April 11, 2025 • 58 mins
"What can we do to find hope when times are tough?" That was the question posed to Dr Laurie for a live recording of IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson at the 2025 SXSW festival.
Dr Laurie explained what science says about retaining hope and how we can act in ways that make us feel better even in bleak times - and the former First Lady shared her tips for staying hopeful.
IMO is a new show hosted by Michelle and her brother Craig - with guests ranging from Jay Shetty to Seth Rogen.
Listen to IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. You know that I often
like to share the conversations I have with interesting folks
on other podcasts, and today I've got one that I
think you'll really enjoy because I had the pleasure of
taking part in a live recording of a new podcast
(00:37):
called IMO, hosted by former First Lady of the United
States Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson, and for
their first live show ever at south By Southwest, the
siblings had Yours truly on as a guest to discuss
a very tough happiness question, how can we fight hopelessness
and scary times. I hope you enjoy our conversation and
(00:57):
be sure to check out IMO wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Well, Hey, south By Southwest, Wow, Boston.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Hi, Craig Robinson, my big brother. Yeah, he's so nice.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
You all are nice. How about my sister Michelle Obama?
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah, you know, I'm not used to being up here
with somebody. Usually when i'm speaking, I'm speaking on my own.
But I got company.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
When was the last time we were on a big
stage together?
Speaker 5 (01:44):
You remember It's been a while. Yeah, remind me, what
do you think I am thinking.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
About the two thousand and eight convention and that was
a big moment for me because that was Barack's first campaign.
In that campaign, people didn't know me, so I got
accused in the press of being angry and combative.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Because of the way I spoke.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
So I found that I had to use this speech
to reintroduce myself to the country. So this was a
big speech, major speech at the DNC, and my big
brother introduced me and we were.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
On stoge an honor.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah there, it was quite an honor.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
But in his introduction, when you're on stage and you're
doing a big speech, you have teleprompters. So you have
prompter in the front, have prompter on the left, prompter
on the right. Because you're reading from the prompter. Because
it's timed, you got to hit it right. It's national,
it's live.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
Let me cut in here. She had to read from
a prompter.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I memorized, Oh, well, mine, here we go, favorite child.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He memorized everything.
Speaker 5 (02:49):
Memory.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Well, my speech was a little longer, a little more impactful,
so I needed the teleprompter, right. So he does this
beautiful introduction of me. It's all action packed, and you
know he says, and ladies and gentlemen, the next first
Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama and I come
on stage and they're cheering, you know, and we do
(03:12):
this greet in front of the prompter where I think
that my big brother is gonna lean down and give
me a hug and say, you got this, girl.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I love you.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I'm so proud of you. So I go out there
and we're on national TV. And do you remember what
you said to me.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
I do.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I'm leaning down to my ear and you said, left
prompter out.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
And he walked off. I was looking out for left
prompter out. I was looking out for you. I knew
you hadn't memorized it, so I didn't want you to
be surprised, but you know, I mean, and that wasn't working.
Speaker 5 (03:48):
So now I'm thinking, what was he talking about?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So I'm wa eving, trying to play it off, and
I'm walking up to the stand and what he meant
was the left prompter was out, and I was like, okay,
good looking out. But anyway, that was my brother looking out.
But that was the last time we were on stage.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
That was the last time. And look at us.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Now we are here, our new podcast, I amo.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, well, what we've been doing. We're gonna chat a
little bit so you guys will get a sense of
our dynamic and sort of some of the lessons we
learned growing up. And some of this podcast was started
because you know, this last year was pretty I won't
say completely rough, but we had some We lost our
(04:34):
mom this year for those of you who don't know
Marian Robinson. And as a result, yeah, yeah, my mom.
She she and our dad were some amazing people. And
I think as a result of that lost Craig and
I you know, it brought us even closer together.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
We were already close.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
But I don't know about you, but there's just something
about losing what was our last parent, and anytime in
your life when you lose a parent, it's tough.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
You think you're going to be ready for it as.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
An adult, but I think, you know, part of losing mom,
it kind of puts us in the position where we
are we're the wise ones in the family.
Speaker 5 (05:20):
Hard to believe, I know.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I mean I talked to Malia and Sasha about this
all the time as they are becoming adults. I know,
Malie always says, well, when do you actually feel like
an adult, and I was like, never, not really ever
do you feel like you know what you're doing? So
I said, the fact that you're in your twenties and
you feel like you are clueless, it's like you're right
(05:44):
on schedule. Because I remind her that even now at
sixty one and how old are you.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
Sixty three, Let's be very clear, he's my big brother.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Although it's all over people because she's so iconic, people
think I'm her little brother.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
If you can believe that.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, that's because you're bold and you have younger kids.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
That is true. I think that helps.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Because he's to set of older kids and he's got
a set of younger kids as well. So I called
him the head of the ODC, the Old Dad's Club.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
He is president and CEO.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
But even at this age, it's a little daunting to
think that now we kind of have to step up
in our family and be that wisdom.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Yeah, and we're always doing it at home with our families,
answering questions. So we're going to be doing that with
our listeners. So as more as we get going, you'll
see we'll have a listener questions and we'll have one
later today.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
So stay tuned.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, yeah, so you know, our goal is to share
some of what we learned. We know people are going
through some tough times, and I don't think Craig and
I are feeling any different than anyone out there. You know,
we're dealing with a lot of uncertainties. I for one,
feel for folks who are struggling and will continue to
(07:09):
struggle in these uncertainties.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
I worry about folks being out of work, you know.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I worry about how we think about diversity and inclusion.
I think about how we treat one another and the
voices that we hear, and what that does, what models
that's setting for the next generation. Who do we want
to be as a country. All of that keeps me
up at night. And I know that a lot of
people are struggling with some of those things. But I
(07:36):
find in those moments that it is better not to
try to figure that stuff out alone. And for me
and Craig and our family, you know, we always try
to step outside of our loneliness and talk as a
family and as a community and to share those concerns.
And I hope that our listeners are pushed to do
(07:59):
some of the same things too. That you know we're
not going to figure this stuff out on our own,
and that we need each other and we need to
step out of our loneliness and start talking to each other.
So hopefully this podcast will spark some conversation, but more importantly,
I hope it leads people to seek out their own
(08:19):
communities of trust and conversation. So we're not sitting alone
in these feelings. So that's my hope. Oh, go ahead
and clap.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
See we're not used to a live audience yet, so no,
I absolutely agree with me. To her point, we talked
about not having all the opinions.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Or all the answers, or all the answers. We got
plenty of opinions, but not all the answers.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
We're going to have a guest with us on most
of our episodes, but sometimes it'll just be the two
of us, ye, kind of chopping it up. But before
we bring out our special guest today, I thought i'd
pose a question to my sister. It's interesting now that
we're doing the podcast, we talk all the time, but
now we save our talking for when we see each other.
Speaker 5 (09:06):
Now, don't say anything. Don't say anything, David, don't say anything.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
But do you remember how mom and dad taught us
how to handle adversity.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, yeah, I talk about this in both of my books.
For those of you who don't know our story, our dad,
who Fraser Robinson, he developed MS in the prime of
his life.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
You know, he didn't always have it. He grew up
as a boxer.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And athlete, a swimmer, and like in his early twenties,
he contracted MS and he couldn't walk without the assistance
of a caine and the disease progress. So we only
knew our father as someone with a disability, and I
think that growing up with a parent with a disability,
(09:54):
looking back on it, we were always kids that were
growing up with a real sense of vulnerability right before
us because our father was the sole breadwinner, our mom
stayed home. He was a city worker, so that salary
was important. I think we knew that. But to know
that the person that you lean on most is vulnerable,
(10:15):
I think it always made us clear about adversity. I
think we lived within adversity to a certain extent, and
it sort of made us both a little wary in
interesting ways. For a kid and Craig, I don't know
if you remember little things that we didn't at the
time tie to our dad's disability. But Craig was always
(10:41):
like doing disaster preparedness stuff around the house. I mean,
I kid you not this little boy. And he was
about ten, and I was always his willing sidekick, running
behind him like what are we doing now? And he
came home one day and said, you know, how are
we going to get out if there's a fire? So
he made us all do you remember I do I
(11:01):
tell your little worries?
Speaker 5 (11:02):
So I was. I was worried about it.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
And you know, back in the seventies there were a
lot of house fires.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
I don't know about you.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Guys were smoke detectors.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
There weren't no sprinkler systems.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
We're talking young people back in the Stone Age.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
So I was always worried that we lived on the
second floor and our dad couldn't get around, so how
would we get out if there were fires? So I
coming home from school and having done a fire drill
at school, I set up a fire drill for us
at home.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
But it wasn't just that.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
He had to make sure that he could drag our
dad to safety.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
So he made I made my dad get on the almost.
He had to be humiliated.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
But he humored you.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
He because I had him stand up, and I grabbed
him from behind and put my arms under his shoulders
and then just leaned him back and I dragged him
through every room of a house to make sure that
I could get him around.
Speaker 5 (12:05):
And he let me do that.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, yeah, God bless yeah yeah. But that indicated this
little boy was worried about some stuff that probably a
normal ten year old wouldn't worry about. And that wasn't it.
You know, he would tie his left hand behind his back. Right, oh,
(12:27):
your right hand because he was right handed, because he
was worried that he would lose the use of his
right hand, so he needed to know how to do
everything with his left hand. There was one week that
you walked around blindfolded just in case you lost her,
I mean his eyesight. And I'm there like little me,
going no to your left, right, to your right?
Speaker 5 (12:48):
No, wait, she was right there right there.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
I was like, I don't know why we're doing this,
but my brother says we're doing it, and our parents
would just humor us. But while we lived with probably
that underlying level of uncertainty, I think when you talk
about how we learned to deal with adversity. I think
(13:10):
we learned it by watching our father persevere, you know,
because let me tell you, our father, despite his disability,
was a man who got up every day.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
And went to work.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
I mean, I don't remember a time in our life
that our dad missed a day of work.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Blue collar worker.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
He took pride in the little things that I think
we take for granted, like paying your bills on time,
not being house poor. That's those a word that we
don't want to be house poor. But my father would
never let.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
A bill go by. He was resilient and he.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Was positive in his life. He was a joyful man
because I think he adversity was relative in our house.
You know, if you could walk, if you could, you know,
hold down a job, if you could take care of
your family, if you could love your kids, if you
(14:07):
could live with honor and decency, well who cares if
you couldn't walk, you know who? He saw the blessings.
So I think for as I look at it, for me,
we learned to I mean.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Adversity was relative.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Diversity was a part of life, but it wasn't everything.
You know that you'd have to just work your way
through it. And the other thing I think Dad taught
us was gratitude, immense gratitude. I mean our fathers you
could tell from the stories, was a kind, gentle man.
(14:43):
He rarely raised his voice or got angry. But you
know when he was disappointed in us was when we
showed a lack of gratitude for what we had. You know,
if we had a bowl of ice cream and we
were looking for the second scoop before we finished our
the first group, what.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Would he say?
Speaker 5 (15:02):
Never satisfy, never satisfied.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
That would be the one admonistion, never satisfied.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
And hate the those two words to this day.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, And when I face adversity, his words, you know,
sit in my brain, It's like, what do I have
to complain about? What is it that I can't overcome?
Because of the model that my father set for me.
You know, why wouldn't I be happy? Why wouldn't I
(15:30):
be able to get through this? Because we saw a
man do it every day and do it without complaint.
Because if anybody had a reason to complain, would be
my father, who was a black man growing up in Chicago,
raised in desegregation, who was an intelligent man with ability
to do art, but couldn't live up to his promise.
(15:52):
I mean, there were a whole lot of reasons for
our father to be upset and angry and not happy
and to feel disappointed, to feel sorry for himself, but
he was the exact opposite. And so that's what I
think about when times get hard. It's like, look, my
dad would push through it.
Speaker 5 (16:12):
Right, right, and I would. We could.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
We could talk about our dad for two shows, right,
but we've.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
Got the perfect yes, we do yes.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
To talk about happiness and adversity and all that kind
of stuff. Doctor Lori Santos is a Yale professor. Oh
you guys, all right, all right, yeah good. She's host
of a wildly popular podcast called The Happiness Lab. She's
(16:44):
also the teacher of one of the most popular classes
at Yale.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Wish we had this when we were I.
Speaker 5 (16:53):
Wish we had it.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
And that's psychology and the good life. And she's just
an all around great person. So can you welcome doctor
Lori Santos.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
Everybody, Well, hey, professor, hey Michelle, thank you for being
on here.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Thanks so much for having me. Yeah yeah, yeah, little
intimate group, this is a little.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Bit intimate chat. So how did you come to teach
the course.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I know you've answered this question a million times before,
but what led you to understand that young people today
need a course on how to be happy?
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Yeah? Well, I took on this new role on Yale's campus,
where I became what's called the head of college. Yale's
one of these funny schools where there's like colleges within
a college, like Harry Potter, like Gryffindors Lytherin kind of thing. Yeah,
so I became head of a college on campus, and
that meant that I was like living with students, like
eating with them in the dining hall, hang out with
them up close and personal. And I just didn't realize
the college student mental health crisis was as bad as
(18:07):
it was. You're right now, Nash. More than forty percent
of college students say they're too depressed to function most day.
More than sixty percent say they're overwhelmingly anxious. Like, this
was a real crisis that I was seeing, and that
felt really frustrating because like, my field has all these
strategies we can use to feel better, experience more resilience,
feel less stressed. And I was like, let me just
develop this class. And then it got very very big,
(18:31):
not as big as this. But you're listening to a
live recording of me on Michelle Obama's new podcast, I AMO.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
We'll be back after a quick break.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
We've got a live question. We have a person, James.
Are you here?
Speaker 5 (18:53):
Oh? There he is, James. James, you stand up, all right?
I'm standing all.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Right, Janet, all right, great, many so excited to be here.
Speaker 7 (19:04):
My question is I'm twenty eight and I live in LA.
The fires impacted people close to me, and it feels
like that's only going to become more frequent. And everything
that's been happening politically, domestically, and globally, it feels like
a version of the world is ending.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
And when I talk to.
Speaker 7 (19:25):
Friends, they say this is the new normal, And my
immediate instinct is the push back. You know, we can't
accept this, but personally, living with the inevitability of it,
it also forces me to rethink what I always assumed
adulthood would look like, you know, buying a house, starting
a family. So my question is, do you have any
(19:48):
advice on how to plan for a future that feels
so different from the one we were promise without becoming
apathetic or just resigning yourself to things getting worse.
Speaker 5 (20:00):
Thanks so much. Cool, Thank you, James.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, that's an aim in from everybody in this room, right,
everybody's feeling like that a bit lor You want to
start by taking any a but an answer, I.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Mean, yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to answer,
the first thing to say for that question is that
this is normal. Right, You're not the only person in
the room that's going through that, And I think that
normalization is critical. All too often we can get into
this like toxic positivity vibe where it's like, I'm feeling
kind of embarrassed that I'm so upset and frustrated and
overwhelmed sad about what's going on in the world. But
(20:37):
like we're supposed to feel that negative emotions are normal
in an abnormal world, and I think it's fair to
say that we are, you know, not it's not great,
but we're in an abnormal world right now. And so
I think that's kind of point number one. The other
reason that normalization is so important is that psychologically it
can help us when you realize that these negative emotions
are a common human experience, that there are emotions that
(20:58):
are there to help you. They still don't feel good,
but it can allow you to get through them a
little bit better. Even here in Uti Austin, there's a researcher,
Kristin Nef who studies this process of what she calls
common humanity right recognizing like we're all going through it
right now, and what she finds is that can actually
help you get through tough times. She does this cool
research with Afghan and Iraqi veterans and finds that those
(21:19):
that give themselves self compassion realize that everybody's going through
a tough time here, they wind up coming out with
less evidence of PTSD and other related disorders. So like
when you give yourself a little grace for feeling those
negative emotions, realize they're normal and bad times, that actually
helps you get through the negative emotions.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
The other thing that I want to get your take on, Laurie,
is what's happened to the bar on happiness? Because it
really feels like these days that the expectation of young
people are so high, and some of that I think
is our fault as parents. You know, when we were
growing up, I mean, life was a lot simpler, you know.
(22:00):
I mean, just to give you an example of excitement
in our house was getting pizza on report card day
if we got good grades, you know, I mean at
Christmas time.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
We could ask for three gifts.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
You know, go through the Sears Roebucks wish book you
could pick three.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
Things out and that was it.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
What that?
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Oh yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Or first of all Sears and that was the only
store you go to. You get your car tuned up
in a washing machine, and your school clothes all in
one place. And they have a catalog. And you know
what a catalog is young people. It's the thing you
look through for items and you pick it out. Well,
(22:45):
that came out each year and that's where all the
toys were. So you know, our parents just you know,
they weren't happy that we got good grades. You know,
I can tell you. Did my our parents push us
to go to Princeton. No, they were just like ghosts.
Do something with your life as long as you're a
good person. But when I think of young people today,
(23:08):
this standard for happiness is like gone through the roof.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
I mean, you.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Don't just go to college, but they're like seven colleges
you can go to or it doesn't matter or you know,
people you look on house hunters and everybody's looking for
you know, marble counters and trade ceilings, and you know
a man cave and there's a certain car and you know,
and you're not supposed to be successful, but you're also
(23:35):
supposed to be famous because social media tells you that
that's what it means to be happy. So I guess
that's the long way of asking, is some of this,
you know, not just the world, because the world's been
bad and it's been worse than it is right now,
but people, young people are more unhappy than I think
(23:57):
we ever were with a lot less.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
And we have data on this right looking across time,
and those rates of depression, anxiety and stuff I just
talked about, they're worse than there are young people right
now than ever since we've recorded them, right like, and
it's much worse. And I think you're exactly right. I
think it's a lot our expectations. Right. We have tools
that allow us to see those fancy houses, those fancy vacations,
those fancy schools, and they're just in our pockets, dinging
(24:24):
all the time, giving us a comparison that makes us
feel kind of crappy, right, And what we know from
the happiness science is that it's not what we objectively
have that makes us happy. It's what we're expecting, it's
what we're used to, you know. That's why I love
the story of your dad, right, you know, just getting
a little bowl of ice cream like that should be enough, right.
And so I think that, especially in young people, the
definition of enough has changed. There's lots of reasons for that.
(24:46):
But I think getting to a better point of accepting
and what our expectations are that'll help a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
And that's different from being complacent, right, because I think
we were taught that you don't need everything, and you're
not entitled to everything.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
You're not.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
We were taught not even entitled to happiness exactly. Our
parents didn't think they were responsible for our happiness.
Speaker 5 (25:11):
For anybody in our generation.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
You imagine a parent who worried about whether your child
was happy, and we didn't come from that. It was like,
you're not happy, to get over it, read a book,
get out of my face, move along, go outside, you know,
and our generation of parents and mean, we lose sleep
if little person is sad today, and it's like sadness
(25:34):
and anxiety that's all a part of life.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
But we as we parent our children.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I sometimes I think we've made them a little less resilient.
And again that's not to say that people aren't dealing
with real anxiety and mental health issues. But I think
one of the things I try to think about as
a parent, and I think our parents.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Did to us.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
They tried to prepare us for what the world was
going to be, which was oftentimes disappointing, most of the
time hard, and there would deep anxiety that you'd have
to get through at all times.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
So they gave us those tools much.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Earlier than I think some parents today are willing to
let their.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Kids go through some of those tough feelings.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So then they get out in the real world and
they're confronted with a whole lot of emotions that nobody
ever told them what's coming.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
That's right, and I think it leads to mental health crisis,
not just in our young people, but also in parents.
The former Surgeon General vveck Murty talked a lot about
parent mental health and parent stress. He actually issued like
a public health advisory on the fact that parents are
going through their own tough emotions. But the biggest tough
emotion that parents reported is guilt, as though you know
(26:51):
they're not doing enough for their kids happiness, They're not
doing enough to kind of give them everything they need.
And I think that reflects exactly what you're saying, Laurie.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
I want to get James question sort of deals with
a little bit of hopelessness there, and I was just
trying to figure out what does it mean for us
our culture with so many people feeling hopeless?
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, was bad, as you probably guess, not great to
live in a completely hopeless culture. And we really do
live in more of a hopeless culture than we ever
have before. Your researchers go out and study this, and
they have over time. One of the best questions for
this is they just ask people, on average, can you
trust the other people around you? Right in the nineteen seventies,
when they asked polksact question, around fifty percent of people
(27:35):
said yeah, on average, most folks can get trusted. When
you ask that same question in twenty eighteen, it's down
to a little less than a third. That doesn't sound
like a big drop, but if I was plotting that,
that's basically how much money we lost in two thousand
and eight when the financial crisis happened. Right, So this
is a like complete like off a cliff decline in
people's sense of trust, in people's sense of hope, and
(27:55):
it's bad for lots of reason. It's bad for us personally.
People who experience less hope experience more depression, experience more anxiety,
experience more loneliness, which is interesting, hope seems to be
connected to our social connection. Also bad for our bodies.
People who are more sick report experiencing more diabetes, experiencing
more heart disease. And it's probably bad for us as
a society because when you don't experience hope, what you
(28:17):
think is like, stuff's never going to get better. And
when you think stuff's never going to get better, you
don't take action to make it better. Right, You don't vote,
you don't do things pro socially to help other people.
And what you find research wise is if you study
people who are cynical, they self report not voting, they
self report not donating to charity, not doing the stuff
that you need to do to make things better. So, yeah,
it's really bad, and it becomes a vicious cycle, right
(28:40):
because as more people get hopeless, then they look out
in the world with this hopeless lens. They post on
social media with a hopeless lens. We get podcasts that
are very hopeless, and it just becomes this cycle where
we reinforce each other's bad perception of the world, one
that might not even be really accurate.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, and you talk about that transference, the ability for
us to you know, export our bad energy onto other people,
and we naturally, as humans we pick up those those cues.
Can you talk a little bit more about that transference that.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
You Yeah, I mean, we know for sure that emotions
are contagious, right, They're just like COVID and we know this. Right,
you go into an office and you hang out with
somebody who's feeling hyped up and optimistic and excited, you
kind of catch that. Right. You go into the same
office as somebody who's down and not feeling it like,
you catch that too, right. These days, we don't just
catch emotions from the other people we're around. We have
(29:34):
this transfer system online where folks are catching emotions globally.
You know, I hop on some social media platform, I'm
catching some emotion from somebody on Instagram that lives in
a different country and a completely different time zone. But
I catch that too, And that's made worth by the
fact that these social media companies obviously have algorithms that
thrive not on us catching each other's positive emotions, but
(29:56):
I'm catching each other's anger and outrage and sadness. Right,
that's what gets eyeballs on our phones. And so all
these things together means not just that there's transference, but
there's particular transference of the bad stuff, of the hope blessness.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
You know, our mom and mishe will remember this, But
obviously we didn't have social media growing up, but we
had friends who had stuff or friends who said things,
and our mom was always why do you care about
what they say? And I find trying to give my
(30:30):
kids that advice is hard with social media, and I
think a lot of parents find it hard. How do
we balance that these days with social media? Because you know,
we recently were talking with someone else who was telling us,
you just if you take social media away, you got
to replace it with something. But my question is, how
(30:51):
do we help help folks find a balance here?
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, I think one of the ways to find a
balance is just to realize that what we're exposed to
affects us. Right, you hop on Instagram and you start
scrolling through that feed, you might know that some of
the stuff you look at as photoshopped. You might know this,
some of the stuff you know these companies are they
have algorithms that are sort of pointing you in a
bad direction. But that doesn't enter psychologically. You're just soaking
(31:15):
in the emotions and then the stuff you see. Right,
But I think that knowledge can be a little bit
of power.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You can even ask yourself, like how do I feel
after that? Scroll through Reddit or through social media and
ask yourself the question, do I feel more empowered, more hopeful,
or do I feel kind of gross and like in despair? Right?
You can make the choice to put that away. Right.
You can kind of notice mindfully how it's making you feel,
and you sort of choose to stick it back in
your pocket. Social media companies wouldn't have these algorithms if
(31:44):
all our eyeballs weren't on phones anymore. And we actually
have more agency than we often remember in that fight.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
People always ask me and Barack how do we stay
hopeful in the not just the eight years that we
were in the White House, but beyond, Because let me
tell you, there was a lot of negative energy float
in our way, a lot of rumors, a lot of gossip,
a lot of you know, my husband wasn't born in
this country. We didn't care about we weren't patriotic, you know.
(32:16):
He yeah, he didn't get into Harvard. I mean, you know,
I don't know if you all remember, I certainly do.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
He wore a suit, wore a.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Tan suit once. I mean, you know the level of
scandal that occurred.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
But through it all, what kept us saying, and we
tried to instill this in our daughters, is you know
you cannot you know, you cannot live through social media.
I don't think I have ever once looked at a
comments section period and at all ever.
Speaker 5 (32:55):
And I know it's difficult.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
For this generation, but you know, I would implore young
people to stay don't let that negative energy enter into
your space. These are people who don't know you. A
lot of this stuff is made up and it does
not feed you. And I you know, I mean, I
(33:19):
can't do it, and we never do. Now that doesn't
mean you don't stay informed. But staying informed has nothing
to do with the comments section, you know, it has
everything to do with the content of the stories that
you take in. And I think, you know, we cannot
get so trapped by social media that we feel so
(33:40):
caught up into the one way we get information. We've
got to broaden our spectrum, and we have to get
off the phone, you know, which is another thing, and
I would love for you to talk a bit about
that as a tool. I know you've got a lot
of tools, but there are a lot of people here
(34:00):
of all ages who are trapped by their phones. And
when you talk about us being disconnected and not talking
to each other, I am.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
I am not out in.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
The world like a normal person anymore.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
But when I am, people don't even recognize me. You
know why, because they're on their phones. Nobody is looking
at each other. I can walk right past somebody with
a hat on, you know, and I'm just a black
woman in a cap.
Speaker 5 (34:27):
But I don't know. No, I've done it. I don't
know about it. I have done it. I fly commercial.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I am out there with the people, and folks are
not paying attention.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
I fly commercial.
Speaker 4 (34:41):
So okay, okay, see the thing.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
I'm here.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Walking around flying commercial. How's Michelle tell Michelle? I said, Hi,
how she doing? They? Okay?
Speaker 6 (35:00):
Anyway, strategy strategies.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
I'm going to get a mute button for.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
No, but strategies. I mean, I think awareness is really
key here. One of my favorite strategies for sort of
dealing with your phone and being on your phone all
the time comes from the journalist Catherine Price. She has
this lovely book How to Break Up with Your Phone,
where she argues you don't have to break up with
your phone so much as you need to take it
to like couples counseling so that you can be a
wait better. But she has this really handy acronym that
(35:32):
she uses whenever she finds herself on her phone is WWW,
which you can think of because you're probably on the
World Wide Web rye. But this is not Worldwide Web.
WWW stands for what for? Why, now? And what else?
So what are you on your phone for? Maybe you're
checking your email or looking at a map, Maybe you're
just deep in some TikTok dive? Right? Was there a purpose?
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Right?
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Why? Now? This is an important one because you notice
your emotions? What drives you to your phone? Were you bored?
Were you anxious? Right? What's your cue that gets you there?
What's that craving coming from? And then finally, what else? Right?
What's the opportunity cost of being on your phone right now,
you might be missing Michelle Obama on your flight, Like
there's just saying right now thanks to you need to notice, right,
you might miss the beautiful scenery, you might miss the
(36:13):
opportunity to talk to someone who has interesting stories, interesting ideas.
Right that what else question is critical because what studies
show us is that because we're on our phones, we're
less social than we could be. A lovely study by
Elizabeth Dunne at the University of British Columbia had people
with their phones or without their phones sitting in a
waiting room. They weren't even using their phones. It was
just like present or not, and she just measure the
(36:34):
amount of smiling that people did. You know, casual, somebody's
in your room, you just smile at them. She sees
thirty percent less smiling when phones are present. Right, calculate
that by all the phones you know, on planes in
Austin and so on. So we're really missing out. But
that strategy of WWW, I think what it gets us
towards is like we just have to be mindful, We
just have to notice. These are good tools, right, we
(36:55):
know even from COVID times they were so useful. But
we just have to use them in a healthy way.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Time perty quick Break, But there'll be more of me
on Michelle Obama's new podcast IMO in.
Speaker 5 (37:08):
Just a Moment, Laurie.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
What can we do to find hope when things are tough,
like in Jamee's situation he's looking at his friends who
have lost things in a fire or you know, other
personal disasters.
Speaker 5 (37:34):
What can we do?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things right.
One is making sure you have the right definition of hope,
because I think sometimes when we think of hope, we
think of what at least psychologists might call optimism. We're
just like, everything's gonna be fine. And I think that
everything's gonna be fine. Is like I mean, look at
the new like, look at X, like anywhere is not fine, right,
And so I think it's important to like call it
(37:56):
the way it is. It's not fine. But hope isn't
that hope says things are not fine. But I can
actually see at least a few paths for things to
get better. Why is that psychologically so important? If you
think things are fine right now, are you going to act?
You're going to take agency, You're going to do anything?
About it now, because you're just kind of things are
fine right now. You know the world's not on fire.
(38:17):
When you experience hope, what you feel is things are
not fine right now, but there is a path. What
does that path do? It gives you agency, It gives
you a sense that like something can be done, and
probably I can be a small part of what needs
to get done. And that small part is key because
I think when we think we have to be the
only one out there fixing everything, that also makes us
feel a little overwhelmed and sad. But when you realize
(38:38):
that you're a small action. You're checking in on someone,
you're donating five bucks to a cause you care about,
you stepping up in any way to make things better,
that actually matters. And one of the things we know
psychologically is that it also helps us feel a little
bit more hopeful when we take action. So you show
up at that cause you care about, or go to protests, right,
(38:58):
donate some money. Psychologically you start to feel like, oh,
we're even getting closer to a solution because I stepped up.
Maybe other people step up. You also see good social
evidence that you're not the only one. You show up
at a protest, You're usually not the only one there.
You get a whole room like this, full of people
who care. Now, all of a sudden, your beliefs start
to change. So you can, instead of being that vicious
cycle of hopelessness that we talked about before, you can
(39:21):
become part of a virtuous cycle of hopefulness. And that's
the kind of thing that can also be socially contagious.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
And as somebody who has seen all kinds of power
at work, you know, I've been at some of the
most powerful tables, one of the things I remind people
of is, yes, there is large power. You know, there
are a handful of people in the world who can
do a few things that can impact so many. But
the truth is is that the small power that each
(39:49):
of us has to do something right in front of us,
if we're all doing that, outweighs anything that you know,
some big leader somewhere can do.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
I mean, if you just think about.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Yeah, just think about as our parents did you know,
marrying and Fraser Robinson who didn't go to college, you know,
mother stayed at home, father was a city worker. And
let me just stop and and and give a big
shout out to city and federal workers, people who are
(40:25):
the lifeblood of this country. Also, those jobs helped to
create an entire middle class of people like our fathers,
our father our parents, and they do the lion's share
of the work in this country. You know, if we're
(40:47):
going to start asking who's doing what, I would from
my experience the folks who are working on the ground
and picking up our garbage and making sure that our
you know, schools run and that our air is clean,
and that our flights stay up in the air. That
those people are the true heart and blood of this country.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
But that power is what changes things.
Speaker 5 (41:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Those parents, with a little bit that they were able
to do with their power, raised two of us, you know.
And if you just think that if everybody on this
planet was valued and had an opportunity to have a
job and to take care of their kids and to
raise them with some level of honesty and kindness and
(41:43):
with humanity and taught them to love everybody and to
be inclusive. You know, just imagine if everybody did that
little thing right in their plate. You know, if you're
going to have some kids, you know, if you can
have the courage and the power to exercise that small
thing of raising them with some truth and some honesty.
(42:06):
Just imagine where we would be right now as a country,
you know, imagine what our leadership would look like and
how we would ask them to speak and to act
and to model that.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
That is the that is the beauty of small power.
Speaker 5 (42:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
So, as James, you know, thinks about what to do.
You know, I hope that retreating into hopelessness is not
on the list, because shoot, if my dad didn't, this
is how I fail. My father, Frasier Robinson didn't retreat
with all that he could have retreated from in times
(42:45):
a lot tougher than this, because he wanted to lay
a foundation for us that we have that obligation, all
of us to do the same thing. We can't afford
to be hopeless. I would say, yeah, And I love.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
The U share the story of your father, because it's
also one of the strategies that we can use, tiny
strategy we can use individually to do better, which is
sharing these positive social stories like the world and social media.
All these aglorithms are filled with terrible stories, but you
can actually see the good ones. You can say, you know,
my dad in the midst of experiencing this terrible disease
(43:18):
was hopefully you taught us gratitude, right, And you know
it doesn't even have to be Michelle Obama's dad. Right.
You can find these little examples of moral goodness, but
don't just keep them to yourself. Share them. And I
think if you're a parent, this is one of the
best things you can do to your kids, right, because
they're maybe don't even have as much kind of frontal
low power to go out there and find those good
stories over the dinner table. What moral goodness did you
(43:40):
see today?
Speaker 5 (43:41):
Right?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
What was something that delighted you that kind of made
you happy, specifically about what somebody else was doing. We
don't share these enough. But the sad thing is like
they're out there, we just don't hear about them enough.
And so that's one of the reasons I'm so glad
y'all are doing this podcast. There's there read way more
stories than that that come out that allow for what
researchers call social savoring or sort of savoring the goodness
of other people.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
And that's also a way, I'm sorry, creative for people
to use their social media.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
You know, you know it's there for a reason. There's
power in it, you.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Know, but we have to resist the notion to use
it to harp on each other, to diss and to
you know, spread gossip into you know, I mean, each
of us in our world can encourage the people within
it to use the tool for good. You know, it
is a choice that we can make right now, everybody
(44:30):
in this room, everybody listening to this podcast, who hears us,
you can make a choice to either, you know, use
these tools for good, or use them for evil, or
to use them to appease your frustration. Because remember, as
Laurie said, we pass on that energy. You know, we're
(44:50):
passing it on our anger. Our rage, you know, is
one of the reasons why you know, when our household
we use the model going high is important, because going
high is the model, especially if you have a platform
like we did for eight years. Yeah, it's easy to
get on a big platform and rile people up and
(45:11):
to say hateful things and to make fun of people.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Of course, anybody could do that.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Any leader can do that, right That's the easiest way
to lead because you're sort of tapping into your easiest basis,
you know, core, and you lash out. You share that anger,
the strength and the power comes is when you can
harness that you know and understand that if you have
(45:37):
a platform, if you're going to be on social media,
that you now have an obligation not to spread hate
and bitterness and anger.
Speaker 5 (45:50):
And if only because I want to give.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
James some takeaways, but this is Craig's job, we also
have we also have the happiness doctor here, So how
can we and and let me back up, because our
mom used to say, you're responsible for your own happiness,
and that was some of the most empowering advice she
ever gave us.
Speaker 5 (46:16):
How can we help.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Those out there who don't have a Marian Robinson or
a social group, how can we help them work through
making themselves happy?
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Well, your mom might have been a better happiness scientist
than yeah, because she's like reading the evidence out there,
because that's what the evidence really shows, is that it
takes some work, but you can do things to feel better,
even in a horrible situation. Right, even in a horrible situation,
there are things you can do to feel a little
bit better. And I think one of the biggest ones
is really to connect with other people. You know, you
(46:46):
talked about the problem of phones leading us away from
each other. You talked about the loneliness crisis, Like, you're
in a room with lots of other folks right now,
you're probably in lots of rooms with lots of other folks.
Just talk to them, right, check in on your friends,
reach out to them. These things sound silly, they sound
like such a tiny thing to do, but they allow
us to get towards more civic action, right. They're really like,
(47:08):
in at very time anyway, the basis of democracy, right,
just talking to people and getting to know them, right,
And so in your own small world, do that and
reach out to the people that you care about. We
often assume again that that's kind of a silly thing
to do, but what the studies show is that when
you're reaching out to other people, when you're checking in
on other people, that boosts your happiness too. So you're ultimately,
(47:29):
by doing nice things for others, growing the pie, and
you're giving yourself a little bit more of a sense
of hope because whenever you take action, you're like, oh
my gosh, I have some agency. Things can't be that bad.
I can make it a little bit better.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well, And I know, Craig, you're a coach, you've coached, you've.
Speaker 3 (47:46):
You know mentored.
Speaker 5 (47:48):
I know that.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
You know, mentoring isn't just about giving, you know, it's
about what you get in return.
Speaker 5 (47:56):
You want to talk about it, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:57):
I I you know, I started out in corporate America
and moved into coaching, but I always felt like I
wanted to be a coach or a teacher because I
was coach and mentored by my dad, my mom and
really good coaches. And I thought it was really the
reason why I got to do all the wonderful things
(48:18):
I got to do, and I felt like I needed
to share that with all these other young people out there.
And to Laurie's point, it makes me feel fantastic and
it just is just such a wonderful, warm feeling to
be able to help folks.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, and I think another thing that we can do
again kind of channeling your parents, because I think they
were on top of this stuff, is what your dad said, right,
find something to be a little bit grateful for that
can feel big in the situation that James is in
right when it feels like everything is collapsing around you.
It's hard to be living in la in the midst
of these fires and be like, well, I'm grateful for
if that feels hard, choose a lighter version of that strategy.
(48:58):
Look for just something that's a little bit of a
delight in the world, like just a delight, something great.
This is a practice I heard from the writer Rosquee.
He has this lovely book called a Book of Delights,
where he decided every day he was just going to
go out and find some small wonder in the world
that delighted him. And they're tiny things like you see
somebody on the train and give each other a fist bump.
You walk into a cafe and it's playing El DeBarge
(49:20):
like Rhythm of the Night. It's just like a great
song and boss days like that's the delight, right, And
what it does is it allows him to train his
brain away from something that our brains do naturally, which
is what researchers call a negativity bias. We instantly notice
all the bad stuff. You scroll through your feed and
your brain is locked onto the bad information. But to
find the good stuff, to find the delights, you gotta
(49:41):
put a little energy into it. And when it becomes
a game, when you know you're sharing them with someone
else or writing them down, now all of a sudden
you find them a little bit more quickly. And one
of the reasons I love Ross's book is that he
actually shows that this power of delight can help you
fight all kinds of stuff in lots of ways. It's
a book that deals with a lot of the bad
stuff that's going on. It talks really explicitly about racism,
it talks really explicitly about cultures of violence and things
(50:04):
like that. But when you find the delights, you're able
to kind of get through it. You're kind of patting
yourself with some positive emotion to deal with the negative stuff.
And this is one of the reasons I think we
need to find our light a little bit more. Is
the other thing that research shows is that if we
want to make changes, we kind of need the emotional bandwidth.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
To do that.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
And one of the ways you do that is finding
your light right focusing on positive emotions. There is researcher
at Constantine kush Lef who works at Georgetown, and he
asked the question, who's out there doing the work to
solve the problems right, who's showing up at the protests,
who's engaging like climate justice? And what he measures is
people's positive emotion and he finds it. The more you
self report having more positive emotion versus negative emotion, the
(50:45):
more you're going out to that protest for a cause
you care about, the more you're donating to kind of
fix the things out there in the world. It's kind
of like putting your own oxygen mask on first, so
you can help others, but it's not just like others.
It's like helping the whole world. And so that pit
of research has helped me because sometimes it can feel
bad to not be hopeless in a hopeless world. Like
if you're going through what James is going through, it's
(51:06):
like should I experience delights? Should I get happy? Because
El Dubarge is on in this cafe?
Speaker 5 (51:09):
It feels like weird.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
But his research helps me because it's like, no, it's
almost your responsibility to find positive emotion because it actually
allows you to get towards the actions that can fix stuff.
Speaker 4 (51:20):
All right, So for James, we've got five minutes for
some fakeaways, and that was a great place to start.
You find your light, all right, I'm looking toward Lori
for a couple of takeaways.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Yeah, let's do it. I think a big one is
to notice how you feel when you're participating in the
twenty four to seven news cycle. Right, the news cycle
didn't used to be twenty four to seven. We all
probably remember there was the day when you get the
paper in the morning, you read it, you were very informed,
but you put that thing away, didn't walk around with
you in your pocket.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (51:55):
I think there's you can probably be informed with like
eighty percent less time on your phone, and you'll still
know all the terrible things that are happening. I promise
they'll still be covering them. You know, it'll be twenty
three hours later, but just kind of give yourself a
little bit of a break. Why information is good. You'll
still have that, but you'll kind of protect your positive
emotion a bit. I think the second one is just
(52:16):
one that we've talked about already. Social connection. Reach out
and try to help someone else every especially if you're
feeling vulnerable, especially if you're feeling in a crummy place,
Just ask what can I very small thing can I
do for somebody else? For a friend, text them, just
say hey, thinking about you donate three bucks or something whatever.
You can finally afford a little tiny thing to a charity.
All of a sudden, that will start making you feel
(52:38):
good and you'll be doing good in the world.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Too, And I absolutely thank you, and I just want
to throw a mom hat kind of peace on there
for James is that you know your physical health is
directly tied to your emotional status. And I know, young people,
you aren't at the point where you believe what we've
(53:02):
been telling you that you gotta get sleep.
Speaker 3 (53:05):
You really do. It absolutely matters.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
You know why are old people but probably a little
bit happier because I take a nap and I go
I will go to bed, and I love nothing more
than going to bed early. Now if you're in your twenties,
that sounds really crazy, but you know it absolutely matters.
And what you eat and whether you move your body.
You know, we've got Lori here because like there is
(53:29):
real evidence.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
We still live in a world where science matters.
Speaker 5 (53:34):
Well please please.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
As we wonder what is wrong, you know, and how
we fix it. You know, we can't ignore the fact
that they're really smart people who have done really important
research to come up with the whys and to give
us answers. So this stuff actually matters, and when you're
sixty plus it all makes sense. And taking care of yourself,
(54:00):
getting outside, making sure you get a little bit of
fresh air, how you move your body, what you put
in it matters. So if you're young and you you
don't feel it yet, because when you're our age, you
will feel it if you start some of those habits. Now,
you know it doesn't change the world for sure, you
(54:21):
know it is not it is.
Speaker 5 (54:24):
Voting still matters.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
But in the meantime, you know, not partying every night
of the week and thinking that you're going to wake
up in a good mood that helps too.
Speaker 1 (54:39):
But I think I think you're like, not only does
it You said it doesn't matter if voting, it doesn't matter.
For I think it does. Right, If you take care
of your body, you're gonna be You're going to have
the bandwidth and the resilience to fight, whether that's fighting
at the voting booth or fighting in other ways. And
you also channel something else that I have and talk
to my students about. You mentioned. We mentioned gratitude, right,
and gratitude is really changing your thought patterns. It's noticing
(55:01):
the delightful stuff and trying to move away from the
negative stuff. But there's other ways we can use our
thought patterns to feel good. I think one of them
is just thinking back right, getting a little bit of
psychological distance. As Michelle said before, things have been bad before, right,
and when you remember that, you're like, oh, we came
back from it. We've come back from really awful stuff. Historically,
especially if you look in long history, We've come back
(55:22):
from really awful stuff. And what does remembering that do?
It makes you realize, oh, things could be different even
in a bad situation. I can see a path to
something being better. What's that? That's hope, that's fighting your
own cynicism right there.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
And one more thing, one more thing, one more thing,
you know, for young people out there, I just encourage
us all to sort of right size our happiness meter,
yes you know, and take a little pressure off of
ourselves and not to measure joy and happiness by the
wrong things. And let me tell you, look, we are successful,
(55:59):
we got degrees, we make money. There's nothing wrong with
that at all. But it is I will guarantee you
that having stuff or money, or all the things that
right now seem to be so important, you know, extolling
the virtues of how much stuff you get, and my
experience that really truly is not the key to happiness
(56:24):
and finding out what your purpose is. You know who
you are helping and why over how much money you
have in your bank account. You know, truly, I know
a whole lot of these billionaires, and not all of them,
as we can see, seem happy, you know, because that's
(56:45):
not ultimately if that's your only goal is to have
more than you need, to never be satisfied.
Speaker 3 (56:53):
If you get on that path and that's.
Speaker 2 (56:55):
What you're going after, you know, there will be a
whole in your heart and it may feel like it's
the world, but it may actually be our misguided sense
of what it means to be human. And truly, what
it means to be human isn't whether we get to
space or how much money we have in our bank account.
(57:16):
It's really how we treat each other. How do we
make each other feel? How how do we you know,
care for one another? You know, and I guarantee you
if you spend your life doing that, you know, really
reordering your steps to be that person in the world.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
I can tell you that's.
Speaker 2 (57:40):
What makes me feel better and hopeful, is directing my
energy at a real purpose. So I would urge James
to make sure he's driven by that and not by
some other artificial goals that we've been told are important.
Speaker 4 (57:58):
It's a great point to end on me. Please help me.
Thank doctor Lorie Santos.
Speaker 3 (58:08):
Thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (58:12):
As you can see, we do have a lot of opinions,
and we could keep this thing going on and on,
but listen and subscribe.
Speaker 5 (58:20):
Thank you all for being here.
Speaker 3 (58:21):
Thank you guys.
Speaker 5 (58:23):
Thanks Lori
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. You know that I often
like to share the conversations I have with interesting folks
on other podcasts, and today I've got one that I
think you'll really enjoy because I had the pleasure of
taking part in a live recording of a new podcast
(00:37):
called IMO, hosted by former First Lady of the United
States Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson, and for
their first live show ever at south By Southwest, the
siblings had Yours truly on as a guest to discuss
a very tough happiness question, how can we fight hopelessness
and scary times. I hope you enjoy our conversation and
(00:57):
be sure to check out IMO wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Well, Hey, south By Southwest, Wow, Boston.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Hi, Craig Robinson, my big brother. Yeah, he's so nice.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
You all are nice. How about my sister Michelle Obama?
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Yeah, you know, I'm not used to being up here
with somebody. Usually when i'm speaking, I'm speaking on my own.
But I got company.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
When was the last time we were on a big
stage together?
Speaker 5 (01:44):
You remember It's been a while. Yeah, remind me, what
do you think I am thinking.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
About the two thousand and eight convention and that was
a big moment for me because that was Barack's first campaign.
In that campaign, people didn't know me, so I got
accused in the press of being angry and combative.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Because of the way I spoke.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
So I found that I had to use this speech
to reintroduce myself to the country. So this was a
big speech, major speech at the DNC, and my big
brother introduced me and we were.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
On stoge an honor.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah there, it was quite an honor.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
But in his introduction, when you're on stage and you're
doing a big speech, you have teleprompters. So you have
prompter in the front, have prompter on the left, prompter
on the right. Because you're reading from the prompter. Because
it's timed, you got to hit it right. It's national,
it's live.
Speaker 5 (02:38):
Let me cut in here. She had to read from
a prompter.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I memorized, Oh, well, mine, here we go, favorite child.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He memorized everything.
Speaker 5 (02:49):
Memory.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Well, my speech was a little longer, a little more impactful,
so I needed the teleprompter, right. So he does this
beautiful introduction of me. It's all action packed, and you
know he says, and ladies and gentlemen, the next first
Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama and I come
on stage and they're cheering, you know, and we do
(03:12):
this greet in front of the prompter where I think
that my big brother is gonna lean down and give
me a hug and say, you got this, girl.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
I love you.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I'm so proud of you. So I go out there
and we're on national TV. And do you remember what
you said to me.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
I do.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I'm leaning down to my ear and you said, left
prompter out.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
And he walked off. I was looking out for left
prompter out. I was looking out for you. I knew
you hadn't memorized it, so I didn't want you to
be surprised, but you know, I mean, and that wasn't working.
Speaker 5 (03:48):
So now I'm thinking, what was he talking about?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
So I'm wa eving, trying to play it off, and
I'm walking up to the stand and what he meant
was the left prompter was out, and I was like, okay,
good looking out. But anyway, that was my brother looking out.
But that was the last time we were on stage.
Speaker 5 (04:03):
That was the last time. And look at us.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Now we are here, our new podcast, I amo.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, well, what we've been doing. We're gonna chat a
little bit so you guys will get a sense of
our dynamic and sort of some of the lessons we
learned growing up. And some of this podcast was started
because you know, this last year was pretty I won't
say completely rough, but we had some We lost our
(04:34):
mom this year for those of you who don't know
Marian Robinson. And as a result, yeah, yeah, my mom.
She she and our dad were some amazing people. And
I think as a result of that lost Craig and
I you know, it brought us even closer together.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
We were already close.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
But I don't know about you, but there's just something
about losing what was our last parent, and anytime in
your life when you lose a parent, it's tough.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
You think you're going to be ready for it as.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
An adult, but I think, you know, part of losing mom,
it kind of puts us in the position where we
are we're the wise ones in the family.
Speaker 5 (05:20):
Hard to believe, I know.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
I mean I talked to Malia and Sasha about this
all the time as they are becoming adults. I know,
Malie always says, well, when do you actually feel like
an adult, and I was like, never, not really ever
do you feel like you know what you're doing? So
I said, the fact that you're in your twenties and
you feel like you are clueless, it's like you're right
(05:44):
on schedule. Because I remind her that even now at
sixty one and how old are you.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
Sixty three, Let's be very clear, he's my big brother.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Although it's all over people because she's so iconic, people
think I'm her little brother.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
If you can believe that.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, that's because you're bold and you have younger kids.
Speaker 5 (06:06):
That is true. I think that helps.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Because he's to set of older kids and he's got
a set of younger kids as well. So I called
him the head of the ODC, the Old Dad's Club.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
He is president and CEO.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
But even at this age, it's a little daunting to
think that now we kind of have to step up
in our family and be that wisdom.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Yeah, and we're always doing it at home with our families,
answering questions. So we're going to be doing that with
our listeners. So as more as we get going, you'll
see we'll have a listener questions and we'll have one
later today.
Speaker 5 (06:45):
So stay tuned.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Yeah, yeah, so you know, our goal is to share
some of what we learned. We know people are going
through some tough times, and I don't think Craig and
I are feeling any different than anyone out there. You know,
we're dealing with a lot of uncertainties. I for one,
feel for folks who are struggling and will continue to
(07:09):
struggle in these uncertainties.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
I worry about folks being out of work, you know.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I worry about how we think about diversity and inclusion.
I think about how we treat one another and the
voices that we hear, and what that does, what models
that's setting for the next generation. Who do we want
to be as a country. All of that keeps me
up at night. And I know that a lot of
people are struggling with some of those things. But I
(07:36):
find in those moments that it is better not to
try to figure that stuff out alone. And for me
and Craig and our family, you know, we always try
to step outside of our loneliness and talk as a
family and as a community and to share those concerns.
And I hope that our listeners are pushed to do
(07:59):
some of the same things too. That you know we're
not going to figure this stuff out on our own,
and that we need each other and we need to
step out of our loneliness and start talking to each other.
So hopefully this podcast will spark some conversation, but more importantly,
I hope it leads people to seek out their own
(08:19):
communities of trust and conversation. So we're not sitting alone
in these feelings. So that's my hope. Oh, go ahead
and clap.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
See we're not used to a live audience yet, so no,
I absolutely agree with me. To her point, we talked
about not having all the opinions.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Or all the answers, or all the answers. We got
plenty of opinions, but not all the answers.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
We're going to have a guest with us on most
of our episodes, but sometimes it'll just be the two
of us, ye, kind of chopping it up. But before
we bring out our special guest today, I thought i'd
pose a question to my sister. It's interesting now that
we're doing the podcast, we talk all the time, but
now we save our talking for when we see each other.
Speaker 5 (09:06):
Now, don't say anything. Don't say anything, David, don't say anything.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
But do you remember how mom and dad taught us
how to handle adversity.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Yeah, yeah, I talk about this in both of my books.
For those of you who don't know our story, our dad,
who Fraser Robinson, he developed MS in the prime of
his life.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
You know, he didn't always have it. He grew up
as a boxer.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
And athlete, a swimmer, and like in his early twenties,
he contracted MS and he couldn't walk without the assistance
of a caine and the disease progress. So we only
knew our father as someone with a disability, and I
think that growing up with a parent with a disability,
(09:54):
looking back on it, we were always kids that were
growing up with a real sense of vulnerability right before
us because our father was the sole breadwinner, our mom
stayed home. He was a city worker, so that salary
was important. I think we knew that. But to know
that the person that you lean on most is vulnerable,
(10:15):
I think it always made us clear about adversity. I
think we lived within adversity to a certain extent, and
it sort of made us both a little wary in
interesting ways. For a kid and Craig, I don't know
if you remember little things that we didn't at the
time tie to our dad's disability. But Craig was always
(10:41):
like doing disaster preparedness stuff around the house. I mean,
I kid you not this little boy. And he was
about ten, and I was always his willing sidekick, running
behind him like what are we doing now? And he
came home one day and said, you know, how are
we going to get out if there's a fire? So
he made us all do you remember I do I
(11:01):
tell your little worries?
Speaker 5 (11:02):
So I was. I was worried about it.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
And you know, back in the seventies there were a
lot of house fires.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
I don't know about you.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Guys were smoke detectors.
Speaker 5 (11:10):
There weren't no sprinkler systems.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
We're talking young people back in the Stone Age.
Speaker 4 (11:17):
So I was always worried that we lived on the
second floor and our dad couldn't get around, so how
would we get out if there were fires? So I
coming home from school and having done a fire drill
at school, I set up a fire drill for us
at home.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
But it wasn't just that.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
He had to make sure that he could drag our
dad to safety.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
So he made I made my dad get on the almost.
He had to be humiliated.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
But he humored you.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
He because I had him stand up, and I grabbed
him from behind and put my arms under his shoulders
and then just leaned him back and I dragged him
through every room of a house to make sure that
I could get him around.
Speaker 5 (12:05):
And he let me do that.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, yeah, God bless yeah yeah. But that indicated this
little boy was worried about some stuff that probably a
normal ten year old wouldn't worry about. And that wasn't it.
You know, he would tie his left hand behind his back. Right, oh,
(12:27):
your right hand because he was right handed, because he
was worried that he would lose the use of his
right hand, so he needed to know how to do
everything with his left hand. There was one week that
you walked around blindfolded just in case you lost her,
I mean his eyesight. And I'm there like little me,
going no to your left, right, to your right?
Speaker 5 (12:48):
No, wait, she was right there right there.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
I was like, I don't know why we're doing this,
but my brother says we're doing it, and our parents
would just humor us. But while we lived with probably
that underlying level of uncertainty, I think when you talk
about how we learned to deal with adversity. I think
(13:10):
we learned it by watching our father persevere, you know,
because let me tell you, our father, despite his disability,
was a man who got up every day.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
And went to work.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
I mean, I don't remember a time in our life
that our dad missed a day of work.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Blue collar worker.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
He took pride in the little things that I think
we take for granted, like paying your bills on time,
not being house poor. That's those a word that we
don't want to be house poor. But my father would
never let.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
A bill go by. He was resilient and he.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Was positive in his life. He was a joyful man
because I think he adversity was relative in our house.
You know, if you could walk, if you could, you know,
hold down a job, if you could take care of
your family, if you could love your kids, if you
(14:07):
could live with honor and decency, well who cares if
you couldn't walk, you know who? He saw the blessings.
So I think for as I look at it, for me,
we learned to I mean.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Adversity was relative.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Diversity was a part of life, but it wasn't everything.
You know that you'd have to just work your way
through it. And the other thing I think Dad taught
us was gratitude, immense gratitude. I mean our fathers you
could tell from the stories, was a kind, gentle man.
(14:43):
He rarely raised his voice or got angry. But you
know when he was disappointed in us was when we
showed a lack of gratitude for what we had. You know,
if we had a bowl of ice cream and we
were looking for the second scoop before we finished our
the first group, what.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Would he say?
Speaker 5 (15:02):
Never satisfy, never satisfied.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
That would be the one admonistion, never satisfied.
Speaker 5 (15:08):
And hate the those two words to this day.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, And when I face adversity, his words, you know,
sit in my brain, It's like, what do I have
to complain about? What is it that I can't overcome?
Because of the model that my father set for me.
You know, why wouldn't I be happy? Why wouldn't I
(15:30):
be able to get through this? Because we saw a
man do it every day and do it without complaint.
Because if anybody had a reason to complain, would be
my father, who was a black man growing up in Chicago,
raised in desegregation, who was an intelligent man with ability
to do art, but couldn't live up to his promise.
(15:52):
I mean, there were a whole lot of reasons for
our father to be upset and angry and not happy
and to feel disappointed, to feel sorry for himself, but
he was the exact opposite. And so that's what I
think about when times get hard. It's like, look, my
dad would push through it.
Speaker 5 (16:12):
Right, right, and I would. We could.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
We could talk about our dad for two shows, right,
but we've.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
Got the perfect yes, we do yes.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
To talk about happiness and adversity and all that kind
of stuff. Doctor Lori Santos is a Yale professor. Oh
you guys, all right, all right, yeah good. She's host
of a wildly popular podcast called The Happiness Lab. She's
(16:44):
also the teacher of one of the most popular classes
at Yale.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
Wish we had this when we were I.
Speaker 5 (16:53):
Wish we had it.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
And that's psychology and the good life. And she's just
an all around great person. So can you welcome doctor
Lori Santos.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
Everybody, Well, hey, professor, hey Michelle, thank you for being
on here.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Thanks so much for having me. Yeah yeah, yeah, little
intimate group, this is a little.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Bit intimate chat. So how did you come to teach
the course.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I know you've answered this question a million times before,
but what led you to understand that young people today
need a course on how to be happy?
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Yeah? Well, I took on this new role on Yale's campus,
where I became what's called the head of college. Yale's
one of these funny schools where there's like colleges within
a college, like Harry Potter, like Gryffindors Lytherin kind of thing. Yeah,
so I became head of a college on campus, and
that meant that I was like living with students, like
eating with them in the dining hall, hang out with
them up close and personal. And I just didn't realize
the college student mental health crisis was as bad as
(18:07):
it was. You're right now, Nash. More than forty percent
of college students say they're too depressed to function most day.
More than sixty percent say they're overwhelmingly anxious. Like, this
was a real crisis that I was seeing, and that
felt really frustrating because like, my field has all these
strategies we can use to feel better, experience more resilience,
feel less stressed. And I was like, let me just
develop this class. And then it got very very big,
(18:31):
not as big as this. But you're listening to a
live recording of me on Michelle Obama's new podcast, I AMO.
Speaker 5 (18:40):
We'll be back after a quick break.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
We've got a live question. We have a person, James.
Are you here?
Speaker 5 (18:53):
Oh? There he is, James. James, you stand up, all right?
I'm standing all.
Speaker 4 (18:58):
Right, Janet, all right, great, many so excited to be here.
Speaker 7 (19:04):
My question is I'm twenty eight and I live in LA.
The fires impacted people close to me, and it feels
like that's only going to become more frequent. And everything
that's been happening politically, domestically, and globally, it feels like
a version of the world is ending.
Speaker 5 (19:24):
And when I talk to.
Speaker 7 (19:25):
Friends, they say this is the new normal, And my
immediate instinct is the push back. You know, we can't
accept this, but personally, living with the inevitability of it,
it also forces me to rethink what I always assumed
adulthood would look like, you know, buying a house, starting
a family. So my question is, do you have any
(19:48):
advice on how to plan for a future that feels
so different from the one we were promise without becoming
apathetic or just resigning yourself to things getting worse.
Speaker 5 (20:00):
Thanks so much. Cool, Thank you, James.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, that's an aim in from everybody in this room, right,
everybody's feeling like that a bit lor You want to
start by taking any a but an answer, I.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Mean, yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to answer,
the first thing to say for that question is that
this is normal. Right, You're not the only person in
the room that's going through that, And I think that
normalization is critical. All too often we can get into
this like toxic positivity vibe where it's like, I'm feeling
kind of embarrassed that I'm so upset and frustrated and
overwhelmed sad about what's going on in the world. But
(20:37):
like we're supposed to feel that negative emotions are normal
in an abnormal world, and I think it's fair to
say that we are, you know, not it's not great,
but we're in an abnormal world right now. And so
I think that's kind of point number one. The other
reason that normalization is so important is that psychologically it
can help us when you realize that these negative emotions
are a common human experience, that there are emotions that
(20:58):
are there to help you. They still don't feel good,
but it can allow you to get through them a
little bit better. Even here in Uti Austin, there's a researcher,
Kristin Nef who studies this process of what she calls
common humanity right recognizing like we're all going through it
right now, and what she finds is that can actually
help you get through tough times. She does this cool
research with Afghan and Iraqi veterans and finds that those
(21:19):
that give themselves self compassion realize that everybody's going through
a tough time here, they wind up coming out with
less evidence of PTSD and other related disorders. So like
when you give yourself a little grace for feeling those
negative emotions, realize they're normal and bad times, that actually
helps you get through the negative emotions.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
The other thing that I want to get your take on, Laurie,
is what's happened to the bar on happiness? Because it
really feels like these days that the expectation of young
people are so high, and some of that I think
is our fault as parents. You know, when we were
growing up, I mean, life was a lot simpler, you know.
(22:00):
I mean, just to give you an example of excitement
in our house was getting pizza on report card day
if we got good grades, you know, I mean at
Christmas time.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
We could ask for three gifts.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
You know, go through the Sears Roebucks wish book you
could pick three.
Speaker 5 (22:18):
Things out and that was it.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
What that?
Speaker 3 (22:21):
Oh yeah?
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Or first of all Sears and that was the only
store you go to. You get your car tuned up
in a washing machine, and your school clothes all in
one place. And they have a catalog. And you know
what a catalog is young people. It's the thing you
look through for items and you pick it out. Well,
(22:45):
that came out each year and that's where all the
toys were. So you know, our parents just you know,
they weren't happy that we got good grades. You know,
I can tell you. Did my our parents push us
to go to Princeton. No, they were just like ghosts.
Do something with your life as long as you're a
good person. But when I think of young people today,
(23:08):
this standard for happiness is like gone through the roof.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
I mean, you.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Don't just go to college, but they're like seven colleges
you can go to or it doesn't matter or you know,
people you look on house hunters and everybody's looking for
you know, marble counters and trade ceilings, and you know
a man cave and there's a certain car and you know,
and you're not supposed to be successful, but you're also
(23:35):
supposed to be famous because social media tells you that
that's what it means to be happy. So I guess
that's the long way of asking, is some of this,
you know, not just the world, because the world's been
bad and it's been worse than it is right now,
but people, young people are more unhappy than I think
(23:57):
we ever were with a lot less.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
And we have data on this right looking across time,
and those rates of depression, anxiety and stuff I just
talked about, they're worse than there are young people right
now than ever since we've recorded them, right like, and
it's much worse. And I think you're exactly right. I
think it's a lot our expectations. Right. We have tools
that allow us to see those fancy houses, those fancy vacations,
those fancy schools, and they're just in our pockets, dinging
(24:24):
all the time, giving us a comparison that makes us
feel kind of crappy, right, And what we know from
the happiness science is that it's not what we objectively
have that makes us happy. It's what we're expecting, it's
what we're used to, you know. That's why I love
the story of your dad, right, you know, just getting
a little bowl of ice cream like that should be enough, right.
And so I think that, especially in young people, the
definition of enough has changed. There's lots of reasons for that.
(24:46):
But I think getting to a better point of accepting
and what our expectations are that'll help a lot.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
And that's different from being complacent, right, because I think
we were taught that you don't need everything, and you're
not entitled to everything.
Speaker 5 (25:02):
You're not.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
We were taught not even entitled to happiness exactly. Our
parents didn't think they were responsible for our happiness.
Speaker 5 (25:11):
For anybody in our generation.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
You imagine a parent who worried about whether your child
was happy, and we didn't come from that. It was like,
you're not happy, to get over it, read a book,
get out of my face, move along, go outside, you know,
and our generation of parents and mean, we lose sleep
if little person is sad today, and it's like sadness
(25:34):
and anxiety that's all a part of life.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
But we as we parent our children.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I sometimes I think we've made them a little less resilient.
And again that's not to say that people aren't dealing
with real anxiety and mental health issues. But I think
one of the things I try to think about as
a parent, and I think our parents.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
Did to us.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
They tried to prepare us for what the world was
going to be, which was oftentimes disappointing, most of the
time hard, and there would deep anxiety that you'd have
to get through at all times.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
So they gave us those tools much.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Earlier than I think some parents today are willing to
let their.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
Kids go through some of those tough feelings.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
So then they get out in the real world and
they're confronted with a whole lot of emotions that nobody
ever told them what's coming.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
That's right, and I think it leads to mental health crisis,
not just in our young people, but also in parents.
The former Surgeon General vveck Murty talked a lot about
parent mental health and parent stress. He actually issued like
a public health advisory on the fact that parents are
going through their own tough emotions. But the biggest tough
emotion that parents reported is guilt, as though you know
(26:51):
they're not doing enough for their kids happiness, They're not
doing enough to kind of give them everything they need.
And I think that reflects exactly what you're saying, Laurie.
Speaker 4 (26:58):
I want to get James question sort of deals with
a little bit of hopelessness there, and I was just
trying to figure out what does it mean for us
our culture with so many people feeling hopeless?
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah, was bad, as you probably guess, not great to
live in a completely hopeless culture. And we really do
live in more of a hopeless culture than we ever
have before. Your researchers go out and study this, and
they have over time. One of the best questions for
this is they just ask people, on average, can you
trust the other people around you? Right in the nineteen seventies,
when they asked polksact question, around fifty percent of people
(27:35):
said yeah, on average, most folks can get trusted. When
you ask that same question in twenty eighteen, it's down
to a little less than a third. That doesn't sound
like a big drop, but if I was plotting that,
that's basically how much money we lost in two thousand
and eight when the financial crisis happened. Right, So this
is a like complete like off a cliff decline in
people's sense of trust, in people's sense of hope, and
(27:55):
it's bad for lots of reason. It's bad for us personally.
People who experience less hope experience more depression, experience more anxiety,
experience more loneliness, which is interesting, hope seems to be
connected to our social connection. Also bad for our bodies.
People who are more sick report experiencing more diabetes, experiencing
more heart disease. And it's probably bad for us as
a society because when you don't experience hope, what you
(28:17):
think is like, stuff's never going to get better. And
when you think stuff's never going to get better, you
don't take action to make it better. Right, You don't vote,
you don't do things pro socially to help other people.
And what you find research wise is if you study
people who are cynical, they self report not voting, they
self report not donating to charity, not doing the stuff
that you need to do to make things better. So, yeah,
it's really bad, and it becomes a vicious cycle, right
(28:40):
because as more people get hopeless, then they look out
in the world with this hopeless lens. They post on
social media with a hopeless lens. We get podcasts that
are very hopeless, and it just becomes this cycle where
we reinforce each other's bad perception of the world, one
that might not even be really accurate.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, and you talk about that transference, the ability for
us to you know, export our bad energy onto other people,
and we naturally, as humans we pick up those those cues.
Can you talk a little bit more about that transference that.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
You Yeah, I mean, we know for sure that emotions
are contagious, right, They're just like COVID and we know this. Right,
you go into an office and you hang out with
somebody who's feeling hyped up and optimistic and excited, you
kind of catch that. Right. You go into the same
office as somebody who's down and not feeling it like,
you catch that too, right. These days, we don't just
catch emotions from the other people we're around. We have
(29:34):
this transfer system online where folks are catching emotions globally.
You know, I hop on some social media platform, I'm
catching some emotion from somebody on Instagram that lives in
a different country and a completely different time zone. But
I catch that too, And that's made worth by the
fact that these social media companies obviously have algorithms that
thrive not on us catching each other's positive emotions, but
(29:56):
I'm catching each other's anger and outrage and sadness. Right,
that's what gets eyeballs on our phones. And so all
these things together means not just that there's transference, but
there's particular transference of the bad stuff, of the hope blessness.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
You know, our mom and mishe will remember this, But
obviously we didn't have social media growing up, but we
had friends who had stuff or friends who said things,
and our mom was always why do you care about
what they say? And I find trying to give my
(30:30):
kids that advice is hard with social media, and I
think a lot of parents find it hard. How do
we balance that these days with social media? Because you know,
we recently were talking with someone else who was telling us,
you just if you take social media away, you got
to replace it with something. But my question is, how
(30:51):
do we help help folks find a balance here?
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah, I think one of the ways to find a
balance is just to realize that what we're exposed to
affects us. Right, you hop on Instagram and you start
scrolling through that feed, you might know that some of
the stuff you look at as photoshopped. You might know this,
some of the stuff you know these companies are they
have algorithms that are sort of pointing you in a
bad direction. But that doesn't enter psychologically. You're just soaking
(31:15):
in the emotions and then the stuff you see. Right,
But I think that knowledge can be a little bit
of power.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You can even ask yourself, like how do I feel
after that? Scroll through Reddit or through social media and
ask yourself the question, do I feel more empowered, more hopeful,
or do I feel kind of gross and like in despair? Right?
You can make the choice to put that away. Right.
You can kind of notice mindfully how it's making you feel,
and you sort of choose to stick it back in
your pocket. Social media companies wouldn't have these algorithms if
(31:44):
all our eyeballs weren't on phones anymore. And we actually
have more agency than we often remember in that fight.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
People always ask me and Barack how do we stay
hopeful in the not just the eight years that we
were in the White House, but beyond, Because let me
tell you, there was a lot of negative energy float
in our way, a lot of rumors, a lot of gossip,
a lot of you know, my husband wasn't born in
this country. We didn't care about we weren't patriotic, you know.
(32:16):
He yeah, he didn't get into Harvard. I mean, you know,
I don't know if you all remember, I certainly do.
Speaker 5 (32:24):
He wore a suit, wore a.
Speaker 3 (32:25):
Tan suit once. I mean, you know the level of
scandal that occurred.
Speaker 2 (32:31):
But through it all, what kept us saying, and we
tried to instill this in our daughters, is you know
you cannot you know, you cannot live through social media.
I don't think I have ever once looked at a
comments section period and at all ever.
Speaker 5 (32:55):
And I know it's difficult.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
For this generation, but you know, I would implore young
people to stay don't let that negative energy enter into
your space. These are people who don't know you. A
lot of this stuff is made up and it does
not feed you. And I you know, I mean, I
(33:19):
can't do it, and we never do. Now that doesn't
mean you don't stay informed. But staying informed has nothing
to do with the comments section, you know, it has
everything to do with the content of the stories that
you take in. And I think, you know, we cannot
get so trapped by social media that we feel so
(33:40):
caught up into the one way we get information. We've
got to broaden our spectrum, and we have to get
off the phone, you know, which is another thing, and
I would love for you to talk a bit about
that as a tool. I know you've got a lot
of tools, but there are a lot of people here
(34:00):
of all ages who are trapped by their phones. And
when you talk about us being disconnected and not talking
to each other, I am.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
I am not out in.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
The world like a normal person anymore.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
But when I am, people don't even recognize me. You
know why, because they're on their phones. Nobody is looking
at each other. I can walk right past somebody with
a hat on, you know, and I'm just a black
woman in a cap.
Speaker 5 (34:27):
But I don't know. No, I've done it. I don't
know about it. I have done it. I fly commercial.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
I am out there with the people, and folks are
not paying attention.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
I fly commercial.
Speaker 4 (34:41):
So okay, okay, see the thing.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
I'm here.
Speaker 5 (34:52):
Walking around flying commercial. How's Michelle tell Michelle? I said, Hi,
how she doing? They? Okay?
Speaker 6 (35:00):
Anyway, strategy strategies.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
I'm going to get a mute button for.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
No, but strategies. I mean, I think awareness is really
key here. One of my favorite strategies for sort of
dealing with your phone and being on your phone all
the time comes from the journalist Catherine Price. She has
this lovely book How to Break Up with Your Phone,
where she argues you don't have to break up with
your phone so much as you need to take it
to like couples counseling so that you can be a
wait better. But she has this really handy acronym that
(35:32):
she uses whenever she finds herself on her phone is WWW,
which you can think of because you're probably on the
World Wide Web rye. But this is not Worldwide Web.
WWW stands for what for? Why, now? And what else?
So what are you on your phone for? Maybe you're
checking your email or looking at a map, Maybe you're
just deep in some TikTok dive? Right? Was there a purpose?
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Right?
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Why? Now? This is an important one because you notice
your emotions? What drives you to your phone? Were you bored?
Were you anxious? Right? What's your cue that gets you there?
What's that craving coming from? And then finally, what else? Right?
What's the opportunity cost of being on your phone right now,
you might be missing Michelle Obama on your flight, Like
there's just saying right now thanks to you need to notice, right,
you might miss the beautiful scenery, you might miss the
(36:13):
opportunity to talk to someone who has interesting stories, interesting ideas.
Right that what else question is critical because what studies
show us is that because we're on our phones, we're
less social than we could be. A lovely study by
Elizabeth Dunne at the University of British Columbia had people
with their phones or without their phones sitting in a
waiting room. They weren't even using their phones. It was
just like present or not, and she just measure the
(36:34):
amount of smiling that people did. You know, casual, somebody's
in your room, you just smile at them. She sees
thirty percent less smiling when phones are present. Right, calculate
that by all the phones you know, on planes in
Austin and so on. So we're really missing out. But
that strategy of WWW, I think what it gets us
towards is like we just have to be mindful, We
just have to notice. These are good tools, right, we
(36:55):
know even from COVID times they were so useful. But
we just have to use them in a healthy way.
Speaker 5 (37:00):
Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Time perty quick Break, But there'll be more of me
on Michelle Obama's new podcast IMO in.
Speaker 5 (37:08):
Just a Moment, Laurie.
Speaker 4 (37:19):
What can we do to find hope when things are tough,
like in Jamee's situation he's looking at his friends who
have lost things in a fire or you know, other
personal disasters.
Speaker 5 (37:34):
What can we do?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things right.
One is making sure you have the right definition of hope,
because I think sometimes when we think of hope, we
think of what at least psychologists might call optimism. We're
just like, everything's gonna be fine. And I think that
everything's gonna be fine. Is like I mean, look at
the new like, look at X, like anywhere is not fine, right,
And so I think it's important to like call it
(37:56):
the way it is. It's not fine. But hope isn't
that hope says things are not fine. But I can
actually see at least a few paths for things to
get better. Why is that psychologically so important? If you
think things are fine right now, are you going to act?
You're going to take agency, You're going to do anything?
About it now, because you're just kind of things are
fine right now. You know the world's not on fire.
(38:17):
When you experience hope, what you feel is things are
not fine right now, but there is a path. What
does that path do? It gives you agency, It gives
you a sense that like something can be done, and
probably I can be a small part of what needs
to get done. And that small part is key because
I think when we think we have to be the
only one out there fixing everything, that also makes us
feel a little overwhelmed and sad. But when you realize
(38:38):
that you're a small action. You're checking in on someone,
you're donating five bucks to a cause you care about,
you stepping up in any way to make things better,
that actually matters. And one of the things we know
psychologically is that it also helps us feel a little
bit more hopeful when we take action. So you show
up at that cause you care about, or go to protests, right,
(38:58):
donate some money. Psychologically you start to feel like, oh,
we're even getting closer to a solution because I stepped up.
Maybe other people step up. You also see good social
evidence that you're not the only one. You show up
at a protest, You're usually not the only one there.
You get a whole room like this, full of people
who care. Now, all of a sudden, your beliefs start
to change. So you can, instead of being that vicious
cycle of hopelessness that we talked about before, you can
(39:21):
become part of a virtuous cycle of hopefulness. And that's
the kind of thing that can also be socially contagious.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
And as somebody who has seen all kinds of power
at work, you know, I've been at some of the
most powerful tables, one of the things I remind people
of is, yes, there is large power. You know, there
are a handful of people in the world who can
do a few things that can impact so many. But
the truth is is that the small power that each
(39:49):
of us has to do something right in front of us,
if we're all doing that, outweighs anything that you know,
some big leader somewhere can do.
Speaker 5 (40:00):
I mean, if you just think about.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
Yeah, just think about as our parents did you know,
marrying and Fraser Robinson who didn't go to college, you know,
mother stayed at home, father was a city worker. And
let me just stop and and and give a big
shout out to city and federal workers, people who are
(40:25):
the lifeblood of this country. Also, those jobs helped to
create an entire middle class of people like our fathers,
our father our parents, and they do the lion's share
of the work in this country. You know, if we're
(40:47):
going to start asking who's doing what, I would from
my experience the folks who are working on the ground
and picking up our garbage and making sure that our
you know, schools run and that our air is clean,
and that our flights stay up in the air. That
those people are the true heart and blood of this country.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
But that power is what changes things.
Speaker 5 (41:21):
You know.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Those parents, with a little bit that they were able
to do with their power, raised two of us, you know.
And if you just think that if everybody on this
planet was valued and had an opportunity to have a
job and to take care of their kids and to
raise them with some level of honesty and kindness and
(41:43):
with humanity and taught them to love everybody and to
be inclusive. You know, just imagine if everybody did that
little thing right in their plate. You know, if you're
going to have some kids, you know, if you can
have the courage and the power to exercise that small
thing of raising them with some truth and some honesty.
(42:06):
Just imagine where we would be right now as a country,
you know, imagine what our leadership would look like and
how we would ask them to speak and to act
and to model that.
Speaker 3 (42:19):
That is the that is the beauty of small power.
Speaker 5 (42:24):
You know.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
So, as James, you know, thinks about what to do.
You know, I hope that retreating into hopelessness is not
on the list, because shoot, if my dad didn't, this
is how I fail. My father, Frasier Robinson didn't retreat
with all that he could have retreated from in times
(42:45):
a lot tougher than this, because he wanted to lay
a foundation for us that we have that obligation, all
of us to do the same thing. We can't afford
to be hopeless. I would say, yeah, And I love.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
The U share the story of your father, because it's
also one of the strategies that we can use, tiny
strategy we can use individually to do better, which is
sharing these positive social stories like the world and social media.
All these aglorithms are filled with terrible stories, but you
can actually see the good ones. You can say, you know,
my dad in the midst of experiencing this terrible disease
(43:18):
was hopefully you taught us gratitude, right, And you know
it doesn't even have to be Michelle Obama's dad. Right.
You can find these little examples of moral goodness, but
don't just keep them to yourself. Share them. And I
think if you're a parent, this is one of the
best things you can do to your kids, right, because
they're maybe don't even have as much kind of frontal
low power to go out there and find those good
stories over the dinner table. What moral goodness did you
(43:40):
see today?
Speaker 5 (43:41):
Right?
Speaker 1 (43:41):
What was something that delighted you that kind of made
you happy, specifically about what somebody else was doing. We
don't share these enough. But the sad thing is like
they're out there, we just don't hear about them enough.
And so that's one of the reasons I'm so glad
y'all are doing this podcast. There's there read way more
stories than that that come out that allow for what
researchers call social savoring or sort of savoring the goodness
of other people.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
And that's also a way, I'm sorry, creative for people
to use their social media.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
You know, you know it's there for a reason. There's
power in it, you.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Know, but we have to resist the notion to use
it to harp on each other, to diss and to
you know, spread gossip into you know, I mean, each
of us in our world can encourage the people within
it to use the tool for good. You know, it
is a choice that we can make right now, everybody
(44:30):
in this room, everybody listening to this podcast, who hears us,
you can make a choice to either, you know, use
these tools for good, or use them for evil, or
to use them to appease your frustration. Because remember, as
Laurie said, we pass on that energy. You know, we're
(44:50):
passing it on our anger. Our rage, you know, is
one of the reasons why you know, when our household
we use the model going high is important, because going
high is the model, especially if you have a platform
like we did for eight years. Yeah, it's easy to
get on a big platform and rile people up and
(45:11):
to say hateful things and to make fun of people.
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Of course, anybody could do that.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Any leader can do that, right That's the easiest way
to lead because you're sort of tapping into your easiest basis,
you know, core, and you lash out. You share that anger,
the strength and the power comes is when you can
harness that you know and understand that if you have
(45:37):
a platform, if you're going to be on social media,
that you now have an obligation not to spread hate
and bitterness and anger.
Speaker 5 (45:50):
And if only because I want to give.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
James some takeaways, but this is Craig's job, we also
have we also have the happiness doctor here, So how
can we and and let me back up, because our
mom used to say, you're responsible for your own happiness,
and that was some of the most empowering advice she
ever gave us.
Speaker 5 (46:16):
How can we help.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Those out there who don't have a Marian Robinson or
a social group, how can we help them work through
making themselves happy?
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Well, your mom might have been a better happiness scientist
than yeah, because she's like reading the evidence out there,
because that's what the evidence really shows, is that it
takes some work, but you can do things to feel better,
even in a horrible situation. Right, even in a horrible situation,
there are things you can do to feel a little
bit better. And I think one of the biggest ones
is really to connect with other people. You know, you
(46:46):
talked about the problem of phones leading us away from
each other. You talked about the loneliness crisis, Like, you're
in a room with lots of other folks right now,
you're probably in lots of rooms with lots of other folks.
Just talk to them, right, check in on your friends,
reach out to them. These things sound silly, they sound
like such a tiny thing to do, but they allow
us to get towards more civic action, right. They're really like,
(47:08):
in at very time anyway, the basis of democracy, right,
just talking to people and getting to know them, right,
And so in your own small world, do that and
reach out to the people that you care about. We
often assume again that that's kind of a silly thing
to do, but what the studies show is that when
you're reaching out to other people, when you're checking in
on other people, that boosts your happiness too. So you're ultimately,
(47:29):
by doing nice things for others, growing the pie, and
you're giving yourself a little bit more of a sense
of hope because whenever you take action, you're like, oh
my gosh, I have some agency. Things can't be that bad.
I can make it a little bit better.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well, And I know, Craig, you're a coach, you've coached, you've.
Speaker 3 (47:46):
You know mentored.
Speaker 5 (47:48):
I know that.
Speaker 2 (47:49):
You know, mentoring isn't just about giving, you know, it's
about what you get in return.
Speaker 5 (47:56):
You want to talk about it, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (47:57):
I I you know, I started out in corporate America
and moved into coaching, but I always felt like I
wanted to be a coach or a teacher because I
was coach and mentored by my dad, my mom and
really good coaches. And I thought it was really the
reason why I got to do all the wonderful things
(48:18):
I got to do, and I felt like I needed
to share that with all these other young people out there.
And to Laurie's point, it makes me feel fantastic and
it just is just such a wonderful, warm feeling to
be able to help folks.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Yeah, and I think another thing that we can do
again kind of channeling your parents, because I think they
were on top of this stuff, is what your dad said, right,
find something to be a little bit grateful for that
can feel big in the situation that James is in
right when it feels like everything is collapsing around you.
It's hard to be living in la in the midst
of these fires and be like, well, I'm grateful for
if that feels hard, choose a lighter version of that strategy.
(48:58):
Look for just something that's a little bit of a
delight in the world, like just a delight, something great.
This is a practice I heard from the writer Rosquee.
He has this lovely book called a Book of Delights,
where he decided every day he was just going to
go out and find some small wonder in the world
that delighted him. And they're tiny things like you see
somebody on the train and give each other a fist bump.
You walk into a cafe and it's playing El DeBarge
(49:20):
like Rhythm of the Night. It's just like a great
song and boss days like that's the delight, right, And
what it does is it allows him to train his
brain away from something that our brains do naturally, which
is what researchers call a negativity bias. We instantly notice
all the bad stuff. You scroll through your feed and
your brain is locked onto the bad information. But to
find the good stuff, to find the delights, you gotta
(49:41):
put a little energy into it. And when it becomes
a game, when you know you're sharing them with someone
else or writing them down, now all of a sudden
you find them a little bit more quickly. And one
of the reasons I love Ross's book is that he
actually shows that this power of delight can help you
fight all kinds of stuff in lots of ways. It's
a book that deals with a lot of the bad
stuff that's going on. It talks really explicitly about racism,
it talks really explicitly about cultures of violence and things
(50:04):
like that. But when you find the delights, you're able
to kind of get through it. You're kind of patting
yourself with some positive emotion to deal with the negative stuff.
And this is one of the reasons I think we
need to find our light a little bit more. Is
the other thing that research shows is that if we
want to make changes, we kind of need the emotional bandwidth.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
To do that.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
And one of the ways you do that is finding
your light right focusing on positive emotions. There is researcher
at Constantine kush Lef who works at Georgetown, and he
asked the question, who's out there doing the work to
solve the problems right, who's showing up at the protests,
who's engaging like climate justice? And what he measures is
people's positive emotion and he finds it. The more you
self report having more positive emotion versus negative emotion, the
(50:45):
more you're going out to that protest for a cause
you care about, the more you're donating to kind of
fix the things out there in the world. It's kind
of like putting your own oxygen mask on first, so
you can help others, but it's not just like others.
It's like helping the whole world. And so that pit
of research has helped me because sometimes it can feel
bad to not be hopeless in a hopeless world. Like
if you're going through what James is going through, it's
(51:06):
like should I experience delights? Should I get happy? Because
El Dubarge is on in this cafe?
Speaker 5 (51:09):
It feels like weird.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
But his research helps me because it's like, no, it's
almost your responsibility to find positive emotion because it actually
allows you to get towards the actions that can fix stuff.
Speaker 4 (51:20):
All right, So for James, we've got five minutes for
some fakeaways, and that was a great place to start.
You find your light, all right, I'm looking toward Lori
for a couple of takeaways.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Yeah, let's do it. I think a big one is
to notice how you feel when you're participating in the
twenty four to seven news cycle. Right, the news cycle
didn't used to be twenty four to seven. We all
probably remember there was the day when you get the
paper in the morning, you read it, you were very informed,
but you put that thing away, didn't walk around with
you in your pocket.
Speaker 2 (51:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (51:55):
I think there's you can probably be informed with like
eighty percent less time on your phone, and you'll still
know all the terrible things that are happening. I promise
they'll still be covering them. You know, it'll be twenty
three hours later, but just kind of give yourself a
little bit of a break. Why information is good. You'll
still have that, but you'll kind of protect your positive
emotion a bit. I think the second one is just
(52:16):
one that we've talked about already. Social connection. Reach out
and try to help someone else every especially if you're
feeling vulnerable, especially if you're feeling in a crummy place,
Just ask what can I very small thing can I
do for somebody else? For a friend, text them, just
say hey, thinking about you donate three bucks or something whatever.
You can finally afford a little tiny thing to a charity.
All of a sudden, that will start making you feel
(52:38):
good and you'll be doing good in the world.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Too, And I absolutely thank you, and I just want
to throw a mom hat kind of peace on there
for James is that you know your physical health is
directly tied to your emotional status. And I know, young people,
you aren't at the point where you believe what we've
(53:02):
been telling you that you gotta get sleep.
Speaker 3 (53:05):
You really do. It absolutely matters.
Speaker 2 (53:07):
You know why are old people but probably a little
bit happier because I take a nap and I go
I will go to bed, and I love nothing more
than going to bed early. Now if you're in your twenties,
that sounds really crazy, but you know it absolutely matters.
And what you eat and whether you move your body.
You know, we've got Lori here because like there is
(53:29):
real evidence.
Speaker 3 (53:30):
We still live in a world where science matters.
Speaker 5 (53:34):
Well please please.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
As we wonder what is wrong, you know, and how
we fix it. You know, we can't ignore the fact
that they're really smart people who have done really important
research to come up with the whys and to give
us answers. So this stuff actually matters, and when you're
sixty plus it all makes sense. And taking care of yourself,
(54:00):
getting outside, making sure you get a little bit of
fresh air, how you move your body, what you put
in it matters. So if you're young and you you
don't feel it yet, because when you're our age, you
will feel it if you start some of those habits. Now,
you know it doesn't change the world for sure, you
(54:21):
know it is not it is.
Speaker 5 (54:24):
Voting still matters.
Speaker 2 (54:28):
But in the meantime, you know, not partying every night
of the week and thinking that you're going to wake
up in a good mood that helps too.
Speaker 1 (54:39):
But I think I think you're like, not only does
it You said it doesn't matter if voting, it doesn't matter.
For I think it does. Right, If you take care
of your body, you're gonna be You're going to have
the bandwidth and the resilience to fight, whether that's fighting
at the voting booth or fighting in other ways. And
you also channel something else that I have and talk
to my students about. You mentioned. We mentioned gratitude, right,
and gratitude is really changing your thought patterns. It's noticing
(55:01):
the delightful stuff and trying to move away from the
negative stuff. But there's other ways we can use our
thought patterns to feel good. I think one of them
is just thinking back right, getting a little bit of
psychological distance. As Michelle said before, things have been bad before, right,
and when you remember that, you're like, oh, we came
back from it. We've come back from really awful stuff. Historically,
especially if you look in long history, We've come back
(55:22):
from really awful stuff. And what does remembering that do?
It makes you realize, oh, things could be different even
in a bad situation. I can see a path to
something being better. What's that? That's hope, that's fighting your
own cynicism right there.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
And one more thing, one more thing, one more thing,
you know, for young people out there, I just encourage
us all to sort of right size our happiness meter,
yes you know, and take a little pressure off of
ourselves and not to measure joy and happiness by the
wrong things. And let me tell you, look, we are successful,
(55:59):
we got degrees, we make money. There's nothing wrong with
that at all. But it is I will guarantee you
that having stuff or money, or all the things that
right now seem to be so important, you know, extolling
the virtues of how much stuff you get, and my
experience that really truly is not the key to happiness
(56:24):
and finding out what your purpose is. You know who
you are helping and why over how much money you
have in your bank account. You know, truly, I know
a whole lot of these billionaires, and not all of them,
as we can see, seem happy, you know, because that's
(56:45):
not ultimately if that's your only goal is to have
more than you need, to never be satisfied.
Speaker 3 (56:53):
If you get on that path and that's.
Speaker 2 (56:55):
What you're going after, you know, there will be a
whole in your heart and it may feel like it's
the world, but it may actually be our misguided sense
of what it means to be human. And truly, what
it means to be human isn't whether we get to
space or how much money we have in our bank account.
(57:16):
It's really how we treat each other. How do we
make each other feel? How how do we you know,
care for one another? You know, and I guarantee you
if you spend your life doing that, you know, really
reordering your steps to be that person in the world.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
I can tell you that's.
Speaker 2 (57:40):
What makes me feel better and hopeful, is directing my
energy at a real purpose. So I would urge James
to make sure he's driven by that and not by
some other artificial goals that we've been told are important.
Speaker 4 (57:58):
It's a great point to end on me. Please help me.
Thank doctor Lorie Santos.
Speaker 3 (58:08):
Thank you, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 4 (58:12):
As you can see, we do have a lot of opinions,
and we could keep this thing going on and on,
but listen and subscribe.
Speaker 5 (58:20):
Thank you all for being here.
Speaker 3 (58:21):
Thank you guys.
Speaker 5 (58:23):
Thanks Lori
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