40: Nick Epley

“One morning, it struck me: what are we all doing here? Is this really the best we can do??”

About Nick

Nick Epley, the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Faculty Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Aside from his professorial duties, Nick is a bestselling author and an award-winning researcher whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, NPR, and many others. He’s been named a "professor to watch" by the Financial Times, one of the "World's Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors" by Poets and Quants, and one of the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics by Ethisphere, among many other honors.

Nick’s class at Booth, “Designing a Good Life,” is one of the most highly rated and sought after classes at one of the most highly rated and sought after business schools in the country. At a grad school known for its quant focus, students have come to love the class where principles include “doing good feels surprisingly good.”

Perhaps this is because Nick understands one of the most important life lessons – it’s not all about the numbers. The real KPIs are harder to quantify: good conversations, meaningful relationships, a career you love, making an impact. And, as Nick teaches his students, there isn’t much of a trade-off between self interest and social interest.

It’s a refreshingly atypical perspective, but Nick is a refreshingly atypical educator. Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in a family full of farmers, Nick fell in love with the outdoors at an early age. He played football in college but, fortunately for the thousands of students whose lives he would positively impact, he broke his nose in his first game and decided that academics might offer a more promising – and less violent – future career than the offensive line.

After earning a PhD in psychology from Cornell, Nick began his teaching career at Harvard. His first day was September 12, 2001. Needless to say, lecturing was not top of mind, and he and his PhD seminar students sat around the table… and just talked, processing their emotions in the wake of the terrorist attacks. It was this vulnerable, down-to-earth, real-world approach to education that got Nick voted one of Harvard’s Favorite Professors three years in a row.

And although Nick hasn’t found himself on the gridiron of late, the father of five has maintained his love for the outdoors, turning his suburban Chicago home into an urban farm with fruit trees, a large garden, a flock of chickens, and a large family to help tend it all. So, when he’s not teaching behavior, you might find him feeding chickens, splitting wood, and picking fruit.

And that’s Nick’s way of living a well-designed life: teaching others about perspective while maintaining a healthy one himself.

   nicholasepley.com

Books

A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson)

• Transcript

  Max Chopovsky: 0:02

  This is Moral of the Story interesting people telling their favorite short stories and then breaking them down to understand what makes them so good. I'm your host, max Dripofsky. Today's guest is Nick Epley, the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Faculty Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Aside from his professorial duties, nick is a bestselling author and an award-winning researcher whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, cnn, wired, npr and many others. He's been named a professor to watch by the Financial Times, one of the world's best 40 under 40 business school professors, by poets and quants, and one of the 100 most influential in business ethics by Ethosphere, among many other honors. Nick's class at Booth, designing a Good Life, is one of the most highly rated and sought-after classes at one of the most highly rated and sought-after business schools in the country, at a grad school known for its quant focus. Students have come to love the class, where principles include doing good, feels surprisingly good. Perhaps this is because Nick understands one of the most important life lessons it's not all about the numbers. The real KPIs are harder to quantify good conversations, meaningful relationships, a career you love making an impact, and as Nick teaches his students, there isn't much of a trade-off between self-interest and social interest. It's a refreshingly atypical perspective. But Nick is a refreshingly atypical educator. Growing up in Cedar Rapids, iowa, and a family full of farmers, nick fell in love with the outdoors at an early age. He played football in college but, fortunately for the thousands of students whose lives he would positively impact, he broke his nose in his first game and decided that academics might offer a more promising and less violent future career than the offensive line. After earning a PhD in psychology from Cornell, nick began his teaching career at Harvard. His first day was September 12, 2001. Needless to say, lecturing was not top of mind and he and his PhD seminar students sat around the table and just talked, processing their emotions in the wake of the terrorist attacks. It was this vulnerable, down-to-earth, real-world approach to education that got Nick voted one of Harvard's favorite professors three years in a row. And although Nick hasn't found himself on the gridiron of late, the father of five has maintained his love for the outdoors, turning his suburban Chicago home into an urban farm with fruit trees, a large garden, a flock of chickens and a large family to help tend it all. So when he's not teaching behavior, you might find him feeding his chickens, splitting wood and picking fruit. And that's Nick's way of living a well-designed life teaching others about perspective while maintaining a healthy one himself. Nick, welcome to the show. Thank you, max.

  Nick Epley: 2:54

  That was lovely, I need to hire you as my PR guy.

  Max Chopovsky: 2:57

  That's great. I love writing the bios. So you are here to tell us a story Before we get into it. Set the stage. Is there anything we should know about the story before we get started?

  Nick Epley: 3:11

  So the story seems small but, like, I think, most good stories, it grew into something really, really big for me and it's something I think about a lot. It's one small experience and it was one that I never would have imagined I would really remember. It's one that's touched my professional life. It kind of changed the direction of my research over the last decade or so, but it's hit me in home a lot too, hit my personal life a lot, and it has changed the way I live my life more than any other research I've ever done. Stem from this, I think, from this little experience.

  Max Chopovsky: 3:55

  That sounds profound. Yeah, all right, let's get into it.

  Nick Epley: 3:58

  Tell me a story. So I take the train into Chicago every day from my home in Flossmore on the far south side, where we have the fruit tree and garden and chickens, and every day I see the same kind of drill, and I don't pay it a whole lot of mind. One morning, though, I got on the train and I just noticed the situation in a way I kind of hadn't noticed it before. So I was writing my first book, which is called Mindwise, and the book is all about the research that I do here as a behavioral scientist, studying social cognition. These are the inferences we make about each other's thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mostly I study how we screw that up and misunderstand each other in lots of different ways. And this capacity to connect with or to think about the minds of others is the thing that really makes us unique on this planet as human beings. It's the reason our brains are three times bigger than our nearest primate, relative to the chimpanzee, and yet and it's also the thing, it turns out that makes us happiest when we connect with others, we tend to be happier than when we're alone. Being alone is one of the most miserable states that we can be in. And yet every morning I get on this train and I see the same drill happen time after time after time. And this morning. I find that morning I finally noticed it. Everybody gets on the train, lines up along the outside window, hugging that window as if it's like the last safe space on the planet. And then people come in and sit down next to them and we've got a 45-minute ride into Chicago and for those 45 minutes people sit there and essentially ignore each other, just totally ignore each other. And this one morning I saw this and it clicked in me that this just seems weird. What are we all doing here? Is this really the best we can do? We're all sitting with our neighbors, other folks who are perfectly delightful or just as interesting as we are, and here we all are sitting there staring at our stupid phones or reading a book or whatever other thing we think we might like to do at this time. And I'd ridden the train for years by then. But this morning it just struck me as odd and so I decided to try something else. That morning a woman had gotten on the train. I'm usually the last one to have someone sit down next to me on a train car if I'm riding by myself. I'm not a kind of guy. Somebody comes and naturally sits down next to me. I'm kind of big. I don't know, I'm often avoided. But eventually a woman came and sat down next to me. She was probably in her 50s I would have been in my upper 30s at that time, or so mid to upper 30s and she came and sat down next to me. She had this beautiful red hat on it's a big red hat and took it off when she sat down next to me African American woman and I decided I'm going to try something different today. I'm just going to try to have a little conversation here. So I did and you can imagine the feeling of sitting there. Somebody comes down, you're going to have a conversation. It was like I was hitting a wall there. I had this anxiety. Maybe she's going to think I'm weird or trying to hit on her or something, or she's going to be uncomfortable. What do I have to say to this person? She doesn't seem interested, she's not talking to me. All this anxiety that we have in many of these social situations about reaching out and engaging, I had right there. Nevertheless, I tried. I remember making a joke about her hat. I said something like I love your hat, I've got one Just like it, and she kind of chuckled. I said hello, I introduced myself, said who I was, she introduced herself and then for the rest of the trip into Hyde Park it was about a half hour ride. We had a perfectly lovely conversation. I asked her about her job. I remember telling me that she felt kind of stuck in her job. She didn't really like it. I asked her is this kind of your dream job? No, but she wasn't quite sure how she was going to get out. She's got kids. She needed support though. So she was feeling kind of trapped and we really kind of opened up to each other in that conversation and it was nice. It wasn't necessarily the best conversation I'd ever had, but it was nice and certainly nicer than a typical train ride I would have had sitting there all by myself, which would have passed totally uneventfully. I mean, I remember it. Now, 13, 14 years later, I remember that conversation and I got off the train and I remember distinctly thinking that this might not be unusual. We've all, I think, had experiences where we didn't want to go to the party but we went and we were happy we did. Or we didn't want to make that call or have that conversation, but, god, we were happy, we did. And here on this train ride. I was a little nervous about having this conversation Nobody else was talking, but I was glad that I did and the conversation. What really struck me is that the conversation wasn't just good, it was surprisingly good, and it's that contrast that I think really matters. That is, the conversation was better than I expected it would have been. Now, as a researcher I'm a behavioral scientist for living, a single anecdote, a single story like that doesn't tell us much. Like well, whatever, she was nice, we found stuff to talk about. That was just a one-off thing. We have no idea, right, what if I did that a hundred times? What would that conversation be like? I don't know, and so, as a scientist, I'm always nervous about individual stories and anecdotes like that because we don't know what it means. Maybe it was just unique to me and it wouldn't show up in other places or whatever. But I remember distinctly feeling that this feels like something that could be reliable and robust. I had a few reasons why I thought that might be true. I remember walking the few blocks here at a campus thinking about why this might be something that doesn't just happen to me but might happen to other people in general with any kind of conversation. And that conversation then, when I was done with that, came back to my office and I started having conversations with our graduate students, juliana Schroeder in particular. I was one of my graduate students at the time. We decided to run an experiment. Look, you see what happens when we just ask folks to do this, like what I did, but we have other people do it. Do it a bunch of times and we found that my experience didn't seem to be so unique. On average, people reported having a more positive commute when we randomly assigned them to a condition where they engaged in conversation with somebody than when they kept to themselves. And yet when we asked a separate group of people to tell us how they thought they would feel, they thought they would feel happier keeping to themselves than they were talking, which makes sense. Now, why nobody talks on a train if you think it's going to be less pleasant talking than keeping yourself? Of course, who keeps yourself every time? But from that one little story it sparked a decade and a half now of research where we find that effect that people find social engagement and social interaction not just to be good but surprisingly good. We find it over and over and over, and, over and over again. I think people aren't social enough for their own well-being. That was the morning I was inspired to do all this work.

  Max Chopovsky: 11:39

  That transcends personality profiles, because some people are introverts.

  Nick Epley: 11:44

  There are a few things that are more widely misunderstood than that phenomena of introversion and extroversion. There's a whole cottage industry of research on this. Now it turns out we didn't find any differences between introverts and extroverts and how much they enjoyed their conversations. This was true in the US. This was true in London as well, when we replicated that experiment there. It's true in calves leaving midway airport buses downtown. We've replicated this a ton of times now. Your level of trait introversion or extroversion doesn't matter, for how much you enjoy the experiences of these conversations. What we sometimes although not always reliably, but others also find is that what personality does predict are your beliefs about how much you're going to enjoy these things. Oh, interesting. The way to think about personality is not a description of your experience, but rather of your expectations and choices. An extrovert isn't somebody who likes talking, whereas an introvert likes doing things alone. An extrovert is someone who chooses to go out and interact, whereas an extrovert chooses to keep to themselves. It's about expectations, not about experiences. That's what personality is really about. There are lots of myths about introversion and extroversion Like it's about experience. Introverts get their happiness from quiet pursuits, whereas extroverts get their happiness from connected. That's just not true, just flat out not true. If that were true, you'd see a few things. One thing you'd see is that personality wouldn't be correlated with happiness, because extroverts get their happiness from certain things, extroverts get their happiness from other things, but there wouldn't be a meaningful difference between them. We've known now for 50 years that that's not true. The first study that actually looked at the personality correlates a well-being found a huge correlation between extroversion and happiness. Extroverts are happier. Full stop Correlations about as big as the correlation between the heights of fathers and sons.

  Max Chopovsky: 13:43

  Big effect Because the extroverts have an expectation that they will enjoy those conversations more and therefore they tend to have them more.

  Nick Epley: 13:49

  That's exactly right. Extroverts are happier because they act like extroverts more. If you look over the course of any given day, you behave in some ways more extroverted. We're talking right now. It's a little more extroverted experience here, but before we were doing this you were setting this up by yourself, quiet, alone, over the course of the day. We vary in how we behave. Sometimes we're outgoing, sometimes we're quiet. I'm teaching a class. Sometimes Other times I'm sitting in my office typing. If researchers come to you and just tap you on the shoulder, they don't actually do that. They tap you on your phone. They just right and ask you hey Max, how are you feeling right now? Hey Max, what are you doing right now? What you find is that people tend to report feeling more positive and less negative when they're behaving more extroverted than when they're behaving more introverted. That's true regardless of whether you tend to be an extrovert or introvert. Introverts are also happier at the periods of their day, feeling more positive in the periods of the day where they're acting more outgoing than when they're not. You also see this in experiments. If you ask people kind of like weeded on the trains, if you randomly assign them to act in a way that's more extroverted versus introverted. There's now kind of a cottage industry of experiments, of these sorts of positive activity interventions, where you just randomly assign people in a moment, right like in a lab study, or over the course of a day, or on several days, over the course of a week or over a couple of weeks, to act in different, particular ways. You ask people to act more extroverted today than you might normally, or act more introverted today than you might normally. What you find over and over and over again is that asking people to act more extroverted, whether in the moment, over the course of a week, over the course of a couple of weeks, makes them feel more positive. Again, that's true regardless of how extroverted or introverted you are. The only experiment I've ever seen that finds this activity intervention, this encouragement to act extroverted, affects extroverts and introverts differently, is a study where the introverts just didn't follow instructions. To ask more extroverted is what happened? Right, they just couldn't do it, for whatever reason, they just didn't do it. And so the effect, you know, your willingness to take the drug in this case, or to follow the instructions, was correlated with how extroverted you were. So extroverts went out and acted more extroverted and they got happier. The introverts didn't do as much what they were asked to do and they didn't get happier. So the extent to which you felt happy was a function of the extent to which you followed the instructions. The extent to which you followed the instructions was a function of how extroverted you were. It's a little like doctors finding that exercise only improves your health when you actually do it. That's. The only exception that I've ever found was one where people's choice to follow through on the thing was affected by their personality.

  Max Chopovsky: 16:42

  Well, I mean, I don't think that has a good impact on the experiment, because the experiment is if you choose to follow it, if you choose to follow the instructions, then you will get the sort of predicted outcome.

  Nick Epley: 16:51

  Yes, although for psychologists, if you're interested in what effect this instruction has on how you feel a week or two weeks down the road, whether you follow the instruction or not does matter for the effect of this instruction on your outcome. But it is also the case that if you do follow the instruction, if you do act more extroverted, you're going to tend to feel more positive, and that's why extroverts tend to be happier, because they tend to have more of these positive outgoing experiences. And this is not our experiments on the train or these experiments I'm describing to you here don't suggest that there's a certain way everybody should behave. But it's important, I think, to understand where our feelings and our experiences and our emotions come from, to be able to understand ourselves accurately, because you can then make wiser choices. So if I'm sitting on the train I'm having kind of a bad day, I know how to make that better. Sitting right there next to me a source of well-being, right there it's crazy that the pandemic obviously increased people's isolation.

  Max Chopovsky: 17:52

  We know that, obviously when everybody was in lockdown. But I think the longer term effect of the pandemic one of the many is that it gave rise to a number of services that actually facilitate fewer interactions. You can order food online and never even interact with your delivery person. In fact, they would tell you on Amazon, like, don't come within six feet of them. You can order your coffee online and just go and pick it up without talking to a single person, and I was thinking about this the other day. It's actually incredible how efficient we can be with our day if we don't go out of our way and order everything on our computer. You and I could have had this conversation online. I could have ordered my food at Medici's in advance and just picked it up, and so we actually get to save a lot of time. As a result of all that, it becomes very efficient. But I found, as you would expect, that I was less happy because I was spending so much time by myself, clicking, clicking, clicking and minimizing my interactions with other people. So here's a textbook example of this when I am by myself, it feels miserable and I need to be around people, whether it's school travel trips, which I've done, or I did this program called Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses. When I was running my video production company, I was around 30 other Type A CEO, founder, extroverts. There probably weren't even that many takeaways that lasted from that time, from that class, but all of those times I remember being happiest, being at my best, and so it's just so interesting how, in an attempt to help people, social distance as a result of the pandemic, we have accelerated these trends of isolation. I mean, I don't know how many you've probably looked at this, but in many, many years we've probably accelerated them.

  Nick Epley: 19:53

  Yeah, so for decades in fact, this has been happening. So throughout most of human history, life was a deeply social affair. Every day was spent in the presence of other people. You had to coordinate with other people for anything. Most market-based exchanges were done through reciprocity and bartering. Right, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. I for an eye, tooth for a tooth, back scratching and eye gouging. Deeply social affairs that's how life happened when people grew up. They didn't move out and start their careers in some far off city. They moved over so that they could stay in the household and welcome their family as part of it. Everybody was local. The concept, even the use of the word loneliness in the English language didn't really even emerge until around the 1800s. Before then, lonely would be used to describe aloneness, oneliness, right being by like solitude, which is not inherently inversive If you are engaged in something alone. I spent a lot of time outdoors in the woods hunting fish and do those sorts of things. Being in solitude alone is not inherently aversive, but before about the 1800s people didn't seem to feel lonely that much. That subjective experience of feeling disconnected from other people or feeling isolated from other people, or feeling like you didn't have people around who would help or support you wasn't common enough for people to write about. It wasn't until the 1800s that this other usage of the word aloneness, loneliness, oneliness started to be used. Now dictionaries before, in the 1600s, dictionaries only had one definition of lonely or alone. It was being isolated or alone being by yourself, being objectively disconnected from others. Now our dictionaries have two. They have lonely, the subjective state of feeling disconnected from others, the psychological state. And, of course, you can feel lonely in a crowd of other people. You can feel lonely. Even when you're in a marriage or with your family. You can still feel lonely. Our dictionaries now have these two different meanings and I think there's just a ton of technology that we have built over years that help us to be more independent from each other, and there are great benefits to that. So I can get in a car and drive somewhere and I don't need to work with somebody else to help get someplace. I can go to the grocery store and pay with money. I don't have to go to the farmer next door and barter this for that thing, Because all of this just so much technology has air conditioning, heating, almost everything has allowed us to live more independently from each other. Technology in recent years phones and computers and stuff have accelerated that to an exponential degree, I would say. And the pandemic did so too enabled independence because we had to be, and there are great benefits to that. It is a great benefit to be able to order your food before you get there if you want, if you want to be efficient, or be able to hop in your car and drive somewhere else you want, or order stuff online. All of that's great. But there's also a cost to that that I think can be harder to observe. You could now spend entire days alone if you chose to never interact with another person, and you wouldn't necessarily know that that was problematic for you Not necessarily. You might think that's going to be much more efficient. So you choose to do that. You don't feel the outcomes of that, except in a slow crawl over the long run. It seems things seem to be a little off. I'm just in this funk. I don't really know why I'm up. I don't have a whole lot to get excited for. A lot of that comes from just being disconnected from other people and that's easy to undervalue. In fact, psychologists for until I would say, around 1950 or so also devalued, underestimated. The importance of social connection, of being with others, for our health, for our happiness, for our well-being, for our flourishing. A Maslow famously created this hierarchy of needs, which turns out not to be true. It never was supported by the empirical evidence. Even though it's woven our way into our psyche, it turns out to be nonsense Interesting.

  Max Chopovsky: 24:23

  I know that.

  Nick Epley: 24:24

  Yeah, so belonging is on the third level. There it's like the bronze medal of importance. You couldn't care about other people until you have food needs met, basic needs of food and sleep and so on. And then the second level, safety and security, and you had to have that satisfied before you could start caring about belonging. He put that in kind of third position. Did it suggest that's not true Really?

  Max Chopovsky: 24:53

  What could you think about being with other people when you're starving or when you're not safe?

  Nick Epley: 24:58

  So it's not that certain goals don't focus your attention they do. When you're starving, you focus on food. When you're feeling unsafe, you focus on being safe. When you're lonely, you focus on other people. So it's not that those goals don't focus your attention they do. It's just that they don't seem to operate in any sort of priority. It's not that a person who's hungry can't also, at the same time, feel alone or isolated or desperately alone. It's not that a person who feels unsafe can't also wish, or feel like they wish, they were better connected to others. Those things can all happen at the same time.

  Max Chopovsky: 25:40

  Maybe his perspective is those lower levels Would crowd out the upper levels, because if you're feeling isolated and you're also hungry and somebody's chasing you to try to eat you, you're not gonna think about connecting with other people until you get away from that threat.

  Nick Epley: 25:54

  Yeah, so that was his intuitive perspective. This makes intuitive sense. It just doesn't support about the data. It predicts a negative relationship. So people who feel, for instance, hungry, shouldn't rate their social connection as being as important. Right, you should see a negative relationship between these needs, and that just isn't true. Interesting, isn't true?

  Max Chopovsky: 26:15

  so let me ask you this how important is the depth of the conversation to creating the intended effect? In other words, if you talk about the weather, that's one. Or if you talk about sort of what makes you happy, what makes you unhappy. When the woman said, you know, it started sharing some for personal problems with you, that seems a bit unusual. But I think that's where sort of the deeper connections are made. But I want to understand your perspective is the depth of the conversation important?

  Nick Epley: 26:46

  Yeah, we've done a ton of research on this. In fact, all of our incoming MBA students, in fact, this fall they're doing a session with me on building Culture, on culture, here at booth. That's really about building community, and they're gonna do this experiment I'm about to describe to you in just a minute. So We've been doing this research now for a number of years and I guess one way to think about it is that almost every, almost every social interaction From whether I talk to you to what do we talk about to do I express this kind thought. I, you know, give you a share complement with to you, express gratitude to you. All of these social engagements come with a moment where you have to decide do I? reach out and engage, or do I hold back and avoid? These are classic approach avoidance Decisions that people have and they're, you know different weights that you feel right. Sometimes you'd want to reach out but you're a little nervous about this right and essentially the way to characterize the research that we've done over the last decade and a half or so that's now published and well over a dozen empirical papers, is that that approach, avoidance calculation we seem to just get wrong. And the weight we put, the fear we have About approaching others, the avoidance motivation that we have it's just a little too strong, not wildly so right now. We're not idiots. Recognize somebody coming down the alley with a knife towards us? I want to avoid that guy, right? Yeah, it's not that we're idiots about it, it's just we're off of it that this conversation, like I had with the woman on the train that morning, it's a little worried how it would go. It's a little off on that turn out didn't even need to be that worried. Yeah, when we're thinking about what to talk about with somebody, we might want to have a meaningful conversation. I want to find out, right, what's your life really like? Tell me about who you are, what you care about. Maybe you don't want to talk, maybe so too personal, maybe it's a little nervous about that. It looks like we're a little off about that too. So in our experiments, what we do is we Ask people to have different kinds of conversations, and sometimes we do this by letting them decide what to talk about. So we have them write down some questions. We did this in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago. So if you're ever out there on a nice summer afternoon you might see us out there running experiments. We have them write down a couple questions that you know they might talk to somebody else about in conversation and we pair them up with somebody else down the park that day too and have that Conversation. Or we have them come up with a couple of questions that are deeper than they would normally ask another person about Conversation, and then we just have them discuss one of those two sets of questions. Or we give them different questions, right. So in some experiments we have people relatively shallow questions, right, tell me about the last time you walked for more than an hour. Or can you tell me what you Did last Halloween? Or we give them questions that are Notably deeper, like what are you most grateful for about in your life? Tell me about it. Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Right, and we just asked them to discuss those different questions and we find two things. So first, before they have this conversation, we ask them to tell us how they think it's gonna go. We asked them to predict how positive they'll feel about the conversation, how much they'll like the other person, how strong a bond they'll feel with the other person, how awkward the conversation is gonna be, mm-hmm, right, and then, after they're done with the conversation, they come back and they tell us how they actually feel, how awkward it actually is, how much actually like the other person much they enjoyed, how strong about they felt okay, and we find a consistent gap between those two things. Over and over again, just like we did on the train, people thought these conversations might not be as good as keeping themselves. As far as we can tell, exactly the opposite was true. If we have people have conversations with strangers, just kind of, in general, they tend to go better than they expect. That's just a very, very robust effect, and that gap between how positive I think this conversation is gonna be and how positive it actually is, or, conversely, how negative and awkward it's gonna be versus how negative and awkward it actually is the gap between that is bigger for the deep questions and it is for the shallow questions right, it's bigger. Interestingly, not hugely bigger. So one thing that was surprising to me actually Was that even when we give people the shallow questions, they still like that more than they expect. And the conversation I mean kind of the nature of conversation, the nature of dyadic conversation, what you and I are doing right now the nature of dyadic conversation that often moves deeper over time as you're in it. So the very first time I ever did this I remember, never forget this with our booth MBA students, we randomly assigned half of this group of you know 300 to have a relatively shallow conversation, a relatively deep conversation. They didn't know that they had gotten different questions. Okay, I'm then revealing this, you know, after we've conducted this experiment, and I'm talking about what happened and I'm telling the deep Condition side that you guys just had a deeper conversation. Then these folks over here who were assigned to the shallower condition and the shallow Condition people like rose up in protest that way wait. No, no, no we really had a meaningful conversation. That question about Halloween led to all of these other things, right, and indeed, if we look at the data, it kind of did that is. There was still a. You know, people say they don't like small talk, and I think that's right. They don't like small talk, right. So if you sticks to that. But these conversations about smaller topics that we had people start in were, gateway is the deeper things that they talked about as they went on and that made it more positive than they expected. But for the folks in that that we start off with the deep questions, they go even deeper, they like it more and it's even more of a surprise now to them how positive the experience is gonna go.

  Max Chopovsky: 32:31

  That's interesting. So the slope is the same, that I don't actually know. It could be. They just start. The people that start shallower go deeper, the people that start deeper.

  Nick Epley: 32:39

  It could be or they start deep and they stay deep, right, I don't know how much deeper. Yeah right, tell me about the last time you cried in front of another person. We're already kind of tugging on your heart strings. Yeah right, we're probably not gonna go a lot deeper than that. So you ask an interesting question there. We've never done as. We only asked people before they go into the conversation afterwards. Some of my colleagues and other researchers in the field will sometimes monitor this as they go along. We don't record these conversations. We don't want yeah yeah, people to to filter what they're doing, like what we're doing right now. We're gonna go out to your nine million subscribers, right? We? We don't do that to our participants, so we just assess it beforehand and afterwards. But it would be interesting to ask them how intimate or deep is the conversation as it goes on? I don't know what that's actually looks like.

  Max Chopovsky: 33:26

  I feel like that's less important than the fact that it starts deeper and stays deep, or Starts a bit shallower but ends up deeper. I think the point is depth.

  Nick Epley: 33:35

  Yeah, so what we could get that? We could certainly get that in our shallow conditions if we just ask people how intimate they think the conversation is gonna be in compare with how intimate they think it actually is at the end. Right, so that we could do that. That I may do you. You just, you've just improved our research there. We'll do that. We'll do that in one of these future, future conversations.

  Max Chopovsky: 33:57

  Sure you know, I Just got back from a cruise with my family, yeah, and I spent a lot of time with my older two daughters just kind of wandering the ship and and there were obviously a ton of other kids on this Disney cruise and I found it fascinating. My middle one, who just turned six, I Found it fascinating to observe her interact with other kids because she is fearless from a social perspective and my older one is more shy. My youngest one can't talk yet. So yeah it was fascinating to watch her do this, because she would find somebody they'd be walking together, you know, to the restaurant or to meet, a character kind of like sitting together on a train.

  Nick Epley: 34:45

  Mm-hmm.

  Max Chopovsky: 34:46

  Obviously she's never taken your class, yeah, but she just turns to the girl and goes hey, I like your shoes, right, yeah, I was like, oh, thank you, yeah. And then she says to her where you from and I just observing this being like I'm learning, yeah, like this is a reminder to me that hey, start with a compliment, yeah, right, huge, yeah. That opens people up, then ask an open-ended question. But that is fascinating to me to see her do it naturally and it's frankly, it makes me feel better about when we start as kids, that we can actually naturally make connections, depending on personality type. Of course, by the end of the cruise she knew so many kids because she was like I remember you from kids club, I remember you from the restaurant and it's all. Because she doesn't have this sort of Stigma, this fear that we would have when we're sitting on a train trying to talk to somebody. She doesn't have that. She'll just make conversation. She makes a different choice.

  Nick Epley: 35:52

  She doesn't know that there's another choice. No, right, but she chooses differently than other kids do, right? So if she were quieter she wouldn't have made that connection with the kid. For sure she was right, for sure. Our daughter, our youngest daughter, 7 Lindsay, she has Down syndrome and she has no social filter either and she says hello to everybody, yeah, and To watch the world kind of come alive when she's around is just so heartwarming and it's so informative too. It's not something that ends with childhood. I often think of it as a switch. We all have it on our back and most people walk around with it turned off. Yeah, they got their headphones in, whatever they're looking at their phone anymore. But when someone engages with you, it's like flipping the switch on their back, like the woman who sat down next to me that morning. She was quiet, right, she'd taken her hat off, she was Alone, keeping it to herself. I made this joke boom, it was like a switch. She lit up, she smiled, she said hi, she came alive. Yeah, right, there's a guy who here is in the, in one of our language departments. I won't, won't embarrass him by calling out his name here, but he looks scary, like a scary guy. He looks kind of like. Close your eyes and imagine Eastern Orthodox. You're from Ukraine, right. Imagine Russian or Ukrainian Orthodox priest right, it's big, long be. He's actually French, but big, long, kind of gray scraggly beard right and eyebrows that only point down the furrowed brow right. Yeah, that's what he looks like and I Remember I got off the train one morning. We're both walking in. I chat people up walking in from the train all the time. I met a guy named John this morning, a guy named Nick two days ago, and we were there, stopped at the side where he had his headphones in and it looks scary as all get out right. You know Ukrainian Orthodox priest and I just tapped him on the shoulder and I wave and said, hi, I'm Nick. And his face just lit up, like he became a different person. If you were to show these two pictures the pictures of him side by side it's not obvious you'd recognize this is even the same guy. Like his face is totally changed. And all because I reached out and engaged with him. He lit up. I mean, we are, we reciprocate each other, that's just. That is the way social life works is through reciprocity. And you know, if I had not engaged with him at that moment, he would not have engaged back with me at all. Yeah right, I would never have known that he could look like that. And now every time I see him, we talked to each other. We, if I see him on the train going home. We sit and talk to each other on the way home. I've learned super meaningful things about his life and his family and we developed a connection, all because I knew he had that switch on his back and if I could flip it, be a different person. Yeah right, and you see that with kids kids who are, they don't even know the other people switch, they're just flipping it all the time, right, they're just nice. They're just nice, that's all it is. They're nice and they're interested. Go around like people up our daughter, lindsay, when she leaves the class, right, so we picked her up early all last year. The kids would knock on the window waving at her when she was leaving. She walked down the hall high, high, high. Everybody knows who she is. But it's not different. As adults we just often choose to behave differently. We don't choose to flip people switches like that.

  Max Chopovsky: 39:20

  Yeah, it's Fascinating how somebody could change visually after you get their attention. It's interesting when people say to you, to anyone, when they say, how are you? I'm sure you probably looked at this too when they say how are you, Most people answer I'm good, I'm well whatever they say, they don't answer.

  Nick Epley: 39:46

  right, they don't really answer.

  Max Chopovsky: 39:48

  Yeah, they're an autopilot. Yeah, what's interesting is if you look at other cultures, like the Soviet culture, like any of those countries, when people say how are you, you'll get an answer. You'll find out how they are. I have started doing it a little differently. Instead of saying how are you, which triggers this autopilot response, I will say how's your day going so far. It's so funny because people's reactions range from a double take like well, that's not what I'm used to hearing, or they'll just go right into it if they also happen to be more of an extrovert. But I find that interactions are obviously more fulfilling when you ask the question. That demands a thought-out answer. If they ask you a question, what I've found begets the most interesting conversation, irrespective of where you are, is if you are vulnerable with them. So you can have an entirely superficial conversation Outside of one of your studies where at least there's some semblance of, by at least one party, of understanding what they're there for. There was a guy that I would run into all the time, dropping my little one off at daycare for years and we would chat and have these superficial conversations. Then at one point we just stood outside the daycare and he asked me something about my brother. My brother and I were. Our relationship was not in a good place at the time and I shared that with him Shortly after that. He was like we should go out and get drinks at some point, as I'm sure. Well, you're probably an outlier, but for most people it's harder to meet people when you get older, when you have kids, you're not in the same place at the same time. Enough to sort of.

  Nick Epley: 41:43

  Yeah, it's hard, for me too it's hard when you're an adult.

  Max Chopovsky: 41:46

  What I found is being vulnerable with relatively random person made me more appealing to them, at least socially, when for the longest time it was like it'd be nice to get to hang out with him. It seems like a cool guy. But then nothing actually happened until we were having a generally superficial conversation. And then I decided to be vulnerable. In one moment he was like, oh cool. Like A he's open enough with himself that he's not just trying to protect his feelings and emotions. B it's kind of interesting. I'm dealing with something similar, but I feel like I guess my gut would tell me and I know your data says otherwise but my gut would tell me that if you are more vulnerable in a conversation like that, it maybe accelerates how quickly it goes deeper.

  Nick Epley: 42:38

  Oh no, I think that's absolutely certainly facilitates friendship and connection. We do that when we talk about meaningful stuff. There's no question about that. What we struggled with a little bit was getting people to stay as shallow as we wanted them to Totally, totally.

  Max Chopovsky: 42:51

  They couldn't just talk about the?

  Nick Epley: 42:52

  weather forever. But yeah, no, absolutely opening up. It's interesting to use the word vulnerable. People use that word a lot and they were quite know how to take it. So what I think people really misunderstand in social interaction is the power of reciprocity. So in our deep conversations, what people will often say they're nervous about is that they'll open up but the other person won't totally open it back. Occasionally that happens. Occasionally folks will say that happens, but super rare. Instead, the typical experience is I opened up and the shared this thing and then they did too. Yeah, from my perspective, at this point I'm thinking yeah, of course they did, because they're human beings. That's what people do, overwhelmingly. That's what people do. Yeah, but it's not quite what we expect and it's not what we fear will happen. What we fear will happen is you'll say something meaningful about your brother and what. This guy will laugh at you or say boy, sucks to be you. No, that's not the way real human beings are in conversation. But we fear that. Well, we fear that. That's right. We fear that. We unwisely fear that, in the same way that we fear snakes and spiders and we are not we fear people being meaner in conversation than they actually are.

  Max Chopovsky: 44:05

  When you're sitting next to somebody and you want to start a conversation with them, what do you say to them?

  Nick Epley: 44:12

  I want to reorient that question just a little bit. It's not what I say that I think is so important, it's the perspective I adopt on the conversation. It's not so much what I say that I think is important, it's the perspective that I adopt on the conversation. What we find is that when people take an interest in other people, then they know what to say. What I say in any given conversation varies from one to another to another. I don't always say the same thing. That woman that morning on the train had a red hat on the guy who I met along the sidewalk had seen him around a while, but not recently, and so that allowed me to connect with him. That way, I like to sweater. What you say to somebody can vary depending on the context you're in. When you adopt a perspective of taking an interest in somebody, you do what your daughter did. Hey, I like those shoes. Hey, where are you from? Hey, what do you do? Hey, how is your day going? Not how are you, how is your day going. That comes from taking an interest in somebody, just being interested in who they are and what they're like and how they are genuinely doing at that moment. Then the rest of it, I think, flows more naturally. That's what I tried to do a little more. I was more interested in other people. I was on a plane coming back from Atlanta a few weeks ago and sat down next to somebody and I didn't ask him how I was doing. I asked him what had he been doing? He was in Cuba fishing Super interesting, I love to fish. Who were you with? How was that experience? How did you feel during that? I asked about what it was like to be him in those experiences because I wanted to know, because I was interested. Then all of that flowed in the conversation. I think changing your mindset about the conversation might be a more effective way to engage with people than trying to focus on exactly what to say, because exactly what you say varies depending on who you're with. But that interest can often prompt things that, whatever is.

  Max Chopovsky: 46:23

  It's a wonderful North Star that, I think, will inform obviously everything you say. I ask because sometimes people say, hey, how's it going? I will find myself, before I even realize it, complaining about something. I do my best not to complain about the weather or traffic.

  Nick Epley: 46:43

  I just don't hear that right Exactly.

  Max Chopovsky: 46:45

  They'll be like oh, the kids are driving me crazy, or there's something that we're dealing with, or whatever. Then the interaction will be over and I'll just think to myself damn, I sounded like a curmudgeon. Inevitably some joke will come up about alcohol. Oh man, there's this big kids event. They should have some booze for the parents or something like that. I'll walk away from that interaction, being like damn, I didn't seem to have any depth in that interaction whatsoever. I'll just be hard on myself about that. You could have done better by being your more natural, positive self and maybe complaining a little less. I'm surprised myself sometimes when I have those interactions.

  Nick Epley: 47:25

  Yeah, you respond with what you're thinking about. In order to change how you respond in an interaction, you have to be thinking about the interaction itself and how you appear to others. That can sometimes be hard.

  Max Chopovsky: 47:38

  See what I found is actually. Upon thinking about it, I realized that I respond with something that I feel they would identify with, even if it's maybe a stretch from my emotional state. But I say it because I feel like it's more likely to create a connection. Then I say it. I'm like, well, that wasn't 100% authentic. I really mostly said it because I feel like they'll identify with me.

  Nick Epley: 48:04

  I see. So those are cases where you actually are trying to connect and you think that's likely to be effective or something.

  Max Chopovsky: 48:09

  Totally, that's what pops into your head, totally.

  Nick Epley: 48:11

  Yeah, I don't know what to do with that. Mostly what we're contrasting in our research are cases where you have that engagement versus have none at all Totally, and even complain with someone is probably better than not at all.

  Max Chopovsky: 48:25

  Better than not at all yeah.

  Nick Epley: 48:26

  Nevertheless, sharing positive stories is good. Sometimes I'll ask people what they're looking forward to that day or what was the coolest thing you did this summer. Like, if I'm meeting somebody, I haven't seen him for a while what was the coolest thing you did this summer? What are you looking forward to this fall? Sometimes you can direct conversation that way if it makes sense, if that's what you're interested in hearing about. That'll help.

  Max Chopovsky: 48:48

  I heard a question recently that was wonderfully open-ended and direct and immediately got people thinking which is what are you excited about right now? People are like wait a second, think about that?

  Nick Epley: 48:58

  Yeah, right, it tells us what's on your mind if it takes you a while to think about it. Right? It tells you what you're already thinking about.

  Max Chopovsky: 49:04

  It just demonstrates how unprepared to answer such a question that person is. I'm not operating in that state right now. You're asking me something that requires searching my database and then kind of unlocking that part of myself for the purpose of the conversation. You've talked about this, obviously, in your research on today, but if you were to sum it up, what is the moral of the story that you told?

  Nick Epley: 49:30

  The moral is that the anxiety we have about engaging with other people is just off. It's like our fear of snake or sharks. It's justified in some cases, but often over-applied. Because of that exaggerated fear or anxiety about how these interactions are going to go, we keep ourselves overly lonely. We refer to it, the phenomenon, as under-sociality. We're not social enough for our own well-being or for the well-being of others around us who, frankly, are also happier when they are being engaged with. The girl who your daughter complimented about her shoes was much happier in that moment than she would have been if your daughter had not said anything. I'm confident that the person I talked to on that morning had a more positive trainer just like I did because I engaged with her to begin with than she would have otherwise. I'm 100% sure that the friends I've made walking three blocks from the train over there to my office here, are happier for those little interactions. When I get on the train going home I almost always know people. How cool is that I've got friends. You make the world a little smaller. But if you're reluctant to reach out and engage, if that introverted inclination that keeps you from engaging, or even as extroverts, I become a more extroverted person because I've made different choices. It's just in the same way. You can become somebody who exercises more. By choosing to exercise more, that's true. I make the choice to engage others more often, and it sprinkles my life with more positive experiences than it would have otherwise. It also has affected some of our major life decisions too. We've adopted three children, one in particular, most recently, our youngest, lindsay. We adopted after we lost a baby who had down syndrome six months into my wife's pregnancy. There is no question in my mind whatsoever that this research we've done and all these data points that I've seen made it clear to me that if we opened ourselves and brought her into our lives, we did that, that things would go well. We would make them go well because that's what human? beings tend to do the fear that we have about reaching out and engaging or connecting with others off of that misplaced and we're under social for it, to our own detriment and to those around us too.

  Max Chopovsky: 51:58

  Yeah, that is so true.

  Nick Epley: 52:02

  We're social animals right Social animals, but we don't always act like it.

  Max Chopovsky: 52:06

  Right, we don't always act like it. Technology allows us to not act like it.

  Nick Epley: 52:09

  Some technology. But even Stanley Milgram, who's a famous psychologist, in the 1960s and 70s did experiments on obedience to authority that if you took an intra-site class you would have seen. Right the shock generator experiments or many of your listeners I'm sure have heard of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments. When he got older. In his research he got interested in anomalies of urban life and one of them is that folks living in cities tend to report being more lonely than people living out in the country. Studying New York in the 1970s, he went down to the subway, saw exactly the same thing that I see on my trains in Chicago, even after Steve Jobs has created the iPhone. He saw it decades before that happened. He said the norm of social behavior on the subways is, on the face of it, pretty clear. One is that people take seats first come, first serve. The other is that there's a norm that nobody talks to each other. Those are in the 1970s. It's interesting. Yeah, I think modern life has accelerated some of that disconnection, but is not entirely responsible to it. It's down deep in all of us that makes us a little nervous to reach out and engage that anxiety when you feel that. I think it's helpful to know it's probably off of it.

  Max Chopovsky: 53:22

  That's really good to know, because I do think there are a lot of people out there that just assume people don't want to be bothered.

  Nick Epley: 53:28

  For sure, for sure. That was the big reason why folks said they didn't want to talk to strangers on the train because they didn't think the other person was interested in talking to them. How would you know? How would you know Well, they're not talking to me, but you're also not talking to them either If two people sitting right next to each other who would be delighted to talk, who never talk because they think the person sitting next to them isn't interested because they haven't spoken up Totally. Psychologists call that pluralistic ignorance Plurality of people being ignorant about what other people believe. You get a trainload of folks who'd be delighted to talk, who never do because they think other people aren't interested. They don't know, they don't find out if they don't say hi.

  Max Chopovsky: 54:05

  I had a guy on the show a few episodes back named Jake Nickel, who is the founder and CEO of Threadless they're the crowdsourced t-shirt company. He's very much an introvert. Very much the story he told on the episode is they went to Sweden. I believe they found out about this tradition that, fun enough, turned out to not be a tradition at all, but started this practice that he has to this day, which is when they have a meeting with new people that they haven't met yet, they will start that meeting by going around the table and giving a five minutes inopsis of their life.

  Nick Epley: 54:45

  Nothing is off limits.

  Max Chopovsky: 54:48

  They'll go as deep as they're comfortable going. He goes after we have these conversations. We all feel so much closer because you realize how many similar experiences you've had to somebody else in the room and it humanizes them. He goes ever since that meeting, which was 10 years ago. Wherever he is with his buddy that went with him, who was working for him at the time. They will do this. It immediately accelerates the closeness that they feel with these people.

  Nick Epley: 55:23

  It just brings them together right away, for sure, absolutely, no doubt.

  Max Chopovsky: 55:27

  Such an interesting.

  Nick Epley: 55:29

  I've experimented on that and confirmed that observation. I'm sure, Totally 100% sure.

  Max Chopovsky: 55:34

  Let's talk about stories telling just for a minute. You tell a lot of stories and I'm sure that you've noticed that when you start a class with a story which I bet you do quite a bit it engages immediately, grabs attention. You've also heard a lot of good stories, because you've met some fascinating people. What do good stories have in common?

  Nick Epley: 55:59

  I think they engage you, they make you part of it as a listener. That's the big thing. If I start a class, I remember when I was in graduate school, my advisor, Tom Gillovich, who's at Cornell, was just a masterful advisor and a wonderful human being. I remember watching I just watched everything he did very carefully because I was going to have to do that myself. I was going to have to teach eventually, do research eventually. He always started papers with a story which is very unusual in academia, particularly with the time but would start with an individual story. That right away, if you pulled you into it so you could feel like you were part of it, and then you understood oh, I get what the paper's about. I don't even need to read the rest of the data. The rest of the data there is to support the cleverly crafted story at the beginning In class. I'll do that too. He would always come up in front of the room. He crosses arm. He had this way of standing, this Gillovich sort of stance. He would start every lecture with a story. He would never wouldn't say hey, welcome to class. Everybody, blah, blah. He would just start writing with a story. The whole class would be quiet and he would pull them in. Pull them in A good story, I think, walks you along through it so that you feel like you're kind of there, kind of there too, like you were there. It's a challenge for me. A lot of the stories that I want to tell in my classes, when I teach, for instance, or when I write, or when I talk about research, they're about experiments. That's, 500 people doing something. That's not a story there. What you try to do when you're telling that story, when you describe in that experiment or that research to people, is you try to put them in the experience as if they were in it, that can feel themselves going through the thing. Even when you're describing an experiment, if you tell it in a way that allows my students to feel like they're going through the experiment, they see the results, they're like get it. Oh yeah, there it is, I get it. I think a good story engages the listener so that you feel like you're part of it.

  Max Chopovsky: 58:13

  Totally. When I was in high school I took a class at UofL and it was intro to psych. I've always been fascinated with psychology and human behavior. My favorite part of the class was the story at the beginning, a lot of the experiments. You could actually just talk about the experiment and it's an interesting story. The experiment that they did with where they dressed up kids as prison guards and another group of kids as the inmates. You just listen to that and you're like, oh my God, what a crazy story. I've always found that so fascinating. You can imagine yourself in it. Yeah, I did think about that. Those stories always grab me. I think it's definitely a great way to start. What is one of your favorite books that gets storytelling right?

  Nick Epley: 59:01

  I think Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is a really good example. This is a story about us hiking along the Appalachian Trail. For me as a researcher, as a scientist, I'm writing, trying to communicate ideas, and I don't do this in the way that he does. That book is super fun to read because he's walking the trail. You feel like you're there with him, you're feeling the experience, but then he uses it to spin all of these tangents about facts and real things, about bears and berries and the history of the trail and whatnot. It's like a tree with all these branches that stick off of them where there's facts and real data and stuff the kind of stuff that I would like he gets to those by through this thread of walking down this trail. I think that's an anybody who can pass along those facts while telling the story. I mean any good, any really really good nonfiction writers does that masterfully. I think he's really good at that. He does that a lot. A lot of his books are of that story, that nature, but that one in particular, because he was hiking the trail, that was kind of the story, that's what kind of pulled you in and he used all these little signposts as he was going along to go off in these tanges. That would be the whole rest of the chapter. But you were engaged with those because of this. You were following this thread of the story that he was going, and that is so I think you know a lot of. When we think about a good story, we often think about the thread of that story itself. Right, the narrow telling of that story, but really masterful storytellers can hang all kinds of other stuff onto it. That's impressive.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:01:00

  I love that. That's impressive. I meant to ask you, by the way, as an extrovert, is it hard for you to write, given that you're alone when you're writing?

  Nick Epley: 1:01:11

  So I would back off on that. I would even stop where you're that assumption. I act extroverted, but I am not an extrovert. To call somebody a particular personality, it seems to describe something about who they are and how they experience the world, rather than the choices they make. So I would think of that as an excursion. I am someone who chooses to engage. Is it hard for me to be alone in my office writing? Yes, damn hard, it sucks. It's hard for anybody to sit alone in their office and write all the time. That's hard. I promise that some people write easier than others. For sure, absolutely. That's true. There's a little bit of wrinkle in variance, yes, but I promise every author is happier when they're out with their buddies at a bar having a beer on a Friday night. I promise you.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:02:02

  They're happier.

  Nick Epley: 1:02:03

  I promise. Everybody who writes is hard, hard. Just sit there and write by yourself. It's hard and it's not as fun as hanging out with your kids. They're going on a vacation with folks you love or going out to dinner with your spouse that's always way more fun. So the huge effect for people is that they tend to be happier when they're with others doing fun things than when they're alone by themselves. There is some wrinkle, some variance in that experience when you're alone and writing and stuff, but that tends to be pretty small. But yes, the hardest part about my job is the amount of time I spend in that office, 15 feet from where we are right now, by myself.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:02:48

  It's so hard. I find it excruciating sometimes, once I get into the flow, if I'm doing something like writing or something like that.

  Nick Epley: 1:02:55

  But you're engaged, absolutely yeah.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:02:58

  Then the time kind of flies quicker. I mean everything you know about being in flow, but it could be brutal.

  Nick Epley: 1:03:06

  It's very hard. Yeah, it's very hard.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:03:08

  All right. So last question If you had a few minutes with your 20-year-old self now, suspend disbelief on the grandfather paradox. Suspend the assumption that your 20-year-old self might not listen to you right now. What would you say to your 20-year-old self if you could say one thing?

  Nick Epley: 1:03:33

  I think I'll say keep at it. One thing I tell my kids a lot is that they will make themselves happy. I think that's something that we don't intuitively believe. We believe that we have to make the right kinds of choices as we go along and things have to work out. I was in graduate school or in college when I was in my 20s right, and thought if I maybe get this girl to agree to marry me which she did, so we've been married for 27 years If I can get this grad school application to work out, all that stuff happens, then I'll be happy, and if it doesn't happen, I'll feel like hell. You kind of need that to keep moving along. Yes, but at the same time, the data on well-being and happiness suggests that people kind of make themselves happy with their own outcomes once they're committed to them. So had I not gotten into graduate school and done something else, I'd have figured out how to make myself happy over there too, and I think a lot of the anxiety that I had when I was younger about things not working out was just kind of misplaced. If I hadn't gotten into graduate school, I'd have done something else and I would have figured out how to make myself happy there too. And if Jen had decided she wasn't going to agree to marry me when we were juniors in college, we'd get married after we graduated. But that was when I proposed to her. She said she wasn't going to do that. Well, I would have carried on and I would have found somebody else I hope, who I would have been connected to and try to tell my kids that too, that when in life commit yourself to something, you will make yourself happy with that thing. You'll figure out a way to make yourself happy with that thing. I think that would have taken. I don't know that that would have changed anything that actually did. But so much of our life, just like with social interactions, comes with this kind of razor's edge of anxiety that we live with. But I think it's just a little too sharp.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:05:40

  Yeah.

  Nick Epley: 1:05:41

  It's a little too sharp. Yeah, I support a family. I had a lot of support around things Before I went to graduate school, before I went to interview for my first job as a Princeton. I was a wreck. I didn't sleep for two weeks. I lost like 20 pounds because I couldn't eat. I was just total wreck.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:05:59

  Yeah.

  Nick Epley: 1:06:01

  Like that was needless misery. I didn't get that job. I did a lot of the life I carried on. I did fine, All right. So I think I would have told my 20-year-old self just to keep at it. Things turn out okay often.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:06:17

  Perspective that we can only get, I think, when we get older.

  Nick Epley: 1:06:21

  Yeah, I think yeah, so you have the benefit of looking back and seeing how things did work out, right? Yeah, and it's easy to imagine if someone else had changed, things would have been maybe not so great, but they would have just been different. They would have just been different. I try to remember that as apparent, with my kids. That, and it's hard for me to worry about how things are going to turn out. And, oh my gosh, are they channeling themselves in this direction? That's going to be a total disaster and I have to constantly remember myself. They'll make themselves happy, they'll figure it out and all likely they will figure it out. Obviously we have to be safe. I mean, let's be careful of certain things. But they'll figure it out, they'll make themselves happy about it. So I would have encouraged myself to keep at it.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:07:09

  Yeah, we all make our own happiness.

  Nick Epley: 1:07:11

  We do. I think so. I think so we can do better. I think our research suggests our ways. We can be a little happier, but in general folks get along okay.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:07:20

  Yeah, what a great note to end on Nick. Thanks man. Yeah, this was so great.

  Nick Epley: 1:07:26

  It was a very fun conversation. I'm going to meet you and shout out to Mark Agnew one of your prior guests who connected us together. I'm grateful to Mark for that.

  Max Chopovsky: 1:07:32

  Agnew is the man. Yeah, I'm really happy he connected us. Well, that does it. Nick Epley. Professor, author, researcher, avid outdoorsman and liver of life to the fullest. Thank you for being on the show. Thanks, max, for show notes and more. Head over to MossPodorg. Find us on Apple Podcasts, spotify, wherever you get your podcast on. This was Morrill of the Story. I'm Max Jepowsky. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.