Episode Transcript
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0:15
Pushkin.
0:18
I'm doctor Laurie Santos.
0:19
I'm Tim Harford, and this.
0:21
Is another crossover episode of my podcast
0:23
The Happiness.
0:23
Lab and my podcast Cautionary
0:26
Tales. Laurie, last time
0:28
I took the lead, I told you a story about the
0:30
tensions between everyone taking
0:32
a vacation at the same time and
0:34
an idea from Stalin's Soviet
0:36
union, where it was decreed that workers
0:39
had to stagger their days off, no matter what
0:41
that meant for missing leisure time with their friends
0:43
and families. So this time
0:46
it's the return match, as it were. So, what
0:48
cautionary tale of happiness have you got in store
0:51
for me?
0:51
Oh, it's a good one.
0:52
It's a story of how we're all biased towards
0:55
action and how we sometimes struggle to do
0:57
less, especially when it involves doing
0:59
nothing at all. It's a tale that will take us
1:01
to where the blue skies start turning to inky
1:03
black, because today we're going to go
1:05
to the very edge of space. My
1:31
story today involves one of my favorite American
1:33
heroes, Major Charles E. Jaeger,
1:37
as a young fighter pilot in World War Two, Chuck
1:40
not only shot down a huge number of enemy aircraft
1:43
but also successfully evaded the Nazis
1:45
when he was shot down over occupied France.
1:47
During his time on the run, Chuck helped the
1:50
French resistance attack German troops and
1:53
even won a medal for helping an American pilot
1:55
cross the snowy Pyrenees to reach safety
1:57
in Spain. Chuck was just
1:59
that kind of hero, and
2:02
he didn't chill out during peacetime either. He
2:05
kept flying, securing his place in history
2:07
by traveling faster than the speed of sound
2:09
in a rocket powered aircraft he named
2:11
Glamorous Glennis in honor of his
2:13
wife. Other
2:16
pilots had perished in their pursuit of this speed
2:18
record, but Chuck broke the sound barrier with
2:20
characteristic nonchalance. He even
2:22
failed to tell his team that he'd fallen from a
2:25
horse and broke in several ribs just before
2:27
his test flight. He probably figured
2:29
that they wouldn't want to trust a guy who could barely raise
2:31
his arms to fly their expensive experimental
2:33
aircraft.
2:36
But none of these stories explained why Chuck Yeager
2:38
is a hero to happiness experts like me. That
2:41
stems from an incident that took place later a
2:43
couple of weeks before Christmas in nineteen
2:46
fifty three, Chuck
2:49
was now piloting an upgraded version of the
2:51
glamorous Glennis, the new X
2:53
one A. The X one A
2:55
was built to travel more than twice the speed of
2:57
sound.
2:58
Chuck was excited to.
2:59
Try out the new aircraft, especially
3:01
since a pilot from the US Navy had recently
3:04
beaten his record. Chuck was pretty
3:06
eager to reclaim his crown as the fastest
3:08
man alive. Back
3:11
then, no one really knew what would happen to an airplane
3:13
or a human body when it reached that velocity
3:15
in height. The forces Chuck was about to
3:17
face were as unprecedented as they were dangerous.
3:21
So cut to December twelfth, nineteen fifty
3:23
three, Jaeger's tenth flight and the
3:25
X one A began routinely enough. Chuck
3:27
and the X one A got carried high into the sky
3:30
by a big bomber plane. The
3:32
X and A was then dropped from the belly of the bomber
3:34
and Chuck ignited the experimental rocket at
3:39
The X and A flew upwards fast, but
3:42
soon started kind of freaking out. It
3:45
was pitching and rolling and tumbling. Chuck
3:48
grappled with the controls inside the cockpit but
3:50
nothing the pilot did seemed to stop the plane's
3:53
violent descent, and
3:56
so the X one A was now plummeting out
3:58
of the sky while tossing its poor test pilot
4:00
around like a rag doll. At
4:03
some point, Yaeger was thrown violently into
4:05
the cockpit's canopy.
4:07
He even cracked the.
4:08
Plastic with his flight helmet. All
4:11
this goes to say this was not a good situation.
4:14
In a matter of seconds, the experimental aircraft
4:17
dropped more than six miles. Even
4:19
if Jeger had known how to stop the X
4:21
one a's rapid descent, he was too dazed
4:23
to operate the controls. Was the
4:25
plane rolling or spinning? Chuck
4:27
had no idea. There was nothing he could do
4:30
but surrender to the g forces jostling
4:32
him in his seat as the aircraft fell
4:34
towards the barren Mojave desert below.
4:39
Laurie. This is the kind of cliff hangout
4:41
opening that my cautionary tails listeners will be
4:43
familiar with. A doomed plane and an
4:45
equally doomed pilot hurtling towards
4:47
Earth. So what
4:49
did Chuck Yeger do?
4:51
Nothing?
4:52
Nothing, well, mostly nothing, which
4:55
is why happiness experts like me loved what happened
4:57
next. Chuck
4:59
was known for his nerves a steel, but this
5:01
situation had him totally spooked. He
5:03
later said that if the X one A had been fitted
5:05
with an ejection seat, he would have used it,
5:08
but most experts say if he'd done that, there'd
5:10
be no way he would have survived. In the parlance
5:12
of test pilots, he would have been committing suicide
5:15
to save himself from dying. So
5:17
without any way to escape, Yeager had two
5:19
options. Option one, he could do
5:21
everything in his power to write his tumbling rocket
5:24
ship to be fair. This was what
5:26
Truck tried to do at the beginning, but his
5:28
attempts to use the controls didn't work. At
5:30
best, they did nothing, and they also may
5:32
have made a bad situation even worse. So
5:35
once the plane's descent became too violent, he
5:38
was forced into option number two. Just
5:40
do nothing, just write it out,
5:43
and that is exactly what saved him. When
5:47
the X ONEA hit about twenty five thousand feet,
5:50
it finally steady. The aircraft
5:52
was still spinning, but it was the kind of spin
5:54
that Yeager was familiar with. Once
5:56
all the nightmarish bucking and tumbling was over, the
5:59
veteran test pilot was finally able to pull
6:01
up the nose of his craft down to twenty
6:03
five that I would want to get back
6:05
to play. Sure, huh. If you listen to Yeager's
6:08
cockpit recordings, his fear is
6:10
very obvious and his relief is
6:12
palpable.
6:13
I can't very much.
6:14
Before I got it, he
6:17
knew he was in trouble, but in the end he
6:19
was going to make it home all right.
6:24
I don't know a thing up or not. The
6:29
wild Ride wasn't a total disaster. The
6:32
X one A had topped out at mock two
6:34
point four to four, and that
6:36
record was finally enough for Chef Boy.
6:39
He told his team, I'm not going to do that
6:41
anymore.
6:46
Jaeger walked away safely from the X one
6:48
A and never flew a wocketplane again.
6:53
I love the story, Laurie, and it's definitely a cautionary
6:56
tale. But what's the happiness moral
6:58
of this anecdote?
7:00
Well, I first heard this story from one of my favorite
7:02
meditation teachers, the psychologist Tara Brack.
7:05
She shares it as a cautionary tale. But our usual
7:07
need to constantly be in control of every
7:09
facet of our lives. When Rafe's with
7:11
a problem, most of us instinctively want
7:13
to take action. We feel the need to do
7:16
something, even in cases when we kind
7:18
of know our actions will be an ineffective or
7:20
even make stuff worse. Tera says
7:22
that in times like this we need to copy
7:24
the great Chuck Yeger. We need to pause,
7:26
take our hands off the controls, and
7:28
just let things be. This pause,
7:31
Tera writes, gives us a possibility of
7:33
a new choice.
7:34
Now, sitting back isn't something
7:36
that comes naturally to many of us, so let's
7:38
have a think about the ways in which it could
7:41
actually be the key to performing better and
7:43
feeling happier. I mean, I'm struck
7:46
by some of the caution detales that
7:48
we've had over the years,
7:50
where doing nothing is in fact
7:52
precisely the right thing to do.
7:55
There's one on the subject of masterly inactivity,
7:58
which features Helena bottom Krter
8:00
as the formidable Lady Saale.
8:03
In the disastrous British Army
8:05
operations in Afghanistan
8:07
in the nineteenth century, this idea of masterly
8:09
inactivity was raised, and
8:12
it applied not just to maybe
8:14
the British should never have invade in Afghanistan,
8:16
which I think with hindsight is obvious.
8:19
But also parenting, maybe we
8:21
should do less parenting or medicine,
8:23
maybe doctors should be doing
8:25
less, prescribing fewer tests, prescribing
8:28
fewer treatments. Even soccer goalkeepers
8:31
are too committed to being active
8:34
when faced with a penalty was in fact, they'd be
8:36
better off if they stayed still.
8:37
Wait, wait, Tim, as you know I'm an American
8:40
on behalf of my fellow Americans, can you
8:42
just explain what this penalty kick example
8:44
is in a little bit more detail.
8:46
Sure, I mean, I understand that the joys
8:48
of soccer are finding American
8:50
shaws these days, but maybe
8:52
not this particular study. So some
8:55
I think there were economists who started that actually
8:57
looked at what goalkeepers do
9:00
when faced with a penalty kick.
9:02
And basically, in the penalty kick,
9:05
the striker gets to try and put
9:07
the ball in the net, and
9:09
they can boot it to the left, or they can boot it to the right,
9:11
or they can bout it straight down the middle, and the
9:14
goalkeeper doesn't have much time to
9:16
react. And so the standard procedure
9:19
for a goalkeeper is just to guess it's fifty to
9:21
fifty, just dive to the right
9:23
or dive to the left, and you got
9:25
a fifty percent chance of going the right way. Even if you
9:27
do go the right way, you might not save it. I mean, actually,
9:30
most penalties turn into goals. Usually
9:32
the keeper isn't able to save it, but
9:34
there's a lot of pressure on the keeper to try.
9:36
So the goalkeeper will usually leap
9:38
off to the left or the right. If they leap in the wrong
9:41
direction, well you know, no one blames them for that. But
9:43
actually quite a lot of penalty kicks
9:45
go fairly close to where the goalkeeper
9:48
originally was standing. They go right
9:50
down the center or near enough to the center,
9:52
and you can prove that if
9:54
the goalkeeper had not dived either way,
9:57
they probably would have had a better chance of
9:59
saving the penalty kick. They
10:01
would also have looked ridiculous
10:04
if the kick had gone far to the left or
10:06
far of the right, because they would have looked like they weren't
10:08
even try. And so there's
10:10
that pressure to act even when just
10:13
waiting and standing still would have been a
10:15
better thing to do.
10:16
Yeah, but I think it's something that's really hard
10:18
for our mind. I mean, take the medical case you mentioned.
10:21
I've seen the importance of doing
10:23
nothing in cases where friends of mine
10:25
who've had cancer have been advised, well,
10:27
rather than do some surgery or rather than do some chemo,
10:30
let's just watch and wait. I
10:32
think this is what doctors often call nonoperative
10:35
management or active surveillance, which I think
10:37
is a funny term, this idea of active surveillance, because
10:39
it feels like there's nothing active about it. It's complete
10:41
inaction. You're just kind of sitting there waiting, and
10:43
I think people don't like that. I mean, some studies, especially
10:46
for some cancer show that this can be really
10:48
helpful for dealing with a cancer. Right. Sometimes
10:51
you go through chemo and surgery, but there's
10:53
a tumor that's going to grow back anyway, and so it
10:55
was just like silly to take the risk of doing
10:57
all that surgery and chemo. But the idea
10:59
of just sitting there and like seeing what
11:01
your tumor does, it's just an incredibly
11:04
scary situation for people
11:06
who are facing it. People just want to do something,
11:08
even if it's futile, to feel like they're taking
11:10
some kind of action rather than doing nothing.
11:12
Which I suppose is why that word
11:15
active is so important. Active
11:17
surveillance, so the idea that you are
11:19
doing something The challenge, of course, is
11:21
to know whether active
11:23
surveillance, whatever it is, mastering and activity, to
11:26
know whether doing nothing is the right
11:28
thing, And for that you would need some
11:30
kind of statistical evidence
11:32
base, you'd need some kind of rigorous
11:35
experiment. But I know doctors
11:37
are quite convinced that they are over
11:39
prescribing too many tests, too
11:41
many treatments that are not necessary. And
11:44
so the question there is, well, why do they feel
11:46
that that's the right thing to do, or maybe they don't feel
11:49
it's the right thing to do, why do they do it? And
11:51
it is often a fear of being sued by
11:53
a patient, or simply just trying to get
11:55
rid of a patient who is pestering them and
11:57
saying I want you to do something, like okay,
11:59
fine, you want me to do something even though I shouldn't
12:01
do anything. I'll give you this drug or I'll
12:03
prescribe this test and that'll help you to
12:06
go away.
12:06
So it seems like we'd all be much happier,
12:08
maybe even healthier, if we could figure
12:11
out the importance of sometimes doing
12:13
nothing. But tim sometimes the best
12:15
decision isn't just to pause and do nothing.
12:18
Sometimes the best thing we can do is to actively
12:20
take something away. But it turns out
12:22
this subtracting stuff seems to be even
12:25
harder for our lying minds to deal with. It's
12:27
something that we're very, very bad at.
12:29
We are, indeed, and we'll learn more about
12:31
that when this Cause Retail's Happiness
12:34
Lab crossover episode returns
12:36
after the break.
12:43
Welcome back to the Happiness Lab.
12:45
And welcome back to Caution Retales.
12:47
Wait, Tim, remind me do you usually introduce a
12:49
second historic story after the break in your episodes,
12:52
because if you do, I have yet another fun tale,
12:54
one that's not about the advantage of doing nothing,
12:56
but about the power of taking stuff away.
12:59
I'm going to stop you, Laurie, go for it. Go
13:01
ahead, how can I resist? Well?
13:03
Story number two doesn't take us as far back
13:05
as the nineteen fifties, but it does involve
13:08
a clever strategy for operating yet another
13:10
hard to deal with vehicle.
13:11
Ooh, let me guess. Hard
13:13
to deal with vehicles combine
13:16
harvesters, no giant
13:18
robots that you get to sit on or I don't
13:20
know, tell me.
13:21
Actually the story involves a bike, like
13:24
just a regular kids bike.
13:25
Oh okay, well, hopefully it's
13:27
a good story.
13:28
Well, the story begins with a guy by the name of
13:30
Ryan McFarland. Ryan came from
13:32
a long line of motorsports junkies. His
13:34
grandfather was a race car engineer, and Daddy
13:37
McFarland ran a motorcycle shop. All
13:39
this meant that Ryan spent his childhood having
13:41
fun with all kinds of dangerous wheeled vehicles.
13:44
He rode dirt bikes and played in go karts and race
13:46
stock cars. Ryan
13:49
was eventually able to translate his love for
13:51
all things wheels into a profitable engineering
13:53
career. He made a name for himself patenting
13:56
both a better bike seat and a new wheelchair
13:58
suspension system. So you could
14:00
imagine Ryan's delight when he finally
14:02
became a dad himself. Pretty
14:04
much as soon as his son Body was out of the womb,
14:07
Ryan was ready to pass on the far In
14:09
family.
14:09
Love of wheels.
14:11
Body was two when he got his first cycle, but
14:13
riding a bike Ryan quickly realized
14:16
is kind of hard for a toddler. Ryan
14:18
was passionate about getting Body on two wheels
14:20
as soon as possible, so he spent thousands
14:23
of dollars buying Body the usual learner
14:25
vehicles toddler tricycles, trainer
14:28
bikes, even a training wheel equipped
14:30
motorcycle.
14:32
Oh wait, a training wheel equipped
14:34
motorcycle. You're trying to convince me that that is
14:36
a typical learner vehicle. I'm not buying it.
14:38
That seemed like a terrible idea for a two year
14:40
old.
14:41
Well, I think it was tim Basically, nothing
14:43
Ryan bought worked, Plus none of them were
14:45
all that good at teaching a little kid the most important
14:47
part of riding a bike, which is the art of
14:49
balancing it. You can't learn to equalize
14:52
your weight on a bike with training wheels because the wheels
14:54
wind up doing all the balancing work. And
14:56
so Ryan decided to engineer a new kind
14:58
of bike, one that even a toddler
15:01
like body could learn to balance.
15:02
And how did you do that?
15:03
Well, his solution was.
15:05
To start with a typical bike, but rather
15:07
than adding something new to the bike's design,
15:09
he chose to take something away. He
15:12
got rid of the pedals. Ryan
15:14
was the first to design what's now known as a strider
15:17
or balance bike. Kids can easily
15:19
get the bike moving just by pushing their feet
15:21
on the ground, kind of like Fred Flintstone
15:23
style, and without pedals to worry
15:25
about. Even a two year old could ride it on
15:28
the strider body was able to learn to steer
15:30
and balance all the stuff he'd need when
15:32
he graduated to a real bike or
15:34
I guess the motorcycle. Ryan
15:36
was able to turn his idea not just into a tory
15:39
for body, his balance bike turned
15:41
into a global company which has now sold
15:43
millions of pedalist bikes in less than a
15:45
decade.
15:48
I love this, Laurie, and as somebody who's written
15:50
about the history of technology, I feel
15:52
obliged to point out that this is
15:54
what bikes were originally like. They
15:56
were sometimes called hobby
15:58
horses. Oh, the
16:00
Germans had, I think the Louf machine.
16:03
I forget exactly what it was. The Dandy horse
16:05
was another thing they were called. The bikes originally
16:08
didn't have pedals because the whole idea of pedaling
16:10
you needed gears. He needed a chain.
16:12
It was too difficult. And so we had
16:14
bikes like this all along, and then somehow
16:17
we forgot them, and then Ryan reinvented
16:19
them for toddlers, which is brilliant.
16:21
But I'm curious, why did you want to tell
16:23
me the story what's going to do with happiness?
16:25
Well, the real reason I wanted to mention Ryan's story
16:27
is it involves a practice that's super good for our happiness,
16:29
but also one that's really hard for our minds to do.
16:32
To get his design right, Ryan had to take
16:34
something away. He had to subtract the
16:36
pedals, and the research has shown
16:38
that subtracting stuff is much harder than we
16:40
think. I first learned about Ryan's
16:43
project in this book by Lydie Klotz.
16:45
He's a professor of engineering at the University of
16:47
Virginia. He's written this awesome book called
16:49
Subtract The Untapped Science of Less.
16:52
But he does all these experiments where he shows just
16:54
how hard it is for adults to figure out how to
16:56
solve a problem that requires taking
16:59
something away. He does these fun studies with his
17:01
college students where he shows them this kind
17:03
of lego bridge type thing that's
17:05
sort of uneven.
17:06
It's kind of about to collapse because it's got.
17:08
One leg in the wrong spot, and
17:10
he asks subjects do something to make
17:12
this structure a little bit more stable. And
17:15
so subjects have two choices. They could
17:17
add a bunch of new blocks so that
17:19
this structure becomes more stable, or
17:21
they could just take away the one stupid block
17:23
that's extra on one side and so then all
17:25
of a sudden the thing would balance better. And
17:28
what he finds is that even if you suggest
17:30
to subjects like hey, it's also possible
17:32
to take stuff away, subjects have a
17:34
really hard time with this. They're much
17:36
more likely to add a bunch of stuff, which takes
17:38
them more time than just to take one thing away.
17:41
Lidy found that subjects even still do this
17:43
when you charge for the amount of blocks they're
17:45
going to use. So subjects now have to pay ten
17:47
cents for every extra block they put on, and
17:49
it's still really hard for them to figure out that they have
17:52
to take some stuff away to make this work best.
17:54
I had the privilege of interviewing
17:56
Lidi for the Financial
17:58
Times. I read his book and I found it
18:01
really fascinating. And when I first saw
18:03
the work on Legos, originally
18:06
the whole idea was sparked because he noticed
18:08
that his son just naturally pulled
18:10
away the extra block. So his son
18:12
didn't seem to have a problem subtracting, but it didn't
18:14
occur to him to subtract. When I first
18:16
thought, I thought, yeah, well, I mean, you know, I
18:18
like Lego, that's great, but is
18:21
this really of practical significance.
18:23
But then some of the other experiments
18:26
that Lady had been doing with his coauthors
18:29
were I think much more obviously
18:32
relevant to day to day life. For example,
18:34
one of the ones he did was he got people to suggest
18:37
improvements to a recipe for soup. Here's a recipe
18:39
for soup. How do you make it better? And
18:42
people would always suggest, oh, well, you could add
18:44
some cream or garlic or salt
18:46
or whatever. They're suggest adding steps
18:49
or adding ingredients, and very few
18:51
people said, no, you need to take away
18:53
this ingredient because it's going to swamp everything else.
18:56
There seems to be this inbuilt bias. And even
18:58
when he suggested cases
19:00
where it was absolutely obvious
19:03
that you should take something away, people didn't.
19:05
So for example, in one experiment,
19:07
they showed people and itinerary
19:10
for a day in Washington, d C. I
19:12
used to live in DC. It's a lovely city. There's
19:14
loads to do, but this itinery was crazy.
19:17
I think they had twenty four different stops
19:19
and they would basically be going to a Library
19:22
of Congress, twenty minutes there, get back
19:24
in the coach down the mall to a museum,
19:26
twenty minutes in the museum, get back in the coach, take
19:28
you somewhere else, and you just go all over DC and
19:30
try and see everything. And it was clearly insane.
19:33
And they were given this itinery and told,
19:35
okay, how do you make it better? And
19:37
the obvious answer is take out some of
19:39
the stops, give everything some room to breathe,
19:42
less time driving from one place to another,
19:45
more time actually enjoying what
19:47
you're seeing. And people just didn't
19:49
do it. They would rearrange the
19:51
order of engagements, they'd maybe try to make things
19:54
a bit more efficient or more logical, but
19:56
they did not remove stuff, even when it was
19:58
clear that everything was just too
20:00
much and subtraction was the only answer. So this seems
20:03
to be really quite a deep bias in the way
20:05
we think.
20:05
And the travel example, I think shows just how
20:07
much it can affect our happy when we have too
20:10
much stuff, when we don't realize the power of taking
20:12
things away. I've been on those vacations where
20:14
it's like just too many things, Just
20:16
like, wait, if I just took out one or two
20:18
of these and I could just sleep in an extra
20:20
hour, I could just take a moment to rest,
20:22
I'd feel so much better. But it's not just
20:25
like ephemeral things like travel plans where we
20:27
mess this up. We also mess this up with the literal
20:29
stuff that's inside our houses. And Tim, I know this
20:31
is something that you've actually written a book on the
20:33
kind of striking way that our materialism is
20:35
problematic for us, and sometimes we don't subtract
20:38
enough of our own stuff.
20:39
Yeah. I got involved in this by
20:41
accident. So I wrote a book a few years ago
20:43
called Messy, and it's
20:46
kind of a messy book. It's about improvisation
20:48
and jazz and filing
20:51
cabinets and conversations
20:53
and all kinds of things. It's sort of a messy
20:56
book, and in many ways it's the book I'm
20:58
most proud of. But when I published
21:01
this book around about the same time,
21:03
Mary Condo's book, The Life Changing Magic
21:05
of Tidying was also out and was a
21:07
huge bestseller, And so people were always
21:10
asking me to talk about, you know, the
21:12
contrast between my book and Mary Condo's
21:14
book, because I'm for mess and she's for tidy,
21:17
and you know, and actually I kept
21:19
saying, I don't think I mean, I loved
21:21
her book. Actually, I don't think there's as much of
21:23
a difference as you might think,
21:25
because really the point
21:27
that she made in the Life Changing Magic of Tidying
21:30
is you can't organize
21:32
your way out of too much. You
21:34
could only subtract your way out
21:37
of too much. You have to get rid of stuff.
21:39
So, in fact, her book is not really about tidying.
21:42
Her book is about minimalism. Her book is about subtraction.
21:44
And I've got absolutely no problem with that. Sometimes
21:46
you need that space. And I
21:49
was similarly skeptical about organizational
21:51
systems. I don't think organizational systems
21:54
solve the fundamental problem of too
21:56
much stuff going on. But yet we fool ourselves
21:58
into thinking that, you know, if only we did
22:00
have the right hacks, if only we had
22:03
the file effacts, or if only we had the right software,
22:05
then we could solve all the problems in our lives by
22:07
just getting organized. And sometimes,
22:10
no, there's twenty four hours in a day, there's
22:12
only so many rooms in your house, that there's
22:14
only so much time, there's only so much
22:16
space. And I think a
22:18
really fundamental insight of
22:21
economics, and people don't think of economics
22:23
as offering wisdom for day to day life,
22:25
but I think it does really fundamental insight
22:28
and economics is everything has an opportunity
22:30
cost. And what that means is everything
22:32
you do, everything you buy, every
22:34
hour you spend is getting
22:37
in the way of something else. It's something else
22:39
you can't do. It's some other way you can't
22:41
spend that hour, it's some other thing that you
22:43
can't afford to buy because you bought
22:45
that first thing. And when you see everything
22:47
as potentially getting in the way of everything else, you
22:50
start to realize, as Ldi Klott
22:52
says, not only should you be subtracting
22:54
the bad stuff, sometimes you have to subtract
22:57
the good stuff as well, because
22:59
subtracting the good stuff makes space for
23:02
more good stuff and to enjoy the good
23:04
stuff that you have.
23:06
I think this is so important for myself
23:08
in so many different way. But this is also
23:10
something that I've seen in my students.
23:13
Right.
23:13
They have these college students today have these such
23:15
like over subscribed schedules, like
23:18
they just never have time to do anything. And I
23:20
think that's because they grew up in generation where
23:22
parents gave them so much to do that they got
23:25
used to not ever having time to do stuff.
23:27
I know you've talked a little bit about helicopter
23:29
parenting. This is something that we talk a lot about
23:31
on the show. But one way to describe
23:33
helicopter parenting is the problem of
23:36
not subtracting enough. Right, you want
23:38
your kids to, you know, learn how to
23:40
play soccer, and you want your kids to get piano
23:42
lessons, and you definitely need them to get a math tutor
23:45
and an SAT tutor and all these things, and
23:47
so you pack as kids schedule to the
23:49
point that they have no time for rest, no time
23:51
for play, no time for being social with kids their
23:53
age. And the right solution isn't to give them
23:56
more tutoring, it's to just subtract
23:58
stuff. I think what happens is that parents
24:00
have kids' schedules that are just really
24:03
oversubscribed, and then they get worried of
24:05
like, oh, well, he doesn't have time for play, he doesn't have time
24:07
for friends. So I'll just add in a play now,
24:09
squeeze that into all the other stuff that kids
24:11
have to do. But this overscheduling,
24:13
the research shows, makes kids like way more
24:16
anxious. Anxiety disorders are going
24:18
up. Kids will sometimes report sometimes
24:20
like you know, we very busy adults do, that they have no
24:22
time, that they feel overwhelmed by their schedule,
24:24
when it also feels like everyone would just
24:27
be much happier and probably everybody
24:29
would perform more successfully if
24:31
we could just take a bunch of stuff out of kids'
24:33
schedules.
24:34
Yeah, and I think an important thing to underline
24:37
We kind of already said it, but let's say it again because
24:39
we're adding, not subtracting as I always do,
24:42
is there's nothing wrong with any of this stuff.
24:44
There's nothing wrong with having a masthitude. There's nothing
24:46
wrong with learning an instrument, there's nothing wrong with
24:49
with learning a sport. It's all good.
24:52
It's just there's a limit. And sometimes
24:55
we like to tell ourselves, oh, if we just get
24:57
rid of all the wasted time, we get
24:59
rid of all the bad stuff, then we'll have time
25:02
to focus on what really matters. But actually
25:04
know, sometimes you have to get rid of stuff that you really
25:06
do want to do, the stuff that is worth doing,
25:09
because you can't do everything, and it's painful
25:11
to face up to that.
25:13
So the question is why don't we follow this
25:15
idea of less is more? Why
25:17
is it something that's so hard for our minds. We'll
25:20
learn some ways that we can all do this better. When
25:22
the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab crossover
25:24
gets back from the break, Welcome
25:30
back to the Cautionary Tales Happiness Lab
25:33
crossover. So, Tim, before we left,
25:35
we were talking about ways that we can make
25:37
subtraction a little bit more obvious for
25:39
our lying minds. And one of the
25:41
ways that occurs is when sadly
25:44
there's nothing we can do but subtract.
25:47
I know these are cases that you've talked about on Cautionary
25:49
Tales before, So maybe share one of these stories
25:51
where people can actually subtract, but only when
25:53
they're kind of forced into a corner and they have to.
25:56
Yes. The example that has
25:58
haunted me ever since I
26:00
heard it was Keith
26:03
Jarrett, the great jazz pianist,
26:06
and his attempt to play a solo
26:08
piano concert in the great German
26:10
city of Cologne. And that
26:13
particular concert, it was the largest concert
26:15
that Jarrett had ever played solo. He was still quite
26:17
a young man, I think he was still in his twenties.
26:20
There was a mix up at the opera house.
26:22
The promoter was very young, she was a teenage
26:24
girl called Vera Branders, and she
26:27
or the opera house between them, had
26:29
not got a good piano on
26:31
stage for Keith. He'd requested a particular
26:33
piano Bozendor for Imperial. He's
26:36
a real perfectionist. And instead they
26:38
looked around for a bozen Door for piano, and they'd found
26:40
this beaten up rehearsal model, not
26:42
a proper grand piano. It's not big enough,
26:44
but also in really bad condition, out
26:47
of tune, pedal sticking, all
26:49
kinds of problems, and Jarrett
26:51
basically said, look, I can't play this. If
26:54
you can't get a new piano, I won't play, and
26:56
he left. But it turned out they couldn't
26:59
get a new piano. There wasn't enough time, and
27:02
Jarrett eventually realized
27:04
that if he didn't play, then
27:06
this poor girl who was promoting
27:09
basically her first concert was going
27:11
to be torn apart by this crowd of angry
27:13
German jazz fans who would show up for it was a late
27:15
night concert at eleven thirty, probably had a few
27:17
beers. They're going to show up at this concert
27:19
and there'll be no concert. There'll be no Keith Jarrett.
27:22
So Jarrett decided, Okay, I have to do it.
27:24
I have to play this thing. And so he walks
27:26
out on stage in front of this packed
27:28
auditorium fourteen hundred people,
27:31
sits down to play this piano
27:33
that he knows is unplayable, and it
27:36
is the concert of a lifetime. It is his most
27:38
successful ever recording. And
27:40
because of the manifest limitations
27:42
of the piano, he was forced into
27:45
playing what was basically a much simpler
27:48
melody, a much simpler approach to
27:50
improvised jazz than he would normally
27:52
use. He was using a restricted number of keys,
27:54
he was avoiding certain areas of the keyboard,
27:57
he was keeping it quite simple and rhythmic.
27:59
The point is he could have done that
28:01
on any piano, and yet he didn't
28:03
because it never occurred to him. You know, he always
28:06
wanted to use the full range of what was available,
28:08
and it was only when all of those options
28:10
were cut off and he was
28:13
absolutely backed into this corner that
28:15
he discovered this simple style, which
28:17
continues to be his most loved
28:20
work. And I think that's just an
28:22
insight into the way that we
28:24
don't do it unless we're forced to. We often need
28:26
this disruption, we need this problem to occur
28:29
before we find a new solution, a
28:31
new way of solving our problems. And
28:33
that new solution, in this case and in many cases,
28:35
actually involves doing less
28:37
than we've done before.
28:39
And I think this is one of the strategies that Lighty
28:41
Klatts mentions in his book right, which is
28:43
to pretend that you're forced into this, like
28:45
he suggests in a business meeting, and
28:47
when you're trying to figure out some problem, to
28:49
just have somebody on the team say, Okay,
28:52
what if we were forced to take something away?
28:54
What if we were unable to add something and we
28:56
just had to take something out?
28:57
What would we take out?
28:59
Right, that kind of thought exercise winds
29:01
up putting you in the simulated situation where
29:03
maybe you can't add anything else, you've
29:05
got to take something away.
29:06
What would be the one thing you take away? And
29:08
the experiment sage.
29:09
While it doesn't come to our mind naturally, when you kind
29:11
of strong arm people and say no, no, no, you have to pick
29:13
something to take away, what would that be, all of a
29:15
sudden, the strategies can start seeming a little bit
29:17
more obvious. So that's kind of one of my favorite
29:19
ones, is to ask this question, Okay, if I was forced
29:22
to take one thing away, what would that
29:24
be. It's helped me in my schedule
29:26
immensely, right where I'm looking at the
29:28
month ahead and I'm like, there are just too many
29:30
trips, like I just can't fit all this travel in.
29:32
Sometimes I ask myself, Okay, if I had to take
29:35
one away, like if you know, I don't know, some huge
29:37
deity came down and was like, no, your's this kind
29:39
of schedule monster, like you have to take one thing
29:41
out of there. What would it be? Usually I have an obvious
29:43
answer. I'm like, well, I didn't want to do that trip. That's
29:45
the one that's kind of least interesting to me, or maybe the
29:47
least valuable. And that can kind of force
29:50
you to realize like, oh wait, maybe I can just take
29:52
that one out. You don't need the mean schedule monster to
29:54
show up to kind of force you to take something out.
29:56
You can make that decision for yourself.
29:58
Yeah, I mean it reminds me we often
30:00
see politicians saying,
30:02
oh, we're going to have a rule that if
30:04
you introduce some new regulation,
30:07
you're not allowed to do that unless you cancel
30:09
an old regulation, a kind of one in one out,
30:12
or sometimes it's one in two out. You
30:14
have to cancel more regulations than you had, and
30:16
to some extent it's a bit silly. I used
30:18
to long, long, long, long time ago. I used
30:20
to work in regulatory reform at
30:22
the World Bank, and we used to try to measure the burden
30:25
of different business regulations around the world. Fascinating
30:28
work, and we try to be quite sophisticated
30:30
and try to produce all these comparisons.
30:32
So one country could say, well, this is the
30:34
regulations for setting up a business in this country.
30:37
But if you're an entrepreneur in the neighboring
30:39
country, it doesn't take you a year to
30:41
set up a business. It takes you seven days.
30:43
So why is that? What are the stages
30:46
that take so long in one country and that
30:48
don't exist in another country. That's really
30:50
insightful, I think, and informative. But
30:52
sometimes just that simple rule is hey, you've
30:55
got to remove a regulation, figure out what it
30:57
is. Sometimes that's enough that'll do the
30:59
job.
31:00
Another thing that does the job is really trying to
31:02
harness your inner economists and to really
31:04
think about what those active opportunity
31:06
costs are like, to really be mindful
31:08
of the other kinds of things you could be doing
31:10
if you were able to subtract something. And
31:13
one of my favorite strategies for that I first learned
31:15
about in Hal Hirschfeld's great book
31:17
About Our Time biases. He talks
31:19
about what economists and psychologists have referred
31:21
to as the yes damn effect and how to
31:23
deal with it. And so the yes damn effect
31:25
is probably something that will be familiar to many of our
31:28
listeners. Somebody says, hey do you want
31:30
to do this presentation? Or Hey do you want to
31:32
go to this kind of not very interesting dinner
31:34
party, or hey do you want to sign up something in
31:36
your schedule? And you feel kind of bad,
31:39
so you're like yes. Then weeks later that
31:41
project or that dinner party comes up, and
31:43
that's where you say damn.
31:45
And so that's the yes damn effect.
31:47
You say yes to something, time passes
31:49
and then you see it in your calendar and you're like,
31:51
damn.
31:52
So how do we deal with this?
31:53
Yeah? I mean that's very familiar. I
31:55
know that experience.
31:56
It's not unique to me.
31:58
Yeah. My general kind
32:00
of heuristic is I should just say no to more
32:02
things than I think I should, and over experience
32:05
you learn it, but then you know it's never
32:07
entirely successful. So is there a te that
32:09
you'd recommend to get more out of this yes?
32:11
And the trick is what's known as the no
32:14
yay effect, or you kind of do the same
32:17
thing, except you start by saying no, and
32:19
then you experience the consequences later on
32:21
of what that feels like. So let's
32:23
kind of play this out. Laurie, do you want to do some project?
32:26
You know, to do this date? I say no, definitely
32:29
don't want to do that. But I don't stop there.
32:31
I record the fact that I was asked to
32:33
do this, and so I go to that date in my calendar
32:36
when that project I just said no to would have been due,
32:38
and I write in, Hey, Laura, you didn't have to
32:41
do the project this day. And then you get
32:43
to that date in the calendar and you realize, oh,
32:45
my gosh, my day would have been so much
32:47
worse if I had that huge.
32:48
Project to do. And then you have the experience
32:50
of yay. And so this is the no yea
32:52
effect.
32:53
And the reason I love it so much is it gives
32:55
you these kind of periodic reminders
32:57
of the fact that saying no had
32:59
a reward, right, Like you are training
33:02
your brain to notice that no doesn't
33:04
just kind of feel yucky in the moment, because I hate
33:06
saying no to stuff. I don't like the feeling of like, oh,
33:09
and wanted me to do it. I feel kind of bad. I feel kind
33:11
of guilty. You're kind of giving yourself
33:13
with the opposite emotional reaction
33:15
when that date of the thing finally comes
33:17
up, where you get the moment to remember, oh my
33:19
gosh, I just save myself this time. I'm so kind
33:22
of proud of myself unhappy. And so the
33:24
no yay effect has been really powerful for
33:26
me because it's helped me like, remember
33:28
how happy I am that I didn't sign up for something
33:30
at the first time.
33:31
I really like that, Laurie. It's very it's
33:33
very clever. I actually have an even simpler
33:36
hack that I use all
33:38
the time. So this works if there's
33:40
someone else to whom you're accountable, if
33:42
you have a spouse, for example.
33:45
And this just going back to that original
33:47
insight about opportunity cost, like everything
33:49
you say yes to is getting in the way of something
33:51
else, and flip that around.
33:54
Everything you say no to every time you're invited
33:56
to some commitment, every time you say no to
33:58
that, you're saying yes to something else. So
34:01
the way I phrase it is if I say no to
34:03
some trip, some dinner, some
34:05
commitment, if I say no to that, I'm
34:08
also saying yeah, yes to my family. I'm going
34:10
to be at home. I'm going to be spending time with my wife and
34:12
kids. But I don't just tell myself
34:14
that. I tell my wife that, and when
34:17
I am replying to the email,
34:19
because it's always an email, when I'm replying
34:21
to the email saying this
34:23
is really kind, but I'm afraid I can't do it,
34:26
I just blind copy my wife and
34:28
it's like a little note to her, look
34:30
at what I just said no to, because I'm saying yes to
34:32
you, And it just makes it much more positive
34:35
to me. Slightly fills my wife's inbox
34:38
with my refused invitations, but I think that overall
34:40
she appreciates that visibility
34:43
into the decisions I'm having to make every day and
34:45
saying I'm not going to do this, I have something
34:47
more important waiting for me at home.
34:49
I bet that increases marital satisfaction in
34:51
a bunch of different ways.
34:52
I might have to do this.
34:53
My poor husband's inbox is going to implode
34:55
with all the things I'm saying no too.
34:58
But the cool thing is that there are these.
34:59
Ways that we can kind of bring subtraction to the
35:01
forefront. It doesn't come naturally, but like with
35:03
a little bit of extra work, scribbling things
35:05
in the calendar, an extra BCC on
35:08
the email can kind of bring subtraction
35:10
to light and maybe that will make us a little bit
35:12
happier.
35:13
Tim, thank you so much for joining me on the Happiness
35:15
Lab.
35:16
Well, it's been a pleasure, Laurie, thank you for joining
35:18
me on Cautionary Tales. Dr
35:20
Lourie Santos, as you know, is the host
35:22
of The Happiness Lab.
35:23
And Tim Harford, as you know, host Cautionary
35:26
Tales. Both podcasts are productions of Pushkin
35:28
Industries and are available wherever you get your podcasts.
35:31
Now, this is the last of our planned crossover
35:33
episodes, but it isn't the final time
35:36
that we're going to be collaborating. On
35:38
March the twentieth, Laurie and I are
35:40
going to be teaming up for a special show
35:42
dedicated to World Happiness Day.
35:44
Yes, Tim will be joining me for a chat alongside
35:47
our fellow Pushkin podcast hosts Maya
35:49
Shunker and Malcolm Gladwell. We we'll all
35:51
be considering ideas for making the world a slightly
35:53
happier place, and we hope to see you back
35:56
then.
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