#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning

Speaker 1 Dude, I am in love with your sub stack. I subscribe to a lot of different sub stacks, and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year.
I think you're absolutely destroying it, dude.

Speaker 1 It's so great. It's an evolutionary lens on things, the big picture questions everybody's already asking.
I think it's awesome.

Speaker 1 So, when it comes to, I guess, what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied? What is missing from that?

Speaker 2 Look, excellent question. So

Speaker 2 in one of my posts, I have this cheeky picture of, you know, the elephant and the blind. I think it comes from India, the story.

Speaker 2 And the story, I'm sure lots of your listeners have heard about it, but you've got a bunch of blind people and they're put in front of an elephant and they are asked, okay, what an elephant looks like.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, one touch the trunk of the elephant and says, well, an elephant is kind of, you know, looks like a tube and it's sweat at the end.

Speaker 2 Another one touches the tail says, Well, you know, it's look as a string and it's very fluffy at the end.

Speaker 2 And another one touches the tusk and says, Well, it's very hard, you know, it's very and it's very smooth. Um, and so when you read

Speaker 2 the literature or sometimes in behavioral sciences and social sciences, and when they don't have an evolutionary perspective, you get the same kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 You, when you know, I talk about the books on self-help, books on psychology on happiness. And you will see, you get a book, and this book will tell you to be happy, you need social connections.

Speaker 2 You know, the secret of happiness is to have friends, to have family. So, okay, that's very interesting.

Speaker 2 You take another book, and this other book will tell you the secret of happiness is to control your desires, you know, to learn not to want what you don't have.

Speaker 2 That's stoicism, that's Buddhism. And another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars, you know, to have very high goals and to work very hard towards it.
And then you...

Speaker 2 you look at these different things like, okay, but

Speaker 2 what's the link between these different things? I mean, are we talking about the same things that we're talking about happiness? And there is one explanation.

Speaker 2 What's the connection between these different stories? And these books are like the blinds,

Speaker 2 giving you a perspective of the elephant. And the elephant about happiness is that you have to consider that happiness is a system of valuation designed.

Speaker 2 And I use the word design,

Speaker 2 not designed by a designer, but evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it's designing stuff. Designed by evolution to help you make decisions.

Speaker 2 And so when you take this perspective all these different kind of secrets of happiness make sense but in a big picture uh so you you ask me you know what kind of stuff it explains like for instance as i say we are social species so we will need connections that's one fact uh but on the other hand um sometimes you you get all the books about happiness tells you well you need to know when to say no to other people you know you know you need to say people make claims about to um to your talents says can you help me, Chris?

Speaker 2 Can you do this, etc.? At some point, you need to be able to say no. Well, every system you have of

Speaker 2 um subjective feelings helping you to navigate the world has to handle that you have facing trade-offs.

Speaker 2 So, if you're always saying no to people, you know, maybe you won't have too many friends, and that's not good for your success.

Speaker 2 But if you're always saying yes, you know, maybe you'll be a pushover, people will take advantage of you. So, a right system needs you to balance these things.
If you take another

Speaker 2 things like

Speaker 2 the goal you have in life.

Speaker 2 If you have very low goals, like everything is fine, whatever you're achieving, you're very happy with it, you won't be very successful.

Speaker 2 And so a system of happiness, which is designed to make you successful, has to push you, to nudge you, to try as hard as you can. So whenever you're going to be successful,

Speaker 2 you're going to look forward to the next challenge. So now you may think, oh, what will make me very happy in the future is this big milestone.
If I reach this milestone, that's it.

Speaker 2 You know, I won't need very much to do much better than that. And what happens is that, let's say you work very hard and you reach the milestone.
And then suddenly you say, okay, that was good.

Speaker 2 But what next? You know, like you're going to start looking further ahead. Like, what's the next milestones?

Speaker 2 If you think that being a millionaire is what will make you happy, well, the sad story is that when you reach the million, the first million, two million, whatever, you'll feel good, but you'll start thinking about the next thing.

Speaker 2 So your system happiness will keep pushing and so when you have these books they tell you you know uh

Speaker 2 either you need to have you don't need to care about um uh what you don't have on the contrary you need to aim very high they kind of they just look at one side of this balance the book tells you don't care about what you don't have that says yes you shouldn't look too high it does it's not worth it for me to think in the morning oh i'm not as rich as elon musk so this is very disappointing there's no point for me to think that that's not going to to help me being successful, to have a goal which is so high that I'm never, you know, there's no point, whatever I do in the day is not going to change it.

Speaker 2 So I shouldn't care about things which are unachievable. But at the same point, at the same time, if I wake up in the morning and say, you know, I'm great, I'm healthy, everything is fine.

Speaker 2 You know, why do I stress, et cetera? Well, I'm not maybe going to do the right things, which is going to help me move forward.

Speaker 2 So our system of happiness is going to be this kind of stuff which kind of try to find the right level to push us to do our best. It's neither too high nor too low.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's that idea of a homeless man isn't jealous of a billionaire, but he is jealous of a slightly richer homeless man.

Speaker 2 Exactly. You know,

Speaker 2 that's something very important because we think that

Speaker 2 we always compare, right?

Speaker 2 One aspect of happiness is that

Speaker 2 we may think that happiness is just objective and that we are this kind of

Speaker 2 we have this

Speaker 2 view about what what we would really want. And if we get it, we'd be happy.
But in truth, we always compare to other people. One reason we compare is that we learn from other people.

Speaker 2 Let's say, you know,

Speaker 2 if you ask yourself, am I successful in life? Well, you can look at people like you, people, maybe who were in your high school when you were young,

Speaker 2 your mates, et cetera. And if they were much more successful than you, then, and I'm not saying that you're spiteful, necessarily, it's not about that.

Speaker 2 But if you see that they were much more successful, you may think, wait a minute, like, you know, they didn't have anything more than me when we started. So why am I not doing like them?

Speaker 2 You know, you extract information from that, from these people who were like you, who were like you. And so you would want to, you know, that's going to help you maybe to change tech.

Speaker 2 You say, okay, you know, I fucked, that was fine doing what I'm doing, but when I'm seeing what they are doing, maybe I should do something else. So these kind of comparisons, it's not...

Speaker 2 useful when you compare to people who are very, very different.

Speaker 2 So if you're homeless, you know, and you wake up every morning thinking that you're not a millionaire, that's not going to help you move the next step ahead of where you are now, right?

Speaker 2 And so, you will care not about people who are much poorer than you, or people who are much less successful than you, or much more successful than you. You typically care about people around you.

Speaker 2 And that's this interesting stuff that we care a lot about. The people who are just like us, being a step

Speaker 2 ahead of us. And the people who are very far ahead, we don't even care too much about them.

Speaker 1 It's so fascinating. It's like

Speaker 1 we're plants in an ecology and we sort of are able to grow toward the light that's nearest to us.

Speaker 1 And yeah, it's an uncomfortable realization that our feelings of well-being depend less on like absolute achievements than they do on just the comparison to other people in the social circles that we belong with.

Speaker 1 And I guess, you know, that. game of relative comparison and the way that social circles, the ones that we choose and the ones that we don't, impact us is

Speaker 1 just, it's endlessly fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I'm with you. Like, obviously, I'm super fascinated in it.

Speaker 2 I think what's interesting is that what's fascinated me is how kind of key happiness and these questions we ask ourselves are central to our lives. And in a way, how we are.

Speaker 2 We don't really know, you know, we don't have the intuitions. So evolution is this kind of programming process which has designed us to work well in the real world.

Speaker 2 But evolution didn't care about telling us the rule book.

Speaker 2 Evolution gave us the design and but doesn't explain why we are doing what we do.

Speaker 2 And so we're like following the path that our feelings lead us to, but why we have these feelings and why they have the shape they have. And, you know, that we don't have the intuitions necessarily.

Speaker 2 So that's why

Speaker 2 when we start thinking about, oh, what's next, what

Speaker 2 will make me happy,

Speaker 2 why I'm not happy, happy etc

Speaker 2 it's actually not trivial because evolution in a way doesn't care you know to make us successful we don't need to know why we have these feelings we just need to have these feelings yeah i think for you know the sorts of people that listen to this podcast uh introspective reflective you know curious people

Speaker 1 having

Speaker 1 a question

Speaker 1 having a why that does not have a very well-defined answer is kind of like some version of purgatory meeting hell. And you're just, you know, you want to know.
And you're right.

Speaker 1 That there isn't, there isn't this definitive sense.

Speaker 1 Just going back to that social comparison thing, I've been thinking about this for ages and I loved that insight about how people with disadvantaged social origins might be more likely to be happy because they've got a lower reference point to judge life from.

Speaker 1 It's so paradoxical, but it makes complete sense.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, that's, and actually that goes back to my PhD. My PhD was on that topic in education.

Speaker 2 It sounds, you know, when you say that, it sounds like maybe some people

Speaker 2 who are on the left would say, well,

Speaker 2 you're saying that people who are from a lower social background are privileged or that people from a higher social background are disadvantaged. So,

Speaker 2 you know, what it's true.

Speaker 1 The advantage of disadvantage, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's right. Well, there is.
There is a kind of hedonic, a happiness advantage of being from a low social background and rising up.

Speaker 2 Because then what you have is that, you know, if you use your original social background as a comparison point, and it's natural to do so, because even as I said, you know, if you use your peers and you come from a low social background and you look at people who are your friends, and maybe they're still your friends, now you think, well, you know, I did well.

Speaker 2 And so you have this comparison, which helps you have this outlook on life. You know, am I unsatisfied with my life? Well, I did very well relative to where I started from, and that makes you happy.

Speaker 2 On the contrary, if you're born from a very highly successful social background, well, the bar is super high.

Speaker 2 So, you know, if your father and mother, they are lawyers, well, you know, if you don't do a super high education achievement,

Speaker 2 let's say a very high educational achievement, it's just the normal standard that you need to achieve. It's not, it can't be super happy, it's just normal.
And so, that's a high pressure.

Speaker 2 And what you observe is that

Speaker 2 there is a kind of a, you know, that's what I'm saying. I don't want to say that because there's lots of questions about privilege, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But people who are born in a privileged background, you observe sometimes more risk-taking, and also they want to do some different line of work because they want to escape the comparison.

Speaker 2 So, if your parents, maybe they are lawyers, etc., maybe you want to become an artist because you know you want to be in a dimension of social comparisons where you can escape the comparison of your life.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's so interesting. Because if you went into law or you went into medicine, there would be a direct comparison between where your father was at that stage in his life.
I mean, look,

Speaker 1 the potential explanation for kids from highly affluent backgrounds having disparate outcomes in educational attainment because they are riven and driven by this terror that they can't keep up with what their parents expected is like,

Speaker 1 it's, I don't know of anyone that's factoring that into the base rate. And sure,

Speaker 1 the material constraints, the resources, the access, the networking, the legacy admissions into these higher institutions. Like, yes, there's lots of structural things, right, that go on.

Speaker 1 But what about the drive for the kids? Why are they, you know,

Speaker 1 working themselves so hard to do this?

Speaker 1 And, you know, the fact that you have higher expectations placed on you and you are aware that anything short of Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge or King's or whatever is going to constitute failure, which is going to result in you being less happy.

Speaker 1 That I think explains at least part of the disparate outcomes that we

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm totally with you with that. So

Speaker 2 when you, if you are, let's say you can take two kinds of cases, different. Let's say you are from, you, your parents moved from a poor country in the US.

Speaker 2 They didn't have a high school diploma. You know, they work hard to pay for your education.
And you end up in a community college in the US and you get a job. And for you, that's an achievement.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 you made it.

Speaker 2 You're able to have a house, a mortgage, a car,

Speaker 2 standard US way of life. Now,

Speaker 2 if you consider from there, do you want to try harder? Do you want to

Speaker 2 go to university, a higher, more prestigious university and get a master's degree?

Speaker 2 The benefits, the psychological benefits from you is not that important because the difference psychologically between where you are now and that additional stuff is not very large because your reference point, as you said, is low.

Speaker 2 And so the biggest difference is between where you started in your mind here and what you have achieved.

Speaker 2 Now, if your parents are lawyers and they did an Ivy League school, you know, I mean, there's no way you would consider going to community college as something like an achievement.

Speaker 2 You'd be like, maybe dreading it terribly. And so for you, this step of, you know, the difference between going there or reaching a prestigious university is going to matter extremely.

Speaker 2 And so as you say, the drive is going to be there.

Speaker 2 And even I would say the risk-taking, something which is interesting when you look at at the statistics is that for the same grades in high school, kids from higher social backgrounds

Speaker 2 who have average grades, they are more willing to take the risk to continue in

Speaker 2 standard university things than kids from lower social backgrounds. Kids from lower social backgrounds say, you know, I'm not sure I would be successful at university.
I want a practical

Speaker 2 training, which is going to give me a job. Well, the kids from higher social backgrounds are more likely to, even if it's uncertain they would be successful, to try hard and to go to university.

Speaker 1 And that's also correlated with more sort of social risky behavior, drug-taking, alcohol,

Speaker 1 fast cars, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's... You're right, because we often associate drug taking, et cetera, you know, to low social background, like neighborhoods, which are risky, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But what we observe is that there is a lot of this kind of behavior also in kids who come from higher social background.

Speaker 2 And one possible, so you know, one conjecture is that this kind of risk sticking is also associated to the pressure that you have.

Speaker 1 I've been fascinated with intergenerational competition theory.

Speaker 1 I learned about it about a year ago, this sort of comparison we have between where were our parents when they were our age and where are we now.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think it really explains maybe this is total bro science, right? But I'm allowed to do this because I'm not held to the same standards of an academic like you.

Speaker 1 My theory, at least in part, is that

Speaker 1 even though objectively, when you run the numbers, the current generation is better off adjusted for inflation than any generation before,

Speaker 1 there is this sense, this milieu that we are not. I think the comparison on social media contributes a massive amount here

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 we assume that everybody is doing better than they are and also we have expanded our social circle to now be so much wider it's it's you're no longer selecting your social circle from who you grew up around but you're expanding it to the entire world and by design the people that you see on social media pretend that their lives are better than they are so not only are they a wider social network than you've ever seen before and selecting for people that are more popular but also on top of all of that everybody's lying so the ability for you to do

Speaker 1 accurate assessment. And then when we think about intergenerational competition theory, I think it, we almost use that model, Where are other people now? As that's where mum and dad must have been.

Speaker 1 And that, I think, is where a lot of this

Speaker 1 uncertainty comes up around, well, you know, you look at the reasons that people say about why they haven't had children yet.

Speaker 1 I'm just not ready,

Speaker 1 financially not in the position, which is odd because the poorest countries have the most children.

Speaker 1 And if you scale it over time, we are, by and large, on average, richer, more affluent, more comfortable than we've ever been. But the sense is that we're not.

Speaker 1 And given that our social circle has been expanded to the entire world, and we have the perspective everyone is doing way better than they actually are, it's just

Speaker 1 social anxiety all the way down.

Speaker 2 No, look, there's several things in what you say, but

Speaker 2 I'll start with the social media.

Speaker 2 I totally agree with you that

Speaker 2 social media is a very strange environment. Like, we were not selected to be in this kind of thing.
But as you say, it's expand our social circle.

Speaker 2 You have, as you say, people lie on social media, lie. I mean, in the sense that, you know, we take selfies all the time.

Speaker 2 I'll take maybe 100 selfies and I'll pick the best angle, you know, the one where the light is good. I have a twinkle in the eye.

Speaker 2 Maybe I'll use a filter and eventually I put that as my social media profile. And so, and you do that for everything.

Speaker 2 My videos of my holidays will be brilliant. You know, I mean, when I have a

Speaker 2 boring holiday, I won't necessarily talk about it, but when I have something, a nice cocktail on a beach in bali i'll i'll post about it and so we're exposed to these beautiful lies these beautiful pictures of all these people and as we as we were talking before we can't help compare right and if this is our comparison points and it's move us you know it moves this comparison point much higher and then we we're thinking well i'm not doing that well in comparison uh and we have to learn to discount to learn okay wait a minute there are filters on these pictures maybe these people are not that young as they look in the pictures you know i see all the nice things they do in the holidays.

Speaker 2 I don't see all the troubles. I went to go these holidays, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 That's difficult. And

Speaker 2 there is

Speaker 2 even another thing which is very interesting on social media.

Speaker 2 I guess you have heard of it like the friendship paradox. Do you know this thing? The friendship paradox? Tell me more.
Okay. The friendship paradox is

Speaker 2 something which happened in networks. When you're in a network, your friends, on average, have more friends than you.
Okay.

Speaker 2 So if you're on Twitter, the people you follow have more followers than you have if you're on youtube the you know the stuff you follow on average have more subscribers than you have so that sounds strange how is it possible should shouldn't be an average like you know on average we have the same no because the people you select to follow or to uh to be your friends they are selected and they are you know you have said you have not selected the people with the least friend you have selected people uh who tend to have more friends and you the fact that you selected them is an indication that they are selected And so when you look into your circle of friends on social media, you'll find, wow, why don't I have, you know, I have so many followers and these guys are like, you know, super popular.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm not as popular as they are. So the funny thing is that whatever network you'll be, you will not be as popular as the average popularity of the people in your network.

Speaker 2 So that's another thing which is not intuitive, but it will make your reference point higher. And in comparison, you won't look as good.

Speaker 1 Does this mean that people in high achieving groups kind of have a bit of a double-edged sword here? Because they've got satisfaction from recognition

Speaker 1 outside of the group, but they've also got social anxiety from within their group.

Speaker 2 Yes. So, you know, that's a paradox of the fact that we always want to go higher.

Speaker 2 Like we have, when we are in a peer group or in a club, we tend often to look for the next club, you know, the most prestigious club.

Speaker 2 If you like academics, for instance, they want to be in prestigious universities.

Speaker 2 Well, the cost of it is that, you know, whenever you move to university to another one, which is more prestigious, your colleagues,

Speaker 2 they tend to be more successful than before, right? That's that goes with it. And so you join clubs of people more prestigious.
And what you have, exactly what you say, you have this kind of,

Speaker 2 let's say, you know, if you join Harvard as an academic, well, for people outside, you are a Harvard member of staff. It's very prestigious.

Speaker 2 But for you, within Harvard, the comparison now are your colleagues who super successful. That's very stressful.

Speaker 2 And so in one of my sub stack, I describe, there was Thomas Schelling, you know,

Speaker 2 it's a story told by Glenn Lurie, Glenn Lowry, when he joined Harvard

Speaker 2 and he got very stressed by the pressure of success, of being successful and publishing, et cetera, et cetera. And he goes to his colleague Thomas Schelling, a very famous game theorist.

Speaker 2 And Thomas Schilling says, what do you think? Everybody here is extremely stressed. They are like, they all think that they are underachieving.
And, you know, when you ask, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 They think, oh my God, I'm being judged for not being performing enough.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, you have this double-edged sword, as you say, that from outside, we think, oh, these people are very successful.

Speaker 2 But because they're in clubs of very successful people, they feel the pressure of not, you know, being up to scratch with their peers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love the term insecure overachiever. I think it captures this energy very well.

Speaker 2 Yes, and you have this term like the

Speaker 2 imposter syndrome, right? And I think the imposter syndrome is exactly that. So you work very hard to be successful in professional life,

Speaker 2 to be maybe

Speaker 2 promoted as a manager in a very important function in academia. You want to be promoted professor in a precious university.
And then

Speaker 2 people once say, oh, there's a thing, oh, maybe... Maybe I shouldn't be here.

Speaker 2 Maybe people didn't see that actually I'm not good enough to be here. I'm here by accident, right? And so people have anxieties like that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You don't get, or at least as of yet on Substack, I haven't seen you get super tactical around this.

Speaker 1 You're not coming out like the typical sort of personal development bro and saying, and here are my 10 steps for you to be able to overcome your imposter syndrome or whatever.

Speaker 1 But when it comes to the sort of social circle comparison thing, given that you're spending a lot of time researching this and you have a

Speaker 1 a pet interest in it, you must relate this to your own life and you must have tried to apply some

Speaker 1 strategy or some tactics to try and negate this social comparison impact on your happiness. So what do you do as an attempt to try and mitigate this effect?

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, that's a good point.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure if I have

Speaker 2 used it.

Speaker 2 I've used it, you know, in practice to kind of not being stressed by,

Speaker 2 you know, not joining higher circles. So when I was actually, I was in a,

Speaker 2 when i i worked for some time in london and and i have the opportunities to choose between academia and to work in finance

Speaker 2 and i fooked you know obviously the wages are much higher than you can imagine in london in finance and i fooked well from what i know from behalf science i know that actually the wage much looks much higher but if i go there you know next thing you know uh i'll think that i'm not paid as much as one buffet and that's actually very true you know i was talking to a trader and the guy must have been on something like 150 000 pounds So something like $200,000, $250,000 a year.

Speaker 2 So clearly, in the top of the distribution. And the guy, you know what, I was having lunch with me.
He says, you know, he told me, I hope I was rich.

Speaker 2 And I was like, well, I mean, you know, you're not a billionaire, but like you, and you're a young guy, and you're already on this kind of wages, like super good.

Speaker 2 But from his point of view, you know, he's thinking of his manager who is on two or five million a year. And then the next thing is a success story is one perfect.
So

Speaker 2 I'm aware of this kind of thing. And that, I guess, you know, I'm not looking back and thinking, oh, I wish I'd done that, et cetera, because I know that,

Speaker 2 I mean, I think I've been very happy there as well. But I'm thinking that you need to be aware that if you were to move in such a circle, then your reference point would move with you.

Speaker 2 And so that's a reason not to stress too much and to appreciate what you have now.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 Another source of pain. Probably, I think I've been doing these live shows.
I was in Australia recently

Speaker 1 doing these live shows. And there's buckets that at the QA portion at the end of the talk, people ask.

Speaker 1 And one of the most common is something along the lines of, why do I set ever higher goals for myself? Why do I seem unable to be able to be satisfied? with what I've achieved.

Speaker 1 Why, every time that I score a goal, do I immediately move the goalposts even further away from me?

Speaker 1 Why do I overestimate the importance of my next success for my happiness so talk to me about sort of the role of of goals and uh and how it impacts our happiness here look i think that's a

Speaker 2 key part of my research another paper

Speaker 2 so some several of my posts on sub-sites were on this topic recently um

Speaker 2 you know maybe i'll use a metaphor i'll start far and we can go back in more on the topic but i'll use a metaphor let's say you can think of evolution evolution is an impersonal process right So, but it's as if it was designing you.

Speaker 2 And you can use a metaphor, right? If it was kind of a designer trying to nudge you to be as successful as possible.

Speaker 2 So now, what kind of situation we can think of where somebody tries for you to be as successful as possible?

Speaker 2 Well, one situation is when you have a parent and a child.

Speaker 2 And a truth that is going to be clear for every parent is that it's not necessarily always best to motivate a child to be truthful with the child, to be to say all the truth.

Speaker 2 And so for the child to know exactly

Speaker 2 what are going to be the rewards is not necessarily optimal from the parent point of view. And here's what I mean.
Let's say that

Speaker 2 you got your son or daughter and you register your son or daughter in a competition. It could be athletic competition, could be a chess competition, and you have no idea really how good they are.

Speaker 2 And you want to motivate them and say, if you do well, you know, you'll have an ice cream.

Speaker 2 So you give a schedule of kind of rewards. If you do well, I would bring you to the cinema

Speaker 2 if you do very well at school i'll give you a video console etc then now you have the problem is that you don't know how good they can be uh suppose that you find out that are excellently talented they um clearly uh go be well beyond your expectations so you told them that if they were going to do well they will have all these rewards so what do you do now do you just keep them giving them all these rewards all the time they don't need to work very hard because they are excellent they are very talented so do you keep giving them rewards if you do that, it's not going to nudge them to do better because they don't need to work hard, they're super talented.

Speaker 2 If, on the contrary, you find out that your child has difficulties, it's challenged, is struggling to be very good, you say, Oh, sorry, you know, you're not very good, so no reward for you. Never.

Speaker 2 So, that's not going to help the child as well. So, what you'll do is that you will adapt

Speaker 2 your skill or force. If you find out that your

Speaker 2 child is excessively good at chess, you say, Okay, but maybe I'm going to give you a tutor, and I'm going to, and if you win tournaments, you know, you'll have more rewards, whatever. It depends.

Speaker 2 In Australia, what we do is we have a lot of, it's very athletic as a country, very sporty. So you bring your kids to the swimming pool and you see whether they are good.

Speaker 2 And if they are good, you enter them in competition. You may have seen in the Olympic Games, Australia does very well in swimming because pretty everybody swims in this country.

Speaker 2 You know, what if you do as a parent here is that you won't tell your kid before, oh, wait, I'm telling you that if if you're successful, you get this reward.

Speaker 2 But if you're very successful, actually, I'm going to move the carrot further ahead.

Speaker 2 You want to, you don't want to say that because if the kid knows that if they do very well, then you're going to move the carrot well ahead.

Speaker 2 They'll be like, what's the point? And nature does exactly the same thing with us. That is, for us to work very hard, we think, oh, you know, if I need to achieve this thing, it's very important.

Speaker 2 All the information tells you if you can achieve it, we have this kind of urge.

Speaker 2 The paper I've written on it, the title is called um if you can you must so if you feel that you can you really get excited by the idea that you want to do it right if you can't if it's way far ahead of you know your the realm of what you can achieve you you don't want to try you won't be interested but if you think you know what i think i think i could run a marathon you will try you will want to try if you think it's prestigious enough if you think well i think i can run a marathon but in four hours you know then you will start thinking about how can i achieve that what kind of steps and that feels good to think that i think i could achieve this then the problem is like let's say you start you know you start thinking maybe i could run a marathon and running a marathon will be something which i think is an achievement you start running and you think actually i'm pretty good so now running a marathon is not enough you will have to do it maybe under four hours or maybe more or maybe maybe a better time so the character will keep moving forward and your hedonic system kind of lied to you initially because your hedonic system told you initially, oh, if you reach this goal, you'll be happy, you know.

Speaker 2 but as you realize that you are able to reach this goal maybe you can reach better and so if you can reach better now the crowd has to move ahead and now it's this initial goal is not enough anymore and you want this additional goal further ahead and the primary i totally understand people in your shows who say why do i do that well it's by design we're designed to be like that and we're designed to be like that and we're designed not to anticipate because if you were to anticipate that if you achieve the next goal you'll get used to it and you think about the another goal afterwards well you'll be like well what's the point you know i i worked hard i may i may as well just you know enjoy life as it is now oh so that's why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness because

Speaker 1 if we didn't think well once i achieve x i'll be fine if we didn't have that thought if we assumed accurately that each different destination is just base camp before the next destination gets unlocked and gets appeared to to us,

Speaker 1 we would be much less motivated to go and do it.

Speaker 2 It's exactly that.

Speaker 2 If you think that it's very important to have this next promotion, that this promotion will give you status and prestige and income that you think that's what I want in life, then you work very hard for it.

Speaker 2 But actually, in reality, once you have it, you know, six months later, it says, okay, what next? You know, next challenge, actually, I could do better, et cetera.

Speaker 2 If you anticipate that initially, if you anticipate that the cart is is always going to move forward uh beyond you beyond your reach then that's not motivating anymore to to reach the next step because you know that you know the same process will repeat what's the focusing illusion

Speaker 2 but that's exactly that so the focusing illusion is a term uh proposed by daniel kalleman and his co-authors and says that you focus in life you say

Speaker 2 you tend to focus on some things and say this is really what i need and people may have different uh view about what they need to be happy maybe some people say you know what i need is a romantic partner, which is attractive and faithful and friendly, etc.

Speaker 2 And if I get that, I'll be happy. Some other people say, well, what I really want to be rich.
Other people may say, you know, what I want is just a group of friends, good social networks.

Speaker 2 And so you really care. You say, this is what I need.
And usually you say that when you don't have it. And

Speaker 2 you think you would be really happy. You focus on that.
This is the key for you to achieve happiness in your life.

Speaker 2 And then, when you, when, if and when you get it, eventually you come to realize that it was not so important for your happiness. So, the key example given by Kahneman are people in the U.S.

Speaker 2 who think that, oh, if I only had a job in California, you know, I would have fantastic weather, uh, brilliant lifestyle.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, maybe if you live in, let's say, Minnesota, where winter are very cold, you imagine that you'd be very happy if you moved to California.

Speaker 2 Now, what Kahneman did is went to ask people who moved from Minnesota or something like that to California and says, are you more happy now?

Speaker 2 And basically after six months, a year, people say, yeah, I kind of, I'm, you know, I'm happy, but you know, they didn't get the kind of change in life satisfaction that they were thinking they would when they were not there.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 how come we set goals to the highest level of what we think that we can achieve instead of finding happiness in lower aspirations? Surely that would allow us more direct access to happiness.

Speaker 2 Oh yeah, you're totally right. Like

Speaker 2 a goal, you can think of it, we use the word reference point before. You can think as a reference point.
So

Speaker 2 you judge where you are, how well you are doing

Speaker 2 with this goal as a reference. So

Speaker 2 if you have a very low goal, everything looks good. If my goal in life is just to have a nice job, a house somewhere, not necessarily in a luxury suburb, you know, know, etc.

Speaker 2 Well, it's much easier to achieve that if I say my goal is to be a top manager, to have a very high income level, etc. So, so having a high goal

Speaker 2 makes that for a given level, if I have a low goal, this looks great. If I have a high goal, the same thing is not going to look great.
So, a very simple path to happiness is to have low aspirations.

Speaker 2 And if you look in history, you know, I talked about Stoicism or Buddhism

Speaker 2 or Epicurus as well. So, a lot of the kind of historical

Speaker 2 path to happiness recommendations like is very simple. It's like, stop desiring what you do not have.

Speaker 2 Just be happy what you have. And that's the secret of happiness.

Speaker 2 And there's something very true in it: is that if you're able to stop, you know, try to get outside of this race where the goal keeps moving forward says, you know what, I'm healthy.

Speaker 2 I have a good meal every day,

Speaker 2 you know, got electricity, warm water. My ancestor didn't have that at at all.
So that's a fairly good life, right?

Speaker 2 I don't need to chase further success and further successes. So if you're able to do that, you can extract yourself from this pressure, you'll feel better.
But then

Speaker 2 what you have is that your head on a system is not designed for you to feel good. As we said before, your head-on system is designed for you to be as successful as possible.
as successful as possible.

Speaker 2 And so your head on a system, your brain should kind of pick all the information available to identify what you can do. And if

Speaker 2 you learn that you can do something better, well, your hedonic system should just go a notch above and says you have to do it.

Speaker 2 You're not designed to be happy and enjoy life. You're designed really to try as hard as possible.
And the reason is that

Speaker 1 you're not designed to be happy in life. You're designed to try as hard as possible.
What an absolutely.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Because if you think about our ancestors,

Speaker 2 some ancestors may be born with psychological traits where they enjoy being on the beach. And, you know,

Speaker 2 if there is enough food, you have enough food and fish, one fish, etc.

Speaker 2 And some others were maybe a bit more

Speaker 2 neurotic, wanted to always work harder or harder.

Speaker 2 Well, unfortunately for us, you know, the people who are the most neurotic and keep trying harder and harder are more likely to be ancestors now than the people who just enjoyed life.

Speaker 1 We are the progeny of the most anxious, insecure, overachievers across time

Speaker 2 so i would say you know there's there's a balance but

Speaker 2 our hedonic system should be designed to keep finding the best thing you can achieve so as i said before you know it's not worth you being depressed every day because you're not elon musk that's there's no point into it but you should identify what is the best thing you can achieve really best thing and then aim for it and so our hedonic system

Speaker 2 does that you know we get a lot of information for what we have done before, what people like us have done. And then we integrate all this information.

Speaker 2 We think, okay, you know, what somebody like me can do. I have

Speaker 2 some psychological traits which makes me better at some things. Maybe if I'm very good at talking to people, I should aim to do a bit to be a manager or maybe to be a public speaker.

Speaker 2 If I'm very good at math, I may be thinking, you know, what I should do is do working in engineering or in finance.

Speaker 2 So you will try to find, given who I am and the traits i have what is the best thing i can do and you don't need to think you know a lot carefully about it you'll pick it up uh you'll pick up that wait a minute this person is like me and this person is is very successful why am i not doing this um you know and the the charter will keep moving forward because it's designed just to push you not too far but as far as possible i've been thinking a lot about the difference between feeling happy when you succeed and just feeling relieved.

Speaker 1 It seems that there is a regular framing that success is the only acceptable outcome and anything short of that is a failure.

Speaker 1 So the achievement of success isn't, it turns the achievement of success not from a cause for joy into just the abatement of fear. You know what I mean? Oh, I avoided disappointment.
Congratulations.

Speaker 1 But that's such a, you know, for the, again, for the sort of high achieving, high expectation, low confidence people out there, that

Speaker 1 you, it's a lose-lose scenario. I didn't achieve the goal.
How miserable I feel about myself.

Speaker 2 I did achieve the goal.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the only acceptable outcome.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, that's fascinating.

Speaker 2 It's another,

Speaker 2 you can explain it

Speaker 2 from how happiness works. Happiness is going to work in your brain, always setting expectations.
and giving you feedback about whether you're doing better than expectations or lower than expectations.

Speaker 2 Now, when you aim for a goal, usually the resolution toward this goal is going to

Speaker 2 take place over time.

Speaker 2 So, if you're working to get a promotion in a company, you know, you have progressive information whether you're doing well enough to be promoted.

Speaker 2 So, your impression, but whether things are going well or not, you know, and as things get better, you feel more and more happy. Similarly, let's say you run a marathon.

Speaker 2 As you're running the marathon, you get information whether you're likely to finish or not.

Speaker 2 And so, the thing is that you will consume the benefit of success all throughout as you get closer from the goal. So, you know, if you look at

Speaker 2 games like, you know, in the US, you have American football, for instance. The guy starts being happy before they score the touchdown.
They start being happy as they know that there is nobody

Speaker 2 in front of them and they are going to score the touchdown. And so they start consuming, in a way, the happiness of the success before the success happens exactly.
And then when you reach it,

Speaker 2 when you reach the success, the only thing which could happen is that you may be 99% chance of being successful, but you could still mess up.

Speaker 2 So, you're running towards the touchdown and you fumble within one meter, that will be a catastrophe. So, you have a relief because

Speaker 2 you have already realized that you are going to be successful, you're super happy, but there's a risk that you could not, and that's this final stuff that

Speaker 2 you're happy not to be failing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love this line from you about how the attainment of a goal seems when the moment of triumph is over almost like a letdown because so few people

Speaker 1 sit back and enjoy it and most people just create another goal that they want to strive for. But the sort of

Speaker 1 the implication of that is presumably they prefer the process of striving toward a goal as opposed to the state of actually having achieved it, which seems completely backward, right?

Speaker 1 Because what you're not saying, why are you pursuing that goal for the pursuit of the goal? No, you're not pursuing the goal for the pursuit of the goal.

Speaker 1 You're pursuing the goal because you want to achieve the goal. But every single bit of evidence about the way that we behave suggests that we prefer the striving as opposed to the achieving.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I think there's two things. First, you will enjoy the striving because the striving is really going toward the goal.
It's like reduce, is increasing the chance that you're going to be successful.

Speaker 2 But obviously, at the very end, the fact that you indeed are successful, there is still an important step. So

Speaker 2 if you look, for instance, like sports matches, and let's say your team is ahead in the game, right?

Speaker 2 You start being happy that you realize you are very likely to win before the end of the match. But nonetheless, when

Speaker 2 the whistle blows and you win the match,

Speaker 2 you are happy because that's the final outcome.

Speaker 2 the success is realized. Now,

Speaker 2 what you have is that

Speaker 2 relative to expectations, relative to maybe the foot about how you would feel before,

Speaker 2 if you were to be successful, then you have this focusing illusion. So

Speaker 2 I have this quote in one of my sub-stack about Andre Agassi. It's in his book, Open.
And Andrea Agassiz,

Speaker 2 I'm not sure if people remember because it's a few decades ago, but there was a lot of pressure.

Speaker 2 He was a very talented tennis player, but there was a lot of pressure that he was a bit rowdy, you know. And people say maybe he's not this kind of guy who can actually win big titles.

Speaker 2 And then he won Wimbledon.

Speaker 2 And then he thinks, well, I felt let down because I was led to believe that winning a Grand Slam would be life-changing. I wouldn't be the same person.

Speaker 2 I would acquire maybe another level of existence, a big world, but

Speaker 2 you'd grow into something else having reached this very high level of achievement. And he said, well, I felt exactly the same person.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 compare that to how

Speaker 2 depressed and sad I was when I was losing in the final of the Grand Slam. I was not that happy having won.
And so that's the thing because

Speaker 2 you would focus on thinking that the Grand Slam is what he needs to be happy. But once he gets a Grand Slam,

Speaker 2 surely he's very happy on the day, right? That's one thing. On the day, he's happy, he may cry, whatever.

Speaker 2 But a few days later, his hedonic system is going to kick in and says, wait a minute, if you want one, you can do more. You know, you can be number one.

Speaker 2 So so the next time is in three months.

Speaker 1 Yeah, gold medalist syndrome, I think it's called.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes, you have the gold medalist.

Speaker 2 You have the, I'm not sure if you, are you referring? Because there's a, you know, you have this study about the gold, silver, and bronze medal.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, I think gold medalists. So, yes, that being bronze is happier than being silver because bronze is two steps away from winning, but silver was very close.

Speaker 1 I think, at least, my, again, bro signs of the gold medalist syndrome was that a lot of the time when people finally achieve their championship that they want at the Olympics and they're left like Andre Agassi feeling significantly less fulfilled than they'd hoped or anticipated that they then tell themselves well ah right it it it's because I have to do it twice it's because I have to prove that it was a fluke that's that's what the problem is that's right yeah so I didn't know the term it's interesting I didn't know this term but yes that's exactly that and I think you know but that's what we're in a way doomed uh to to to experience because if you win one well that's a good you know there's good correlation people win one slam often they win more than one and so eventually you should be you know if people were like i win one slam and i'm happy now i'm going to enjoy cocktails at the hotel well that's not you know conducive to further success yeah it's uh

Speaker 1 it's so funny the the sort of curse of continuing to succeed if if you are a competent person and you break new ground each new achievement doesn't feel like a cause for celebration.

Speaker 1 It simply feels like the next minimum acceptable outcome that you can have the next time you do the thing.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Exactly.
And but the funny thing is that you have this

Speaker 2 the fact that all people behind or below these very highly successful people think that the people who are very successful are very happy.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I can imagine that, let's say if you're on social media and, you

Speaker 2 if you start, you think, oh, if only I had 10 followers, or not 10,000 followers, that's the thing, I'll be very happy.

Speaker 2 People with 10,000 followers are thinking, wait a minute, why don't I have 50,000? People with 50,000 says, why don't I have like 200?

Speaker 2 And we don't know that. So we think that these people are happy, but these people are just looking two steps ahead.

Speaker 1 Have you ever looked at the research around when you ask people what their ideal level of annual income would be?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 yeah, I look I've I remember I don't remember the net the the the um the numbers but I saw a study and maybe do you do you remember so I remember what the outcome was which is basically it's almost always about three times what you earn right now.

Speaker 1 So people will say well I would be you know I'm at I earn 50,000 pounds a year

Speaker 1 150 would you know that would really be exactly but the people at 150 say yeah I mean 450 would really be and then it just keeps on going and keeps on going. And it's very reliable.

Speaker 1 It's all the way up. You know, the millionaires jealous of billionaires, the billionaires jealous of multi-billionaires.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. So I can tell you a few things about this.

Speaker 2 First, on a level, on a very basic level, you ask people,

Speaker 2 let's say, when they're 20, what would be a good life? You know, what would be something where when you're 40, you have achieved and you're happy.

Speaker 2 And they say, I don't know, I've got a house in the suburb, a car, I've got a big TV, you know.

Speaker 2 And then you guys, in the 40, okay, you've got a car, you've got the house, you've got a big TV.

Speaker 2 Is it, do you think you have a good life? He says, well, you know, not really, because, you know, I don't have this thing, I don't have that, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So people move their goalposts, the kind of stuff that they said they would be happy with is not enough for them to be satisfied. So that's a first thing, interesting thing.
And then in terms of

Speaker 2 people always looking ahead, there was, I remember I listened once to an interview of a psychologist with specialists of the psychology of millionaires.

Speaker 2 And he said, you know, when I'm saying that a psychologist of maybe not millionaires, but like super rich, maybe multi-millionaires or billionaires, when I say that I'm a psychologist for these guys, people say, wait a minute, they don't have any problem.

Speaker 2 And the problem is that he says, no, on the contrary, they're often very miserable. Because,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 if you earn $50,000 or $100,000, your next comparison point is maybe the person who gets $150,000.

Speaker 2 But if you're a millionaire, your next comparison point is a guy who's like twice the size of your house. He's just multi-million yachts with all these VIPs coming in.

Speaker 2 And so they're super frustrated that they are not competing well enough with the next guys

Speaker 2 ahead.

Speaker 1 Will Smith, in the memoir that Mark Manson wrote, said, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. When I was rich and miserable, I was despondent.

Speaker 2 That's a good one.

Speaker 1 That's a good one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just, you know, the

Speaker 1 it very much is the case that happiness is not achieving a thing.

Speaker 1 It's not being rich.

Speaker 1 It's being a little bit richer than yesterday

Speaker 1 consistently over and over again. You're right.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, so, but here again, it's here's a trick that is that

Speaker 2 we are, we

Speaker 2 experience positive feelings from doing better than expected. So when you go up, usually, you know, there's a part of

Speaker 2 uncertainty which is resolved.

Speaker 2 Usually, you know, if you're promoted, there was not 100% chance initially. So as

Speaker 2 you win and you are successful,

Speaker 2 there's an element of surprise, of positive surprise. And so you enjoy that.
But if you were on a schedule,

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 the growth of your income, for instance, so the promotion is totally scheduled is is it's uh there's no uncertainty maybe because like you know your your income is indexed on inflation and it's going to increase whatever or maybe not on on on seniority so as you get older and older your income automatically increases then if you expect these increases even if you're doing better you will not feel better because

Speaker 2 all these increments are going to be factored in you expect them and if you expect them you're not going to be more satisfied that's a trick yeah The relationship between happiness and expectation of

Speaker 1 surprise is, it feels so ruthless because by design, you can't design surprise. Like if you knew that it was going to happen, it wouldn't be a fucking surprise.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, you may wonder, why? Why, why are we designed like that? Why can't we have something like happiness, which is something like a mountain? And you start from the bottom.

Speaker 2 And as you more and more successful in life you get more and more happiness you know why why are we not designing that and the the quick answer is that designing a system uh which instead of uh measuring big difference like that only focus on measuring variations related to expectations

Speaker 2 it's a more efficient system to treat information and to

Speaker 2 use whatever

Speaker 2 cognitive capacity you have in your brain to produce a signal which is going to help you. So it's a bit abstract, abstract, but I can say that

Speaker 2 something which we have learned in the last first 30 years is there have been a very interesting convergence between AI research and reinforcement learning and cognitive neuroscience.

Speaker 2 And what some cognitive neuroscience found out is that the brain looks like when the brain rewards you as a difference, you know, relative to your expectations, it's pretty much looks like it's implementing optimal algorithms used in machine learning.

Speaker 2 So you'd have people working in artificial intelligence trying to program how a program is going to learn the right thing to do.

Speaker 2 And the best, one simple thing

Speaker 2 for this program to learn is to say, well, form expectations about what different actions are going to lead to. And then try out.
And when you try the action,

Speaker 2 you just compare. Is this action, is the outcome better than expected or worse than expected? And then you adjust your expectation.

Speaker 2 And if you try a lot, eventually you are going to learn to to do the right thing. And it's pretty much exactly what we do.
And it's an efficient way of processing information.

Speaker 2 It would be much more difficult for your brain to have a very complete map about happiness from zero to

Speaker 2 the top. It's better to have a kind of a local stuff guiding you locally

Speaker 2 expectations exactly incrementally.

Speaker 1 Yeah, how interesting. So talk to me, let's expand this out a little bit more into habituation and sort of the adaptive explanation for habituation more broadly.
Like,

Speaker 1 why didn't evolution just design us with the ability to feel greater and greater happiness whenever we do better?

Speaker 2 Well, it's exactly what I was saying before, is that it's more efficient. I think a very good comparison is our visual system.
That's exactly the same thing. So, you know, your visual system

Speaker 2 doesn't kind of recall the objective luminosity in a room,

Speaker 2 the objective luminosity. Actually, it's not measuring it.
From the time where the light hits your retina, what's recorded is actually a divergence relative to expectations.

Speaker 2 And what you see is that, you know, if you were to turn off the light somewhere, so now you see things, you turn off the light, everything is bleak. So you can't see anymore.

Speaker 2 But if you wait a bit, your eye is going to adapt, you're going to start seeing shades, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And so you're going to be able to perceive difference in contrast that you were not perceiving before. What has happened is that your eye

Speaker 2 does exactly the same thing, that you have a kind of an expectation and you observe differences within this range. If suddenly I change the range of luminosity, your eye doesn't see anything anymore.

Speaker 2 So you have to adapt to eventually perceive again the differences. And having this, why is it useful?

Speaker 2 Because if you have a kind of range where you can perceive differences, you want to maximally use this range in the area you are.

Speaker 2 If I was to allocate this range, I have to stretch it to observe any kind of differences.

Speaker 2 Then the problem is that a lot of things would look the same because because you have a limited ability to perceive differences.

Speaker 2 So you I want to use this ability to perceive differences the most in the area where there are variations that I need to observe.

Speaker 2 So my eyes are optimally adapting my ability to perceive difference in contrast in the range of contrast that I'm facing now.

Speaker 2 And if you turn off turn the light off or put a bright light, I'm going to adapt to this new range. And your happiness is the same thing.
So your perception of subjective values,

Speaker 2 they adapt to the range you're facing. So, you know, if you are not very rich selling sandwiches

Speaker 2 on a cart, you know, you need to be careful about not losing $10.

Speaker 2 So you'll be mindful about not making mistakes such that when you count the money, you're hanging in and getting back, you know, that you're not losing money because this money is important.

Speaker 2 But let's say that you scratch. a lot of card and you become a millionaire.
Well, $10 doesn't matter anymore. So, you know, why would you care?

Speaker 2 Why would you allocate some of your perception of value to difference in $10 when this doesn't matter anymore?

Speaker 1 Is there an implication then if sort of incrementalism, this step-by-step nature of us slowly getting toward our goals, is there an implication that sudden huge leaps in improvement of life circumstances are actually very bad for us?

Speaker 1 In that if you win the lottery, how are you going to ever have a better day than the day that you won the lottery? Like it came out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 It sets this new unreasonable standard for you as opposed to, you know, the person who's maybe tormented by their daily grind to move toward their goals.

Speaker 1 But presumably, if you're already on that sort of path and momentum, you were only half a step behind yesterday and you can be half a step ahead tomorrow.

Speaker 1 The difference between that and somebody that just has a windfall aunt that dies with $50 million and gives it to them or something,

Speaker 1 where do you go from there? You don't even have any systems to be able to locate yourself.

Speaker 2 So I think you're right that if you're very successful very quickly, one challenge you face is to reset,

Speaker 2 you know, because we're designed for that. We're designed to have goals and to move forward, et cetera.
So

Speaker 2 one challenge you face is to reset your goals in life.

Speaker 2 If you're not able to do that,

Speaker 2 if you're not challenged anymore, first you may become bored,

Speaker 2 if you don't think that you have anything

Speaker 2 to achieve.

Speaker 2 But also you may make mistakes. So

Speaker 2 I think I've heard that you know people who win the lottery and were not specially rich before, often they get counseling. And you can imagine so because

Speaker 2 if you used to have a lot of money, you want to have a professional investment strategy, right, to gain even more money.

Speaker 2 But if you move from not much to a lot of money, maybe you think, well, I'm going to buy a luxury car, luxury boat, I'm going to, and you're going to spend things which maybe

Speaker 2 the value deteriorates, maybe organize luxury parties, et cetera. It doesn't last.
And you may remember, I think that was a very famous footballer.

Speaker 2 I think it was best, I think George Best, who said,

Speaker 2 most of my money, I use it on women and drugs, and the rest I squandered it.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 you know, if you have a lot of money very quickly, you may not make the best use of it. So I think the challenge when you're very successful is to find your is to get yourself back on the ground.

Speaker 2 It says, where do I want to go from there

Speaker 1 do we habituate less to certain things are there any categories of

Speaker 1 accumulation that we have in our life that

Speaker 2 we seem to be a little bit more resilient to this adaptation so so look it's it's a very good question so arbitration once you reach a certain level of of a comfortable life, which should be, you know,

Speaker 2 lower middle class in the US,

Speaker 2 anything better, what you observe is that people think they will give, but they will be much more happy or much happier if they get more. And actually, you don't.
So happiness doesn't increase much.

Speaker 2 It does increase within the country. And one likely reason is because within the country, you're able to compare yourself to others.
So

Speaker 2 what we observe is that this doesn't increase

Speaker 2 between countries. So you take Americans now overall, for instance.
And

Speaker 2 you look at the number of people who say they are happy or moderately happy. It's the same number as 1949.

Speaker 2 Now, think about all the things which happened since 1949. People have fridges, like TV, colour TV, etc.
They have internet.

Speaker 2 Things that whenever it happens, people say it's amazing, it's fantastic.

Speaker 2 But when you ask now, they don't feel happier. And that's the thing you see in most countries, that when you look at countries, apart from the very poor countries, which

Speaker 2 they get sanitation, they get water, et cetera.

Speaker 2 If you're from a lower-middle-income country to a rich country, it's very flat. Happiness is very flat.

Speaker 2 So that is true. Nonetheless, at the bottom end, there are things which can improve life satisfaction.
So if you move from being homeless to having a house, that improves

Speaker 2 in the long term your life satisfaction.

Speaker 1 That kind of locks it in in a more permanent way.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so one thing which is possible is that your hedonic signals,

Speaker 2 if you think about the modern life that we are living, when we have food on the table, when we have like, you know, sanitations, water, etc. That's not, that's a good, that's a good life.

Speaker 2 I mean, our ancestors didn't have that. So we are in the range of the good life, which in a way,

Speaker 2 the basic signal that we can get, we can still learn that we can do better, but

Speaker 2 we're already doing very well relative to the kind of things that our ancestors were doing.

Speaker 2 But if you are in a life where, you know, your life is threatened because you don't have a home, your health is threatened because you don't have access to good food or protection, et cetera,

Speaker 2 That may still give you signals that, you know, that's not good from an evolution point of view. So I think there's something where

Speaker 1 that's so interesting. So much of what we're doing with habituation in

Speaker 1 lower to like

Speaker 1 developed nations is chasing down better standards of living, but not removing ourselves from things that could be mortal threats to us.

Speaker 1 And maybe our brain is able to detect, okay, there is, you don't always have food on the table. You don't always have a safe place to sleep.
You don't always have reliable water or whatever.

Speaker 1 And if you get out from that, you lock in a particular, so the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I've always thought this about the, you know,

Speaker 1 issues that many of us face. Am I actualizing my logos forward? Is this really me reaching my eudaimonia and making the most of my brief time?

Speaker 1 It's like, hey, dude, an existential crisis is a pretty fucking luxurious position to be in for all of human history until like 200 years ago.

Speaker 1 People were terrified of whether they'd make it to the next day.

Speaker 1 They thought that they were going to get smited from above by a lightning bolt because they'd masturbated last night or whatever it might be. You know, like they're just on this permanent,

Speaker 1 fearful world. And it's odd that, yeah, if you're asking yourself these deep questions about meaning, about fulfillment, about flourishing, about eudaimonia, about reaching your goals, Go,

Speaker 1 it suggests to me that much of the stuff that really matters that you would absolutely miss if it wasn't there has been sorted. And that's why you're up here.
It is no comfort.

Speaker 1 I'm aware it's no comfort because we habituate, but

Speaker 1 I do think it's an important frame.

Speaker 1 No, no, exactly.

Speaker 2 I think you're right. And I have nonetheless, so all this vision is a bit depressing because

Speaker 2 it can be depressing. I don't know.

Speaker 2 You know, know kahneman described himself daniel keneman the psychologist described himself as a cheerful optimist a pessimist a cheerful pessimist cheerful pessimist yeah i like that because you know you you don't tell yourself stories about how the world is you know you you take it as it is so it's a bit pessimistic but actually you can still be cheerful in your life so if you know i'm as a person sometimes to be cheerful and and daniel kahneman was as well so um

Speaker 2 anyway the the the the thing i wanted to to to say about um the arbitration is that there's a positive aspect to it because I say it's a bit can be a bit depressing, but there's a positive aspect to it is that

Speaker 2 the rest point of happiness where we come back to is not neutral. And there is good reasons for it,

Speaker 2 which we can come to it if you want. But

Speaker 2 if you take a scale from one to ten and you ask people how happy you are, people don't say, I'm kind of neutral on average. They won't say five, they will say seven.

Speaker 2 So people on average tend to be fairly cheerful, fairly fine with it. And, you know, it's true.
You go to people who don't have a high income and they say, well, yes, life is relatively fine.

Speaker 2 You know, I could do better. But, and

Speaker 2 they will give you an answer around seven. And you go higher levels, people will tell you an answer.
So we habituate, but we don't habituate to misery.

Speaker 2 We habituate to a fairly fine level of happiness. So that's the positive news.

Speaker 1 I'd seen somewhere that status is a little less subject to habituation than some of the other elements in our life. You get any idea if that's true?

Speaker 2 Look,

Speaker 2 I think it's likely to be true.

Speaker 2 And maybe this explains why your happiness still increases when you get richer within your country because your status increases within your country.

Speaker 2 So when the whole country gets richer, you know, you move with the cohort of your country. So you get the fridge, but everybody gets the fridge.
So

Speaker 2 you're happy to have the fridge. But when you get the fridge and people don't have the fridge, you know, you're happy that you have the fridge and relative to others who don't have it.

Speaker 2 So I think status makes sense because status

Speaker 2 is,

Speaker 2 we are a very social species, and status, you know, how well you are regarded by others in your community is a key indication of success. So if you go to ancestors,

Speaker 2 in particular for males, like status would have much more conducive to find mates and to have hairs, etc. So

Speaker 2 even if it's something not like food or sex or whatever, status, it's likely that it is one thing where we feel what will primarily was, that you feel good from experiencing status.

Speaker 2 And that's something that, you know, cognitive neuroscientists also,

Speaker 2 maybe not necessarily all of them, but something which is accepted by some cognitive neuroscientists that status as such experiences and increasing status is going to feel good.

Speaker 2 And that is going to be

Speaker 2 status is super flexible. Like,

Speaker 2 and you can always keep increasing status

Speaker 2 all across your life so when you were talking about food etc

Speaker 2 in a way once you can eat well is from an evolution point of view there is no so

Speaker 2 a big difference between the food you get in a five-star michelin restaurant and the food you can buy from getting the supermarket and you know maybe that may seem shocking to a lot of people but the fact is that the food in the supermarket is super safe uh relative to we are talking about our ancestors who are freaking out etc.

Speaker 2 You don't have to fight for the food. There is no bacteria or parasites in your food.

Speaker 2 You know, it's warm, etc. So the food in the five-star Michelin restaurant, the biggest difference is not the number of calories, whether it's safe, etc.
You know, in terms of fitness effect,

Speaker 2 it's not going to be very different. The difference is a status, is that it gives you status or to be able to you or because you have status you can do that.

Speaker 2 It's a signal of status to be able to eat in such a restaurant, etc.

Speaker 2 And so while you can't, you know, increase all this stuff about the comfort of your life, you have a roof over your head, you have food, you have water, etc., status can keep increasing.

Speaker 2 You can keep relative to others being doing better and better.

Speaker 2 The sad thing about it, though, is that status is a zero-sum game.

Speaker 2 Exactly. So as you rise in status, others who are competing with you are relatively to you going down in status.

Speaker 2 And so it's what I'm just going to say, it's not something that you can, you know, you have utilitarianism, it's this philosophy that you want to maximize the happiness in the country.

Speaker 2 And thirdly, if status is one of the key things where you can increase the happiness of individuals, well, you can't increase the happiness of the country because status is

Speaker 2 those who have it, those who don't have it, is a zero-sum gap. So you can't increase the status of everybody.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 another huge tension that a lot of people seem to have to deal with is this relationship between happiness and a meaningful life.

Speaker 1 Is it a tension? Is this a fake thing? What is there to know when it comes to useful definitions and differences between happiness and meaning?

Speaker 2 Look, I find it fascinating. And once again, I think it's fascinating because

Speaker 2 We have these big questions. What is the meaning of life?

Speaker 2 What am I meant to do? I mean, some people don't care, but some people care and some people think, what should I do? What would give sense to my life, etc.

Speaker 2 Some people make big life decisions, you know, they go to foreign countries and work and et cetera, to do in poor countries, to dedicate their lives to some causes, etc.

Speaker 2 So why do we have these feelings and

Speaker 2 why don't we understand?

Speaker 2 Why are this kind of mysterious? And here again, we are in the thing where evolution gives us the feelings that guides and our decisions for us to navigate the world.

Speaker 2 But the evolution didn't need to tell us why we have them. And so

Speaker 2 part of the mystery is that because now we kind of try to think about why we have this, but we have not been given the tools because these tools, understanding why we have these feelings is not in itself helpful.

Speaker 2 And actually, you know, I was saying before that you have a convergence between cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. And it's exactly the same thing in artificial intelligence.

Speaker 2 If you program a if you design a computer program to do a task, you don't need the computer program to know why it's doing the task.

Speaker 2 So if you design a computer program to win at chess or to win at Go, you know, the game of Go, you don't need to tell the program, you know, everything which is happening now is for you to win.

Speaker 2 You just give this program this system of values.

Speaker 2 It expands these values to choose the next decision and it revises values depending on whether the outcome is above or below the expectations. And the program can be completely myopic.

Speaker 2 It ends up winning a chess. It has learned to win a chess.
But it doesn't have a conscience saying, oh, my goal in life is to win a chess.

Speaker 2 But now imagine this program become self-aware and start thinking, what am I doing? What is my goal in life? Well, you know, you would have to find

Speaker 2 this stuff by itself because the programmer didn't need to put in the program the answer, oh, everything which is happening is because you have been designed to win a chess.

Speaker 2 And this is the same problem we have.

Speaker 2 We have been designed by evolution to be successful, and we experience all these feelings for us to be successful, but we have not been given the awareness about why we experience these feelings.

Speaker 2 And so, we are grasping these big questions

Speaker 2 because we don't have the tools to naturally think about why we were doing that. So, the thing about the meaning of life, we have these big questions,

Speaker 2 and I think there's a fairly simple answer: is that the hedonic feelings we have

Speaker 2 have to answer several types of questions. One question is right now, you know,

Speaker 2 is my meal now good or is it not good? Should I stop it? You know, is it too breezy? It's making me sick, et cetera.

Speaker 2 You know, is this person I'm talking to, a friendly person I want to continue the interaction with? Or is it a boring person I'm wasting my time?

Speaker 2 Or somebody who doesn't like me and I shouldn't say anything private because this person is going to gossip about it, whatever. So you are asking all these questions.

Speaker 2 And your hedonic feelings right now, whether you feel that you're happy because the food you're eating is good or you feel sympathy with somebody all these feelings are helping you to guide you in the right now moment now

Speaker 2 this is good but a lot of success is going to be determined by a larger span of time uh you know are you in in the right setting in the stuff you're doing in your life overall is it good so if i ask you how satisfied are you with your life

Speaker 2 you are going to think about what you are doing with your life in a bigger window, bigger time window. And you're not going just to think about, oh, is my meal good? Is this friend good?

Speaker 2 You're thinking of the bigger scheme.

Speaker 2 Am I going somewhere in life, which is in line with what would be successful, which is like building, maybe your standing in the community, finding a romantic partner, maybe raising your kids and seeing your kids grow, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So if you

Speaker 2 can see that this kind of stuff happening, you're more likely to experience this kind of life satisfaction.

Speaker 2 and what you can have you can have a disconnect between pleasure and achieving these goals because you can have a lot of pleasure in the short term but they don't lead you to achieving these goals often achieving these long-term goals need

Speaker 2 to for you to do some things which are costly now so you know if you spend your time playing video games from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Speaker 2 it may be very nice but if i ask you six months later are you happy with your life you may say you know what i'm not sure i'm going anywhere

Speaker 2 I enjoy what I do every day. That's why I'm doing it.
But I don't feel I'm going anywhere. Something is missing.

Speaker 2 It's missing is that you're not doing what's right for you to feel that you're progressing toward a successful life. And so

Speaker 2 when you think about the meaning of life, I think what's kicking in in your head is this kind of intuition about...

Speaker 2 Am I in the right setting? Am I in the right progress? This right dynamic toward being successful in life? Something which is meaningful is

Speaker 2 doing things where people are happy what I'm doing. So my standing in the community is increasing.
I'm perceived as somebody nice and contributing to my community. I have friends.
I have my family.

Speaker 2 My partner loves me, et cetera. This gives meaning because we think I'm doing things right.
I'm moving forward in the right direction. This gives us kind of feelings.

Speaker 1 It seems like

Speaker 1 time is a really important contributor here that sort of a good life versus a pleasurable life is a conflict across time, short-term versus long-term.

Speaker 1 And you've got this great, this gorgeous quote where you say, much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches, where short-term hedonic signals conflict with long-term ones.

Speaker 1 And it's just this tension. It's this tension between the two.
I want to eat the cookie or smoke the cigarette or drink the beer today,

Speaker 1 but I don't want to deal with the fatness or the hangover tomorrow. And you scale this up over time.

Speaker 1 The thing that's super interesting,

Speaker 1 I have had this intuition for ages that certain people are

Speaker 1 predisposed to take more pleasure from meaning, and other people are more predisposed to take more pleasure from enjoyment.

Speaker 1 I think people find their way, they they do in life the thing that gives them the best hedonic signals. So, for me, I

Speaker 1 actually suck quite a bit at pleasure,

Speaker 1 really fucking good at meaning. Like, I will, you know, bury myself for three months in the hopes that something will come out of that on the other side.

Speaker 1 Suck at pleasure, good at meaning. I have a lot of friends who are the opposite.

Speaker 1 And this was that famous, you may know this story better than me, but this famous conversation debate, friendly debate between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman, where Gilbert was saying that a good life could be one where you spend every hour for the remainder of your days laid on a lilo, floaty in a pool with a cocktail.

Speaker 1 And he he said, in retrospect, and you look back, would that have, would you have considered a life well-lived? Well, it doesn't matter because day to day, your experience was just pleasure.

Speaker 1 I'm in a pool. This is nice.
The cocktail tastes good.

Speaker 1 Kahneman said that, no, what you want is a true happiness or true meaning in life comes from a life which, in retrospect, you're glad that you lived. Right.

Speaker 1 And I think that, at least to me, this is my, again, another pet bro science theory, which you'd feel free to tear apart. That

Speaker 1 I think that the more ruminative of a thinker that you are, the more you need to optimize to be Kahneman, not to be Gilbert.

Speaker 1 Whereas I have friends who are able to just fucking be, they don't care about where they're going with this. They're not asking about whether it's this deeper contribution in the same way.

Speaker 1 And maybe they're going to have midlife crisis at 55 and they're going to come back to me and go, dude, should have buried myself for three months. You were, or whatever.

Speaker 2 But not that I told them to change their ways or whatever.

Speaker 1 But I just get this like to tie all of that together, this tension over time, uh short-term hedonic signals conflicting with long-term ones but i think that our predisposition uh the frame that we enter the world with and the way that we're rewarded individually based on genetics and experience is

Speaker 1 i think it it disposes us to focus on one more than the other. And I think that this is why one size fits all solutions to this.

Speaker 1 Most people will lie somewhere in the middle, but there's some people that are out on the tails. I have no idea what percentile I am.
I could be 99. I don't think I am.

Speaker 1 But I'm definitely toward the, I'm toward the long-term signals. Like they, they are more salient to me.
They're more powerful to me compared with the short-term ones. That makes sense.

Speaker 2 That makes totally sense. I like how you frame it as, you know,

Speaker 2 being focused on meaning or being focused on pleasure.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we have all, we have always to make these choices, like

Speaker 2 pleasure right now versus later. And our ancestors had to do it as well.
A lot of, for instance, a lot of cooperation, like basic cooperation decision is being nice to other people.

Speaker 2 You know, sometimes you can take advantage of people now, there's a benefit now, but what you lose is that you lose that goodwill tomorrow and they won't help you when you need their help.

Speaker 2 So even our ancestors in very different settings, you know, had to see trade-offs. But something which

Speaker 2 characterizes our modern world is that these trade-offs have become

Speaker 2 way outside of the kind of range of we were facing before because our time horizon has increased increased massively. First, our life expectancy has increased.

Speaker 2 If you compare to even 200 years ago, the life expectancy had doubled. That's one thing.
But also the time horizon has increased because now we have a lot of institutions which give us the time to

Speaker 2 invest in the future. Now we have banks.
So sometimes banks go bankrupt, but very often, most often they don't.

Speaker 2 So you have this crazy thing which you can put money in a bank at 20 and get money back at 60.

Speaker 2 when i say bank it's all the financial system now you think about this our ancestors were not designed you know we're not facing this kind of decisions so when you are 20 60 is like way out so thinking about making these decisions we we don't have the intuitions we don't have the hedonic feelings to make these decisions uh

Speaker 2 and when you think about now you know Think about, I don't remember when, what was the age of Alexander when he conquered this big empire, but he was super young.

Speaker 2 I think he was less than 25 or something like this. And think about people who are 25 now.
They are like often considered still like kids, right?

Speaker 2 We have these things where we become in a way ready to enter the world much later. And it takes a lot of time to achieve leadership positions and high position, etc.
So you need a lot of investment.

Speaker 2 You need to work hard at school when you're 15. You need to work hard in early position when you're 25, et cetera, to invest to be successful.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you want to be successful, I say you need is is if you want to be successful. And the thing is,

Speaker 2 this requires a lot of

Speaker 2 postponing of enjoyment, maybe

Speaker 2 less video games, less eating nice stuff, and less holidays, and more.

Speaker 2 And so I don't think we have necessarily the this is a big challenge we face. And a lot of unhappiness

Speaker 2 that we observe is, I think, comes from this tension. Is that the world

Speaker 2 offers us a lot of ways of being happy now? You know, you have

Speaker 2 at the kick of a button, you have,

Speaker 2 in fact, for young boys, like a lot of video girls, this takes a lot of their time, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And it's designed by, you know, designed by psychologists to be exactly tapping into the stuff which is pretend status, which they like and they enjoy, et cetera. So you have all that.

Speaker 2 But then you ask people later, are you happy with your life?

Speaker 2 Well, the problem is that all these very nice things that you do in the short term and that you have been seduced to do in the short term, they have not led you to maybe go the steps where for you to progress in life.

Speaker 2 And so you have this mismatch between what you said, you know, this feeling for meaning and this feeling for pleasure.

Speaker 2 And in a way, the problem of the modern world is that it has designed so much appealing things which are pleasurable in the present, and we want to buy them, but it has increased the time horizon that we face.

Speaker 2 and increasing

Speaker 2 the importance of pervading further.

Speaker 1 That's so interesting. I love that.
So what about

Speaker 1 the classic question, the meaning of life? What do you think that misses, given your evolutionary lens, given your insights into sort of neuroscience?

Speaker 1 Because it seems like what people are looking for is something outside of life.

Speaker 1 Why is life here? Give me something that transcends the thing that I'm asking the question about.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 I think you're right.

Speaker 2 That a lot of times when we think what's the meaning of life, people want to see that there's something objective out there, which gives sense to your life beyond your subjective experience.

Speaker 2 So for instance, if I'm, you know, working in an orphanage in a poor country, helping kids, you know, learn things, I feel I'm doing something good and that gives sense to my life.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 if you

Speaker 2 believe into some metaphysical reality, like for instance religion, If you're religious and you believe there is a God or several

Speaker 2 spiritual entities out there who

Speaker 2 gives you a mission to do in life, then I guess that can be the meaning of your life, is to follow these goals that are given by your religion.

Speaker 2 Personally,

Speaker 2 I don't think that

Speaker 2 my point of view is purely naturalistic, so I'm just going to look at naturalistic explanation. If you don't have any metaphysical explanation, the fact is

Speaker 2 these feelings that we want something objective to give sense

Speaker 2 to give a meaning to our life, it's just a feeling because the only thing that we have is our subjective experience. And so I think that

Speaker 2 there's nothing out there. There's a Dennett,

Speaker 2 the evolutionary psychologist called a sky hook, to have an explanation which

Speaker 2 hook which comes from the sky and holds your theory. So if you don't have a sky hook like a religious explanation, then the only explanation you can start with is that we have these feelings.

Speaker 2 They They come from a brain. They have been designed to help us make good decisions.

Speaker 2 And the feelings of meaning have to come from the view that you are going somewhere in your life and it has to be connected with the kind of thing which help our ancestors being successful.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't mean, so some of it often is linked with being very pro-social. So I think people often experience meaning where you know they are doing they are doing good toward other people.

Speaker 2 And I think it makes sense because

Speaker 2 investing in the future, as I said before, often being cooperative is investing in the future.

Speaker 2 So it doesn't pay right now to do a lot of good things to other people, but to build goodwill and a good reputation. And that helps you being successful in the future.

Speaker 2 And I think that we would have the Edonic

Speaker 2 system helping us to take that into consideration. And, you know, because it's far in the future, in a way, this feeling that we're doing something good

Speaker 2 is bringing the

Speaker 2 the benefit from the future in the present and uh

Speaker 2 and so we feel you know we can feel we can i'm not saying i'm not saying that we are consciously calculating and think oh you know what i'm going to help my neighbor today i don't really care about my neighbor but by doing that when i will need my neighbor helps you know i can ask no we don't do that we we help our neighbor uh and we feel good about it and we and and But what it does is that it also gives us goodwill.

Speaker 2 So when we need it, we can get it.

Speaker 2 And so i think that lots of this feeling of goodwill of sorry of meaning that we experience when we are doing good things is because it would have helped our ancestors to actually be good cooperators and to to care about being nice with other people contributing to the community rising and standing as being perceived as a as an altruist and positive person a trustworthy person so i think that's why we experience this kind of meanings but if you don't have a sky hook it all has to come from these feelings which are designed to help us being successful

Speaker 1 i suppose yeah you're right.

Speaker 1 If all that happiness and meaning are as signals produced by the brain to indicate if we're on a path that's aligned towards success, but the path gets calibrated by an ancestral past, there's huge opportunity for mismatch now in the modern world.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. No, no.
And I think that's, you know,

Speaker 2 you see,

Speaker 2 for instance, a big topic now is

Speaker 2 the challenge faced by young boys in the modern world.

Speaker 2 Young boys,

Speaker 2 for evolutionary reasons, are maturing later than girls. And so they are not necessarily ready for the kind of

Speaker 2 demanding

Speaker 2 pushback of pleasure that school is requiring. School is requiring to be systematic, to be

Speaker 2 not jumping around, listening to the teacher, doing your homework, et cetera. for years and years and years.
And the rewards are very far in the future.

Speaker 2 And what happens is that we see now with um

Speaker 2 a decreasing proportion of of young men going to university being successful etc because the world offered them you know all these um quick um reward accessible online and has pushed back the uh the schedule to become successful as i say alexander you know must have been uh riding a horse uh with his father and fighting before he was 20.

Speaker 2 that doesn't happen anymore you know before you're 20 you're still a kid in in modern world so

Speaker 2 this is a clear mismatch and and

Speaker 2 you know the perspective i'm proposing is not a normative perspective i'm not saying you should do that because there's no normative principles philosophical principles i'm just saying this is the way we work but what i what it can say is that because there's a mismatch uh it can give the warning that you know

Speaker 2 maybe

Speaker 2 if you don't think enough about the future,

Speaker 2 be careful because the modern societies is kind of can entrap you with all these nice

Speaker 2 pleasures it's offering you now, in particular when you're young. And it's not going necessarily to help you do the right step for you to be happy when you're 35.

Speaker 1 Lionel Page, ladies and gentlemen, Lionel, let's bring this one home. Dude, you are fucking awesome.
I love your writing. I'm so glad that you're able to speak as well as you write.

Speaker 1 You are now officially on the rotation of guests. I'm going to hassle every couple of months to bring on.
I love it. Where people want to check out more of the stuff that you write?

Speaker 1 Where should they go?

Speaker 2 Well, um, I've got a book which is uh here, Optimally Irrational, uh,

Speaker 2 nicely placed. So, it's about you know, you, if you're interested in psychology and behavior, I highly recommend that you check it out.

Speaker 2 And otherwise, as you said, I have my sub stack where I kind of continue the same name, optimally irrational, and I continue talking about psychology with an evolutionary perspective and game theory, perspective, economic perspective.

Speaker 2 And yeah, the last um post were about

Speaker 2 happiness and the incoming ones are going to be about coalitional psychological theory, which I think is super interesting as well.

Speaker 1 Dude, until next time, I appreciate you.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Chris. See you.

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