Welcome, welcome. Welcome to armchair expert. Experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by the minister of mayhem.

That's a new one.

Yeah, try it on. So you get into a little trouble.

You know what it sounds capital t trouble. It sounds like screamo.

Sure.

Or.

Yeah. Some kind of a metal collective.

Exactly. Not really my style.

No. And not on topic either, for our guests.

Nope.

Any witches?

Well, that's not true. Okay, thanks for correcting me because there's a lot of ritual that happen at these screamo concerts.

True, true, true, true.

Everyone screams at the same time, I imagine. I mean, I've never been to one.

But Michael Norton is a. Well, first, he's our guest today, and Michael is a social psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School. He has previous book, everyone loved happy money, the science of happier spending. He's also written a lot, and we talk about it on humble bragging, which I think is lovely.

Yeah, it was fun.

It's a fun topic. But he has a new book out right now called the ritual effect. From habit to ritual harness. The surprising power of everyday actions. And what's really fun about this episode is, I think, like us, many people enter it thinking they don't have any rituals.

And we all do.

And we do.

This is also the answer to an Easter egg we were talking about on some fact check about teeth brushing and order of things.

And some people actually, in the comments, sounded off that they totally disagreed with me and that they agreed with me. A lot of people were like, you like toothbrushing in the middle of the skincare routine? Sacrilege. And then other people were like, I do the same thing while I let my serum set in.

Really? And they're not worried that the toothpaste is gonna get into the serum and make a sludge?

Apparently not.

Wow.

Oh, this isn't the place for it. But I didn't do it in the fact check. And we already did the fact check.

Uh huh.

But I felt obligated to explain the full situation because while we were interviewing Amy Poehler, I had mentioned that righteous gemstones had reached out and that I wanted to do it.

Yes.

And a lot of people were like, definitely take that job. And they were excited to see me, which was so flattering, and I would love to be on it. And when they don't see me on it, I don't want them to think I didn't take that job. They just never called back. They said, are you available? And I said, I am available. And then they never called back.

Okay.

So I just want to be very clear, right? Come next season when you don't see me. Don't think I got high on the hog. I would have been there in a second. Right.

Okay.

Maybe not a place for it, the intro, but here we are.

That's fine. I just think timing didn't work out.

It wasn't on my side.

Yeah.

All right. Please enjoy. Michael Norton.

He's an object. Hello. How you doing?

Nice to meet you.

Hi.

Dax. Nice to meet you. So sorry I'm late. Have you been offered all the beverages?

I have.

Thank you. You have the famous cream top. I was talking to someone yesterday, and they said that they like Maru.

We need to ask, or do you know for sure?

Okay, I make the joke. See you tomorrow.

Of course you do.

And they make it back to me.

Now, did you make jokes like that before you were a dad, or did you. I find mine. Yeah, mine have gotten a lot worse.

He's a pun, Matt.

Well, and we can talk about this. It kind of dovetails into your research. He is increasingly having impulse control issues with his puns. Compulsion has perhaps entered the chat.

I did a dad joke the other day, and my daughter's eight. I said, the joke, and she went. And then my wife said, oh, delia, that was a joke. And she goes, sadly, I know.

Burn.

Burn. That's what they're there for, those children.

To humble the shit out of you completely. More than one?

Just one.

And you were smart. You were like, this is a lot of work. Let's cap it here.

One and done seems all right because zero to one is completely different life. Yeah, but then one to two is just more of a thing.

Yeah. Someone said wisely, it's not twice as much. It's exponential. The second one's, like, four times as much.

Well, my brother's eight years younger than me, so we're not ruling it out for you.

We don't know anything about your.

We don't know about your vasectomy or not. Yeah, we're not gonna ask. We're not gonna start there.

I'll start. I had one.

I sent all the paperwork in. Did you not see the paperwork?

How old are you?

49.

Me too.

Oh, my God.

19? 75?

75.

What's your birthday?

April 17.

January 2. So I am your elder. I want you to treat me as such.

I shall obeisance. Is that how you say that?

Where are you from?

From outside Boston. I'm Irish Catholic. There's only, like, two places you can live.

I have to ask.

Yeah, go ahead.

Cause you're of the appropriate age.

Little young, but. Yeah.

Do you know my boyfriends, Ben and Matt?

No.

Ben Affleck. Matt Daniel.

No. I know who you mean.

Okay, good.

Believe me, I know who you mean.

But you don't know them?

No, I don't.

He went to a competing college. He went to Princeton, right? Princeton.

Oh, ouch.

Yeah. But he now teaches where they went to school, which is much more impressive than going there.

I agree.

I don't think so. Cause I didn't get in.

So did you take a certain joy in becoming a faculty member there?

Every grievance you've had, you just visited on the. You know what I mean? It's so fun. It's so fun.

You can resent all these incoming freshmen. So you grew up outside of Boston, like, how far out?

45 minutes. Such that we never, ever went into the city. Once a year. It was kind of a big thing, but otherwise, we just lived on a block that was a circle, and we would just kind of bike and walk in a circle all year in the suburbs.

And what did mom and dad do?

They owned a Hallmark store, actually. Oh, my goodness. It's very novel, which was very, very interesting as a kid. A lot of gift stuff in my blood. I used to work security.

Oh, at the Hallmark?

Yeah.

Because this is the surprising thing. People really like to steal cards.

Yeah, of course.

Cause they're so easy. I mean, they're flat. Put em anywhere.

And also, nobody wants to pay for a greeting card. It sucks to buy a greeting card.

Exactly.

Well, when you know you damn well could have made one out of paper at home.

That's right.

Now was most of your concentration on the employees? Because we had a prompt for one of our shows, and it was, tell us about a time. What? Oh, mall stores. And we had two people that had worked at greeting card stores, and one of them had just robbed the place blind. And then we had a bunch of people in the comments saying, like, I, too, worked at a green card store. And, yeah, we stole every little knickknack and chot store. I wonder if it overindexes in thefts among the employees.

Can we follow up with them and see if they worked at my parents store? Because is there a way to recoup?

She did want to stay in business.

Ask if it was the Dedham mall in Massachusetts, and then we'll know.

Well, that's kind of exciting that mom and dad had a store at the mall.

It was interesting. I'm the youngest of five, so most of us, at some point cycled through working at the store.

Now, when you're in high school, you probably want to be working at the gap or merry go round.

A shoe store?

No, it's really cool, actually, to work at a card store in a mall. Everybody's like, this guy is cool.

He's security.

We should hang out with him.

I'd ask his number, but I'm sure it's already taken. What kind of guy were you in high school?

I would say a nerd.

Your four older siblings, were they boys, girls, brother?

Three girls, and then I'm the youngest.

Oh, okay.

I was, according to everyone except my mother, an accident.

Okay.

She's still keeping strong.

She'll never go there.

And were the sisters in school with you at the same time?

One was.

And was she protective and helpful, or did she distance herself from you?

She's four years older than me, so she wasn't as cool. Nice, but not let's hang. Which I completely understand.

And what was your ba in?

Psychology and English, which my father said, I don't know which one of those is more useless.

Minimally, you could have gone into law with your english degree.

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

Sure. Wow. Cause lawyers hate being lawyers.

He hated it.

Yeah. As soon as you become friends with a few lawyers, you realize the entire field hates their job. Maybe more than any other field.

It was amazing. He had a great job, but he just is really miserable. He was like, work all the time on hard, sad things.

Yeah. And it's all about hours. It's billable hours. Right. So you're just enslaved to the hours. Okay, so why psychology?

I believe that as the youngest of five, you're automatically an observer of kind of the chaos. Large families are a lot going on. Actually, I was talking to my sister about this. So we have seven, obviously, with my two parents. So the number of possible permutations of coalitions, you know, like two versus five, three versus four. All of the different ones. I'm not good at math. Or somebody's like, oh, that's easy to do, but it's gotta be. There's so many. Today it's us three against those four, but in an hour, it might be one against six. I think it was just this fascinating shifting landscape.

And you have the least amount of power and control and the dynamics. So you're probably the most incentivized to figure out why it works the way it does.

Completely. How can I get somebody to drive me where I need to go?

Right. And the parents have stopped parenting probably two kids ago. It's a miracle. You did good in school and stuff. It really just must have been an innate drive. Were they on you?

If things went wrong, they would show up. Otherwise, it was. If we don't hear anything, let's just let him do his thing.

Yeah. Let's not fix what's not broken. The wheel's not squeaking. Then even when applying to graduate school, what tips you to psychology, other than the lawyer saying, this isn't for you, it's not for anyone.

My randomly assigned freshman year college roommate is still one of my best friends, and he's smarter than me. He was one of those people. Even in college, he had it figured out.

He was probably the firstborn.

Yeah, oldest of three. Totally. And he applied to PhD programs in psychology, and I was like, I don't know what I want to do. So I applied also. That is the actual true reason why I applied, is that I was like, this guy is going places. He's a professor at Tufts now, actually. I was like, he's going places. Maybe I'll just do what he's doing, at least for a little while, and see if I work, too.

Yeah. The masters in also psychology. So, once you get into your PhD program, you're getting imagining a much more specific thread of psychology. And what was that?

Social psychology, which used to be the study of groups, but it ends up being really just how people think. That was just really fascinating for me, what's going on in social interactions, but also just full stop what's going on with the humans.

Yeah. Because throwing social in there makes me confused. Like, are we talking about a hybrid of sociology and psychology?

Kind of. Yep. Far from clinical. I think I would be very bad as a therapist. And so it was more the academic side.

And did you want to run experiments?

Oh, my God, I did. It's very fun to design experiments and see how people react. That's just the most fun thing in the world.

Yeah. What was one you did in your doctoral pursuit?

We created a game. You know the guess who game?

Yes.

Where you're like, do they have a hat on? That kind of thing. You flip them down. We were studying racism at the time, and we made a version of that where we made new faces for the game and we varied the age and the race and the gender of the people in the game. And we saw how people played the game. And basically people will say, is the person old or young? That's fine. The hair color's fine, eye color's fine. No one would ever say, is the person black or is the person white?

Really? They avoided it completely, and we did it.

So you made money if you won the game. And people were like, I'm good. I don't think I need to say that. And so we were really thinking about. It's difficult to have conversations about race, and this is even one step before, which is you can't even say the word. How can you have a conversation if you can't even use the word begin with?

Wow.

Well, I'm also thinking of a lot of kind of ancillary or contributing factors. One is they know they're being observed. Right. So if they're at home playing with their wife, they would have said, are they black? So that's interesting.

Yep.

And then also, where in the country you are is relevant. There's a million studies within the one study that could have been looked at. Right.

It reminds me, we did one where the person you played with was either black or white, and they either went first or second. And what happens is, if you're playing with a black partner and they ask about race, then when you go, you ask about it.

Aha. Aha.

Cause they've shown that it's okay to.

Ask, but they gotta go first.

But if I'm playing with you and you ask about race, I still am. Like, I'm still gonna stay away from it.

Yeah.

It's like getting permission from the minority group completely. That's so interesting.

What can bleed out of that? Like, once you discover that this was.

With grownups, we did this to see those dynamics, but then we did a version with little kids. And one thing we can do then is we can see, at what age do kids start to realize that they maybe shouldn't say this?

Yes.

Because if you've ever had a four year old, they point at people and say, why does this person, you know, whatever it might be? And so it turns out it's eight to ten ish, where five year olds are like, are they black? And eight year olds are like, are they wearing a hat?

Right.

You know, they'll do anything, except do.

They not have to apply as much sunblock in the summertime?

I'm surprised, though, that they don't even say, like, I get the inclination to not straight up say, are they black. I'm surprised they don't say, are they white? Cause that feels less scary. Maybe just people.

But then you've gotten rid of all the black players. Then you feel guilty about it.

No, it's just the way to figure that out without calling out the minority. It's actually calling out the majority. I'm just surprised, I guess. That wasn't even on the table completely.

It's funny, I noticed my eleven year old has a lot of interesting things. So, like, we were just at a restaurant and I didn't see the child, but she said, as this little girl left the dining room at the hotel, oh, did you see that little girl that's going to swiftie? And I go, no. And she goes, yes, beautiful girl. And I was like, this is so weird. She's never commented on a girl being beautiful. And so now I'm like, I gotta figure out what, you know, she's saying, I'll spare you all the many steps. Before, it was a girl with like, a shaved head from going through cancer treatment, clearly. And she was in a wheelchair, and my daughter was being so kind. But it was funny how she just kind of instinctually or innately decided she didn't want to say, the girl with cancer.

Right.

She was rooting for her. She wanted to say how beautiful she looked. Awful sweet.

But I know what you mean. It's really opaque, beating around the bushes to what she really wants to ask or talk about. Probably.

Yes. And then some other weird cultural pressure, too. I think the most honest thing would be, like, I saw a little girl and I'm so sad she has cancer. I'm glad she's at this Taylor Swift concert.

I'm glad she's having fun.

Yeah. But there's something about just saying I saw this. It was sad. I feel bad that for some reason you're not supposed to say, but you could.

It kind of focuses the thing on you and your feelings about things, rather than, you know, the other person.

We just had an experience. This is a total brag. I'm going to virtue signal. And you wrote about humble.

You just bragged about your daughter. So you mean this is another. Okay, I'm just checking where we are.

How many were the b? I guess is what I need to know.

Okay.

We're at this restaurant. We ate all the time, and on Wednesday nights they have drag queen bingo. So we're sitting there and it's just me and my two girls. And the drag queens are setting up. And then the littler one goes to the bathroom and the older says to me, delta knows not to point, right? I said, I don't know if she does or not, but drag queens in particular, they put on a show, they want attention. They might not mind pointing. And then it became this kind of, should I be calling her her she or not? And I said, well, this is tricky. Now the eight year old's back. I'm like, drag queens aren't necessarily trans. So just because this current drag queen is a she doesn't mean she identifies as she. I'm about midway through, and now, of course, I'm now guessing at a lot of stuff. So the drag queen walks by, and I go, excuse me, we're so interested in the drag queen. Bingo. And we would love if we could ask you some questions. And the drag queen was like, oh, my God, I'd love to sits down. And now there's just two little kids, and it's like, how'd this start?

This drag queen knew the history from the 16 hundreds. Then we get a stonewall education, and then she's not a she when she's not, you know. And the drag queen was delighted. We were delighted. And I just thought, like, God, I wish that was easier for folks to do, because everyone was delighted.

People usually respond well to genuine curiosity.

Exactly right.

You can read intention.

Yes.

These two kids, they just have real questions.

Humble bragging. How did you end up. No, no, that's too far ahead. How do you end up at a business school? You have this in common with Adam Grant, right? So he's organizational psychologist, teaches at a business school. How do you end up teaching business administration?

It seems like they just hire bald white men.

Just me and Adam grant.

I got a PhD in psychology. The normal thing would be to go and be a psychology professor. I was not super interested in that for various reasons. And I quit academia after I got my PhD for a little bit, then found that I was completely unemployable with a PhD in psychology.

Right?

And so I came back and was at MIT for a little bit at the media lab at MIT, which is a super weird, fun, cool place. Technology and social life, completely broadly defined, meaning voting machines and online dating and artificial limbs, totally blew my mind to be there. That hooked me back on academia. And then I applied for at least 100 jobs all over the country and world, and I got one job offer.

Wow.

And it was from Harvard Business school. And so people were like, well, why did you choose Harvard business school? And I'm like, that was it. I was either unemployed, like, I gotta go to a business school, it kind of happened a little bit randomly and then it turned out to be great.

Well, it really shatters my fantasy of how Harvard selecting people, my thought is like, they have 6000 applicants. Every professor in the country wants to work there.

Yeah.

And then they sift through and whittle it down. But no, they grabbed you. No one else wanted you. That's so interesting.

Fascinating. I've asked the people who hired me and they're not sure what happened.

Yeah, they don't know either.

They really don't. I mean, they like me now, but they go, what process were we using? Where this guy I was in the marketing group, they were like, he doesn't know anything about marketing at all.

Right?

Which is true to this day.

Now, one thing that seems kind of new, tell me the history. It does seem that as corporations got more and more methodical, I guess you have like Welch, what's his name, the old gE, Jack Welch. He's applying like a system that's really, really fleshed out and thoughtful. And I imagine they're starting to think of new ways to get more out of businesses. And obviously culture starts to become something they think about. And then at that point, I guess it's the gateway to, let's invite psychology into this. What is the history of that exactly?

Always, companies have brought in social scientists very broadly, but I think the testing and experimentation, that really became huge in the nineties. But really even more, the two thousands business schools and companies thought we should get some people who do that because we can learn things from them.

Their incentive at that point is they might be able to select in the interview process through a personality test, something that could reap rewards. There's all kinds of ways.

Designing product services, advertising for customers. Testing is really, really great because rather than just put an ad out, you make four and you test them and then you say, oh, that's the one that works. Let's use that one and save a lot of money. So it really became many companies, a culture of experimentation and the Internet, which I'm not sure if you've heard of, but the Internet allows experiments at huge scale. So Google does hundreds of experiments all the time. They just vary little things about the website. We're not even sure what they're doing to us, but they're just checking. What do people click? What do people not click? Let's rigorously test all these different options and see what we learn.

Yeah, I remember hearing an NPR or some podcast talking about how Facebook had originally, when you wanted to ask for a photo to be taken down that you were in. It had a drop down menu, and it said, it's not me. There's all these things. One of them, I'm embarrassed.

Amazing.

And no one ever checked it. And then there was other. And they would write in there, it's embarrassing. And they figured out that if they change it from I'm embarrassed to it's objectively embarrassing that all of a sudden people click that. So that's like a social experiment no one designed. It was a total accident. But again, talk about the scale of it.

And someone had to have that insight to make the change. Right.

Right. That this word. And then they could probably reverse engineer all these other things they had. Had.

Yeah. People don't like to say they're a.

Type of person, and it's vulnerable to say, I'm embarrassed to say it's embarrassing as not.

Yeah, that's just the facts.

Yeah.

The facts are, that's an embarrassing photo.

Any reasonable person would say, okay, so.

What particular skill of yours that you picked up in psychology did you bring? This history of running lots of experiments?

Yeah. The projects that we do are all over the place, in a sense. There's some themes to them, but we really look at all sorts of different stuff, which is why the job is super fun, actually. But the real thing was trying to cultivate observing the humans. That's the skill that people like me have, where you can look at what people are doing and get something out of it that somebody else wouldn't notice, and then you do a little research to kind of figure out what's going on under the hood.

Okay, so let's be very frank. How confident are you, though, that our social science experiments are really yielding much? I've become more and more skeptical over the years, to be a honest.

In some domains, they have a big impact, and in other domains, they might not move the needle that much. For me, what's interesting is the learning from them. In my lab, I train my students to look at the humans as though you're an alien. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And observe what the humans are up to and try to take that mindset about it as if they're ants or something. That sounds insane, but just to really have an outsider view of them, it's a skill that you need to develop. It's not a natural habit of mind. Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth. The people who are amazing at this, one of the things they're amazing at is they look and they say, aha, I know what's going on there.

Right? Feel free to add this. We have the same analogy. Monica and I talk all the time about the aliens, but we always say the aliens are watching the monkeys. Because if you even start calling us monkeys, it gets even more objective. We were overlooking a wedding.

Yeah.

At a hotel, and we're on our balcony, like, six of us, watching this great wedding. And I said, oh, the aliens. Like, when the monkeys do this, the monkeys come from all over the country in their little boxes, and then they sit in a row, and then the monkeys cry.

I live right next to the Charles river between Cambridge and Boston. At a certain day every year, it's usually in march or April, suddenly, people emerge from their homes with new, weird clothing on, and they run to the river and run around in a circle on the river, and then go back in their house, and they do it, like, in lockstep. You'd be like, this must be some powerful religious ceremony that affirms their faith in something.

Well, an anthropologist would definitely conclude it was rites of spring. We're blessing the coming crops, and these.

People are like, I look terrible after the winter. I gotta get out there.

I always think of the aliens watching a football game. Some of these monkeys are running into each other, and then all these other monkeys are cheering.

So many of the monkeys don't participate in this thing. In fact, it seems to be 99,012.

And most of the time, nothing's happening at all.

How did you land on humble bragging? This is a great thing to expose.

If you start to notice humble bragging in yourself, by the way. I'm never pointing fingers at anybody else. It's always something I do also. It's just the most common thing that people do. And we're studying bragging, actually, because we don't like to brag, but we like to say positive things about ourselves. So the question is, how do you do that without looking like a jerk? And people think that humble bragging is a nice way to do it. You get away with it, and, in fact, it makes people so, so angry when you do it.

Well, now, it's two things, right? It's deception and bragging completely.

And, in fact, we like people better who just brag.

Oh, wow. That's interesting.

Than humble brag. At least they're being genuine. I think I'm amazing is better than I'm amazing, but I'm not gonna admit, you know? Yeah.

And for my trigger. Yeah. Like, I'm gonna deceive you into thinking it occurred to you I'm amazing. So there's a nefarious plot afoot as well.

The example that really got us onto it actually was a celebrity said, by the way, if ever you see someone say, ugh, whatever comes after that is a humble brag. Ugh. They say, ugh. This person said, ugh, my hand is so sore from signing so many autographs. And we thought, what is. So there's actually. There's the humble brag, and then there's the complaint brag. The complaint comes victim. A model was like, oh, I'm just. No makeup and sweats, and everybody's still hitting on me. Look for the outcome.

I think I might be guilty of the complaint brag.

The victim.

Yeah. Oh, it's hard to know.

I think you mainly just straight up brag.

I try to, because I do think it's more offensive to humble brag.

Yeah.

When you were saying that, I think I have been complaining about something, but implicit in it that I was doing something spectacular.

Exactly.

I think you do. It's not because of a bragging, though. You're trying to maybe subconsciously you feel bad that what you're doing is actually spectacular, so you're trying to make it not so bad.

That's how I.

There's something bad about this. Don't worry.

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

One version I love is when a band or any artist gets popular or third album. Many of the songs are about how difficult it is to be so famous, and it's like an industry wide humble brag, where you only have an album about how hard it is to be famous. If you're famous, you know, that's so hard to be on the road. We played 80 gigs. Well, that's kind of a humble brag.

Yeah, but you know what?

So this one totally, like, I don't think it's ever what people thought it was gonna be. And you're kind of, like, not allowed to say that. See if they went straight to it and go like, look, I really wanted this more than anything, anybody. I cheated. I stepped in front of people in line. I was unethical, and I got it, and I don't like it. Would that be okay? As long as you owned a lot of your shittiness along the way.

I made a huge mistake.

Does this interest in humble bragging? It must be the direct result of Twitter, actually.

There was a book on humble bragging, and now I forget the comedian's name. And he passed away, actually, which is sort of tragic. But he also just collected off of Twitter. I think the book is called either humble brag or humble bragging. Totally worse.

Oh, was it?

I remember.

I wish I could remember him. Harris Whittles. Harris Whittles, yeah.

And he wrote on parks.

He did, yeah.

Yep.

But a brilliant book. Very funny.

He was so funny.

And do we hope by exposing it? Well, to bring up to speed, I have an anthropology degree, so I'm not quick to judge what we do. I think, like, oh, hmm, I wonder what this is servicing completely. So, like, gossiping. This is kind of well studied in anthropology. And there's so many great aspects of gossiping. It's kind of how we keep systems of power in check. And so this is a part of gossiping I like. We can shame people into gross behavior. We think is we gotta get rid of our. And is that what we're doing by exposing it?

It's funny, there's a psychologist named Tom Gilovich who's an amazing psychologist, also the nicest person in the world. So he shows silly things that people do all the time, but you always feel with him that he's rooting for them. Right. And I try to take that from him, which is, of course, we're completely ridiculous. And by we, all of us and everyone, that's never pointing fingers. It's not bad. It's just, look at this guy doing this thing again. You know what I mean? Yeah. And you might not want to change it, but you see it now. You might make some different decisions in certain places.

Yeah. And just try to skin the cat a different way ultimately, because also, this is very cultural. Right. This isn't the same in Japan as it is here, but we are selling ourselves to your point. Like, you want to tell people good things about yourself completely. Because we're like any other item in this commodified capitalist thing. We're a product, and increasingly so on the Internet.

The best way to do it, by the way, not my research, but research shows, is just to have somebody else say it about you.

Yes.

It's a brilliant workaround. In fact, people will pair off and say, I'll say nice things about you if you say nice things about me in the meeting. And then we can get something going with the boss.

I say to my daughter all the time. I'm like, let people brag for you. It'll happen. Trust me. You're doing spectacular stuff, and it'll happen.

Yeah. I just went on a double date. It was a double blind date.

Everyone double blind tried.

No.

So it was, like, me and my friend, and then everyone. Yeah.

No one knew each other.

It took, like, an hour and a half just to find out. Who was it?

Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. Were we paired up?

Well, that was kind of confusing. But anyway, so my friend was getting set up with this person. It was a blind date, and she told him, I'm gonna bring my single friend. You should bring a single friend, too. So, this is how it all happened. My main takeaway was, oh, man, it's so much easier to talk about yourself, because you don't have to. Because I was, like, talking about my friend and telling them, oh, Liz has a book. She's so good. And then I was, like, trying to tell this story, and I was like, oh, I was in India. And they're like, why are you in India? And I was like, um.

Liz was like.

She was with Bill Gates.

Amazing.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

I could never. I would never have said that. But I also wanted it said. So it was kind of a good hat.

It's like a hype man right next to you at dinner. It's amazing. We all need that.

It was good.

Okay, so, you tackle in this book from habit to ritual. You're talking and exploring ritual. And I think what's maybe most interesting from the jump is that you were skeptical of ritual completely.

Now, I know that you're an anthropologist. We'll have to.

That's our stock. And trade is ritual.

Cause it's what we're doing all the time, and we're doing a ritual right now. I started studying them cause I thought they were fascinating.

What ones piqued your interest to get you on the path. What was the gateway ritual?

One of the first things was, I just came across this. I told you I was a nerd. An infographic which really struck me.

Hit me hard as a rock.

Exactly.

It completely blew my mind. But it was a color coded wheel that had in different cultures the color that they used for different things. Like, what's the color for love in all these different countries? And it's red in some, but different in other countries.

In the red family, though, because of the hard.

Not always. And one of them was for grief.

Let me guess. Russia was black.

Everything was black for Russia. That would be Ireland to make fun.

Of my own people.

Everything would be very dark and dim for Ireland, but there was one that was grief. What's the color for grief?

Blue.

And there's so many different colors all over the world, including just black and white. When you're in a culture, you say, hey, somebody died, we should get a call, right? And for whatever reason, this group was like, I have some black pants, you know? And it was like a thousand years later. That truly just blew my mind. It is random in a sense, right? Like, how does that happen?

And then maybe even within it, informed by the environment, what dyes did they have access to?

Royal blue. You see, when new colors are available, humans are like, let's use that now.

Yeah, that's very special and rare.

Wait, so I was wrong about blue. It was black. For America, grief.

It depends on the religion, actually.

Well, I guess you could split it up, right? What do people wear to the death ceremony?

Is black.

Is black here? But yes, we associate blue. Blue with being blue. Yeah, but it'd be interesting. Cause that's actually a linguistics thing, right. We have named that emotion blue.

Or did we name it blue because we associate the color?

Michael?

I wasn't there when they decided. It was a while ago. I think in some cultures it's green. It means that it's death, but it's also life.

Oh, right. That's nice.

You might say green. And on the other hand, when you think about what that culture is signifying, it makes perfect sense that you would use green because they view death as differently than someone in another culture.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. You had a life event, though, and I can't imagine it was this infographic.

The most impactful thing that happened to me in my entire life was that infographic. I also had a daughter, so I've been studying rituals for a while. In my mind, I wasn't using them. My wife and I had our daughter and go to the hospital, and then the child is there and then they're like, take this home with you forever. And you're like, can you come with me? And they're like, no, you have to just go to yourself. It's extremely obviously stressful and you're completely incompetent.

You had like 36 hours where they teach you how to operate the fang. And so much information's coming.

This comes out of there. This comes out of there.

This is merconium. This will pass three weeks. You're going to see this kind of turd.

This is going to shrivel up eventually. Don't worry about it.

And now when are we supposed to feed it people food at eleven months ish?

Nobody knows.

Yeah.

Avocado seems fine. Yeah, very stressful. And if you talk to new parents, we are annoyingly talking about sleep all the time. Are you sleeping? Is the baby sleeping? How's the sleep? How do you get them to sleep is pacifier. I mean, it's just like it's never ending. And what many people do, if I hadn't had a kid, I would have studied this, is they develop very elaborate bedtime rituals for their kids. And what my wife and I started doing, but we didn't sit down and say, let's develop a sleep ritual for the child.

Well, you probably called it a routine. And then we can get into the nitty gritty of what's the difference between.

Totally and what happens with parents is they start small and then it gets more and more elaborate over time. So it's these two books in this room. And then you sing this song and I'll sing that song. My daughter had gray bunny and brown Bunny. Sure, sorry. She would say gray bun and brown bun and both needed to be there. But actually gray bun was more important than brown bunny. There was like a hierarchy of stuff.

Typical.

You know what I mean?

Exactly.

Oh, my God. The racism shows. So young.

Exactly.

They extend longer and longer and longer. And if you can't find the bunny, you're panicked. Oh, my God, what are we gonna do? The baby's never gonna sleep. And at some point I realized we completely developed a ritual without knowing it. Cause we had to do it the same way every time. We deeply believed that it would work. If we follow these magical steps and listen to this James Taylor song or whatever it was, she will sleep. What I realized later was I'm not sure that it had anything to do with her, but it helped us have a sense of control over what was happening with the chaos in our lives. And I think often we think we're doing it for some reason and in fact, we might be doing it for another need that we have in the moment.

You could almost argue all parentings for yourself under the facade for them.

My daughter just reminded me that we used to say goodnight to the stairs. When we walked up the stairs, I would be carrying her and she would say, good night, stairs. And I, as the stairs, would say, good night. And then she would say, what do you need, stairs? I don't know where that came from. And I'd be like, I don't need anything. And she'd be like, okay. And then it was bedtime. And I mean, what the, you know, there's no 2000 year old text that says when you bring the child to the bed, make sure the stairs are.

Set with the stairs. Anthropomorphize the stairs. You won't be forced to play the role of stairs. Yes.

And then they will sleep perfectly for the rest of their life.

Oh, you're so bringing me back. And you're right, it grows to a preposterous out of control. Cause you would remember too, Monica. I'm thinking of Atlanta in particular. We had to sing wheels on the bus, but there was three extra verses. Cause we had to get tt in there. Everyone that was in her life all the time.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, the titi Zambia. The daddy on the bus says, ha ha ha. And then that would grow. And then at some point you're like, man, this wheels on the bus is like nine minutes long. Also, do you remember there was a bath every single night? And then we haven't bathed our kids in years and we're like, we thought that was so essential. And then one day you're like, oh, it's not part of this routine. I don't need it anymore. Hey, take a shower when you feel dirty.

Basically, I teach a seminar on rituals, actually, to freshmen. It's one of the first classes they take when they get to Harvard. They're 18 ish years old. I say your assignment this week is to ask your parents about the bedtime ritual in New York. Little. And they're like, yeah, I asked my parents, they both started crying.

Yeah, yeah.

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

You start thinking about what direction all these cultural elements move in. When we think of this kind of increasingly thrown away binary paradigm of nature and nurture, and then you look at two people independently coming up with something that everyone else is independently coming up with. Right? It's not like you were talking to your friends about like, so, hey, how many books are you reading? In what order? And where are you putting the stuffies. Everyone did the same thing. And then you start wondering, what direction is it flowing in? It's so fascinating.

And it's really no different than people deciding on black for funerals and white for funerals. It has this sense of everyone is doing it, but the way that it's built up is so variable and so interesting because of that.

What's maybe even more interesting is not ever the specifics, but what situations or context do we see predictably produce a ritual? And there's a bunch. Or at least in Anthro, we believe there's a bunch.

There's tons. Weddings, funerals between the ages of twelve and 16. Most cultures and religions are like, we should do something. What it is is completely different from each other. But humans independently are like, oh, are they already twelve across human history? We should all get together and do a thing. I mean, it's so interesting.

Think how we're not Maasai send out with a spear to kill a lion. Oh, no thanks. I'll stay a boy.

There's a culture where you wear a glove of bullet ants. Bullet ants is the most painful sting.

Oh.

And the rite of passage is to withstand the pain. You know, the variability is so fascinating.

We're jumping ahead, but fuck it, we're here. Yeah. Rites of passage, to me, are probably the most fascinating one, because, yes, they're something to symbolize the transformation from childhood to adulthood. And what's insanely common for boys, at least, is these acts of bravery. And, like, once you learn about them, and if you're an anthro and you go through every single known culture, there isn't one without the right of passage. So you go, oh, these are standard. And then you look at our own modern culture and you go, well, we don't really have anything to offer boys. So every time I see boys doing something insane, I go, what else did you expect? Like, they're supposed to go out and hunt a lion or fucking get stunned by ants. Yes. They jumped the bonfire on their bicycle and caught up. You didn't give them any other option. It's almost, like, dangerous that we don't have any agreed upon rituals.

Yeah, and they really do, Mark. Not only you're not a kid anymore, you're a grown up, but in most cultures, and that means you're expected to be a full member of the society, which comes with don't jump your bike over bonfire. You know what I mean?

A lot of responsibility.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think losing those can be problematic. Really? Although I will say so. People often. Like, I don't do any rituals. I don't have any rituals. And I'm like, have you ever worn a weird robe and a square hat and walked across the stage and grabbed a piece of paper and everybody clapped? And then you threw your hat in the air, and they're like, well, yeah, that's graduation. You don't need to walk across the stage to graduate from college. But we decided that we need to get the family together. And so that it's official that you're no longer that now you are this.

We need some unique costumery.

Make it an event.

Hassles. Oh, the pride with which I had that something for all honors. You had more tassels than other people. And I just strutted around campus.

Felt so good with just the tassels on.

Yeah, exactly. Fuck this robe. I don't even want to get distracted from the tassels.

We had different colors.

Yeah. Didn't feel good.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's amazing, right? You know, like, oh, God, a red tassel.

Yeah.

Lightweight. Yeah.

He's an assassin. What do you do? 5.3 gpA. Where'd that color come from? From? Okay, so let's first differentiate ritual from habit and maybe compulsion. And then I think, I'm interested in the fact that you incorporated a few different disciplines and how they might look at or study ritual. But let's first just say, what is the difference between a habit and a ritual?

Can I ask you a very silly, trivial question? Both of you.

Do you need to go to the bathroom?

Yeah, exactly.

That's not trivial.

It's, do you like me? No. The question is, in the morning when you're getting ready, or maybe even at night when you're getting ready for bed, do you brush your teeth and then shower, or do you shower and then brush your teeth?

I love this question. I brush my teeth in the shower.

That's disgusting.

I do, too.

Both of you.

That's gotta be anomalous, right? It's gotta be low percentage that does that.

I have told my people that I don't do interviews with people who do that.

Yeah.

So I'm not sure how this got through the screener.

I've got a knob. We've never had a 20 minutes color.

Wheel and all that.

Do you know when you started brushing your teeth in the shower? Did you always.

You know, it's a big, huge bummer, and I hate to admit it here in front of you. You know what it is?

I'm a guest.

I think I adopted it from them.

Ah, interesting.

I mean, guys, how fucking inefficient do you need to be to be splitting that task force?

I think that is what I said.

You're in the shower, already covered in water. Brush those teeth.

Do you also go to the bathroom in the shower?

Number one, for sure. And if you don't, you're a liar. I know one thing about you, and that's your by accident.

I mean, there's no way to know really what's happening.

It would be as preposterous as getting out of your shower to urinate.

Okay, but before I adopted, I brushed after the shower.

And do you know why you did that?

I guess it's like, that's the end. That would be the last thing before bed.

So people who brush their teeth first and then shower, the opposite of that, they think that you're disgusting.

So much judgment.

How can you get in the shower with a gross mouth and not have brushed your teeth? If I do this in an audience, first off, half of people do it one way and half do it the other way, which is so weird. And then a tiny percentage, but apparently everyone in this neighborhood doesn't. Exactly.

Exactly weird. Everyone in Hollyweird.

That's right. We've learned something about the culture today, haven't we? The officiousness.

My next tweet is going to be like, wrist so sore from brushing my teeth in this shower.

I like it because then everything's done at once. It's very nice.

So efficient.

Would you do it differently if I asked you to? Or how would it feel if I said, hey, can you separate them tomorrow morning?

It's funny because we're cross pollinating here, but again, maybe I'm lying to myself. It's the efficiency thing. It's like, go before, go after. This is a net zero gain or loss of time. But this scenario you're pitching is like.

It's like you're asking to take extra time.

Another task.

Yeah.

So what's so interesting to me is that about half of people are like the two of you. If I say, can you switch the order? You're like, what kind of a question is that? I mean, that's like the dumbest question. And half of people are like, no.

Oh, like, they could never.

No.

No one says yes is the point.

No. People who say yes are like you. They're like, yeah, sure, I care. I can do whatever you want. You know, do whatever you feel like.

Right?

Cause it's efficiency. It's like, these are things I need to get done. I'm gonna be efficient. I gotta check them off the list. And to me, those are a little bit like habits. They're things that we gotta do or we want to do, but they start to get rituals. So if you ask people, will you switch? And they say, no. If you say why? They say, I would feel weird. I would feel uncomfortable. I would feel off all day because they had to do the opposite order. And so for those people, it's the same task. It's like brushing your teeth, but for them, it's becoming a little bit of a ritual where how they do it starts to matter. I don't mean ritual like people in Russia, robes with candles. Like, that's further down the continuum. But even just in that little example, it's got meaning, it's got emotion. There's a right way to do it. Your way is wrong, and it'd be.

Very disruptive to your emotional core.

And the positive side is, they say, and when I do it my way, I feel really good. I feel ready to start my day. I feel ready to go. So they're like a risk reward where if you do it your way, it can feel really good. But, you know, kid comes in and interrupts it, you might be worse off, because now your ritual has been disrupted.

So I don't super identify with that one because it's not a huge thing for me. But you've never met someone that fucking more complicated ritual in the morning than me. So many things have to happen. One of them would be, I brush my teeth after I drank my first coffee, and then I've got a whole explanation for that. But it's immediately negated by the fact that I'll walk directly in here and have another cup of coffee. But that first cup of coffee would have been disgusting to have if I had already brushed my teeth. It would taste gross, and I'd rather make my teeth dirty than clean them. But then I'm ignoring the fact that five minutes later, I drink another cup of coffee with the clean teeth and.

Doesn'T bother me at all, but in a different place.

Yes, different settings.

So you left the old coffee and toothbrushing over there?

Yep.

And now your new you over in this other room, so you can just.

Start over, attack the day. Dax is now gonna have a coffee. I never even consider the cleanliness of my teeth until nighttime.

I can't stop thinking about the brushing teeth, the order, we shouldn't stay here. But if I'm showering in the morning, I do brush my teeth first. But if I'm showering at night. I brush my teeth last in the shower. If I'm doing it in the shower.

If you're being inefficient.

If I'm being inefficient. I agree that you want your teeth clean as soon as possible.

Although I do want to push back on your students who said it would be disgusting to enter the shower with a gross mouth. I think they'd be more accurate to say it's gross to exit the shower because you're filthy. To say that you have an issue that one of the parts of your body's dirty as you enter. The whole thing's a mess.

It makes no sense at all.

Now I understand if you're like, well, shit, everything's clean. But my mouth is skanky and I've left. I feel like I didn't really get clean. I'm with, yeah, okay. We cleaned that up.

I mean, we see couples who haven't realized that they do it differently. And I can see them look at each other like, what the. This whole time. And they really, really care. What kind of a human would ever do it in that or the other person. Of course, same thing.

But really quick. Cause we're contrasting with habit. So some part of the morning routine might be habit, and people wouldn't have any kind of. What would be an example of a habit?

I think when you're checking off stuff to get done, you know, I mean, even something like putting their shoes on, some people, it's like, I put my shoes on every morning. I have to do that to leave the house. Because that's what you do. And other people are like, let me tell you about how I put my shoes on.

Do you have 20 minutes?

Yeah. And if you talk to, like, athletes, they're like, let me tell you about how I put my shoes on. It's just shoes. But for some people, some of the time, it gets really built into something that's way more meaningful, way more emotional. That's a good thing if it feels good, if. If you do it. But it's not always a good thing. Cause if the shoelace breaks, you're like, I'm doomed. The whole day is ruined now because I couldn't do my shoe tying.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. That part's.

Oh, man. I'm reminded of I have such a also cumbersome sleep time ritual. Cause I have a hard time falling asleep. We were based in Sedona. I was filming in Flagstaff. We got up there. We went so long, and we were gonna start so early. That basically it was decided, guys, you have to stay in Flagstaff. And I hadn't brought any of my sleep aids. I hadn't brought the thing I listed my book on tape on. I was like, oh, sleep is not going to be possible tonight. It was like going to the World Series with brand new socks and shoes.

Did you at least have gray bun with you?

I didn't have any of my snuggies.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

It was a miracle. I went to sleep. I had worked it up into such a discomfort. I hit the bed going like, we're fucked completely.

And I think that's actually really important because the research we did, it's not that rituals are good. If you do more of them, that's terrific. And the seven secret rituals that will change. It's not that emotional, which can have really positive effects on us. And like in your example, they can really mess with us as well. They're not just great, they're complicated and we use them all over our lives. And so they play these very strange, interesting emotional roles.

They work both ways because we're offloading our own responsibility in some bizarre way. We're kind of hiding behind the routine and distancing ourselves from our own responsibility from it. But then that goes the other way. If you don't have it, you will be capable without it.

Correct. Because now you're left to your own devices and that's not good.

And we already decided I can't handle it. This voodoo I do has to take over. Okay, so you talk to other social psychologists like yourself and then economists, neuroscientists and anthropologists. So I'm curious how these different fields think about ritual. And I would love to start with economists.

There are some topics that just everyone interested in humans eventually stumbles on, and rituals are for sure one of them. And then the way you study it is very, very different from discipline to discipline and almost the orientation. Speaking of, are you rooting for the humans or are you trying to show they're making mistakes? You could study rituals to say, what are people doing this crazy?

We're irrational. That would be the thrust of that, right?

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

Well, a lot of these economic models and tests play these games where if ultimately they lose or it's a disadvantage to themselves, it's kind of easy to observe. And we would label that irrational. Cause it's against their best interests.

Right? But unclear. I mean, compared to what? If I had done a study where I showed that the way to fall asleep immediately was to snap twice, and you were like, no, no, no. What I like to do is these 19 things. I would say, you know what you should do? Snap twice. It works for everybody, but most things for humans, we don't have the snap twice. Compared to what? Are these rituals a waste of time or irrational or whatever else? Because we don't have the solution in place that would solve it. Often that's when we turn to these kinds of practices.

Nor do we generally have a great control group who's not doing any rituals and measuring the outcome of their actions.

There's no human that's never taken place in at least one ritual. It's just impossible to avoid.

Involuntarily, they arrived, and someone handed someone a cigar. Tough shit. You're part of a ritual.

Completely.

Okay, so the economists, where would they tend to?

There's a paper that I love, and I forget the author because I'm terrible, but we'll find it. But they look to see the frequency of rain dances, of rain rituals in cultures. And so what they're trying to see is, what are the conditions under which these emerge? Because rain rituals have occurred spontaneously in cultures over human history. It's not like one came up with it and other people were like, let's do that. On one viewpoint, what the. Because that does not make it rain. So why would all of these different groups. So again, like one viewpoint, what a waste of time. But what you see, actually, is that one of the predictors of whether these emerge or not is if you live in a region not that has drought, but that has unpredictable drought. That's the key. And if you think about unpredictable drought, where society is fraying, everybody starts looking out for themselves. What are you supposed to do? If we had a thing where we could shoot at the sky and make it rain and be like, hey, you know what you should do? Yeah, yeah. Fires make it rain. It's easy to do, but we don't have it.

And so you see these things emerge. It's not going to make it rain, probably. But when social fabric is fraying, how do we stay together as a group? Well, we've been doing this rain ritual for like a thousand years. Our grandparents did it. Remember that? It shows you two things. One is we have a shared history, and also they got through with doing this as well. It's possible to get through this period and stay together. So they're wrong in a very narrow sense of there's not rain coming from it, but they're perfectly rational to try to think about, well, how do we solve this problem that the weather has caused in our group?

And it's an antidote to the selfish compulsion during scarce resources. It forces them to be communal at a time when they're probably inclined to be every man for themselves.

Exactly. What do we have in common?

Not to get too voodooy about it, but I think they all do something. Yes, they might not be answering the thing that they expressedly are trying to, but they are answering something.

Even our parenting, our sleep rituals, it's not clear they were helping the kids sleep, but sure, we're doing something for us when we were going through it.

Yeah, but they get sucked into it. And it is all comforting because they know what's coming next. And the world is full of uncertainty. And just knowing what comes next is very pacifying.

Well, control in a world that there is, is none.

There's this super old study, BF Skinner, who was a psychologist who founded behaviorism as a field. He studied pigeons and reward. You know, how do you reinforce the behavior and make pigeons more or less likely to do it? And mainly he did, you know, if you click the thing six times to get a treat, does that work better than clicking five times? I'm saying it dismissively. The guy's like a legend. It's amazing research.

He's got a clicker. Dumb pigeons. And they deserve each other.

Exactly. But he did this one experiment where there was like a food box with knobs and leather levers on it and stuff, and so you could train the pigeons to turn that one and click that to get a treat. And what he did in this particular case was he made it so that none of the knobs or levers did anything. The food just came out randomly.

Oh, Jesus. What a mind fuck for these pigs.

What you should do is not do anything. In other words, if it's coming out randomly, don't bother with the levers. And what do even pigeons do? They're like, you know what makes the food come out? When I tap that three times and I turn that lever twice. That's when the food comes, and each pigeon comes up with their own. So even pigeons are looking for control, superstition over something that they have no control over.

Wow. But also, they're drawing a spurious conclusion. Cause it does come out once. And whatever preceded that becomes it. Irregardless of how successful it is in the future.

We have a very hard time updating because we think at least it worked the one time. You know, what people do. So you do it again, and it doesn't work. And they say, I must have done it wrong.

Exactly. You blame yourself.

Let me do it again.

I have a friend who's a fellow addict. We were sitting around talking about all the insane things we've been addicted to that aren't even addictive. We both have at a halls mendoliptis phase, where we were eating the family sized bags of halls, and he said, listen to me, man. One day, I took two motrin and had a diet Coke, and I felt fucking perfect. And for the next five years, I had two motrin and a diet coke. Never did feel like that again, but I just kept at it just in case. Yeah, it's very core to the addictive brain, I think.

You know, I had a student who was an athlete, and she went one step further. So she had her. Her ritual that she would do. I think she was a runner, actually. So before a race, she had her thing with the tying shoes, and she said, sometimes what I do is I purposely do one of the steps slightly wrong, and that way, if I lose, I can blame it on the fact that I did it wrong. I mean, if you think about the psychology of what we're doing with rituals, I mean, that is like third level thinking, and yet it kind of makes sense.

Yeah, but Jordan would be furious. She built in an excuse to lose.

Maybe she was less confident in that specific race. You know, it's all subconscious. It's like, I might not win here, so I can't handle that.

Or she built in an explanation for failure that relieved enough pressure that she performed better.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Yeah.

And then how about neuroscientists? What are they seeing?

If you look at the research on. You mentioned compulsions earlier, and that's a case where, again, many people have studied compulsions because they're so ubiquitous in what humans are up to. But that's a place where neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, have used their methods to try to figure out what are compulsions. What's the neuroanatomy of them. Why do they develop? How do we try to break out of those compulsions? Fascinating research, and very difficult, as we all know, to stop a compulsion once it started. And I think, speaking of rituals aren't just good or bad, but the other version of rituals, of course, is you're trying to use them for control over a situation. They can come to control you. Eating disorders completely. Often what you're doing a ritual for is in the service of something else. I'm doing my shoe tying thing so that I'll do well in the race. I'm doing the sleep thing in order that the baby will sleep. And even something like, you know, every time I leave in the morning, I double check to make sure the door is locked. You're doing that in order to then go to work and have a good day.

What happens with compulsion sometimes is you lose the link between the behavior and the in order to. And you get stuck on the behavior. So you're not checking the lock again so that you can go to work and have a nice day. You're checking the lock so that you are checking the lock. And one of the ways to diagnose it, of course, is if it starts to interfere with other goals. We all have compulsions, of course, but if they don't interfere with other things in life, we tend to say, that's an okay one. But as soon as they start to get in the way of other things, that's when we might say that maybe has gone too far. I mean, even athletes, you know, if they kept doing their ritual through the entire game, they'd lose the game. We're aware, as humans, you gotta do them in a time and place in order to do the other thing you wanted to do. But we're very sometimes quick to lose the link and get in this other path.

The leak had to just step in. Actually, funnily enough, this is good timing, right? Like, I guess I don't follow baseball, but I am told two years ago they enacted the pitcher can only freak out on the mound for like 20 seconds. Now they finally put a time limit on it.

Like, how many times they can, like.

Yeah, look over there. All the shit they do. And it got so insane. Some people's thing was, you know, 45 seconds between pitch, and they said, you gotta tighten this up. And the game started moving way faster.

So being outside Boston, Nomar Garcia Para was a player for the Sox, and just google him. He had an insane, not before every bat, before every pitch, every step out, batting gloves tapping. I mean, you know, like a whole, whole thing now. Then he went in and he was an amazing player. So you're like, cool.

Do the gloves.

Whatever you need to do, man, because you're amazing. But at some point, it's like, that's taking much, much too long.

There's an interesting psychological experiment there, though, too, which is we have a tolerance for it if it produces great batting. But if you're the worst batter on the team and you're doing that, people go, fuck this. They'd start yelling at you. Get it together, Michaels. We have a different tolerance based on outcomes.

It's strange, isn't it, that we just allow it? Yes. Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams have pre served rituals that are very, very complicated. And we're like, oh, that's cool. But if I did that before I started teaching a class, people would be like, you're not allowed. This isn't that hard, man.

If your Uber driver connected and disconnected his or her seatbelt 17 times.

Not to mention these rituals are also used for intimidation. As soon as Serena starts doing her thing, whoever the upper opponent is, it's.

Like, oh, no, you hope she fucks up her. Yeah.

You're like, oh, my God, here it is. Like, it's happening and she's gonna go do her thing.

Now I'm doomed.

I'm doomed.

The hawk is the best one, and it's totally organized in rugby, did you study the hawka?

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

Yeah.

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

Oh, yeah.

You're just terrified watching them scream. So stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare. So the neuroscientists, have they had someone in an fMRI? I guess you can't be actively doing your ritual, but then also be in an fMRI or has the brain been observed in states of ritual?

Yeah, we've done some research on and kind of the underpinnings of ritual. So, for example, this is actually in a group context. We can give people a brand new ritual to do, and we say, do this for a week. It's a little bit like the haka, clapping and stomping. And then we bring them into the lab and we have them observe other people. And if they observe someone who's doing the same ritual as them, they're like, I like that guy. And we're like, hey, you want to share money, trust them, stuff like that? Yeah, sure do. But if they see somebody doing a different one, they're like, I don't like that guy. Just because of the ritual. And what we see, actually, when we use EEG is that when you see somebody doing a ritual that's different from yours, one of the regions that gets activated is the region associated with punishment.

Oh.

So, like, at a very basic level, if you're doing the thing wrong, meaning just different from me, I'm at a very basic level, like, get him. We made these up on purpose. So you can imagine with cultural history when you're doing it wrong, it's not just like, I don't want to share the money in the lab. You can see how it gets to be so extreme.

Well, this would be a great opportunity for you to tell us about the link between identity and ritual, because that's also what's happening, right? Their ritual is now out group.

And it's so fast. Sometimes when I give a talk, if I can divide the room so that one side of the room sees one screen and the other side sees another screen, and there's a barrier in between, so they don't know that the other side is seeing something different. It's like, clap three times, stomp three times. It's a ritual. So I say, everybody stand up and let's get going. You start clapping and stomping, and you synchronize with the people around you because obviously we're cool. But you can hear on the other side, you can't see them, but you can hear them doing the same thing as you for a while. So you can hear them clapping and stomping. In San Virginia, you think, oh, my God, those people are great over there on the other side of the barrier. And then, of course, what I do is I give different instructions. At some point, we yell one thing, and then you hear them yell the other thing. And what people on both sides do is they look at the barrier in disgust. They're doing it wrong. And I say, what's wrong? And they say, they messed up.

They're doing it wrong. And I say, doing what wrong? You've never done this before in your life. And right there they say, and it's.

Not what's wrong with them towards anything predictable.

At the end of this, sometimes the last steps, I'll have people put their hands in the air and yell, let's go. And then louder, let's go. And then louder, let's go. By the end, they're standing with their hands in the air screaming, let's go. And then I just look at them and they look at themselves like, what just happened? I have the feeling that if I ran out of the room, they would come right with me.

Yeah, yeah. They need something. You've completely organized them. They're all on the same page. They can work as a unit, and now you have no task and it's.

A made up ritual. And I'm just some nerd professor. If you think of the emotion that you're getting in that group from these very, in a sense, trivial things.

Yeah. So anthropologists obviously have been on this from the get go. So what were you learning from anthropologists?

The variability. So if you think about rituals today, if the only rituals we could do are ones that have a long history, then we're a little constrained. I mean, imagine a ritual has to be around for 500 years or it doesn't do anything for you. Then they'd still be incredibly important in our lives, but we wouldn't be able to use them and make up our own. And so when you see the variability across history, even the color of grief, it means that different humans at different times came up with them. They're not from somewhere, they're from us. And from that in anthropology, what I took was, I wonder if people make up their own all the time, that we think of rituals as the wedding and the funeral and religious, and those rituals play incredibly important roles in our lives. I don't mean to dismiss them, but I got interested in the, oh my God, people are completely, really freelancing this stuff all the time. There's no history, there's no anything. They're just very creatively coming up with them. And that kind of got me on my way of studying, which was more like at an individual level as a psychologist, what are people doing and how does this impact them?

Well, what it says to me is that we are very hardwired and evolutionarily incentivized to have them, and so the software is there, and then we just do it all the time.

I'm not an anthropologist, so please correct me, but one of the ways that you can determine if a group of early humans had a culture is by the burial site. So, like, dinosaurs didn't have a ceremony, just bones all over the place. Humans, at some point when you uncover a grave, it's very carefully laid out. There's sacred objects placed very carefully around it. And you say, this group of people obviously cared about each other in a different way. So it's the remnants of the ritual that tell us that there was a culture there. That's how deep I think rituals are in us.

That's also why some zoologists have argued that elephants have culture, because they have these burial sites and they go play with the bones and they reminisce. Yep.

They often stand in a circle and make sad noises in unison, which a lot of human funerals were kind of standing in a group and making sad noise. You know what I mean? It's strikingly similar.

If you're a woman, you're allowed to. Oh, my God, don't you dare. If you're a man, make any sad.

Do you mean a woman elephant or a human woman?

It'd be great if we called female elephants. What is emo diversity?

This is something we started to study a few years ago. So I used to study happiness. We did lots of research for many years on how to help people be happier over the course of their day, mainly with spending their money differently. The biggest insight was just, if you spend money on yourself, it's not bad. It just doesn't do much for you. If you spend money on other people, it tends to result in more happiness. And we did things like $5. You know, if you're a billionaire and you give all your money away. We're not studying that. We're studying people with small amounts of money and got very interested in, like, what could you do today to change your happiness over the course of the day? But at some point, happiness is kind of limited. We all want to be happy, but if you were a perfect ten, happy every minute of every day of your life, I don't know if that's a amazing life or, like a really one note kind of life. And we started to think about, it's the richness of emotions, it's the diversity of emotions, the variety of emotions. That's what make life.

We got a little hung up on happiness for a while. And then the Kahneman work is really interesting, too, because if you're asking people hour to hour in their day, it'll have one measure of happiness and then their narrative self reflecting, that's a completely different number. So you got to figure out, too, which one of these we're even servicing.

What's one more important is the other.

Tricky thing, and increasingly, we're thinking the narrative. So I feel like that's where the winds are blowing. Purpose and sacrifice and all these kinds of things. So, specifically, this emo diversity, it's incorporating other metrics to evaluate.

If you think of biodiversity on an island, what you do is you kind of count the number of species and their relative abundance. If there's 9 million snakes and one rat, not good. They're in trouble.

I see a collapse.

So you need the balance of these things. So we use the same metric, but we use it on emotions in your mind. So if you think of joy and sadness and fear and anger and happiness and all of these things, we count the number of them and then their relative abundance. And what we see is that same metric predicts actually your feeling about your life overall. It's true that having a happy day is good, but we learn and grow often through different emotions than that. We learn fear. And overcoming fear and sadness makes us grow in ways that are quite different. Just this idea that we should be thinking more about the mix. If we think about having a rich and interesting life, less about the one note we go to see horror movies, which is super weird in one sense. Like, why would we just add fear? Well, I think it's related. Right. We want this diversity of experiences in our lives.

Yeah. I've been trying to brainwash my daughters. They have a nightmare, or they're afraid of something. I say, you know, the gift of a nightmare is it tells you what you care about. You are afraid we're gonna get divorced. That means you really like having a mom and dad. That's kind of sweet. It can be a roadmap to what you really value. It's useful.

There's amazing research on the nightmares of kids as a function of their age that's super predictable.

Oh, like, they go through nightmare phases? Yeah.

So at a certain point, they're like, someone's gonna break in the house.

Monica stayed a long time there.

Oh, yeah. I pretty much still. I haven't really grown out of it yet.

You have some arrested development in that.

But also, happiness exists because of the others, and the others exist because I don't think you can just even have happiness? What does it even mean without sadness? It's all relative to each other completely.

There's a learning and going from one to the other that you don't get if you're just on one or the other.

Yeah.

To own all my privilege, I was lucky enough to step onto the hedonic treadmill in a way most people can't. I would say it's a huge luxury. But then ultimately what I figured out is I was at one spectacular place after another. And the fifth cool trip I took in 2022, I was like, oh, all of this is now meaning nothing. I've absolutely spoiled it, and I've got to actively reset, even though I don't have to. I've got to choose to fucking tighten all this up and make things special again.

There's this research by Liz Dunn and Jordy Koidbach on amazing experiences, basically. And it's a nice problem to have, as you said, but it is a bit of a curse, which is that if you go to Copenhagen and it's your first european city, you're blown away. But if it's your 19th european city, you're like, huh, that's nice. Here. I've seen something like this. So we do have this thing where we get accustomed even to the extraordinary.

Yes. Okay, really quick. How do rituals work in relationships and how can they strengthen them?

So the funny thing about studying rituals is the way that it unfolded over time was we would be studying them in some domain, and then we would talk to somebody about it and they would say, hey, did you ever look at them in teams? We said, no. Then we do a project on teams. You ever look at them in families? No, we do a project on that. And at some point, my former student Ximena Garcia Rada, who studies decision making in couples, which is, I mean, talk about an amazing goldmine topic. But she said, what about rituals in couples? And of course you say, of course we should. I mean, first off, weddings. But again, it wasn't the received thousand year old kind that we liked. It was the kind that people come up with themselves. So we just ask couples and we don't say, do you have a ritual? Because they're like, no, we don't have weird candle ceremony. But we say, is there something that the two of you do that's special that you make sure to do every so often, regularly that's unique to the two of you? About two thirds of three quarters of couples say yes.

And then they have the most adorable one of my favorites is this person said, when we kiss, we always kiss in threes. We've been doing it for 22 years.

Oh, that is so.

And we don't know why it started. And another one that I completely loved is this person said, every time before we start eating, we clink our silverware together.

Oh, man, I like that.

I see the monkeys look at.

That's a good thing.

Those two monkeys like each other, and this is how they show it.

Do you think part of that is this is our special thing? It's special because we invented it together.

So what we see, if you break up with somebody, which happens in life, you might not like it, but they're allowed to date other people. They're allowed to get married, they're allowed to have a family. They're allowed to do all that, but they are not allowed to reuse your ritual.

Right.

The rage that people feel, and we looked at this, the rage that people feel like if you looked over and you saw your ex clinking the fork with the new. It is such a betrayal of the relationship in a way that's very different than other kinds of things that happen in relationships. So you're exactly right. People say, that's us.

Yeah. It's an act of creating this shared identity that you have, which is so special because there's a third person in the relationship, which is the relationship.

One of the things that is interesting about these is we see that couples that have these report higher relationship satisfaction. But another thing that they report is a higher sense of commitment to the relationship. So when you get married, there's a ceremony, and then for 15 to 60 years, you're supposed to be with that person, but there's no other wedding. That's over. So what do you do every day to show that you're committed and you can buy property? You know, I mean, there's stuff we do. You have a kid, stuff like that. But what we see is that these little rituals. We've been kissing in threes for 22 years. How do we know that we're committed to each other? Well, you know what? We've been doing this thing every day for 22 years without missing a beat. Yeah, I have a feeling we're going to be doing it for 22 more years. I mean, they really have this very deep resonance for us that is just different from other types of commitments that we might make.

Yeah. It's like a tangible commitment. It's not just a theoretical. It's action is what it is.

There's this painful episode of this is us where Miguel was explaining when he knew his marriage was over. I'm gonna butcher the details. I apologize. But he says, every morning I used to bring her coffee in bed. And one morning, I just didn't feel like doing it, which is extremely sad. And then he said, but the worst part was she didn't even notice.

Ooh.

So we're done. It's just coffee. It's just silverware. These aren't big, huge things.

Everything.

They're everything. Yeah.

What are the four lessons of relationship rituals? Do you still have them memorized?

Who knows? I remember one, at least.

You might be shocked how many people I interview that have books, and they're like, I don't fucking.

We got this a long time, Rob.

What are the seven principles? They said, it must be fun.

You can just mess with people like, well, tell me the story about something. Oh, I'm glad you asked about that. I'm just gonna die.

You write in here of Tabitha in her rabbit. What happened with her?

Funny story. One of them is very related to what we were just talking about. So we ask couples, we can interview them separately, and we can say, do you have something special that you do? And then the other one would say, do you have something special that you do? And most couples agree, so they'll say, yes, we do. And then they'll tell you, we clink silverware. Some couples don't have them, but they agree. They say, no, we don't have anything like that. The saddest couples in the world, to me are the ones where one person's like, oh, my God. We have this adorable thing that we do all the time where we kiss in three, and then we go to the other person. They're like, no, we don't have anything like that.

Yeah.

The actual nature of these is one of the key things in them. It's not that if one of you has it and the other doesn't, you're halfway there. You're nowhere. You've got to create it together, and you've got to both endorse it in order for these kinds of effects that we see to emerge.

Right.

We are talking about the exclusivity one, which is, you may not use Mars with anybody else.

I hadn't really thought about it.

Oh, that makes. I get very fixated on things that are just mine and somebody's. And if I see it starting to happen other places, I get very upset.

Nicknames, too, like Schmooper Bear, you know? You're gonna call this new person schmooperberg in fact, when we ask people, do you have a ritual in your current relationship? And then we ask, did you have on your previous relationship? They're more likely to say they have one in their current one than in the previous one. Now, that could be because they didn't have any with the person and they were doomed. But it could also be they're not willing to admit that they had ritual with this person who they now hate. They've, like, taken it out of their memory in order to not taint.

We had one, but it was fraudulent.

I came to learn, do you guys have one or multiple?

I think we have multiple, but they're not as consistent, I don't think, as some of these ones you're. That we have daily ones.

You should ask your kids.

Yeah, they might notice it.

When people say, I don't have any rituals. They say, ask your partner. Ask your kids. Ask your coworkers. And they're like, oh, my God, she totally does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a thing for years, and if we travel, we still do it, but we have identical crossword puzzle books, and we challenge each other to a race, and we shake hands, and there's a bunch of other words that have to follow it. Good luck to you, buddy. And then we go off and do that. So doing crossword puzzles isn't what makes us close or affirms our bond, but it's the stupid pageantry, especially if we're seated. I've got one kid on one side of the airplane she's got, and we've got to reach across the aisle and do the whole thing. We would never start the crossword without doing that.

How would you feel if you looked over and she'd already filled one of them out without telling you she's got a head start.

I would immediately lean over and ask the person next to me, do you have the name of a good divorce attorney you've observed?

I'm sure we have a. I'm sure you do.

We had a thing, too, when we were first dating. We were in Hawaii, and we watched this movie that was so terrible. And it was so terrible, but I paused it, like, ten minutes in. I said, what do you think of this movie? She goes, it's terrible, and I love it. And I go, me too. I can't wait to watch more. And it's so bad. And so we declared that date. September 1 is the name of the movie. I'm not gonna say it out loud, but every September 1 was like, it's the blank name of the movie. And we had to watch it.

I love it. There's a family that every Christmas, someone's in charge of making a completely disgusting thing that everyone has to eat. That's the original. So it's not necessarily like, let's make a wonderful cake that's delicious. It's, let's do our thing, which could be the grossest thing in the world, but, you know, we've been doing it for 20 years, or whatever it might be.

It's so identity. It's like we're gonna do something that no one else does.

Yeah.

It's almost specifically and intentionally abnormal. Cause that's what's differentiating you from the family next door.

People literally say, I know that there's no other family in the world that's doing this right now, and that's really important to them.

I am really susceptible to ritual because I think I have a lot of anxiety. So I do think it's about, but also just fun. Like, me and my friend do pig day, and it's always the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and we get the Christmas tree, and we kind of do the same thing every time.

Wait, I'm sorry. You're not gonna explain why it's called pig day?

Oh, sure.

Is this, like, a thing that's happening in the world?

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

Love it.

But I love that. I love things like that.

We had Christmas eve eve, McDonald's. We try to commit to eating.

Yeah, we haven't done that.

An insane amount of McDonald's on Christmas Eve Eve.

One of my colleagues just told me his wife's parents are immigrants from Russia. And when they came here many years ago, the first place they wanted to go when they came was McDonald's. And so every year, they take the whole family to McDonald's. And he said, they don't actually like McDonald's. They don't eat the food anymore. Yes. They just make sure that everybody goes to McDonald's to honor that tradition. So, I mean, the way that they stick and matter so much.

Yes.

I just want to ask you a couple more from the book. Why should someone never say, calm down before going on stage.

Speaking of snapping twice. And nothing works. To try to calm down with anxiety. One of the most common things that people do when they're nervous is they'll say to themselves in their head, calm down. Be like, just calm down. A big deal. And what happens when you do that? So, if you've ever experienced anxiety, let's say you have to give a presentation or something like that at work, and you're anxious about it, you're anxious about the presentation, and then what happens with anxiety, unfortunately, is it starts to spiral. So then you think, you know, if the presentation doesn't go well, probably gonna lose my job. If I lose my job, I'll have to get a divorce. I'll probably have to resort to a life of crime. I'll probably end up dead. You know, I mean, we really spiral with anxiety all over the place. And telling yourself to calm down. All that does is, now you're anxious about the thing, and you say, calm down, and you can't. Now you're anxious about the fact that you can't calm down when you told yourself to calm down. Here comes the spiral. The only thing worse than telling yourself to calm down is telling your partner that they need to calm down.

Yeah, I highly, highly don't recommend so. Absolutely. It feels like a good thing to do, which is like, I'm good. But it turns out it can be really, really counterproductive.

I think people think they're one step ahead of it, so they'll just say, take a deep breath. That, too, can be a very triggering.

Bit of advice, because if you think this should have worked by now, and.

I know why there's saying, take a deep breath, because I'm clearly panicking, and they've observed it. There must be personality types that my favorite word, over index in ritual, is that kind of predictable.

We did surveys where we asked people about different domains of life. We even developed a quiz that people can take where you can see different domains of life. Do you do them or not? Like your morning in your relationship and your family at work, you know, think about all the domains of life. And what's interesting to me is that there don't seem to be ritual people.

Oh, okay.

In other words, like, if I'm somebody who has a really big morning thing that I need to do, if we ask you, like, what about your nighttime routine? Sometimes people are like, oh, I have one of those, too. And just as often, they're like, no, I don't need anything at night. I absolutely need to do this incredibly elaborate thing for this purpose before meetings, I have to do this thing. And then we're like, what about with your partner? And, no, no, we don't have anything like that. So it's often domain specific. It's like, where you need them. Pragmatic is where people bring them to bear. Like, if you don't get nervous before a presentation, don't bother with a ritual. You don't need it in that case, because you're not nervous. But if you get nervous before a first date, well, then we see people. Oh, yeah, of course. I use them over there. I just don't use them at work. So I do think we're oddly sensitive to the idea that we use them where we think we most need them.

So what is the prescriptive message of the book? So we learn all about, from habit to ritual, harness, the surprising power of everyday actions. What's the prescriptive element?

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

It shows you what you care about, because you're not doing rituals around shit you don't care about.

Exactly. Remembering your bedtime ritual with your kids when they were little, it's like, a very nice thing to do, just taking stock of how they played a role. And then the other thing, prescriptively, is to experiment with them. If you're not nervous before meetings, I don't think that you should bother experimenting with them. But if you are, I mean, you can take Medicaid. You know, there's lots of ways to deal with anxiety, but because we don't have of a magic solution, so many people, when they are anxious, including Serena Williams and all these other people, they turn to these. Why not try them yourself and see if it in fact, helps you feel? I feel like I'm more ready to go. So freelance with them a little bit because we can see that they can still have an effect on us even when we make them up ourselves. That means we've got some latitude in using them and trying them out in different domains.

It's a cool tool.

Really cool.

Well, Michael, this has been really fun.

Yeah.

Rituals are cute. I think it's a cute thing the monkeys do. I know you're right. That's got to be the biggest headscarf for the aliens watching rituals.

I mean, I'm sure we have some here. There must be some work ones that we have that we don't even consider necessarily.

I don't know what the line between superstition and ritual is, but that building that you walked in front of that's just newly completed was supposed to be a new studio for this show. And Monica was like, what are we doing trying to monkey with something that has worked so well and literally it can't work outside this room. We've decided.

Yeah, decided to add a door there. And I'm pissed.

A door to the backyard.

I really don't like it.

Yeah, it's been a big.

Well, it hasn't been a big. I've been keeping it to myself.

Well, I know about it pretty well.

Okay, well, I have kept quiet, but I really don't like it and I think it's gonna ruin everything. So. Good thing you got in now and again.

Like, what does better mean? Is a nicer building better? Sure, it's better. Is it actually better?

Yeah.

Totally unclear if that's actually gonna be better.

Yeah. Doctor Michael Norton. This has been a blast. I want everyone to check out from habit to ritual, harness the surprising power of every day actions and start monkeying around with some rituals and see how it impacts your anxiety and everything else. I think I'm actually excited to now be moving through the rest of my week looking. Yeah. Clocking the rituals I have.

Me too.

All right, well, thanks for coming.

Thank you.

Bye.

Hi there. This is Hermione. Hermione, if you like that, you're going to love the fact check. Miss Monica.

How was Father's Day?

Oh man, it was a raging success.

Sure.

A rioting success.

Oh, raging.

It was a major rager. I'm sore as fuck today.

Yeah. You played a lot of games.

Yes, it was an all sports Father's Day at the sports complex of Los Feliz.

Yep.

It was really, really fun. My brother arrived in town at 1230.

Yes.

David Robert Junior.

Big bro.

And Kevin Zeigars came over. Of course.

Eric, of course.

Matthew. Sweet Matthew.

Yeah. Father to be.

First Father's day. He's celebrating. And then Jake Johnson.

Oh, fun.

Yeah. I was delighted he accepted the invite because he's not in that little bubble of people.

No. Either seekers.

Yeah. In fact it was. It was a coming together of a few different friendship circles and family.

Yeah.

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

Okay.

So we've learned through history we make great teammates and we make terrible opponents.

That's nice.

Yeah. Of the two, if there was, like, one version we had to have, I'm glad that we have to be teammates.

Yeah.

So we were teammates. And Eric is, admittedly, the Lee sin interested in volleyball. He'll be the first to tell you it's not his sport.

Yep.

I was like, perfect. We'll put Eric with David and I because we're both fucking ball hogs and we're maniacs. Yes. And then, so Ziggers, Matt and Jake were on a team. None of those three know each other.

No. Zeke. Oh, yeah.

Right.

I mean, maybe Zeagers tangentially knows Jake from bumping into him at events or something, from being an actor. But anyways, it was so fun. And they started really gelling as a team. By the end, they were doing bumps, sedate and spiking. Now, they were fucking that up enough times that I was confirmed. Just get it over the net is my policy.

Okay.

But I was on fire. I was just running from end of the court diving. But I had done a workout in the morning that was solely to warm the joints up. So 200 jumping jacks, a lot of lightweight shoulder work. I was wearing two knee braces and a right elbow brace.

Thank God.

It looked like I was about to go, like, ten goalie for the fucking flyers or something. And it was great. It doesn't even matter who won. Two out of three.

It doesn't matter.

Doesn't even matter. Doesn't matter.

But listen, were you ever jealous when. When they were all, like, chatting and laughing?

No, no, no. I was really happy because my anxiety was that these. These people who don't know each other very well are forced to hang out. They became a team. And even Jake kept saying. He's like, yeah, it just works. It works. Like you start playing something.

Yeah.

I don't know. To play volleyball, and then, first of all, it's just fun moving your body, then we're joking, and then it's competitive.

Yeah, exactly.

And then the fire took off.

That's fun. Yeah. You're not a very jealous person.

Yeah.

Which is good.

Oh, thank you.

I think it's good.

I would not want to be a jealous person. Cause I had a. In high school, I was jealous over girlfriends. And I hated it.

Yeah.

I hated it.

What was the worst thing you ever did when you were jealous?

You know this story. My girlfriend and I was probably in 12th grade and she was in 11th grade. She went on spring break, and a bunch of kids from my school had gone to the same location, to Cancun.

And you didn't go?

I didn't go, no.

Because you didn't want to go.

I think Aaron and I were going. We had a mission to go to every spring break in the continental USA in one trip. So, like, we drove a car and we went to Panama City, then we went to Daytona, then we went to Virginia beach, then we went to Myrtle beach.

Okay.

Yeah. So we had a whole different game plan. And when she returned, I learned she had slept with a dude in my school. And not just a dude, he was literally the biggest. I think he was the center on the football team. So he was, like, probably six five and 260. He was enormous. And I. She was big enough. God bless her. I can't even imagine doing this. Maybe because maybe she had a hunch other people were gonna. It was gonna get out, whatever. She got home, I went over to her house and say hi to her after she got back, she told me, oh, I was very cruel to her. You are so regrettably cruel. Shamefully cruel.

You were a kid.

And also I was really hurt by it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's more common than not.

Yeah. I just. Boy, oh, boy.

It's not who you wanna be.

It's not who I wanna be. It's very regretful.

What'd you say?

Oh, just all the stuff you say. I'm not gonna commit to those words, but.

Slut.

Fucking c word. No. I left in a huff. She was crying. And I drove directly to his house, and I was going to knock on the door and punch him. And he's again, enormous.

Yeah.

And I got there, I knocked on the door, his father answered. I said, is so and so home? He said, no, he should be home in ten or 15 minutes. I go, okay. I clock in that moment, the dad's also six, seven and enormous. So I sit outside of his house for ten minutes. And I'm growing crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier and more and more angry. And I know I've told you the story, because I see his car pull up, and I want to say, he drove a Ford probe, windows down. I get out of my car, as I get out of my car, and I'm now walking to his car. My vision has reduced, sure by, like, 80%. I'm seeing, like, two saucer dishes worth of information. As I approach, his window's down, and I just swing. I miss him. I punch his steering wheel.

Oh, I don't know this because I can't see. Yeah.

And the dad, uh oh. Was in the window the whole time wondering, like, what is this guy who came over and now he's sitting in front of the house? So this, the dad watches me walk up to the car and throw a punch through the window. And now he's out of the house as the boy's getting out of his car. And I'm now backing up, prepared for one.

One.

Well, first I'm preparing for just the one on one, which my odds are very low. I'm going to win at that point because I really am not doing well.

Yeah.

Now all of a sudden, the dad's on the scene. By the time the dad is yelling at me and getting in between us, my vision was down to a pinhole. I look like I felt like I was looking through a pinhole of, like, a fucking.

You probably looked so weird.

I can only. I wish there was video of this.

I would feel like rubbing your eyes.

I mean, gracefully. The father didn't. They shouldn't just beat the shit out of me, probably. Well, and another neighbor, they were a little more upscale than some of my other neighbors.

Maybe he knew. He was like, oh, my kid probably plowed someone down. Yeah.

Must have something to do with the reason. Recent trip to Cancun.

Right.

I got out of there without having to fight either of them somehow and drove away with very limited vision. Yeah. And it was just like, you know, post all of that, like, laying in bed that night, I'm like, what a horrible several hours of feelings.

Yeah.

I hated how I felt at her house. I hated how I felt at the kid's house. I felt, you know.

Yeah.

I'm like, you know, what's tomorrow at school look like? He'll tell people I came.

Sure. But were you. Were you done being mad at her?

No, I broke up with her.

Right. Yeah, but, like, were you mad at her for the rest of your life?

No, I'm friends with her currently.

Oh, wow.

I've apologized to her.

That's nice.

Yeah. Oh, I can't even believe I'm gonna admit this part out loud. This most sickening part of this is I had cheated on her. I just hadn't told her. That's what's downright evil. That's evil.

That makes more sense as to all of this.

Yeah.

Cause if you.

I was so shame ridden that I had, mind you, in the moment, I genuinely am hurt. I'm not, of course, thinking, like, well, I cheated, so this is no big deal. I'm devastated.

Yeah.

Cause what I did didn't mean anything, but what she did meant everything.

Yeah.

This is growing up. You live and learn. But, yeah. So regretful. So shameful.

Did you tell her later I had cheated on you, too?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she was rightly so. Like, how dare you?

She's like, you're such a slutty bitch.

Yeah. She called me the C word.

Yeah.

So. And then another girlfriend that lived with me who cheated on me, and that was equally, I was completely devastated. I was mean to her about it. And so I was like, I don't like this. I don't like this, this emotion at all. I do not want it. I've got to figure out how to not have it because I don't like it.

Huh.

Yeah.

I wonder what that did to you. Because, like, I think there's a ton of good that came out of that. And it's. And, yeah, jealousy is a bad feeling, but being affected by other people's actions is life. Right? Like, we are, we are supposed to be affected by people and not live in a vacuum and just feel on our own, necessarily. I wonder if that had sort of an impact.

Totally. I agree. But also, if you contrast that reaction with, like, Aaron Weekly. So Aaron Weekly would have other friends and he'd have sleepovers at their house, and there were even periods where I'm like, oh, I think he, he's definitely with Mark Yackley more than he's with me. But the difference there is, and it's why it's an internal job, is that I felt deep confidence in Aaron's love for me.

Yeah.

And these girls I was dating, I didn't, I had insecurities that I wasn't enough and I wasn't all these things. So, yes, it's, I think you should be impacted by people and not live as a robot. But also, it is really telling of what you're just your own self esteem and confidence is in that relationship. Because, again, I'm not getting jealous over Aaron having other friends. I'm not getting jealous of Carrie. Once I start dating Carrie and we're, like, so in love and we're together for four and a half years, I'm not jealous.

There's two things, right? Because one is jealousy. This is the predominant problem with jealousy, is the feeling of worry. It's like. It's an anticipation feeling of, I don't like that person because they could be better than me or they might be better than me, or my boyfriend might.

Start liking this thing from me. I.

Exactly. Or they. They might cheat.

Yeah.

But you felt jealous when you were betrayed.

Yeah, I wasn't suspicious. I wasn't suspicious of either of them beforehand. See, I was never really, like, a controlling boyfriend, I don't think.

Which is then, for me, the reaction of being hurt is appropriate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then it's okay to feel hurt when people hurt you. Like, it's impossible. It's part of life.

It is. It is. It is. There's so many layers to it. I don't know. I just know, like, there's a level of love and connection I desire, and that version of love and connection isn't really vulnerable to anything.

Yeah.

And I have had that with a handful of people in my life.

Yeah.

And when I have that, I'm not very worried ever.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

I feel like there's true something foundational and substantive and real.

Yeah.

Then I'm not worried. I'm not worried.

Well, it's kind of like. Yeah, I guess it's kind of.

It's you and Kelly. Like, you're not worried if she has a new best friend.

No, I'm not. But it's the friend parallel is harder because we're allowed to. Everyone's allowed to have multiple friends. In fact, you're, like, supposed to be okay with that. Like, that's how we've built our society. So it would actually be a failing on my part if I was like, you can't have another best friend. Like, that's my issue. But in a romantic relationship, you know, we've all agreed to these terms where you can't do that.

Yeah.

So the feeling is weird.

But again, if you start feeling back what that really means, and you go, like, okay, so in a romantic relationship, is my partner not allowed to have friendships with the opposite? And you go, well, no, of course not. Of course they're allowed to. Okay, so they're not allowed to do anything physical with them. Okay, but would I rather have them be in love with the person they're friends with, not acting on it, than getting fingered by a stranger in a bathroom in Atlanta one night? You know, then you're. I don't think that's a smart choice to pick the one over the other. Cause you've made that arbitrary thing the definition of the loyalty.

Well, I think people will feel betrayed in all of those circumstances? All the above, yeah.

But would you agree, though, that maybe the most self actualized person in the world would understand that someone they love, or at least would grant someone they love, whatever experience on planet earth, and just know in their heart that nothing is threatened?

Yes. I think the goal is the way when you talk about your love for your children. Right. Or like. Yeah. The highest self, I guess, would be okay. Just knowing the love you're giving.

Uh huh.

And not be so wrapped up in the love you are or aren't receiving.

Or that can be taken from you. Yeah. Yeah.

But, I mean.

Good luck, motherfuckers.

Yeah. We're human, I think. Yeah. Great. Like, it would be so good to just float through life just being like, I love them, doesn't matter and nothing else matters. But then you do run the risk of getting taken advantage of. You do. It gets slippery. It can get slippery in practice.

It can get murky.

Yeah.

And then if you introduce kids to it all.

Yeah.

Like, what did I say? Oh, we were talking about Ryan Gosling. This is really funny. Lincoln goes, oh, my God, I just found. Do you know Ryan Gosling's, like, 40 and he has two kids? And I'm like, yeah, I know that. She's like, I thought he was in his twenties.

Oh, my God. Does she have a crush on him?

Well, I don't know. I mean, that's probably funny that he and Kristen, I think, are virtually the same age. Or they're close.

Yeah, he's probably in his.

Yeah, he's gotta be 40 something. Three.

Probably 43.

43. Bingo. Yeah, that's. That's exact. That's Kristen's age currently.

Yeah.

Yeah. So here their mom is like a mom, and she's clearly in her forties. And then Ryan Gosling was not. Right.

Yeah.

And I go. I go, he's the same age as your mom. And she's like, I know, it's crazy. And I'm like, well, they. Yes. It's almost a shame your mom's not with them. Think what a gorgeous couple they would make. And she's like, I don't like that. Like, even if a joke like that.

She'S very sensitive to that.

She's very sensitive to that. So, yes, there could be some understanding that two parents have. The kids would never. I don't know how kids. Yeah. I don't know. These poly relationships that have children. I'm not sure how all that goes. But me. Yeah, it's funny, too, because I got to say. Oh, is it my own vanity. What is it? I'm like, long for her to be past that. Isn't that silly? Like, I want. I want her to understand. Life's more complicated than that.

Yeah, I know.

You know, and, like, well, mostly I don't want her to be judgmental of other people.

Sure.

That some of the people we love the most. It is. It is. It is. It's like everything's very simple. Yes.

I mean. Or she won't. I mean, I'm not. I know a lot of adults who have. No, they don't think it's complicated. They do.

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

Yeah, I agree.

But she's eleven.

But she's eleven. But it's also everyone's individual fears. I know people who are just like, that's the worst thing anyone could ever do to someone. The end of conversation.

Yeah, well, and I already told this story. Like, we were watching the scene where Crosby cheats on jazz, right? And, like, Lincoln was so mad and been out of shape at Crosby, and Delta was like, of course he did. She's so much nicer to him. And I was like, yeah, they just genetically, like, I guess.

But also, do you think maybe Lincoln watching that is part of why she ruminates on this? Like, maybe she's equated me in Crozet.

Yeah, well, who knows? Maybe it's underestimating. It is weird that her parents go to work and kiss people.

Yeah.

Like, maybe are underestimating that. Like, for us, we're like, yeah, this is our job and it's not a thing, but yeah, I guess most. I didn't see my mom go to work. My mom didn't kiss anyone at work to my knowledge.

Yeah.

But I think actually it's more a symptom of the primary thing. And I try to tell her that this is, like, a beautiful thing, which is like, it's just that she wants us to be together.

Yeah.

And so that's a threat. But there's other things.

This is a dingy thing. We talk about it in this episode.

Oh, okay. There's. It could be any number of things that could result. You know, her nightmares tend to be about us getting divorced. Sometimes they involve infidelity, but sometimes they involve other stuff.

Yeah.

If I start drinking again, will we get divorced.

You know, that's a fair fear.

She's gonna go to Broadway. Oh, Christmas, you know. Yeah. Am I gonna move to Nashville? You know, there's a lot of different rivers.

I can relate. I wonder if all of. Also maybe some of that's firstborn stuff.

I do, too, because Delta's so free.

Of all that she doesn't care at all, and my brother didn't either.

Yeah.

But I was so hyper aware of them getting divorced. I was so nervous they were gonna get divorced. I was always like, are you gonna get divorced?

I know what I'm tempted to do with her all the time. Well, I do say a lot of stuff, which is like, listen, your mom and I would work through any one of these things. Like, these are not deal breakers for either of us. There's nothing we wouldn't work through. So, first of all, we would. We'll work through anything.

Yeah.

But also, I do think, like, the firstborn gets both people's undivided attention in a way that is.

Well, there's no distraction, either. If there's fights and you're there and there's no other kid there, that's very scary. You don't have a buddy to survive this. It's just you then. Then you're alone.

Yes.

Scarier.

It's scarier. I remember what I was gonna say, what I'm tempted to say to her, which I don't do, because I think it would feel like I'm minimizing her fears. But what I want to say is, like, girl, you don't even have any idea what most married parents are like. You. You're so afraid of this, and we don't even fight.

Yeah, that's, like, a lot.

No, it's not helpful. But part of me wants her to go. I want her to know, like, you're seeing one of the lightest ver. Like, a lot of people are dealing with. Their parents are arguing. Nonsense. Stop.

Right.

And there's legit reason for some fear. But I'm like, there's not even really anything happening. We don't. We're not mean to each other.

You saying we'll work through anything?

Yeah.

Is good as I can do. Yeah. Cause my mom said we are never getting divorced. And she said it in such a matter of fact way that wasn't like, don't worry. We love each other so much. It wasn't. It was like, we're not making that.

Decision whether we want to or not.

Was that it was that that was the subtext, is. Doesn't matter what happens here. We're not doing that. And I was like, oh, got it. And, like, I did.

Did that alleviate your fears?

100%.

Oh, okay.

It still sucked when there was fights and stuff, but I didn't. I was done thinking they were getting divorced.

That worked.

It did.

By that point, I didn't trust adults too much. Like, if they had said, this will never happen. I didn't put a lot of stock in that.

By the time I was eleven, well, your mom.

I mean, I love her. She was just here. I want to talk about that. We had such a great time, but, you know, when we kicked Greg out, there was a declaration. We're not. I'm never doing that again. It'll just be us three, you know? So.

Yeah, yeah.

And I knew, like, well, shit, here we are again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair.

But on the upside. Got it. I was here, and a few nice things that happened. We're in Delta's class, end of the year thing. We're privy to the council.

I was there, too.

Sweet. And, like, you get a. Your birthday was this date, or that you could end up with a stone, and if you had a stone, you could make a shout out to somebody.

Yeah.

And so Delta was really excited to give one, and I did not see this coming. And she said, I'm so grateful that my grandma.

I want to dedicate this to my grandma.

So happy for my mom.

Yeah, it was really sweet. It was so sweet.

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

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

That whole thing was really cute. The council, I loved it.

I loved it, too.

I wish we had that when I was a kid. You had to talk about your real feelings.

Delta's teacher is awesome.

Yeah.

Such a good handling of kind of lorna esque a little bit. Yeah.

Kind boundaries. Kept everything moving really, really cool. Yeah.

So should I even. What's the point of me saying, I don't think that there's what were you gonna say?

It was painful.

No, I had this whole, like, thing happen where the day before was Lincoln's graduation.

Yeah.

And Anna was like, are you going to Lincoln's graduation?

Uh huh.

And I was like, no, I'm not in. I wasn't invited to Lincoln's graduation. She's like, well, I mean, like, I'm sure you can come to this.

Like, I don't know if invites went out, right, exactly.

But then, you know, I am thinking about everyone's boundaries, and I don't know what everyone's boundaries are. Maybe there's a reason that, you know, maybe it's just family plus Hannah. Or maybe it's whatever.

Yeah.

You know? So I didn't, like, insert myself. Right. Hey, can I come to Lincoln's graduation? But then I was sad that I missed it.

Oh, I'm sorry.

And then the next morning. The next morning I wake up late. I wake up at nine and I look at my text and there's one from Kristen, and she says, delta's graduation is today. Can you come? And she has this counsel after, and it's really important to her that you're there. And I was, like, freaking out because the graduation is underway at this point that I'm even seeing it.

Right.

And then the council thing, she's like, it starts around ten. And I was like, oh, my. Oh, my God. And so I just, like, jump out of bed. I mean, there's not. If you say it's really important to delta that I'm somewhere, I'm gonna be there. It doesn't matter. But I was so stressed out.

Right? You into the hallway and you look full of frazzles.

I was so stressed out trying to get there.

And the parking's a beat down.

Yes, yes. I, like, barely brushed my teeth, so it was kind of like, oh, this is, like, a lot. And then it was so, so sweet, and I was so glad that I.

You were there for the good part. Okay, so that was Wednesday. Then I did a car day on Friday with my surrogate father. Tom Hansen.

Yep.

His friend from Jackson hole, Sutton, and my mom and two different cars. He's got this really cool old 1967 Alfa Romeo. This. They only made 200. It's so freaky looking. Interesting. It's so him. Idiosyncratic, kind of James Bondi. He's so handsome. His hair is so thick. And at a certain point, they swapped cars. And my mom was up with Tom Hannah, and I was like, good luck, sister. You're gonna get out of that car. Head over heels in love. I mean, how could anyone?

He's very charming. Friend of the pod. Go back and listen to our friend of the pod episode with Tom.

Yeah. And they're. I think they're almost the exact same age.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyways, we had a blast. My mom loves driving fast. So we were up at Angela's crest, just flying, having a blast. So many old cars out, so many collector cars. It was really, really fun. Then Saturday, I took her to the Hollywood bowl for the jazz fest, and that was a blast, too. We rode on the motorcycle. Now, I will say this about Lorzy. She's very confident in the car flying through the canyons. She did not like that motorcycle ride. I mean, she wasn't complaining, because she's. That's not her style. But she was so tense on the back. I go, mom, you've got to, like, breathe and let your body relax a little bit. I can't. I can't. Just go. Just get there. So we rode the motorcycle, and we had a big barbecue dinner. We watched jazz, and it was lovely. Heaven.

Wow.

Sent her on her way.

A ding ding ding. Because in this episode, you talked about taking the kids to drag bingo, and I went to drag bingo this weekend.

You went yesterday?

Yeah, I went yesterday.

You met Molly.

Uh huh. Molly and Jess and Laura.

Uh huh.

Yeah. So before reefer madness on Sundays, now they're gonna do drag bingo. So they got Laganja estranja, which is a drag queen that she's so good. And she was on RuPaul's drag race. She's like a big get. And it was really fun. I had never gone before, but we had a lot of fun.

Have you played bingo before?

I have played bingo.

It's a great game.

It is. Except. Okay, I was starting to win.

Yeah.

And I was like, I do not want to win.

Why? What happens when you win?

Well, nothing. I mean, you go up there and you win a prize. But I didn't want to go up there. I just hate audience participation so much. And it was enlightening. Cause I was realizing, oh, I hate audience participation so much that it's actually above my need to win, which is also extremely high.

Right. Something stronger.

So Dahlia was there, and Dahlia, Molly and Eric's kid, and I was like, maybe I'll just give it to dahlia. But then Dalia ended up winning.

I heard she was the big winner.

It was so, so great. Except she did do it the wrong.

Sure. But she's a kid. She's a kid.

Everyone thought it was fine. Thank God. Cause she saved my life. Cause otherwise I was gonna win.

Ooh.

Ooh.

I was stressed out. But it was fun. It was really fun. Okay, couple facts. Okay. We started talking about the new rules for baseball.

Mm hmm. All right. Where they've put a time clock on the.

Yeah. So there's a few new rules. Pitch timer. The time between pitches with runners on base has been reduced from 20 seconds to 18 seconds, while it remains 15 seconds with the bases empty. Okay. Pitching changes. If a new pitcher enters the warning track with less than two minutes remaining on the inning break, the clock resets to two minutes. I don't know what any of this means.

Yeah.

Okay. Runner's lane. The lane for runners to first base has been widened to include the dirt between the foul line and the infield grass, giving her more room to beat out an infield single. Okay. None of this is actually about. Well, no pitch timer, I guess.

Yeah, I think that's where people were really, Rob, you watch probably more baseball. It just speeds up the game so they can't sit on the mound and fuck around too much.

Pitchers will have 15 seconds to throw a pitch with the bases empty and 20 seconds with the runner on base. He said there was this one guy with a great routine. Yeah. And so I'm gonna play it.

Oh, this will be great. There's one dude that was in the World Series two years ago, and he puts his arm out in a really specific way. What's his name? Kimbrell. Yeah. He has to go like this. He throws with this one, but this.

One has it out.

He, like, dangles his arm like this.

That feels hard.

Oh, it looks like it would fuck up your throw so much. And that's what works for him. And he. He was lights out in that.

Yeah.

He is a really good closer.

Oh, my God. You know what this is reminding me of? Moneyball, my favorite movie. I haven't thought about it in, like, a year and a half.

You say my favorite, you think that I'm the only one that says my favorite, but I'm kidding.

Well, everyone knows my favorite movie.

Good one.

Yeah.

What if I didn't get that just now?

No, but remember I used to talk about moneyball every day?

Yes.

It was a thing. Okay, hold on. Okay, ready? Hold on.

Into the batters.

Oh, my God. He's already doing it.

Go full wolf.

I am. Okay, put this here.

Do the batters have a time limit, Rob?

Not really.

Oh, this is a batting.

That's okay. This is a routine, though. Very unique routine. When he steps into the batter's box.

Oh, my God.

Wristbands. There's the feet a little too stiff.

Yeah.

Oh, and he does something with his nostrils.

Wow.

They were about to say superstitious. Something he's developed into a superstitious.

Wow. He literally is touching like every part of his.

Yeah, I could so relate to that. I've got a specific thing too, when I bet.

What do you do?

Like, touching certain parts of the plate.

Yeah, that's kind of fun.

They also limited the amount the pitcher can throw to first base.

Oh.

A lot of times they would just throw at a runner and they've limited. You can do it like twice now. Oh, okay. It's all to speed up the game. And it's. Wayne worked. Last time I watch, I was like, this feels like it's twice as fast it used to be.

Well, yeah, cuz Anna was at the Dodgers game the other day and she was like, the game was, was so fast.

Yeah. If they're striking people out, it can kind of boogie too.

If they're like, okay. Also I got sort of another peel.

Okay.

Not the same as last time, but she put a lot of acid on and she was like, I hope you peel. And so it is peeling a little.

She really takes your face to war.

I love, thank God.

I love it.

Thank God, thank God for her. Okay. Ten career is reporting the lowest levels of happiness. Cause we were talking about lawyers.

Mm hmm.

Okay. Now this is from Washington Post. Very trusted brand, very number one pharmacy technician.

Really?

Yep. It says, this job involves working in a pharmacy, locating, packing, and labeling patient medications. This work is then reviewed by the pharmacist on duty. So it's not the pharmacist, it's the tech.

So they don't have the narrative self saying, well, you're a pharmacist.

It says, unhappiness in this job appears to stem from a significant lack of growth opportunity in the field. Oh, all right. Plus, people are mean to you. People are mean at the pharmacy.

Yeah.

Cause they want their meds they got.

Yeah. No one's insurance is doing it wrong.

They're jonesing.

Yeah.

Okay. Number two project engineer.

Uh oh.

He loves it, though.

Well, yeah.

And I was just thinking, but my friend's a pharmacist, so that doesn't count. I was gonna say, my friends a pharmacist, he loves it.

These employees ensure engineering projects remain on time and within budget. They aren't usually involved in the actual engineering work, just the paperwork and reporting. To higher ups, which likely contributes to their dissatisfaction.

Okay, so that's not your dad.

That's not my dad. Oh, this one's sad. And a ding ding, ding.

Podcast host.

Yeah. Teacher.

Yeah. Oh, my God.

Of course, despite having one of the most meaningful jobs in the country, teachers rank lowest on the happiness scale.

It's a shame.

This seems to be largely due to out of touch administrators, unreasonable parents, low pay, and chronic underfunding that results in having to cover the cost of their classroom materials.

How about 30 kids, too?

I know, but I think this up. But that at least you get self esteem. But I do think these logistical things. I have a friend who's a teacher, and he started teaching a few years ago, and he. Yeah, he has to, like, every year at the beginning there, he, like, puts out on instagram. Like, if anyone wants to donate to my classroom, it's like, you got to go begging.

We're begging. Yeah.

Okay. Number four, administrative assistant. Five. Five, cashier. Six, general manager. Having to be the person who shows up whenever a customer asks the dreaded question. Can I speak to the manager? Seven, data analysts. Eight, customer service representative. Yeah, that would be hard. Nine, retail salesperson. And ten, sales account manager.

Lawyer. Didn't even make it.

Didn't.

Wow. Wonder if they talked to any lawyers.

They also, I will say they're probably.

Afraid to get sued. So they didn't even ask them.

They also. They hate their jobs, but they make a lot of money. I mean, not all of them.

And they have societal status.

Exactly. So I bet it in some ways.

Like, well, what's weird, though? Yes. So this is why the questionnaire itself might be tricky. Cause they might be miserable. But if you ask them if they like their job and they want their job, they might say yes.

Right. Well, that's on the lawyers for not being able to identify their feelings.

Yeah, but, boy, all the ones I talk to, I don't know. Entertainment lawyers are happy, but their workload is so much smaller. So if you're gonna be a lawyer, be an entertainment lawyer.

Well, and like Tom Hansen, you go.

On car rides on a Friday. You can date my mother.

He's earned. No, you know, you. She's married. She's.

No, she has a way. He's married. I just.

He's married. And your mom has a boyfriend.

That's right.

Well, he made some reference to. He says to me, like, he biked and walked in a circle. I don't really remember what he was talking about, but it reminded me that I learned to ride a bike by just riding in a circle in my garage.

Yeah.

That's the proudest my dad said no. Yeah. And that's the proudest my dad's ever been of me.

That's worthy of being proud of. Cause it's almost impossible to learn. Yeah. It's like learning to ride a bicycle in a closet.

Basically. It's like I just walked in and saw you just writing in circles.

Maniacally writing in circles.

Oh, boy. That's it.

All right. I love you, love.