt jealous of,

When you were betrayed. Yeah, I wasn't suspicious. I wasn't suspicious of either of them. Exactly. Beforehand. So I was never really like a controlling boyfriend. I don't think. Which is then for me, the reaction of being hurt is appropriate. Yeah. And then it's okay to feel hurt when people hurt you. Yes. It's part of life. It is. It is. It is. There's so many layers to it. I don't know. I just know like.

There's a level of love and connection I desire. And that version of love and connection isn't really vulnerable to anything. Yeah. And I have had that with a handful of people in my life. Yeah. And when I have that, I'm not very worried ever. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I feel like there's truly something foundational and substantive and real. Yeah. Then I'm not.

I'm not worried. Well, it's kind of like, yeah, I guess it's kind of like... It's you and Callie. You're not worried if she has a new best friend. No, I'm not. The friend parallel is harder because we're allowed to. Everyone's allowed to have multiple friends. In fact, you're supposed to be okay with that. Yeah.

how we've built our society. So it would actually be a failing on my part if I was like, you can't have another best friend. Like, that's my issue. But in a romantic relationship, you know, we've all agreed to these terms where you

Can't do that. Yeah. So the feeling is weird. But again, if you start peeling back what that really means and you go like, okay, so in a romantic relationship, is my partner not allowed to have friendships with the opposite sex? And you go, well, no, of course not. Of course they're allowed to. Okay. So they're not allowed to do anything physical with him.

okay, but would I rather have them be in love with the person they're friends with, not acting on it, than getting fingered by a stranger in a bathroom in Atlanta one night? You know, then you're...

I don't think that's a smart choice to pick the one over the other 'cause you've made that arbitrary thing the definition of the loyalty. Well, I think people will feel betrayed in all of those circumstances. All of the above. Yeah. But do you agree though that maybe the most self-actualized person in the world would understand that someone they love or at least would grant them

someone they love, whatever experience on planet Earth and just know in their heart that nothing is threatened? Yes. I think the goals is the way when you talk about your love for your children, right? Or like, yeah, the highest self, I guess, would be okay just knowing the love you're giving.

Uh-huh. And not be so wrapped up in the love you are or aren't receiving. Or that can be taken from you. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean... Good luck, motherfuckers. We're human. Yeah, we're human. I think, yeah, great. Like, it would be so good to just float through life just being like, I love them. Doesn't matter. Nothing else matters. But...

When you do run the risk of getting taken advantage of, you do, it gets slippery. It can get slippery. In practice, it can get murky. Yeah. And then if you introduce kids to it all. Yeah. Like, what did I say? Oh, oh, oh, we were talking about Ryan Gosling. Oh, this is really funny. Lincoln goes, oh my God, I just found, do you know Ryan Gosling's like 40? Yeah.

And he has two kids. And I'm like, yeah, I know that. And she's like, I thought he was in his 20s. Oh, my God. Does she have a crush on him? Well, I don't know. I mean, that's just so funny that he and Kristen, I think, are virtually the same age. They're close. Yeah. He's probably in his, yeah. He's got to be 40-something now. Like three, probably. 43. 43. 43.

Bingo. Yeah, that's that's exactly Kristen's age currently. Yeah. Yeah. So here's their mom is like a mom and she's clearly in her 40s. And then Ryan Gosling was not right. Yeah. And I go, I go, he's the same age as your mom. And she's like, I know it's crazy. And I'm like, well, yes, it's almost a shame your mom's not with them. Think what a gorgeous couple they would make.

And she's like, I don't like that. Like even a joke like that. She's very sensitive to that. She's very sensitive to that. So yes, there could be some understanding that two parents have. The kids would never, I don't know how kids. Feel good about it. Yeah, I don't know these poly relationships that have children. I'm not sure how all that goes, but me. It's so, it's funny too, because I got to say, oh, is it my own vanity? What is it? I'm like long for her to be past that. Isn't that silly? Like,

Like, I want her to understand life's more complicated than that. Yeah, I know. You know? Yeah. And, like, mostly I don't want her to be judgmental of other people. Sure. That. Because some of the people we love the most. It's too early. It is. It is. It is. She'll figure it out. It's, like, everything's very simple. Yes. I mean, or she won't. I mean, I'm not. Yeah. I know a lot of adults who have no, they don't think it's complicated. Yeah.

Right, but I'd have to imagine almost everyone knows a couple that survived infidelity and would say at this vantage point, thank God they did. They're a great couple and blah, blah, blah. I think if you live long enough, you're at least going to have one example of that. Yeah, I agree. But she's 11. She's 11, but it's also everyone's individual...

Fears, I know people who are just like, that's the worst thing anyone could ever do to someone. Yep. The end of conversation. Yeah, well, and I already told this story. Like we were watching the scene where Crosby cheats on Jasmine. Oh, right.

And like Lincoln was so mad and bent out of shape at Crosby. Yeah. And Delta was like, of course he did. She's so much nicer to him. And I was like, yeah, just genetically like, I guess. But also, do you think maybe Lincoln watching that is part of why she ruminates on this? Like maybe she's equated. Me and Crosby. Yeah. Well, who knows? Maybe it's.

underestimating it is weird that her parents go to work and kiss people. Like maybe we're underestimating that. Like for us, we're like, yeah, this is our job and it's not a thing. But yeah, I guess most, I didn't see my mom go to work. My mom didn't kiss anyone at work to my knowledge. So you know of, yeah. Yeah. But I think actually it's more,

a symptom of the primary thing. And I try to tell her that this is like a beautiful thing, which is like, it's just that she wants us to be together. And so that's a threat, but there's other things. This is a ding, ding, ding. We talked about it in this episode. Oh, okay.

There could be any number of things that could result. You know, her nightmares tend to be about us getting divorced. Right. Sometimes they involve infidelity, but sometimes they involve other stuff. Yeah. If I start drinking again, will we get divorced? Right. That's a fair fear. If she's going to go to Broadway. Oh, Christmas. You know, yeah. Am I going to move to Nashville? You know, there's a lot of different rivers. Yeah, I can relate. I wonder if also maybe some of that's firstborn stuff.

I do, too, because Delta is so free of all that. She doesn't care at all. And my brother didn't either. Yeah. But I was so hyper aware of them getting divorced. I was so nervous they were going to get divorced. I was always like, are you going to get divorced? I know. What I'm tempted to do with her all the time. Well, I do say a lot of stuff, which is like, listen, your mom and I would work through any one of these things.

These are not deal breakers for either of us. There's nothing we wouldn't work through. So first of all, we'll work through anything. Yeah. But also, I do think the firstborn gets both people's undivided attention in a way that is...

Well, there's no distraction either. If there's fights and you're there and there's no other kid there, that's very scary. You don't have a buddy to like survive this. It's just you then. Then you're alone. Yes. Scarier. It's scarier. I remember I was going to say what I'm tempted to say to her, which I don't do because I think it would feel like I'm minimizing her fears. But what I want to say is like,

Girl, you don't even have any idea what most married parents are like. Like you, you're so afraid of this and we don't even fight. Yeah, that's like a lot. No, it's not helpful. Yeah. But part of me wants her to go. I want her to know like.

You're seeing one of the lightest, like a lot of people are dealing with their parents are arguing nonstop. Right. And there's legit reason for some fear. Yeah. But I'm like, there's not even really anything happening. We don't, we're not mean to each other. I think you saying we'll work through anything. Yeah. Is helpful. As good as I can do. Yeah. Because my mom said we are never getting divorced. Right.

And she said it in such a matter of fact way that wasn't like, don't worry, we love each other so much. It wasn't. It was like, we're not making that decision. Whether we want to or not was the... Exactly. It was that. That was the subtext is, doesn't matter what happens here. We're not doing that. And I was like, oh, okay.

Got it. And like, I did. Did that alleviate your fears? 100%. Oh, okay. It still sucked when there was fights and stuff, but I didn't, I was done thinking they were getting divorced. Oh, that worked. Yeah, it did. By that point, I didn't trust adults too much. Like if they had said, this will never happen, I didn't put a lot of stock in that.

by the time i was 11. well your mom i mean i love her she was just here i want to talk about that we had such a great time but you know when we kicked greg out there was a declaration we're not i'm never doing that again it'll just be us three you know so yeah yeah and i knew like well here we are again yeah yeah yeah that's fair but on the upside gaga was here and a few

A few nice things that happened. We're in Delta's class, end of the year thing. We're privy to the council. I was there too. It was so sweet.

And like you get a, if your birthday was this date or that, you could end up with a stone. And if you had a stone, you could make a shout out to somebody. Yeah. And so Delta was really excited to give one. And I did not see this coming. And she said, I'm so grateful that my grandma's here. I want to dedicate this to my grandma. So happy for my mom. Yeah, it was really sweet. It was so sweet.

It was so sweet. Yeah, I told Delta later, I'm like, you make me so proud sometimes in ways that I can't. I'm like, if you're good at math or reading, I only care so much. The fact that you made that dedication to your grandma, that's who you are. That's who I'm proud of, not these accomplishments. I know.

Yeah, she said, I want to dedicate this to my grandma because she came a long, something like she came a long way to be here and I don't get to see her very much and I'm happy she's here or something. Oh my God, it was so sweet. Anna was crying. Yeah.

That whole thing was really cute, the council. I loved it. I loved it, too. I wish we had that when I was a kid. I know. You had to talk about your real feelings. Delta's teacher is awesome. Yeah. Such a good handling of a lot of kids. Kind of Orna-esque. A little bit, yeah. Kind, boundaries. Yeah. Kept everything moving. Really, really cool. Yeah. So...

Should I even... What's the point of me saying... I don't think that there's... What were you going to say? It's painful? No. I had this whole, like, thing happen where the day before was Lincoln's graduation. Yeah. And Anna was like, are you going to Lincoln's graduation? Uh-huh. And I was like, no, I'm not. I wasn't invited to Lincoln's graduation. She's like, well, I mean, like, I'm sure you can come to this. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if invites went out. Right. Exactly. But then, you know, I am thinking...

about everyone's boundaries and I don't know what everyone's boundaries are. Maybe there's a reason that, you know, maybe it's just family plus honor, maybe it's whatever, you know? So I didn't like insert myself or I didn't ask like, hey, can I come to Lincoln's graduation?

then I was sad that I missed it. Oh, I'm sorry. And then the next morning, I wake up late. I wake up at nine and I look at my text and there's one from Kristen and she says, Delta's graduation is today. Can you come? And she has this council after and it's really important to her that you're there. And I was like, freaking out.

Because the graduation is underway at this point that I'm even seeing it. Right. And then the council thing, she's like, it starts around 10. And I was like, oh my, oh my God. Yeah. And so I just like jump out of bed. I mean, there's no, if you say it's really important to Delta that I'm somewhere, like I'm going. You're going to be there. It doesn't matter. But I was so stressed out. Right. I bumped into you in the hallway and you looked a little frazzled.

I was so stressed out trying to get there. And the parking's a beat down. Yes, yes. I barely brushed my teeth. So it was kind of like, oh, this is like a lot. And then it was so, so sweet. And I was so glad that I got to be there. You were there for the good part. Okay, so that was Wednesday. Then I did a car day on Friday with my surrogate father, Tom Hanson. Yep.

His friend from Jackson Hole, Sutton, and my mom, and two different cars. He's got this really cool old 1967 Alfa Romeo. They only made 200. It's so freaky looking and interesting. It's so him. Idiosyncratic, kind of James Bond-y. He's so handsome. His hair is so thick.

And in a certain point, they swapped cars and my mom was up with Tom Hanson. And I was like, good luck, sister. You're gonna get out of that car head over heels in love. I mean, how could anyone? He's very charming. Friend of the pod. Go back and listen to our episode with Tom. Yeah, and they're, I think they're almost the exact same age. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, we had a blast. My mom loves driving fast. So we were up at Angela's Crest just driving.

flying and having a blast. So many old cars out, so many collector cars. It was really, really fun. Then Saturday I took her to the Hollywood Bowl for the Jazz Fest.

And that was a blast too. We rode on the motorcycle. Now I will say this about Lorzy. She's very confident in the car flying through the canyons. She did not like that motorcycle ride. I mean, she wasn't complaining because that's not her style, but she was so tense on the back. I go, mom, you've got to like breathe and let your body relax a little bit. She's like, I can't, I can't. Just go. Just get there.

So we rode the motorcycle and we had a big barbecue dinner. We watched jazz and it was heaven. Wow. Sent her on her way. A ding, ding, ding. Because in this episode, you talked about taking the kids to drag bingo. And I went to drag bingo this weekend. You went yesterday? Yeah, I went yesterday. You met Molly? Uh-huh. Molly and Jess and Laura. Yeah.

Uh-huh. Yeah. So before Reefer Madness on Sundays, now they're going to do drag bingo. So they got Laganja Estranja, which is a drag queen that she's so good and she was on RuPaul's Drag Race. She's like a big get.

And it was really fun. I had never gone before, but we had a lot of fun. Have you played bingo before? I have played bingo. It's a great game. It is, except, okay, I was starting to win. Yeah. And I was like...

like, I do not want to win. Why? What happens when you win? Well, nothing. I mean, you go up there and you win a prize, but I didn't want to go up there. I just hate audience participation so much. And it was enlightening because I was realizing, oh, I hate audience participation so much that it's actually above my need to win, which is also extremely high. Right. Something stronger. So Dahlia was there. Ah.

And Dahlia, Molly and Eric's kid. And I was like, maybe I'll just give it to Dahlia. But then Dahlia ended up winning. I heard she was the big winner. It was so, so great. Except she did do it the wrong. Sure, but she's a kid. She's a kid and everyone thought it was fine. Thank God, because she saved my life. Because otherwise I was going to win. I was stressed out. But it was fun. It was really fun. Okay. Okay.

Couple facts. Okay. We start talking about the new rules for baseball. Mm-hmm. Oh, right, where they've put a time clock on the... Yeah. So there's a few new rules. Pitch timer. The time between pitches with runners on base has been reduced from 20 seconds to 18 seconds, while it remains 15 seconds with the bases empty. Mm-hmm.

Okay, pitching changes. If a new pitcher enters the warning track with less than two minutes remaining on the inning break clock, the clock resets to two minutes. I don't know what any of this means. Okay, runner's lane. The lane for runners to first base has been widened to include the dirt between the foul line and the infield grass, giving hitters more room to beat out an infield single. Okay, none of this is actually about...

Well, no, pitch timer, I guess. Yeah, I think that's where people were really... Rob, you watch probably more baseball. It just speeds up the game so they can't sit on the mound and fuck around too much. Pitchers will have 15 seconds to throw a pitch with the bases empty and 20 seconds with the runner on base. Okay, then he said there was this one guy with a great

Yeah, and so I'm gonna play it. Oh, this will be great There's one dude that was in the World Series maybe two years ago He puts his arm out in a really specific way bro. What's his name Kimbrough? Yeah, it's on the White Sox for a little bit. Yeah, he has to go like this He throws with this in but this one's got- And has it out? Yeah, he like dangles his arm like this. That feels hard! Oh, it looks like it would fuck up your throw so much and that's what works for him and he was lights out in that as I recall. Yeah, he was a really good closer. Oh my god. You know what this is remind me of Moneyball my favorite

I haven't thought about it in like a year and a half. So you say my favorite. You think that I'm the only one that says my favorite. I'm kidding. Well, everyone knows my favorite movie. Good Will Hunting. Yeah. What if I didn't get that just now? No, but remember I used to talk about Moneyball every day? Yes. It was a thing. Okay, hold on. Okay, ready? Hold on. Oh, fuck. Oh, my God. He's already doing it. Go full. I am. Okay. I'm going to put this here. Do the batters have a time limit, Rob?

Not really. Oh, this is a batting game. That's okay. This is a routine though. Very unique routine when he steps into the batter's box. Oh my God. Is that Omar Garcia Parra? Yeah. Oh yeah.

He's got to touch the back of his ass, too. Yeah. Oh, and he does something with his nostrils, too. Wow. I thought they were about to say superstitious something. He's developed into a superstitious... Wow. He literally is touching every part of his body. Yeah, I could so relate to that. I've got a specific thing, too, when I bat. What do you do? Like touching certain parts of the plate. Yeah. That's kind of fun. They also limited the amount the pitcher can throw to first base.

A lot of times they would just throw at a runner and they've limited. You can do it like twice now. Oh, okay. It's all to speed up the game. And it worked. Last time I watched it, I was like, this feels like it's twice as fast as it used to be. Well, yeah, because Anna was at the Dodgers game the other day and she was like, the game was so fast.

Yeah, if they're striking people out, it can kind of boogie too. Okay. Also, I got sort of another peel. Okay. Not the same as last time, but she put a lot of acid on. She was like, I hope you peel. And so it is peeling a little. She really takes your face to war. I love. Thank God. You love it. Thank God. Thank God for her. Okay. Um.

10 careers reporting the lowest levels of happiness. Because we're talking about lawyers. Mm-hmm. Okay, now this is from Washington Post. Very trusted brand. Very. Number one, pharmacy technician. Really? Yep. It says this job involves working in a pharmacy, locating, packing, and labeling patient medications. This work is then reviewed by the pharmacist on duty.

So it's not the pharmacist. It's the tech. So they don't have the narrative self saying, well, you're a pharmacist. It says unhappiness in this job appears to stem from a significant lack of growth opportunity in the field. Oh. All right. Plus, people are mean to you. People are mean at the pharmacy. Yeah. Because they want their meds. Yeah. No one's insurance is doing it right. They're jonesing. Yeah. Okay. Number two, project engineer. Uh-oh.

He loves it, though. Well, yeah, and I was just thinking, but my friend's a pharmacist, so that doesn't count. I was going to say, my friend's a pharmacist. He loves it. These employees ensure engineering projects remain on time and within budget. They aren't usually involved in the actual engineering work, just the paperwork and reporting to higher-ups, which likely contributes to their dissatisfaction. Okay, so that's not your dad. That's not my dad. Oh, this one's sad and a ding, ding, ding. Podcast host? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, my God. Of course. Despite having one of the most meaningful jobs in the country, teachers rank lowest on the happiness scale. Oh, it's a shame. This seems to be largely due to out-of-touch administrators, unreasonable parents, low pay, and chronic underfunding that results in having to cover the cost of their classroom materials. How about 30 kids, too? I know, but I think this up...

At least you get self-esteem. But I do think these logistical things. I have a friend who's a teacher. He started teaching a few years ago.

And he, yeah, he has to like every year at the beginning there, he like puts out on Instagram, like if anyone wants to donate to my classroom, it's like, we got to go begging. We make them go begging. Yeah. Okay. Number four, administrative assistant, five cashier, six general manager, having to be the person who shows up whenever a customer asks the dreaded question. Can I speak to the manager? Seven data analyst, eight customer service representative,

Well, yeah, that would be hard. Nine, retail salesperson and 10, sales account manager. Lawyer didn't even make it. Didn't. Wow. I wonder if they talked to any lawyers. They also, I will say. They were probably afraid to get sued, so they didn't even ask them. Maybe. Maybe.

They also, they hate their jobs, but they make a lot of money. I mean, not all of them. And they have societal status. Exactly. So I bet it in some ways like. Well, what's weird though. Yeah. So this is why the questionnaire itself might be tricky because they might be miserable. But if you ask them if they like their job and they want their job, they might say yes. Right. Well, that's on the lawyers for not.

Being able to identify their feelings. Yeah, but boy, all the ones I talk to. I don't know. Entertainment lawyers are happy, but their workload is so much smaller. So if you're going to be a lawyer, be an entertainment lawyer. Like Tom Hanson. You can go on car rides on a Friday. Yeah.

You can date my mother. He's earned. No. She's married. She's. No, he's married. He's married and your mom has a boyfriend. That's right. Well, he made some reference to, he says he biked and walked in a circle.

I don't really remember what he was talking about, but it reminded me that I learned to ride a bike by just riding in a circle in my garage. Yeah. And that's the proudest my dad's ever been of me. That's worthy of being proud of because it's almost impossible to learn. He still brings it up. Yeah, yeah.

It's like learning to ride a bicycle in a closet. Basically. It's like I just walked in and saw you just riding in circles. Maniacally riding in circles. Oh, boy. That's it. All right. I love you. Love you.