Elon’s Twitter Buy, Urban Hellscapes, and Guest Dr. Laurie Santos

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Speaker 13 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher. Scott Galloway, I cannot believe it on the day Elon is trying to buy Twitter, is out today.

Speaker 13 I'm joined by writer, actor, and media personality, and sometimes Pivot co-host Ji Han, George Hahn. I'm thrilled that you're here, George.
Good to see you again.

Speaker 12 Kara, it's such a thrill to be here.

Speaker 12 So thank you for asking.

Speaker 13 Of course, you're my first choice, honestly.

Speaker 13 I thought it would be fun to talk to you after. And by the way, Scott thinks every now and then, because he's such a loudmouth, we need a palate cleanser.

Speaker 13 And you are a palate cleanser, as if I had to pick one.

Speaker 13 That's what he said to me.

Speaker 12 Give me a minute. Give me a minute.
I'll share that real fast.

Speaker 13 Anyway, just did you watch the Grammys last night? I did not. I was on a plane to Vancouver.
I'm in Vancouver right now.

Speaker 12 I didn't because I still have PTSD from the Oscars. And I'm in that place where if, like, you know, for the next few award shows, I'm going to have to watch them through my fingers.

Speaker 12 Right, right, right. I did see some clips, and I'm sure you heard as well.
By all accounts, it was actually a fun show.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah, I think there wasn't too much. Zelinsky appeared.
Justin Bieber's outfit. I noticed you tweeted about it.
Tell me about what you thought about that. He was channeling David Byrne.

Speaker 12 Preet prompted me and he showed up and he said, George, can I get a ruling? And

Speaker 12 I immediately thought of David Byrne and his

Speaker 12 stop making sense talking heads

Speaker 12 drag, which was fantastic. And Bieber is kind of doing his own riff on it.
It's fine. What really concerned me is that Justin, along with many others, starting with Timothy Chalamay,

Speaker 12 there is that term, so-and-so lost his shirt. Well, it seems like everybody literally lost their shirt.
No one's wearing shirts now. Their shirts are very last year.

Speaker 13 No, it was interesting. The host of SNL, I'm totally Jared Carmichael.
He wasn't wearing a shirt, but he looked good, I have to say. I kind of like it.
What What do you think?

Speaker 12 I think it depends on who's doing it. You know, and there's Lenny Kravitz.
I'm a little bit of it.

Speaker 13 That's why you took a picture of him doing it.

Speaker 12 Oh, of me? Yeah, and you did it. Yes, I get that.
You look good.

Speaker 12 You look good. You're very kind.

Speaker 12 I,

Speaker 12 you know, some can pull it off, and it's not necessarily an age thing because Lenny Kravitz showed up. I don't know if you saw what he was wearing on the red carpet.
No, I did.

Speaker 12 But he had on like tight leather pants. He still pulls it off.
He had boots that nearly went up. He was catwoman from the waist down.

Speaker 12 And then shirtless, but he wore this chainmail halter. Yeah.
That he, it worked. It worked.
Lenny Kravitz looked great. Yeah.

Speaker 13 What about Chalamet? What do you think of Chalamet?

Speaker 12 I think Timothy's having fun. You know, you're young, have some fun.

Speaker 12 These are the days where you're in, you know, you're 20, you're in your 20s. Everybody wants to have sex with you.
Like, find yourself. Okay.
All right. Okay.

Speaker 13 Well, speaking of finding yourself, Louis C.K. apparently isn't canceled.

Speaker 13 He won the Grammy for for Best Comedy album just days after Will Smith resigned from the Academy over his conduct at the Oscars.

Speaker 13 Smith, by the way, says he's willing to accept whatever punishment the Academy doles out.

Speaker 13 The obvious question, why is Smith's bad behavior potentially punished? And Louis's back, I guess, you know, and he was whipping out his ding-dong.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he was whipping it out. That's my word for penises, just so you know, ding-dong.

Speaker 13 But go ahead, move along.

Speaker 12 Or dong, as you know, get-ass preet about that. I don't like that.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. But, you know, listen, it's been a minute since the Louis situation, and comedy is tragedy plus time.
So it's been a little time.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 12 He is funny.

Speaker 12 I'm not excusing it. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I got.

Speaker 12 In terms of craft, I think Louis C.K.

Speaker 12 minus the incident or the, you know, the stuff.

Speaker 13 Many incidents, apparently.

Speaker 12 But go ahead.

Speaker 12 Incidents, yeah, several.

Speaker 12 He is a master craftsman when it comes to joke making. Right.

Speaker 12 A modern genius.

Speaker 12 The whole situation really disappointed me. I liked and admired his work so much.

Speaker 12 He's a real artist in that

Speaker 12 world.

Speaker 12 I haven't seen his special.

Speaker 12 You know,

Speaker 12 some of his competition in the category was

Speaker 12 Lewis Black, whom I adore, Chelsea Handler.

Speaker 13 That was a good special.

Speaker 12 Hers was a good special. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Very strong.

Speaker 12 Although Although Chelsea hits it with the drugs a lot. Like, I get it, Chelsea.
You like to be high. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Well, everybody's got their thing.
Dave Chappelle has the trans stuff. I mean, what's interesting, I've been thinking about it a lot because I did think

Speaker 13 Chappelle, that particular segment, was super transphobic and he has a problem with it. I interviewed Kathy Griffin about that.
At the same time, he's a genius.

Speaker 13 I think I've decided to give comics like a real wide berth now. And as I think about it and sort of evolve my opinion, in this case, I don't give him a wide berth for whipping out his penis.
It went

Speaker 13 disgusting.

Speaker 13 But it's an interesting issue.

Speaker 13 But on stage, I give comics the hitting or the penis whipping. It's just, I don't know what to do.
It's really hard to figure it all out.

Speaker 13 Although I'm pretty much on the side of yuck, like you all are creepy.

Speaker 12 It's reminding me of this early 90s album from Sandra Bernhard titled Excuses for Bad Behavior. And now we're here, like now we're living it.

Speaker 12 Yep, yep. Yep.

Speaker 13 I mean, what's interesting is people voted for Louis C.K. knowing about his behavior, so they've obviously forgiven him for it.
Will Slap came only after the votes were cast.

Speaker 13 So anyway, it's interesting. It's an interesting thing.

Speaker 12 It's a scratch from a head.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it is. It's interesting.
And so, you know, people want to watch it. I think people should watch what they want to watch.
And,

Speaker 13 you know, sometimes,

Speaker 13 you know, with Chris Rock, people are giving a hard time over the tasteless Jada Pinkett Smith joke. Same time saying he didn't deserve it.

Speaker 13 I think Jared Carmichael made a great point during his monologue on SNL. He's a comic.
He's wonderful.

Speaker 12 I'm not going to talk about it.

Speaker 12 I want to be clear up top.

Speaker 12 I've talked about it enough.

Speaker 12 Kept talking about it. Kept thinking about it.
I don't want to talk about it. And you can't make me talk about it.

Speaker 12 But I got a question. Do you want to talk about it?

Speaker 13 I urge everyone to go watch his monologue because it was.

Speaker 12 It really is delicious.

Speaker 13 He really is.

Speaker 12 Masterful opening monologue.

Speaker 13 Yep. He did.
So today, just so you know, we'll talk about a lot of things. Elon Musk's new Twitter, not his new tweet, but his new Twitter.
He's bought a big chunk of the company, nearly 10%.

Speaker 13 We'll get some news about Sarah Palin and other loudmouths. I know you love to talk about them.
And then to cool down, we'll speak with Dr. Lori Santos about happiness.

Speaker 13 But first, Discovery and Warner Media will merge in the coming days. Advocacy groups are saying the merged company is failing Latinos.

Speaker 13 Okay. The Alliance of Groups, including Edward James Olmos Latino Film Institute, say say Discovery has zero Latino showrunners, directors, and executives in 2021.
That seems odd and strange

Speaker 13 when you think about all the different companies with all these hits and everything else. Anyway,

Speaker 13 that's going to happen. That's going to happen next week.
And then David Sazoff takes over. He's sort of an old schooler.
I suspect. He's like, oh, God, now I own a big company.

Speaker 13 He's sort of been toiling away over at Discovery for a long time where he's not gotten as much attention. So he better be ready for this kind of attention on all kinds of fronts, the way Bob Chapik

Speaker 13 is on at Disney. I don't know.
What do you think?

Speaker 12 You have to represent. You know, I mean, it's not, it's kind of a no-brainer.

Speaker 12 You know, and they have

Speaker 12 the Latino community has every right to be sort of going, uh-uh, hey, hey, with this. Yeah.
Yeah. What's going on?

Speaker 12 Yeah. Yeah.
Sorry, not sorry. You got to represent.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I think it's interesting because when you move from,

Speaker 13 you know, when you're not prepared for the onslaught, because there's these partisanship and culture wars are, are even though people are actually concerned about inflation and day-to-day life when you look at polling, it's going to be a part of the corporate scene, no matter how you slice it going forward.

Speaker 13 And so depending on what side are in the and the right is just as aggressive as the left in calling people out.

Speaker 13 You know, Bob Chapic got caught in sort of a scissors here when he in a squeeze because he did the wrong thing on the gays and lesbians in Florida.

Speaker 13 And then when he started to do the right thing, Juan DeSantis attacked him. So I don't envy these CEOs.

Speaker 13 They're paid an enormous amount of money, but it's a really difficult squeeze for a company when they have to pick a side, essentially.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 I am sometimes, yes, and sometimes not a fan of Anna Winter, but she says one of my favorite things about this very thing. You have to stand for something.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Yes, it just depends on what you stand for.
Well, she's had her own share of controversies, by the way, in that area.

Speaker 12 You know, she generally saw it in that regard.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah, I would agree. I would agree.
And I think it's hard for

Speaker 12 You have to stand for something.

Speaker 13 Well, David, welcome to the Thunderdome. I think you're going to find it a little different than

Speaker 13 having a controversy on Guy Fieri.

Speaker 13 Whatever. I think it's going to be a little more than that.

Speaker 13 That was the biggest star discovery. He has been.
I like Guy Fieri anyway.

Speaker 13 I watched Diners, Trivens, and whatever it's called.

Speaker 13 Also, Jen, the White House is Jen Saki, maybe headed to MSNBC. She reportedly hosts Sean Peacock, also on the regular channels.
What do you think about this sort of revolving door?

Speaker 13 It seems like it's not just her, it's on the right, it's on the left.

Speaker 13 They just hired Mick Mulvaney somewhere. I forget where they

Speaker 12 are. Mick Mulvaney at CBS.

Speaker 13 CBS.

Speaker 13 That got a huge controversy. So what do you think about these things here, John?

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 it depends. I think Mulvaney is a different thing.
And Stephen Colbert had an incredible monologue about that. He did, indeed.

Speaker 15 CBS News has hired the ex-president's former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to, quote, provide political analysis across the network's broadcasts and platforms.

Speaker 15 For more, we go to the late show's own media analyst, Stephen Colbert. Stephen, your thoughts?

Speaker 15 What the

Speaker 12 sake doesn't surprise me, you know? Like, the conservative ones go to Fox. Jen Saki's going to go to MSNBC.
Right, right. Similar Sanders went over there.

Speaker 12 Not really, but not really a surprise. But

Speaker 12 the difference,

Speaker 12 as I see it from where I'm sitting, is that Jen Saki's not a liar. No.

Speaker 12 She doesn't stand up there and lie to everybody all day when she does that.

Speaker 13 Well, the right thing she does, but go ahead. Go ahead.

Speaker 12 Of course they do.

Speaker 12 But she's also very good at her job.

Speaker 12 It's the formula now. It's what you do.

Speaker 13 Like Cole Wallace and others. I don't know if I think of that, but I got to say, I mean, what's his name? Sean Spicer's over at what? Own or one of them? I forget.

Speaker 12 Listen, like we're saying, Sean Spicer went where? We don't know.

Speaker 13 I know, I know.

Speaker 12 But then who else went?

Speaker 13 What was the other press secretary for

Speaker 12 Kaylee McAneneman?

Speaker 12 She went over Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Speaker 13 Who's running for governor and stuff? They either go into politics or they go onto one of these things. I still think it's a,

Speaker 13 this, this formula that cable has has got to be overhauled. I just feel like it's just a lot of people screaming at each other.
And I get why you would scream to the

Speaker 12 to the to the converted, but it seems, I don't know, it just doesn't illuminate george it doesn't well i as a junkie of public radio because i broke i broke up with cable a long time ago i cut that cord a long time ago and i'm an npr listener and so when you listen to something like npr which really kind of feels like the grown-ups table nobody's yelling although some people think it's shaded but go ahead

Speaker 12 they're they're pretty good about getting both sides and you know the people on the right show up and they say thank you it's a pleasure to be here and they do their bit but there's nobody's yelling And then when I turn on or see a clip from cable news, it is jarring the contrast in tone.

Speaker 12 And it seems like sort of almost childish by comparison.

Speaker 13 It is, 100%. I try not to touch it.
Although I've been watching, obviously, the imagery from Senik Sina has done a very good job in Ukraine.

Speaker 13 And less good job covering inflation and stuff like that, which is interesting. They could do the same thing on all these topics.

Speaker 13 There doesn't have to be a war with really awful photo, you know, imagery, which I think does bring people in at the same time. They're doing great reporting.

Speaker 13 Anyway, let's get on to our first big story.

Speaker 13 Elon Musk frequently owns people on Twitter, but now he owns Twitter, at least a big chunk of it. On Monday, an SEC filing revealed that Musk had purchased more than 9% of the company.

Speaker 13 That makes him the largest shareholder, and that is a big deal. I have been waiting for some rich person on the right or left to do this.
And who knows where he is? He's all over the place.

Speaker 13 Scott asked a good question last week: What does Elon want from Twitter that he doesn't already get?

Speaker 13 When we were talking about starting his own, because he did a poll about whether he should start a social network. As clever as Elon is, he decided to buy one.

Speaker 13 He's never gotten even close to getting kicked off of Twitter, which I, people are like, oh, now he can't get kicked off.

Speaker 13 He actually stays within, you know, whether you like his Hitler memes or calling U.S. Senators Senator Karen, like

Speaker 13 Elizabeth Warren.

Speaker 13 It's fine. I think this is a really fascinating.
People got mad at me because I said it was fascinating, but it certainly is. And Twitter jumped on the news.
So the markets expect him to do something.

Speaker 13 It doesn't mean that others won't come in. I'm surprised.
He's the exactly right person to do this. And he's quite, he was actually quite close, has been close to Jack Dorsey.

Speaker 13 It doesn't have integration with any of his other companies. Maybe it does.

Speaker 13 Although Mark Benioff tried to buy Twitter at one point. So tell me, what do you think about this?

Speaker 12 It doesn't surprise me.

Speaker 12 I don't, I'm still kind of unclear about the why. Like, it's not like he needs the cash.
What is this about? He hasn't been canceled. He can say and do kind of like whatever he wants.

Speaker 12 And I guess we're going to talk about it later with our guest. But in terms of like this being a pursuit of happiness, what, like, what more do you need?

Speaker 13 Oh, I think, no, I don't agree with you. I think he is so linked with Twitter.
He loves it. He's obviously like you and I, addicted to it in some fashion.

Speaker 13 I think he's got a point of view on this about free speech.

Speaker 13 You know, he did that when he did Starlink in Ukraine. No one's going to try and let us decide who what goes over this thing.

Speaker 13 You know, I think it fits in exactly with his worldview in that he probably felt Twitter had gone too far in policing people. I wouldn't be.

Speaker 13 He is going to have, if he continues and others jump in, enormous pressure on this on this management. It is probably something nobody expected.

Speaker 13 Although when you think about it, it makes perfect sense that he would be the one to do it.

Speaker 13 I always thought a rich person would move in, but if it was, you know, Soros or Teal, that would be too much. This guy is sort of in a weird spot.
People who hate him think he's too right-wing.

Speaker 13 People who love him think he's just saying it like it is.

Speaker 13 I would think he would be for putting Trump back on the platform. That would, that would be my guess.

Speaker 12 Is he for that?

Speaker 13 I don't know. That's the thing.
I don't, I, I think I am imagining he's a little bit of a mystery that way.

Speaker 13 When when we last interviewed, he didn't want to vote for Trump, but at the same time, I think he has some things in common, right? Like some things he agrees with.

Speaker 13 So especially around this idea of being censorious. I think this is really interesting.

Speaker 13 And I think people are losing their minds that their beloved Twitter could get in the hands of a billionaire, you know, like this. And that's a lot.

Speaker 13 10% gives you an enormous clout within a company to make changes. It's more than most shareholder activists.

Speaker 13 And let me just say the stock of Twitter has been very low, as Scott has talked about a lot.

Speaker 13 This is an activist shareholder moving in in a very different way. So I don't know.
I think it's kind of smart on his behalf. It's his money, but it's up 30%.

Speaker 12 Washington Post has an owner.

Speaker 13 Yeah, exactly. Right.
So, I mean, he's not going to be the full owner, but he can't, well, he might not be able to afford it.

Speaker 13 But it's certainly shareholders have got to cheer this because they felt that Twitter is undervalued for a long, long time. And it has been.

Speaker 13 It's the same as it was when it went public or something like that.

Speaker 12 you but you like again the idea that him he

Speaker 12 claiming that he's being censored exactly how exactly I don't well he he just no he talks about free speech in general I don't think he himself has claimed he's he I haven't seen that he might have at one point but you've talked about this yes I'm gonna push back a little bit okay Twitter's a private company and when we agree like these are their rules You know, it's like, these are, this is the, this is their codes of conduct.

Speaker 12 And if you're not going to abide by it, we're a private company. This is not the public square.
Twitter can kick me or or you off whenever it wants to.

Speaker 13 Right. Well, it has to go along their guidelines.

Speaker 12 I'm surprised I haven't been suspended.

Speaker 13 I know. No, come on.
They love you. But here's the deal.

Speaker 13 That's correct. It's a private company, and therefore he can buy it.
So, and he could change the rules if he wants, their rules.

Speaker 13 If he gets enough influence on the board, et cetera, he can change their rules. And so that's how he's doing it.
He's not like yelling from the sidelines like a Ted Cruz or whoever, or Josh Hawley.

Speaker 13 He's actually going to buy it and change the rules. And I think, I suspect they made some very hard calls on Trump and some others, and he would take the those breaks off.
I think he would.

Speaker 13 He would change those rules. He would, I'm not sure he'd go as far as Alex Jones, but he might, you know, he might be like, look, good ideas, bad ideas, they need to be out there all at once.

Speaker 13 And of course, he's not taking in mind that these things can be terribly abused and manipulated by people.

Speaker 13 But it's really, and people are really losing their, they love Twitter and like they don't want someone they don't agree with owning it.

Speaker 13 Um, right now, Jack Dorsey was sort of managed to be in both worlds, very free speech-oriented, and then he seemed to make the right decisions at the right time, whether it was Alex Jones or Trump or whatever that the left liked.

Speaker 13 But it and he's he's sort of got pressed from the right, but he managed to sit in the middle.

Speaker 13 Elon is a really interesting character to put in the middle of this because you just don't know where he's going to come out. Although he does tend towards loudmouthery, I guess.

Speaker 13 I don't know what to say. He does tend towards attacking Democrats and Biden,

Speaker 13 for example.

Speaker 13 But he doesn't necessarily not attack the other side when he feels like it. He's just, people find him to be, some people find him to be authoritarian focused.

Speaker 12 But here's my, and I think Scott might feel the same way. I can't remember exactly what Scott said.

Speaker 13 Scott should be thrilled because the stock is up, but go ahead.

Speaker 12 There is that, but I'm sorry, but like the fact that a guy, the way we worship the ultra-wealthy and powerful people, and he is excused from behavioral norms, from manners, from like being a gentleman, like, what is your problem?

Speaker 12 What he has said about Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Warren, like, what the hell happened to you? Your mother loves you, right? Yes, she is.

Speaker 12 Was it because dad wasn't in the picture? Why are you like this? Why is it okay

Speaker 12 for him to be a dick? He's a dick. And I'm like, but because he's rich and powerful, we're supposed to go, well, it's okay.

Speaker 12 It's not okay.

Speaker 13 It's just what he is.

Speaker 13 I don't think it's an excuse. He can do what he wants.
And I think in this case, he can buy this. It's a private new, just what you're saying.
It's a private company. I'm not supporting it or not.

Speaker 13 I'm just surprised no one's done it.

Speaker 13 And I do think there's only a very few people who could pull something like this off. Jack Dorsey was one of them.
And of course, he was even pressured because the stock.

Speaker 13 This has gotten the stock up 30%.

Speaker 13 This is literally the plot of succession. at the end of the season when Alexander Sarzgaard

Speaker 13 was going to be bought, and then he ended up pumping his stock that allowed him to buy Logan Roy's company, right? This is sort of fantastic. It's like following along with those playbooks.

Speaker 13 And when I, I don't know why I didn't think Elon buys Twitter, like kind of thing. Now, again, this could be a pylon of others.
There might be some in Silicon Valley that come with him.

Speaker 13 He's got a whole crew, you know. And so

Speaker 13 you could see, you know, Mark Andreessen getting in here and others. And so it changes the equation quite a bit because it's a private company.

Speaker 13 And so as much as people people don't like that Twitter does what it wants because it's a private company, he can do what he wants because he has money and can buy it. So

Speaker 12 I don't want to sit next to him at Thanksgiving dinner table. Like, no, I just

Speaker 12 don't want to do that. All right.

Speaker 13 But, you know, it's interesting that

Speaker 13 it doesn't have to fit in with his other things because Twitter is really two things, a news vehicle and a marketing vehicle.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, he will have influence. People say, oh, he's not going to be.
I'm like, sure will. Like anyone who has that much, they can influence the board.
They can influence.

Speaker 13 And there's no particular stock here that keeps one person in power. Jack Dorsey, who actually, when I interviewed Jack Dorsey last time, I said, who's your favorite person on Twitter?

Speaker 13 He said, Elon Musk.

Speaker 13 I think they're quite close. It's my

Speaker 13 impression. And so I don't know that for a fact, but it was an interesting choice.

Speaker 13 And he thought he was enthusiastic and he said what he wants and this and that. And so I think he can have enormous influence now.
And it could set off a bidding war for this thing.

Speaker 13 Mark Benioff has wanted to buy it.

Speaker 13 You know, Peter Thiel could get in here.

Speaker 13 There's all kinds of people who have the means to do this. And before people didn't want to touch Twitter because it was so toxic.
And in this case, why not touch it? You know, why not grab it?

Speaker 13 And I think this is fascinating. This is going to be real interesting.

Speaker 13 And it's going to be hard for Scott because, as much as, you know, as you know, Elon called Scott an insufferable numbskull on Twitter, which was enjoyable to all of us, including Scott.

Speaker 13 But he loves to dump on Elon, but Elon's the reason this stock is up, which.

Speaker 12 Elon's punching down. You think?

Speaker 13 I guess.

Speaker 12 I don't know. Elon, every time Elon goes after anybody based on his money and his following, every move he makes is a punchdown.
Okay. All right.
Well, in any case. Price of being on top.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I guess so. He doesn't need to.
I've talked to him about this. I think it's ridiculous, but that's all right.
He can do what he wants.

Speaker 13 If I was his mother, I'd tell him to. to dial it back, but he does.
Yeah. That's what he wants.

Speaker 13 But I ain't his mama.

Speaker 13 his mother is actually a, it was a model. She's quite beautiful and very cold.
She has a point of view. She got mad at me once.

Speaker 13 That was scarier than Elon getting mad at me, which happens periodically. Anyway, I like her so much.

Speaker 12 I really do. I do.

Speaker 13 Even though, even though, like, she got mad at me, I don't care. She's his mama.
That's okay.

Speaker 13 He polled his Twitter followers and asked if Twitter's algorithm should be open source, which was interesting. And 80% said yes, which creates a whole nother fork in the road here.

Speaker 13 There's already an open source version of Twitter called Mastodon. So that's interesting.
Anyway, we'll see what happens.

Speaker 13 Scott, I can't wait till Scott gets Scott's point of view because he must be torn today. All right, George, let's go on a quick break.

Speaker 13 When we come back, the blue-red state divide is growing, and we'll speak with a friend of Pivot, Dr. Lori Santos.

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Speaker 13 George, do your impression of Julia Fox, please.

Speaker 12 Oh, my book. You wanted to ask me about my book.
Well, it started as a memoir, but now it's just kind of, now it's just my first book. And if I may say so, it is a masterpiece.

Speaker 13 Explain who you're doing. I just love it.
Oh, you're still going.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 That's not a vocal fry. That is a vocal, like flipping that on the grill.

Speaker 12 I saw her in Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler, and she was Adam Sandler's sort of secret mistress girlfriend. And she was good.
I thought she was very sweet and charming in the movie.

Speaker 12 That movie is a 90-minute heart attack.

Speaker 12 Yeah,

Speaker 12 really a stressful film to watch.

Speaker 13 Anyway, you did it. That was a beautiful Twitter thing.
I'm sure Elon will like it as the owner of Twitter.

Speaker 13 I want you to do do the rest of the show in that voice. No, please don't.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 13 All right. So we're going to get on our next topic.
America's Blue Cities Are Hellholes, apparently. At least that's what you'd think if you read the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 13 A recent piece in the Post claims that murder and rape rates in San Francisco are up by double-digit percentage points.

Speaker 13 But as Peter Calloway points out, who is a public defender, that's only true because the numbers are so low.

Speaker 13 That's a single instance raised the rate significantly in case homicides went from 10 to 11 people. Meanwhile,

Speaker 13 the group, the third way, found that among the top 10 states with the highest murder rates, eight are red states. So, this has been a meme.
I've been on Twitter just this past week.

Speaker 13 I was just in San Francisco, and I went, I literally went to every part of the city. I walked myself around.
There are terrible parts, including downtown Soma and Tenderloin, as always.

Speaker 13 They're just horrific, and lots of problems in the streets. Other parts have improved.
Now, everybody's complaining about petty crime, and I don't think it's petty.

Speaker 13 Breaking windows, cars, bike stolen package theft um people homeless people yell mentally ill the homeless people yelling at people um you know i was also just in new york city people there's been a lot of really significant crime of very high-profile crimes but there is sort of this attack i i just i my point was that it's cartoonish to talk about any city this way and they've seized on san francisco in this way that

Speaker 13 Listen, there's absolute problems, no question. But it really is very complex and nobody wants to talk about that, including post-pandemic.

Speaker 13 So you live in New York City and you went through the same thing. People are going to say your city is dirty and awful and we should leave.
So, and yet you can't ignore it.

Speaker 13 New York City, Mayor Adams recently cleaned out homeless encampments across the city.

Speaker 13 And San Francisco,

Speaker 13 they did that too. They pulled out a lot of these homeless encampments.

Speaker 13 So what do you tell me what you think about these very real problems of these cities without falling into the cities as hellhole myths or shitholes, as Donald Trump might say?

Speaker 12 Well, it was the whole the city is a hellscape narrative that kind of made me internet famous. And I did a video that went very viral and it was that same kind of narrative.

Speaker 17 New York City's streets are like a fucking hellscape.

Speaker 17 I mean there is like people and violence and like looting and fires everywhere and like I mean look at the just the streets are lined with people doing things like getting ice cream.

Speaker 17 gay ice cream.

Speaker 12 And Molly Jong Fast and I actually were calling bullshit on it because we're actually here.

Speaker 12 That was in the summer of 20 in the wake of the George Floyd killing and the demonstration.

Speaker 13 I think Megan McCain got famous for saying it was a hell hole and everyone was like, What the fuck are you talking about?

Speaker 12 Then leave. Then get out.

Speaker 12 You know, that is my thing.

Speaker 12 But going back even further, Kara, there has always been this very,

Speaker 12 the middle American relationship with the big city in general has always been one that has been colored with fear and distrust.

Speaker 12 And it's where those weirdos are, and you're going to get mugged, and you're going to get raped, and

Speaker 12 it's where weirdos go. Yeah.

Speaker 13 New York City usually bore the brunt of this for a long time.

Speaker 12 100%. And people are afraid of the big.
I grew up in Cleveland, and I remember in the late 60s, after the riots, there was the, you know, the white flight. Everybody went to the suburbs.

Speaker 12 And to this day, there is a mistrust of city folk and public transportation is like dirty.

Speaker 12 You know, so the law.

Speaker 13 You got a very Batman version of the city, which is interesting.

Speaker 13 And again, and at the same time, you don't want to fall into the see what happens to me in San Francisco is you've got these people who want to get Jessu Bowdoin out.

Speaker 13 I think Bowdoin is how you pronounce it.

Speaker 13 He was the DA, who has actually been doing more prosecution of rapes and murders, which is interesting if you actually look at the statistics.

Speaker 13 At the same time, he's been tone deaf to what very real, and I don't want to call them petty crimes because if you live in a city, it becomes, it creates a real, my neighbor got assaulted by a mentally ill, homeless man.

Speaker 13 You know, you, and then you have those people who are trying to pain him a certain way.

Speaker 13 You have this, you have the board of education that got recalled because they went too far. They went too far on the lab, like ridiculous.

Speaker 13 They should have been focusing on schools and they were focusing on renaming things.

Speaker 13 And I get why they do that at San Francisco, but at the time, in the middle of the pandemic, parents didn't want to hear this. There's a tension around that.

Speaker 13 He is probably going to get recalled.

Speaker 13 And at the same time,

Speaker 13 you have these sort of

Speaker 13 those on the left who are pretending it doesn't exist, right? So it's kind of a real problem when you, or when these cities, but you, they become these,

Speaker 13 it's, I keep saying it's nuanced, it's nuanced, there's much more going on, and nobody wants to ever, and let's talk about how to solve them versus either virtuous signaling on the left or virtual signaling on the right.

Speaker 13 It's really,

Speaker 13 and again, cities are returning, rents are up. I found New York and San Francisco to be vibrant, vibrant.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And I was sort of struck by New York,

Speaker 13 and I was struck by San Francisco. Same thing.

Speaker 13 Nonetheless, it's a problem. And so have you changed that? Because there was a story in the New York Times today about the gulf between red and blue states, in terms of being run.

Speaker 13 They have all these, you know, the anti-trans things and

Speaker 13 happening in the red states. And in the blue states, they're doing the opposite, which is further protecting whether it's trans people, gays and lesbians, women, abortion, et cetera.

Speaker 12 Still going back, like going back to what I was talking about before, before, look at an electoral map. Look at the electoral map after 2020, 2016.
The cities,

Speaker 12 blue, everything else red.

Speaker 12 You know, in the city, like the Emerald City, it's where people go to get out of where they came from to share ideas. Like ideas and thinking and conversations happen in cities that don't happen.

Speaker 12 not necessarily at all, but in the way they do anywhere else.

Speaker 12 You know, I have been accused, to answer your question, that, managing and running a city, it's a work in progress. There are problems.
There will always be problems.

Speaker 12 There is no such thing as a utopia in American or global society, really.

Speaker 12 And it's work. And we have problems here in New York.
We always have. We always will.
Is it perfect? Never going to be. Do I want to live here more than anywhere else? Absolutely.

Speaker 12 I've been accused of being in this sort of liberal bubble. I'm in a bubble, excuse me.
I walk a block and I hear five or six different languages.

Speaker 12 There are people of different colors, backgrounds, educations, customs, cuisines, clothing, you name it. Orientations, gender IDs.
How is it where you, everybody else is? Tell me about their bubble.

Speaker 12 I love that about this.

Speaker 13 Yes, I see that once.

Speaker 13 They were talking about,

Speaker 13 someone, I have a lot of relatives in the Red States and they are red. They are red people.

Speaker 12 It's isolated. It's like a snow globe.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And one of the things they said is, you all never visit us here. You don't get our point of view.
I said, when did I see you in San Francisco to get my point of view?

Speaker 13 Like, it does, it goes both ways, sir. Thank you.
You know what I mean? And so it was interesting. I was like, come over here and see how we live.
Come and see.

Speaker 13 Someone tweeted at me, and I thought it summed it up well. Republicans keep stoking fear and hate, while we Democrats keep hoping that facts are more important than feelings.

Speaker 13 We never learn both sides. Like, they don't understand these are feelings and stuff.
Democrats have got to get a hold of themselves on this stuff. Like, it's really hard.

Speaker 13 At the same time, I get completely offended when they, that, that, that the republicans try to reduce it into this scaremongering and this is and it it is worse it is worse guess what the city used to be new york city i lived there during david dinkins it was like a

Speaker 13 i used to call it what did i call it a hell of just before i got here it was terrible i i went to columbia then there's a charles bronson movie era you know um there's and who was it who said to new york city drop dead was it forward dropped dead it was for forward to city dropped dead and so it's look if you want to live in a rural area live in a rural area you don't need to dunk on cities.

Speaker 13 And you, you know, same, you know, a lot of the people who've left San Francisco, all they do is dunk on San Francisco. I'm like, just go to your little home and be happy where you are.

Speaker 13 And so I think there's a very difficult and almost intractable problem, some of these issues in the city.

Speaker 13 No matter what you do, whether you move these encampments, which some people are like, you can't do that to these people.

Speaker 13 You have others who, you know, are in the middle, don't like the homeless encampments, yet also feel for these people. And this is just what a city is, like you said.

Speaker 12 Was it Tom Cotton who was something recently tried to paint this picture that, like, why would you want to be in the cities where you're on public transit, where you have to, you know, be in with other people and stuff?

Speaker 18 They want to make you live in downtown areas and high-rise buildings and walk to work or take the subway or ride an electric scooter or whatever it is that Pete Buttigieg takes to work this week.

Speaker 12 I remember Kara when I lived in Cleveland for three years. I didn't have a car, which was weird to people.

Speaker 12 And I took a bus to, there was a funeral like not far from where I live downtown. And And my brother called me while I was on the bus and he said, Are you going to Father So-and-So's funeral?

Speaker 12 I said, Yeah. He said, Do you need a ride? I said, No, I'm on a bus.
And he goes, Ugh, why?

Speaker 12 That was his response. Like, that's

Speaker 12 like that is the sort of Midwestern or smaller town perception of, oh, you're going to share space with people who aren't necessarily just like you. Yes, that's how I get around.

Speaker 12 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 You must have been.

Speaker 12 It freaks people out.

Speaker 13 It does. It does.
Here's I was an anomaly. Yes,

Speaker 13 you are still an anomaly in any case um uh i we're gonna bring it because we're gonna talk about happiness next we're gonna talk about because you know what be happy where you are like so like you don't need to when you have to drag another group and that applies to the left and the right but the right does it a lot well no they both do honestly at this point listen after enduring this elon stuff this month i have a theory and we could talk about it further but like these people on the right with the culture war and what these cards they're playing yeah these are people who were not they didn't get to sit at the cool kids' table in the cafeteria in high school and they're still bitter about it.

Speaker 12 And they have made it their life's mission because they're not funny, they're not clever, they're not even sometimes interesting. And so this is their, this is their petty payback.

Speaker 13 I suppose, but the cool kids could have been a lot nicer, let's be clear. Agreed.

Speaker 12 You know, I'm not a fan of the mean girls. Were you a cool kid? Were you a cool girl? No, I was kind of in the middle.
Like I was friendly with the jocks, even though I was not sports.

Speaker 12 I was friendly with the theater kids. I was friendly with the kids who were black and smoked.
No.

Speaker 12 I kind of, yeah, I kind of got along with everybody.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I was right in that middle, too. It was interesting.
The cool kids can be assholes, by the way. FYI.
Anyway, let's bring in our friend of Pivot.

Speaker 13 Dr. Lori Santos is a professor of psychology at Yale, where she teaches the university's most popular course in over 300 years.
That's a long time. Psychology and the good life.

Speaker 13 She's also the host of the Happiness Lab, a podcast based on her course. She joins us today to finally reveal a secret to a happy life.
Welcome, Dr. Santos.
Thanks for being here. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Speaker 13 So we're just talking about, you just wrote about Yale's happiness professor. I don't know if you like being known as that.
It says anxiety is destroying her students.

Speaker 13 There's been a lot of articles lately about this idea of putting, I think I was reading a David French piece and some others, about this idea of bringing our own fears and anxieties to kids, the impact of

Speaker 13 social media on it, the lack of, there's all kinds of reasons. So,

Speaker 13 can you talk to me a little bit about your piece and what you were talking about? This anxiety is destroying your students.

Speaker 13 I noticed that I have some teens, and I don't think it's destroying them necessarily, but it's definitely an issue.

Speaker 14 Yeah, to be fair, I didn't write that quote.

Speaker 12 That was the New York Times

Speaker 14 blow quote to kind of, but I do think, you know, I mean, if you look at the level of mental health dysfunction we're seeing in our college students, it's really unprecedented, right?

Speaker 14 Nationally, over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Over 65% report feeling overwhelmingly anxious.
So, you know, more than two-thirds.

Speaker 14 And what we're seeing is around 10% of students regularly report being suicidal, or at least feeling so suicidal that they've seriously considered taking their life in the last year.

Speaker 14 So that number is more than 10% nationally.

Speaker 13 And like, which could be pandemic-related, correct?

Speaker 14 No, this is actually pre-pandemic. So the last national college health report was 2019.
And so some of these numbers have gotten even worse. And so

Speaker 14 there's this really open question of like, what has happened? These rates of depression and anxiety in many cases have doubled in just the last eight or nine years, right?

Speaker 14 So it's not just the normal, like, oh, maybe it's more awareness or, or, oh, it's the pandemic.

Speaker 13 Or we're studying it more. It's being studied.
Maybe they were unhappy before and we didn't know it.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And I think there is something to that.
You know, you know, students before a test, you know, back in my day would say, like, oh, I have butterflies in my stomach.

Speaker 14 Now people are like, I'm anxious. Or, you know, I'm upset that, you know, this boy didn't call me back.
Now I'm depressed, right? So I think we have more clinical terms for this.

Speaker 14 But again, if you look at, you know, real markers, again, cases of suicide, these kinds of things, all of these rates are going up and they're going up quite significantly.

Speaker 14 I mean, the big question is like, why? And I think we don't have a great handle on exactly what the answer is yet.

Speaker 13 Well, what would be your feeling if you had to, you know, obviously Facebook got an enormous amount of attention for Instagram. And I don't think the research is quite there yet.

Speaker 13 I think it got a lot of attention because politicians and the media can seize on this. It's anecdotally quite true.
You can see it, right? If you talk to kids.

Speaker 14 I mean, if you plot the rates, even just if you plot the rate of iPhones, right? Or just having a smartphone and these rates of depression, the curves hang on to each other perfectly.

Speaker 14 But of course, correlation doesn't equal causation.

Speaker 14 Another thing that we know is just different is parenting styles, right?

Speaker 14 You know, I get anxious, as a Yale professor, I get anxious parents calling me about students' grades, about students' rooming situations.

Speaker 14 You know, this just, again, it's anecdotal, but it's different than it was five years ago, where you really have parents stepping in to solve kids' problems in a different way.

Speaker 14 And lots of scientists like Julia Lithgot-Hames writes about this a lot. She's a former Stanford dean who talks about, you know, what does this teach kids?

Speaker 14 It teaches kids like everything scary, you know, from the tiniest roommate problem to getting a B plus on an exam that is a level that parents need to call in.

Speaker 14 But it also teaches kids that they're helpless in this. There's a sense of kind of learned helplessness that's happening in this generation where they don't solve their own problems.

Speaker 13 You know, it's interesting because I'm kind of the opposite of people would imagine I'm much more controlling, but I'm not. Like I was talking to one of my kids yesterday about something.

Speaker 13 I'm not going to say what it is because it's very private. And it was something significant, you know what I mean? And I literally was like, you got to figure that out for yourself.
I don't know.

Speaker 13 I don't have an answer. And often with my sons,

Speaker 13 the older ones, I'm often like, yeah, well, good luck. Good luck with that.
Hope it works out for you. And I think it's something I...
I tend to let them do because they need the struggle.

Speaker 13 They need to figure it out more than others. But I do see parents, it drives me crazy at the schools, doing everything for their kids.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 13 Like making sure there's like the most safe they could be.

Speaker 13 And it's, I find it really disturbing to watch these poor kids.

Speaker 14 And we know, I mean, there's some lovely work on what happens cognitively when you do this to kids.

Speaker 14 There's a scholar, Julia Leonard, here at Yale, and she studies, if you give just say toddlers a like problem box to solve, like a puzzle box that could, you know, it's hard, but they can kind of figure it out.

Speaker 14 And you look at what happens when a parent intervenes, when they say, oh, let me just do that for you.

Speaker 14 What she finds is that if you give them new puzzle boxes, kids will look to help more quickly. They'll generalize basically, I'm not good at solving these problems.

Speaker 14 Otherwise, why would someone jump in? And so we think of all these actions as just kind of getting kids through the hump.

Speaker 14 But functionally, what parents are doing in these cases is teaching kids, I don't believe that you're able to solve this, which either means the problem is huge or you're just not that good at this stuff, right?

Speaker 14 You know, maybe you just don't have the skill set for this. And, you know, I think parents don't mean to be doing this.
This isn't what parents intend to do. You do.

Speaker 14 Yeah, maybe some do, but hopefully not many. But, you know, the consequences are bigger than I think parents sometimes assume.

Speaker 12 I agree. You know, when I was growing up, the notion that like there were, there were, I went to an all boys high school and there were guys who, whose parents kind of did everything for them.

Speaker 12 I was lucky enough to have parents who didn't,

Speaker 12 you know, they were more like Kara, you know, like, you got to figure that out on your own. You're going to have to go do that apologizing.
You're going to have to have that conversation.

Speaker 12 conversation i'm not going with you um and i've often had this it's kind of a joke but i'm kind of not joking when i say like i it kind of feels like if your teenage kids like you you might not be doing it right yeah exactly um

Speaker 12 i always liked my parents of course but when i was a teenager god i wanted nothing to do with them so yeah if you're a parent and you're like if you're worried that your teenage kids don't like you don't worry like i don't know i can't say it because i don't have kids but

Speaker 14 yeah no it's I think it's a similar thing.

Speaker 14 If your teenage kids don't like you, you might be doing something right. If your teenage kids are messing up, you might be doing something right.

Speaker 14 If they're getting the worst grades they've ever got in their first semester of college, that's good. That means they're challenging themselves.

Speaker 14 That means they're sorting it out on their own and making the appropriate kinds of failures. I think today's kids are really failure-deprived.

Speaker 14 And I think it really connects to their mental health, right? It's one of the reasons you become anxious. If you've never messed anything up, then the tiniest mess up seems enormous.

Speaker 14 It seems like the kind of thing that you should be really worried about. And so, yeah.

Speaker 13 So, so one of the things that's interesting when you talk about something like that is the ability, you're talking about resilience in a weird way.

Speaker 13 And I know that there's been books about that or grit or whatever you call it.

Speaker 13 It is much harder with social media there. There's no question.
I just happen to have kids that aren't ruled by it.

Speaker 13 But they definitely, you know, I've had so many instances of people leave you on red, like on Snapchat, or judging if they don't text you back because of the immediacy of it.

Speaker 13 It definitely definitely does affect them. That was one thing I was talking about with one of my sons.
He's like, Well, they didn't text me back. I'm like, Well, then they didn't.

Speaker 13 I don't know what to tell you. You're going to go play the guitar.
I don't know what to say.

Speaker 13 But it does bring on an extra added level of not just FOMA, but also anxiety that you're somehow left out. Do you, when you say that correlation doesn't mean causation, where are the studies on this?

Speaker 13 Because I do think it's very clear that for not just kids, but everybody, this constant barrage of information, which is either upsetting or, you know, you can see visual stories.

Speaker 13 Not that they weren't there when we were growing up, but it was much, you know, we had Nixon, we had everything. We, you know, the falling apart of this and that and this, or pollution.

Speaker 13 At one point, I thought pollution was going to kill us all that week.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 13 how do you look at social media and where it is? How do you study that?

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's tricky, right? Because we don't have a great control group, right?

Speaker 14 I mean, ideally, we'd have a control group of a whole generation that wasn't on social media but if there was such a control I don't think such a control group exists but if they did they'd be maybe non-neurotypical in their own way right in the current generation so it's hard um what we do know is like anytime you look at these kinds of correlations or experimental studies where you have people get off social media for a little bit of time rates of things like depression and anxiety do go down um but it's nuanced right um you know there is evidence for example that active facebook use facebook in particular facebook's the platform that's been studied the most just because it's been around the longest, frankly.

Speaker 14 But active Facebook use, where you're really connecting socially and taking part in groups, not just passively lurking, there's some evidence that that doesn't have as much of a mental health hit as, for example, passive social use.

Speaker 14 So it kind of depends how you're using it, who you're using it with, what you're using it for.

Speaker 14 I actually think one of the biggest hits that social media has on teen mental health is through their sleep.

Speaker 14 There's lots of evidence that, you know, a ton of 15-year-olds wind up sleeping with their phone. Even 13-year-olds are sleeping with their phone.

Speaker 14 And I know what happens when my phone is with me at night. It's very tempting to look at it.
It means I'm sleeping less. And just a hit on sleep can have a huge effect on students' mental health.

Speaker 14 And I actually think we could solve a lot of this mental health crisis if we just got students to sleep more. And one of the easiest ways to get them to sleep more is to move their phones away from.

Speaker 13 I think the one-that's an Ariana Huffington thing.

Speaker 12 She's like, for her thing.

Speaker 13 Do you remember the bed? She tried to give me one. I'm like, get that bed away.

Speaker 12 I have one and I actually

Speaker 14 have my phone sleep in the bed, and and it's helpful. Like the phone goes to bed.
She did. She did.

Speaker 12 The phone goes to bed. I go to bed.
Wait, there's a

Speaker 12 bed for your phone.

Speaker 14 It's like a little like doll bed, but it's for your phone. So it's like, you don't have to be worried about your iPhone.
It's comfy. It's over.
It's got a little charging port. It's very fun.

Speaker 13 It's somewhere else. It doesn't go on.

Speaker 12 Sounds like a master.

Speaker 13 You know, the reason I do keep my phone is that

Speaker 13 he's channeling Julia Fox, who makes him happy.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 13 are billionaires happier than the rest of us? What are the things you look at in in this class besides, I'm going to get away from social media, but what makes people happier than others?

Speaker 13 Do you imagine?

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's not what we think. It's not money.
It's not accolades. It's not this stuff.
Well,

Speaker 14 I should update, right? So it depends where you are.

Speaker 14 If you're living well below the poverty line, if you can't put food on your table or a roof over your head, yes, giving you like a living wage is definitely going to help.

Speaker 14 Right now, though, in the U.S., or at least in a 2009 study in the U.S.,

Speaker 14 if you start earning over 75K,

Speaker 14 doubling or tripling your salary isn't going to have any improvement in your long-term happiness. It's not going to reduce your stress levels.

Speaker 14 It's not going to improve your positive mood, even though we think it will. And I think this is the problem.

Speaker 14 You know, one of the biggest things I teach in this class is that we have misconceptions when it comes to our happiness. We think more money, we think better grades, we think more accolades.

Speaker 14 We think changing our circumstances is the path to happiness. But often it's about changing our behaviors and our mindset, right?

Speaker 14 Becoming a little bit more present, becoming a little bit more grateful, engaging in more social connection in real life. These are the paths to happiness.

Speaker 14 You know, it's not getting the raise and the promotion at work that we thought. It's really different than we often expect.

Speaker 12 The jump from happiness between someone like you said who's making at least 75K, basically your housing, your food, and your health insurance is taken care of relatively painlessly.

Speaker 12 And the measure of happiness from those people to billionaires is not that large, from what I understand.

Speaker 14 That's right. There was one, you know, there's always new studies and kind of controversies over this.

Speaker 14 There was a famous paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton, two separate Nobel Prize winners, right? That was the paper that showed, you know, 75K was, you know, at that point,

Speaker 14 any more funds, you're not going to get much happier. There was a recent paper by Matthew Killingsworth that sort of challenged this.

Speaker 14 And what he finds when you look at really big ranges, yeah, you can see some wiggle room, but the wiggle room, when you look and really look in the paper, is like TD.

Speaker 14 It's like you can go from a 60 out of 100 on a happiness scale to a 61 out of 100 on a happiness scale, but you have to quintuple your income. You know, you have to go from like $100,000 to $700,000.

Speaker 14 And what I often say to my students is like, okay, you could put in the time and energy to quintuple your income, or you could write three things you're grateful for in your gratitude journal at night, and that will have a five-fold increase on your happiness bigger than quintupling your income, right?

Speaker 14 You know, you could talk to a stranger on the train, and that will vastly and much more significantly improve your positive mood. So it's not so much that money doesn't make us happy.

Speaker 14 It's like it doesn't move in as big a way as we assume.

Speaker 12 I was talking to Scott one of the last times I saw him, last week, actually, and I mentioned my tailor, the guy around the corner from me who like, you know, alters my clothes.

Speaker 12 He's from Korea, loves what he does, loves his job. He's not making a fortune.
I walk the dogs past his shop at like 10.30 on a Sunday night, and there he is.

Speaker 12 I can hear classical music playing, and he's like mending a garment or whatever he's doing. And I say to myself, he won.

Speaker 12 He won.

Speaker 12 He is so content there. You know, whether it's the bartender who loves his job and is not looking to have a yacht and a penthouse, like

Speaker 12 if you found that happiness, that contentment, you won.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 On my podcast, The Happiness Lab, I interviewed this guy who on Yale's campus goes by Marty. He's the pest control guy.

Speaker 14 He's the guy that, you know, if there's a mouse in some student's room or we find a cockroach in the dining hall or something like that, he gets called and he's the happiest guy.

Speaker 14 And when you talk to him, he's he's like, I think I have the best job. I got like a company truck I get to drive around in.
I have all this social connection.

Speaker 14 I talk to people all the time and I help them solve their problems. There's something that they feel kind of a little gross and shameful about.
And I come in, I get to chat with them and I fix it.

Speaker 14 And he's like, I have the best job. And it's like, you wouldn't think like, you know, snakes and creepy crawlies and cockroaches would make your job great, but he's happy.

Speaker 14 And I think that's, that's a message not a single one of my Yale students is like, when I grow up, I want to be a pest control operator.

Speaker 12 Right, right.

Speaker 13 No, they want to just be happy.

Speaker 14 But they all still think they want to be happy. And so I think we need to kind of come to terms with that conception we have about what a happy life is might be wrong.

Speaker 13 Talk a little bit about those connections. Is it having family? Is it friendships?

Speaker 13 Is there something that adds more to the than anything else?

Speaker 14 Yeah, to it. It's really all of the above.
I mean,

Speaker 14 it's great to connect with really close personal friends and close family members, but there's evidence that talking to a stranger on the train, on your commute to work, can significantly improve your positive mood, right?

Speaker 14 It's really just other humans in real life, not scrolling through your social media feed, right? Like talking in real life.

Speaker 14 And I think, you know, we've all kind of felt the hit of this a little bit with working from home and a lot that's gone on in the pandemic.

Speaker 14 We're losing these weak tie mini interactions, but those are the things that often, you know, fill up our leaky happiness tire, as it were, much more than we often expect.

Speaker 13 So three million students have taken this course on Coursera, correct? It's enormous amounts. Why do you think so many people are seeking seeking this answer to happiness?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, I think we've always been worried about happiness, right? Like it's in the Declaration of Independence, right? It's like up there with life, liberty, right?

Speaker 14 But I think lately, you know, we've been sold a lot of false promises. I mean, look at my Yale students.

Speaker 14 I think so many of them believed if I killed myself in high school and I didn't sleep and I put everything on hold, then I'd get to college and I'd be happily ever after.

Speaker 14 And then they get to Yale and it's like, oh, the carrot just moved. Now I have to get into medical school or I have to get my investment banking job.
Right.

Speaker 14 And so I think there's all these cultural notions.

Speaker 13 The achievement wheel. Exactly.
I talk about it all the time when I meet students.

Speaker 12 It's the American dream, not the American promise. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 14 But the dream is wrong, right? Like if we dream to, you know, have a close relationship with our family members and a job that just gave us enough money, we might, we might be good.

Speaker 14 And so, so I think that the reason that so many people are seeking out answers is like, you know, the current culture isn't giving them to us.

Speaker 14 People are putting time and effort into improving their well-being and they're putting the effort in and it's just not working. And so, they're like, something must be wrong.

Speaker 14 And so, I think that was true before. And then the pandemic hit.
And I think people were really looking for answers of how to navigate this stuff. People had a little bit more time on their hands.

Speaker 14 And so many folks signed up online to learn more.

Speaker 13 And they were worried. What makes, I'd like to know what each do what makes each of you happy?

Speaker 12 What makes me very happy is when I am able to,

Speaker 12 my dreams are not grand, you know, when I'm able to pay for my housing, my food,

Speaker 14 and feed my dogs, and have my health insurance taken care of of painlessly and maybe some nice shoes to wear um like and and friends to share things with you know i love sharing things and i love being with friends so that makes me very happy what about you dr santos yeah i mean my husband makes me happy uh my students mostly most of the time make me happy springtime makes me happy just like walking around and seeing the daffodils poking up i've just planted some pumpkins and they're doing that thing where they're you know they're just coming out and i'm like baby pumpkins baby pumpkins make me happy i think a final thing that makes us happy that we're all deficient in right now is time um a lot of work in social science on what's called time affluence this sense that you have some spare time um i know when i'm famished on that then that i'm not feeling so good so yeah those are the things time affluence affluence time affluence you're affluent in time george um i like to clean I mean, I love my family.

Speaker 13 I love my kids. My kids make me the most happy.

Speaker 12 I was going to say,

Speaker 12 your kids bring you a lot of joy. They do.
They do.

Speaker 13 Every time, one time I was having a problem at work and

Speaker 13 I literally said this to someone. They were being a pain about something dumb.
And I go, you know what? I don't give a fuck. My kids love me.
And they were like, what? And I'm like, fuck you.

Speaker 12 I was like, Mike drop.

Speaker 13 Mike drop. It was great.
They were sort of shocked. I was like, I don't really care what you think of me.

Speaker 13 But what's interesting is when I was talking to these students, getting back to students, and then I want to finish up with one more question, and George might have one more, is I was having dinner with a group of Stanford Business School students, all of which

Speaker 13 were delightful. It was really a great group of people and it was men and women.
It was quite diverse and it was really lovely. But they all definitely had that like anxiety.
And they asked me what

Speaker 13 they should do. Like, you know what I mean, to be, to, to be successful.
What's my, my, my prescription? And I said, you got to, you got to quit more. You got to just stop.

Speaker 13 And like, I think I'm much more successful than most people because often when I'm unhappy, I stop. I'm like, nope, now I'm going to do this.

Speaker 13 And I think when you're on that achieve, I do that with my, one of my sons right now with the college thing. I'm like, what if this? I'm like, don't friggin worry about it.
It'll be fine.

Speaker 13 Like, it's just, it literally will not matter at all. And so one of the things I used to do with my, in my kids' school, with homework is my.
my béte noir at schools, right?

Speaker 13 The amount of homework that they spend doing, it gives them anxious. And I used to tell them, don't do it.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter.

Speaker 13 And I would have teachers call me, stop telling your children homework doesn't matter. I'm like, it doesn't.
It doesn't. Let me just give you that piece of information.
It doesn't make them smarter.

Speaker 13 It certainly makes them more anxious. And, you know, if they get bad grades, so be it.
I don't know what to tell you, but they're very smart kids.

Speaker 13 And so it was a really interesting thing when my son then got a D in Spanish.

Speaker 13 And this is my, this is why I decided I was the best parent ever. And he goes, I go, Louie, a D, what the heck? And he goes, at least it's not an F.
And I was like, well, it is an F, but good for you.

Speaker 13 Good for you.

Speaker 12 Anyway, good answer, Louie.

Speaker 13 Good answer.

Speaker 13 George, any last questions?

Speaker 12 Doctor, the older I get, I feel like the less I know and also the less I need. Meaning, when I was in my 20s and I moved to New York to pursue, you know, work as an actor and stuff like that.

Speaker 12 It's not that dreams have shifted over time, but the older I get, I find that the less I need. I don't have grand designs.
I don't need a palace. I'm not looking for a Ferrari.

Speaker 12 You know, I just want a few good relationships. I want to have some good laughs before I go

Speaker 12 and enjoy the people in my life. I don't need like the stuff, the catalog that gets thrown at us, particularly on social media.

Speaker 12 Is that, am I crazy? No, that's my question.

Speaker 14 That sounds like, those sound like great strategies, you know, go for experiences, not material goods, like be present, be social. All of those are right, you know, right out of my happiness playbook.

Speaker 14 But this is also something that gets better in middle age. You know, if you look at the arc of happiness across a life, it too is not what you expect.

Speaker 14 I think you look at every wrinkle commercial and think like, oh my gosh, as soon as I hit 40, it's downhill in terms of happiness but actually

Speaker 14 uh kind of as you leave work as your kids leave the house that's often a big boost in happiness around that time retirement another big boost in happiness um but it's not said you know the trajectory is award one um you know as you yeah i know yeah one more

Speaker 14 almost there then almost there i think is the the answer but yeah yeah so i now have a i have a four month old so oh i see yeah that'll you know 15 years it goes by fast but uh um i don't care how much

Speaker 14 but but that's the thing to it's it's a thing to remember, a thing to look forward to is that, you know, even as your body's kind of breaking down, overall, statistically speaking, your well-being will probably go up.

Speaker 13 What do you think the biggest challenge to finding happiness is?

Speaker 13 I know you can't, I don't want to stack rank them, but there probably is one big challenge. And what's wrong with sadness, I guess? What's wrong with sadness sometimes?

Speaker 14 Well, the biggest, I think, challenge to happiness is that. We get it wrong.

Speaker 14 Like we kind of have these things that we're going for that we think, oh my gosh, once I get it, you know, I get the Ferrari, I I get the accolade at work, I get the A in Spanish.

Speaker 14 You think you're gonna get that and it works, but that's just not how happiness works. I think the biggest problem with happiness is that we get it wrong.
And the sadness question is relevant.

Speaker 14 One thing that we get wrong is that we think, like, true happiness, a true sense of purpose in life, is really about being happy all the time.

Speaker 14 Like, it's some sort of yellow, smiling emoji, like beaming at you. And that's not right.
That's toxic positivity. What we know from truly happy people is that people experience all kinds of emotions.

Speaker 14 Like, truly happy people are okay with their negative emotions. They have the full gamut of the kinds of experiences that happen.

Speaker 14 And so, I think this is another thing we need to do, and that, especially, you know, my college students need to do, is to find ways to be okay with negative emotions. It's okay to be sad.

Speaker 14 It's normative to be sad in the face of sad experiences.

Speaker 12 It's part of the human experience.

Speaker 14 Yeah, normative to be anxious in the face of certain experiences. And so, we need to allow these things that might not feel so good at the time, but as you said, allow for a full human life.

Speaker 12 Heartbreak and pain, they're part of the journey.

Speaker 13 It's true.

Speaker 13 Do you think it's going to change or is it just we've dragged these kids into our own unhappiness in a way that's really significant compared to before?

Speaker 14 I'm hopeful. I mean, I'm hopeful that, you know, a quarter of the entire Yale student body wanted to take my class.

Speaker 14 They were looking for evidence-based practices and evidence-based strategies they could use to feel better.

Speaker 14 You know, when I see these kids, they don't like this culture of feeling depressed and anxious, and they really want to do something to change it.

Speaker 14 And so when I talk to the young people today, I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that we can come up with a better path.

Speaker 13 It's an interesting thing because I spent a lot of time thinking about this with my own kids and the kids that I talk to.

Speaker 13 And one of the things that at this dinner I had, I was talking about, I was ending a relationship,

Speaker 13 not one of the most current ones. And this person dragged me into couples therapy, which I always think is the last stop on the relationship train.

Speaker 13 And the doctor said,

Speaker 13 How are you feeling, Kare? And I said, I feel like watching television. And she was like, what? And I said, it it makes me happy.
I like watching television. This doesn't.

Speaker 13 So I'd like to watch television.

Speaker 13 And she goes, and then my person I was with goes, you're blocking. I said, it's working.

Speaker 12 I was like, I don't know what to tell you.

Speaker 12 And I was very happy. I was like,

Speaker 13 give me a fugical and an episode of Law and Order. I'm very happy.
I'm very happy.

Speaker 12 You said fugical. Wow.
I love that. Fudgical.

Speaker 13 Fudgicals will make you happy. I'm going to write a book.

Speaker 12 Yes, they do.

Speaker 13 The Fudgical Lab. Anyway, Dr.
Santos, I I love your podcast. It's great.
It's called The Happiness Lab. I did not get into Yale, which made me unhappy briefly, and then I didn't give a fuck.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 13 I'm revisiting all the

Speaker 13 schools right now that I didn't get into, so it's kind of a reminder.

Speaker 13 Anyway, you can find the Happiness Lab wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you're lucky enough to get into Yale, you can have her as a professor, but you can also see these courses on Coursera.

Speaker 13 They're well worth your time. Thank you, Dr.
Santos. Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 12 Thank you, Dr. Santos.

Speaker 13 All right, George, when I see you next, I'm bringing you a fudgical. I'm just telling you.
Please. By the way, you know what something else is going to make you happy?

Speaker 13 Watch The Atom Project by Ryan Reynolds always makes me happy.

Speaker 12 I think I love his movies.

Speaker 13 I know. I don't care if they're shitty.
They're great. Good.
All right, George, one more quick break. We'll be back for predictions.

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Speaker 13 Okay, George, it's time for predictions. I'd like you to make one.
Please do.

Speaker 12 All right. This is not a big reach, but my prediction is that we are going to see more horrible behavior from men that goes unpunished or even rewarded.

Speaker 13 Oh, dear.

Speaker 12 I was honestly surprised to see that Louis won. Like, that actually surprised me.
It was like, welcome back.

Speaker 13 Really? Doesn't surprise any women.

Speaker 12 But again, you know, the prediction is that we're going to see more men behave badly and it's going to go unpunished. They're going to get away with it.

Speaker 12 I'm one of these people who does not get excited on Twitter when something is discovered in this investigations on January 6th or Trump. Right.

Speaker 12 Because I think Trump is going to get away with all of it. And if he doesn't, call me when he is not arrested, not on trial, but when he is convicted.
Then I'll get excited.

Speaker 13 All right, yeah, because people get their hopes up in some fashion. Some of these weirdly, yes, they do.
You know what I say? Guess what?

Speaker 13 Someday he's going to die, just like there was a lot of people.

Speaker 12 He was discovered in this investigation. This is true.

Speaker 13 This is how I think about it. I'm like, well, you know, someday.
And who knows? It's not my job to

Speaker 13 bring him to hell or heaven or hell.

Speaker 14 If the KFC

Speaker 12 think would happen soon.

Speaker 13 Some people do well with that stuff. Look at Rupert Morak.
He's still hanging on.

Speaker 12 And then there's

Speaker 12 Jerry Hall, Powerball winner. I mean, you got a girl.

Speaker 13 I guess. But you know what? Think about what you have to do for that.

Speaker 12 I know.

Speaker 12 She doesn't seem unhappy. I saw the Warhol diaries.
She seems okay.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's good. That's a fair point.
Okay, I think Judge Jackson's nomination to Supreme Court, I think it will pass, but some of the Republican virtue signaling has been really depressing.

Speaker 13 Likely qualified. They all say she's qualified.

Speaker 13 They all think she'd be a good colleague on the court, and they just can't just suck it up.

Speaker 12 Seriously, do you know this?

Speaker 12 You know how infuriated this goes back to what I was saying about these people who weren't allowed to hang out with the cool kids at lunch or weren't like invited to their parties or whatever.

Speaker 12 And they're furious about it. And they're furious that there is this black woman who is the smartest one in the room and it drives them nuts.

Speaker 13 Behind the scenes, they like say an opposite thing, which makes me, I literally sometimes walk away from these people when they do that. I'm like, I don't want to, I don't care.

Speaker 13 You're not, I'm not going to like you. I like you less if you, I'd like you to be crazy as ever.
Speaking of which, my prediction, Sarah Palin announced that she'll run for Congress in Alaska.

Speaker 13 I think she's going to lose badly.

Speaker 12 I hope I will. I'll be sort of peripherally tuning into that show.

Speaker 13 I don't think Alaskans go for that bullshit. I just think they don't.
They're much more, you know, they can be very conservative, but I don't think they're that kind of conservative.

Speaker 13 I don't think they're crazy. The only thing she has hope is if the crazies come out, and I think they're less crazy up there in Alaska, although there's plenty of crazies everywhere.

Speaker 12 There'll be more work for you.

Speaker 13 Sarah Palin. Anyway, I think she's going to not win, and it's going to be another sad, pathetic chapter to her sad, pathetic life.

Speaker 12 Sort of peripherally.

Speaker 13 She electrified the populace for a very brief second. And she's managed to dwindle it down ever since.
Anyway, George, Kara, what are you going to do to be happy today? Tell me one thing.

Speaker 12 Today, I'm going to take my dogs for a nice walk in Central Park.

Speaker 13 All right. I think you're a very happy person.
You bring happiness to people. I love yourself.
Thank you. I try.
Anyway, George, thank you for doing this. That's the show.

Speaker 13 We'll be back on Friday for more with Scott Galloway, who will probably is now twisting himself into prestals, trying to figure this Elon thing out.

Speaker 13 And I can't wait to hear his perspective because it's like, it's hard.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 many sides for him.

Speaker 12 Scott's got feelings about it, like really just.

Speaker 13 Feelings on all sides because he wants the stock to go up. Anyway, I think he's sold his Twitter stock, I believe.
Anyway, will you please read us out as we go?

Speaker 12 Thank you. It'll be a masterpiece.

Speaker 12 Today's show was produced by Lara Naaman, Evan Engel, and Taylor Griffin. Ernie Endredott engineered this episode.
Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 12 thanks for listening to Pivot from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We'll be back later this week for another breakdown of all things tech and business.

Speaker 13 A masterpiece.

Speaker 12 Masterpiece.

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