Chapter 164: Nick Epley invites introverts into improved interpersonal interactions

Listen to the chapter here

[Nick Epley]

We're increasingly isolating ourselves from others, and this is not something, as far as I know, that's happening to any other mammal on the planet except for us. The only thing that we hate worse than the worst possible outcome is the uncertainty that we might experience the worst possible outcome. And the thing that really seems to differentiate introverts and extroverts is not actually their experience in social interaction.

So it is not true, for instance, that extroverts get their energy from other people and introverts get their energy from being alone. There's just no data at all to support that. It's that gap between our beliefs about the way the world works and the reality of the world, that's where wisdom sits.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha. Welcome or welcome back to Three Books, the only podcast in the world by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. Did you know, the number one driver of human happiness is our social relationships, the strength of our connections with friends, families, even strangers?

And yet these days, we're more lonely than ever before, right? We're all watching our own screens, listening to our own music, nobody's talking to each other on the trains anymore. But that's why I'm super excited to introduce you, or maybe reintroduce you if you already know him, to my guest on this chapter, the one and only Professor Nick Epley, E-P-E-L-E-Y, who teaches behavioral science at University of Chicago's prominent Booth School of Business.

He even teaches a course called Designing a Good Life, which is pretty impressive. I love Nick's new book, which is called A Little More Social, How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection. If you feel a little friendless these days, I do, who doesn't?

We all kind of feel that way. This is a conversation for you. It's gonna provoke and make you think about how we think about our social relationships.

Nick has been studying this for decades under prominent professors, by the way, like Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahneman. If you know those names, you know, this guy's no slouch. He's been researching this stuff for years.

Brené Brown's been touting his work for a long time, as we're gonna talk about. We're also gonna talk about why you may wanna have more children. I got lots, Nick has lots.

We talk about that. I mean, we're not gonna push anybody, but it's a conversation topic that's interesting. What's the state of the MBA program?

We're gonna talk about, you know, how do we actually find wisdom? What's the distinction between introversion and extroversion? The uncertainty effect, how technology is affecting the way we socialize.

Nick Epley's three most formative books and a lot more. Let's jump into the conversation now. Nick Epley, it's a real pleasure to meet you because I have been following and studying your work since I heard about it for the first time via Brené Brown.

[Nick Epley]

Oh, is that right?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah, and as you know, Brené's a huge admirer of your work. She talks about your stuff a lot.

[Nick Epley]

Is that right? I actually didn't know of that, but I appreciate that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh, you didn't know that?

[Nick Epley]

No, I didn't know that.

[Neil Pasricha]

Okay, so just the background there, just to share. I was sitting in the front row watching Brené Brown speak on her Braving the Wilderness tour probably 10 plus years ago beside my friend Frank Warren, who was actually our guest in chapter two of this podcast. He's the guy that created the website PostSecret.com.

We had bought these very expensive tickets to something called Summit, S-U-M-M-I-T, Summit LA, Summit on C, this kind of like a get-togethers that are about interesting speakers and conversations. We were going from hearing Brené Brown speak to hearing Tim Urban speak to hearing Adam Grant speak. It was like Tim Ferriss was at nighttime.

It was like they just brought the coolest speakers together, hence the expensive ticket. Yeah, in the middle of her speech, she talks a lot about the power of social connection, the sort of research behind friendship. She read, I believe she read onstage from your book.

[Nick Epley]

Oh, is that right?

[Neil Pasricha]

Like pulled it out and then she opened it and said, Nick Epley at the University of Chicago has been studying this topic and she like quoted your research. So yeah, I've been a fan of your work for a while and I loved your new book.

[Nick Epley]

Thank you.

[Neil Pasricha]

It's time to be a little more social.

[Nick Epley]

I agree.

I agree. I'm with you.

[Neil Pasricha]

And so we're talking on the eve of it.

[Nick Epley]

I guess I got two opening questions to kick us off, which are, what are you most grateful for in your life? And can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person? Most grateful for my wife.

And I cried in front of my wife last week when we have a son who's going through some hard times and that happens sometimes. Yeah. All right.

Well, you laughed heavily when I said those two questions because of course they're part of your experiment where you ask strangers to ask each other those two questions. Not to leave you out in the branch, I'll just answer them for me as well. In the morning right now, I have four boys, 12, 10, 7, and 5.

And if I'm lucky enough to get up early, they kind of come downstairs one by one in various states of like pajamas, messy hair. They're warm like guinea pigs. They cuddle.

Whatever they do, they just aren't yelling. There's just no yelling, screaming, hitting, biting, or blood at that time. It's just like morning cuddles and they come the way like a rock band would come down the stairs.

So that's my current most grateful for. And crying, you know, three days ago I was giving a talk and I just, I just, I always mention my friend Chris who, you know, formerly lived in Chicago actually and he took his own life. And when I talk about him, I usually don't feel the emotion, but this time I just, I just ended up bawling on, on stage.

And then I said, I used to apologize for crying and now I don't, which I think, you know, because everyone's all trying to hide their tears, you know? Yeah, yeah. So those are my two.

But you said, you said you have a son going through a hard time. That would be one of your five children. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have, we have a very interesting, unexpected family. When I was young, it never occurred to me that we would have, have a large family. It just wasn't, I have two sisters, so there are three of us.

And we had two sons, you know, two sons. Second one was born in 2005 and I kind of thought we were done. And, you know, I don't know that I can be a parent to more than, than the two boys.

Like I have a busy job and, you know, being a dad to two kind of takes everything I got. But then we, we went on this journey. My wife, Jen, is, is amazing.

She was interested in having a bigger family. We decided to adopt and we have since adopted three children as well. And we lost a baby along the way as well who had Down syndrome.

So our family has been, has been quite an adventure over the years. That's quite a, it's a, it's an enormous blessing. But not, but not, but not always easy.

I mean the, not always easy. You speak openly about your family in your new book, A Little More Social, which I read and highly recommend to people. You talk about some of your children's experiences.

You do talk about the story of Jen and deciding to adopt. I have, I also have a large brood and I'm curious about that conversation about like going up kind of far beyond the echelons of what's now considered like average family size. So, so we were in, we were in California, 2009-10, the academic year 2009-10.

I was on sabbatical that year at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. and, and Jen was, was kind of interested in having another child, a bigger family. And I, I wasn't sure I could do it.

So I was a little hesitant. But then a few, a few things, a few things happened that made me open to it including, I very vividly remember watching my friend Dan Gilbert, who's a professor at Harvard, longtime friend of mine, mentor of mine. Author of Stumbling on Happiness.

That's right. He made this amazing PBS series called This Emotional Life, which I, which I loved. And I remember watching, watching it.

There's a session where a couple are in counseling and the husband kind of realizes that his, his main job is to keep his wife happy in his life. And if that, if he just focuses on that, if she does that too, they will, they will, they will have a good marriage. And, and that kind of hit me at the moment that, you know, that's kind of my job as a husband is to try to keep my wife as, as happy as I can be.

And I know she's trying to do that for me too. And that's how you, that's how you work well together as a couple. And here my wife wanted, wanted a bigger family.

You know, can I really say, you know, not, not go down that road even. And I know I would love kids if, you know, if we, if we had a bigger family, it's not like you can't love more. It's like jumping into water.

You get all wet. It doesn't matter. And, and the earthquake hit Haiti at the time.

And it got us thinking about adoption, got me thinking about adoption. And we, we went down that road and we, we ended up adopting two children from, from Ethiopia at the time. And that, that has been amazing.

I thought you were going to say Haiti, but you said, but you said the Haiti earthquake opened up. Yeah, it's complicated. There's, I'm compressing.

No, no, a long story into a short one. No, and I actually appreciate you just being open to talking about it. Rich, Mitch album in chapter 15 talked about adopting a child from Haiti and then starting up an orphanage there.

He's the author of Tuesdays with Maury, of course. And I'm, I'm, I remember my second date ever with Leslie, who's my wife now of 12 years. And, uh, you know, I said something crass.

I don't remember what it was. It was something like I was coming out of a divorce. It'd been a couple of years, Nick, but still I was like, I'm not getting married again.

I'm not having kids. Like, these were hard rules in my mind. I'm not getting married.

I'm having kids. It was like, I even said that on my, on my second date with Leslie, which by the way, like I wasn't easy for me to get a second date. Like I had a lot of first dates.

I never had a second, you know, I'm not kidding. Like, so I was like, here I am. But this, so it's kind of like, it didn't feel serious, but it felt like more serious than anything I've had.

And, uh, she's like, what? And I was like, no, I'm, you know, I'm not interested in marriage and kids. I want to just say that upfront.

And she's like, oh, okay, well, it's been great knowing you. And I was like, what do you mean? She's like, she's like, oh, I'm like, I'm having kids.

I was like, well, what if you don't meet someone? She's like, no, no, I'm having kids. I was like, well, what if you don't meet the right guy?

She's like, oh, I'm having kids either way. I'll adopt. I will do in vitro.

I will get, I will buy, I'll buy sperm from like a, like, you know, like the 4chan channel. I will do whatever to have kids. Yeah.

I'm having kids. So if you're not interested, that's so good that you told me. Uh huh.

Uh huh. I was like, well, well, well, I was like, well, well, just before you, just before you go, you know, and so here we are today with four, four children. And, um, I am curious what you'd say to people, by the way, who are in not, not, I won't say your shoes, but like, let's just say somebody is listening to this right now.

And cause this is a question I often get, Hey Neil, I actually weirdly get this cause I write about it sometimes. I always say, uh, many people regret not having one more kids, but nobody, uh, would say they would rather have one less kids. I said something like that online.

I want to go. It was very controversial. It's great for the algorithm.

Algorithm is loving. I got a lot of hate mail, but, uh, so therefore I get emails. Hey, I'm thinking about having two.

We have one. Let me think about having three. We have two.

What do you think? And I always say, well, I won't tell you what I say. What do you say to people wondering if they should have another kid?

Yeah, that, that is a, that is a tricky one. I think if you, um, I mean for us, what the, you know, to the extent that you're worried that you won't be able to handle it somehow. That's, that's the hangup.

but you know, you have, you've, you've got a stable relationship, a good partner to help you, or you've got the resources to manage this on your own. So as you know, as long as you've got the, the resources to do it, if you're worried about your emotional state or extent to which you're going to love this stranger you're bringing into your life, or, you know, you're pessimistic about that part of it, that's probably mistaken. That's what I would say.

And that was for me, that was sometimes a hangup. Um, you know, Jen and I have, have a wonderful marriage. We're going on 30 years this year.

And so that part is, is solid. And, you know, I have a very good job, very stable job as a professor. So that part is solid.

Tenured, tenured. Yes. And the part that I was worried about was more about me, um, and not, not anything else.

And, and that, that part was, that part would have been mistaken, you know, that I wouldn't be able to handle it or that, you know, the child wouldn't integrate into our lives. Well, of course, of course they do. So those fears are the ones that are misplaced.

That's a pushback I usually get is that we can't afford it. That's what I usually hear. We can't afford it.

Yeah, that I, you know, I'm not in people's checkbooks, so I don't know what that looks like. To the extent that not affording it is, you know, you're worried about the nature of the relationship, the emotional part, the love part, all of that part. That's the part that our research might speak to a little bit and suggest is mistaken.

I'll leave the money part to the economists. Oh, okay. Not to the, not to the blogger who says, ah, don't worry about it.

[Neil Pasricha]

There's people with a lot less money to you with a lot more kids.

[Nick Epley]

That's what I usually say. Um, now I believe your course that you teach at University of Chicago, uh, at Booth School of Business is, is called designing the good life. Yeah.

Designing a good life. Yep. Designing a good life.

Yep. What's the curriculum? So lots of students come in wondering it.

If they haven't read the course description, the course description makes it clear it's actually an ethics course. That's what I teach at Booth. and the course tries to encourage students.

Uh, tries to teach students how they can create organizations, but also set up their own lives, um, in ways that make people be a little, a little better than they might be otherwise a little more ethical than they might be otherwise, um, in ways that are also aligned with doing well as an organization and also feeling good. So the good part in good life is multifaceted. I mean that in three senses of the term, I mean, being ethical, that's kind of the core of the class, uh, uh, being successful, being good at work.

And then third feeling good. And I actually think, um, being, being good, being ethical is, uh, is critical for both of those other two things as well. Ethical organizations tend to be successful in the long run, more successful in the long run.

It's hard to be unethical and successful over, uh, over a long period of time. And then doing good actually tends to feel, feel good. And that's some of the most interesting, I think behavioral science research that's come out of the field in the last three or four decades is how much reaching out and lifting other people up benefits your own wellbeing.

I mean, like this is incredible work and research. I love the framing of the class. I'm not surprised it's as popular as it is.

And then how do you define being ethical and being successful? So, uh, success, well, let me put success off to the side, actually. Let me just, let me do what seems like the hard part first, which is defining goodness.

Um, I actually don't think good as being good is that hard. We don't deal with a lot of ethical gray areas. Mostly, um, we deal with the issues that everyone kind of recognizes would be, would be good treating other people.

Well, that's the essence of being ethical. All ethics are social. They deal with how we treat other people.

Uh, the golden rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you as sort of the moral foundation for every ethical system on the planet, whether it's a deeply religious one or a secular, a philosophical one. And so that's that, that core element of pro-sociality. That's what good means being successful.

Uh, as I often in class, I define it in the business sense, which is being profitable in the long run, having a successful business. That's that, uh, that lasts, creates jobs for people is successful in that way. And, um, given that you're a tenure professor at Booth school of business at the university of Chicago, which for those that don't know is one of the most illustrious business schools in the world, uh, bar none.

And I believe when I was looking at business schools, uh, 20 years ago, I think it was number, I think it was number one or certainly up there in the top three with, with Harvard business school, Stanford Warren, those, those of those elk maybe in Seattle or something. I just curious, uh, this is kind of a personal one, but like, what do you think is the state of the MBA? Uh, that one is a little unsure.

Um, the full-time MBA programs, at least in the top programs still have a lot of demand. Our students are amazing. Uh, I love teaching them.

Um, we also get a lot of veterans at the university of Chicago who are really fabulous to teach. They really add a lot to our student body. These folks have come in to our classes, seeing things.

They've, they've been through stuff that, uh, that really enriches the enriches the class. Veterans from the military. Yeah.

Yep. Um, yeah. And you know, we have a lot of Navy seals and army Rangers and those types.

It's, it's really something. Um, there was a, there was a joke at Harvard business school that there's the three M's. Have you heard that?

They say, Oh, if you go to HBS, you'll be surrounded by McKinsey, Mormon, and military. We have McKinsey and military. I'm not so sure how many Mormons, but, uh, some, some for sure.

They said I was in a group of 90 there. And I think I had about, uh, you know, three, three from each of those groups out of 90. So it was just, it was a, it was, it was reductionist.

Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. But yeah.

[Nick Epley]

Yeah. So, you know, our, the full-time MBA program is really strong. Um, students are fabulous.

We're increasing our, we have, have increased our class size recently. Um, other programs, part-time programs are a little, um, less certain. The marketplace for that has shifted a lot.

Many schools after COVID started doing online programs where students didn't have to travel. We've always had a tradition of having, uh, our part-time students who take classes on the evening or on the weekends, come, um, uh, come into in, in person. So they're often people from Chicago, or if they take our weekend program, they fly in from all over the country.

Uh, and that has been a harder sell since COVID when so much has moved online, but being in person is just so essential to, to being able to learn, but those are a little harder. And then the international marketplace for MBA students is also a little complicated. We have a campus in London and one in Hong Kong as well.

We've got a, a North American executive professional program, a European one, and a, and an Asian one as well. That meets in Hong Kong. Um, and that one also is a little bit uneven.

The world's in turmoil. In case you've haven't noticed this, if you picked up the news recently, there's some stuff, stuff going on. And that has complicated.

Um, that has complicated the international day. So I saw NYU just closed their like Dubai campus or something. Yeah.

Yeah. But we're also, um, we're, we're starting a booth. We're starting to teach some undergraduates, which we never used to teach.

So our business economics major is the most popular on, on campus. Students are really wanting to connect with our economists. And in so doing, they also connect to the psychologists like me over the business school.

I don't teach the undergrads, but, um, many of my colleagues do. And that's very successful. Those students are great.

We've started one year master's program. So, you know, we're, uh, we're, we're finding ways to keep teaching. I'm happy to hear it.

Um, as a person who graduated with an MBA, like that, the, uh, you know, the, the, it's still, I mean, I had a transformational experience. That's what they said. They said, you're going to have a transformation experience.

I did. So, um, I'm glad to hear that the MBA is, uh, still viable. I have an MBA and I, you know, I, I think it's like, uh, I had a great transformational experience.

Um, we get transformed by many things, whether that's, uh, you know, school or in the case of this show books, um, on the eve of the publication of your second book, a little bit more social, how small choices create unexpected happiness, health, and connection. And I really love the cover. You know, it's just, uh, it's like a cyan blue cover, but there's just two coffee cups.

And I know you have, I've, you've been quoted as saying, I drink way too much coffee, too much coffee. Presumably these are not both for you. Well, maybe, but no, they're not meant to be.

they're free refills though. Free refills. Uh, I thought we'd dive back into your history.

You were kind enough to give us three books that shaped your life for each of them. I will hold them up to the camera. Um, and then for the people listening, you know, most of our audience is still kind of Apple podcasts, Spotify, that, that world, including me.

That's how I listen to podcasts. I will describe the book as if they can see it, you know? So just give me a second.

And then I'll ask you to tell us about your relationship with each book. And then I have a couple of follow-up questions for each. All right.

The first is the National Geographic Book of Mammals by the National Geographic Society. This was very hard to get. It was published in 1981 by the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC.

It's a giant brown hardcover with a young chimp swinging between two vines taken in Tanzania. Of course, the inside cover tells me this, and then it says in brackets, a country in Africa, which is nice to know. Volume one, A to J is written in the top left.

It's interesting, by the way, because, you know, you don't see A to J much. You know, you often see A to L, right? Oh, all right.

Okay. Well, I mean, that's half the alphabet. That's the distribution of mammals.

I guess it's stacked in the wrong direction. I just love that it ended on a J. J doesn't get too much credit there.

National Geographic Society was founded in 1888. It's one of the world's largest nonprofits, scientific and educational organization. Original mission was to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge.

Today, the mission has evolved to use the power of science, exploration, education, and storytelling to, quote, illuminate and protect the wonder of our world. What's this book about? It's a richly illustrated exploration of the planet's most diverse and fascinating species, spanning continents and ecosystems.

The book delves into the biology, behavior, and habitats of mammals from the smallest rodents to the largest whales. Detailed photos, complex write-ups. And as I was saying to you before we recorded, like, like an acknowledgements page or an authorship page at the beginning, it looks like the movie credits.

Like, it's like a lot of people worked on this for a long time. Even the president himself says in the foreword, never in my 25 years with the National Geographic Society, have I been so enthusiastic about a project as this one. By all this one, do we decimal heads under 599 for science slash zoology slash mammals.

Nick, please tell us about your relationship with the Book of Mammals. This was a book that both volumes, I actually liked the second one. K to Z is pretty impressive.

The tigers are in there, I have to say. The Okapi is in there, which I remember so vividly, the Okapi. We had a, when I was a kid, my bedroom was right next to our study, like our kind of the office area on our second floor.

And we had the encyclopedias and the books up there. And I would sometimes sneak out like late in the evening when I was supposed to be going to bed and would grab an extra book and, and pull it into my room and, and read it. And the Book of Mammals was one.

I, I, I, I had that, I had that thing next to my bed for years. I would look at that every night, you know, and I was just fascinated by it. I was just fascinated with the outdoors, fascinated with wildlife.

I spent lots of my free time running around through the woods. I grew up in the country in Iowa, did a lot of hunting and fishing as a kid, which you do if you, you know, grow up out in the country. All my family, extended family are farmers.

So I spent a lot of time on the farm when I was a kid. And I would pour through that book page after page after page. Although I did not read the foreword like you did just now, the way you read it as a kid is different than the way you read it as an adult.

Of course. But I have, I have both of those additions now in the house too, both, both one and two. And if you notice on the inside cover there, the tracks, do you see the tracks there?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

So I spent tons of time looking at that, at that too. Yeah. Look at that.

The lion in the front. When I was a kid, I would watch these TV shows too, like Grizzly Adams. Yeah.

You know, this guy living out in the, in the woods. And. I don't know Grizz, I don't know Grizzly Adams.

[Neil Pasricha]

There's the armadillo.

[Nick Epley]

I think it got a little sketchy in his personal life. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Problematic.

[Nick Epley]

If I remember right. But, I remember as a kid. The range map, every animal has a range map.

It's cool. It's cool. As a kid.

and I grew up thinking I wanted to be a biologist. Like I wanted to be a mountain man. I want to live out in the woods and, and be a mountain man, study the bears, whatever.

And, and I remember when I was nine years old, roughly, I learned, Oh, the beaver. Yeah. I, I learned that, um, that mountain man was not a real job.

And that I thought it was like, I thought it was a legit, legit job that I can do mountain man. I would just go out and do this, you know? And, uh, and I was out.

Yeah. It sounds pretty real.

[Neil Pasricha]

I was devastated. Wait a minute.

[Nick Epley]

You can't do this. No, you can't. Grizzly Adams does a TV show.

It's make-believe, but, but I, I went into, I went into college wanting to be a biologist in large part. Oh yeah. The Capybaras.

They're cool. Invasive in Florida now. A couple of them escaped in Toronto.

It was like a big crisis. Oh, is that right?

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

They were running around in Hyde Park here for like weeks. Everyone was looking for them. And they finally found them.

Is that right? Otherwise it would have turned into Florida, I guess. Yeah.

So I, I went into college thinking I wanted to be a biologist, because I spent my whole time as a kid, reading that book, right? Thinking that this is what I would get to do, go and study all these creatures. And then I took introbiology and learned that's not at all what biologists get to do, or at least they have to go through classes that I couldn't get through with much enthusiasm in order to get to the other side of that.

but that book was, I, I can't even, I can't imagine how many hours I've spent going through that. Hmm. I can see why it's so, it's so well put together.

And it's so nice reading something so, um, curated and edited. Good pictures too. As a kid.

[Neil Pasricha]

Good pictures, right?

[Nick Epley]

Yeah. The photography credits in the back, you know, for people that are watching this on YouTube, like you cannot even read the names. They're written in like a 0.5 font. You know, it's like, it's the smallest thing ever. They, you know, and, and they're not AI. They're real pictures.

They're taken with film. And I wonder about AI. I do wonder about AI, like affecting mammals brains.

You know, we've had, um, you know, I, I know you're not a biologist, but you do study mammals. Like you, you know, you, you study, man, well, you, you read this book all about mammals. You thought I'll do mountains, mammal studying.

And now you're studying mammals. Neil, I'd never put that all together, but you're right. You're right.

That's right. There are no, there are no pictures of us as mammals in that book that I know of. Maybe some somewhere, but yes, no, you're right.

Fair enough. Fair enough. I'll take it.

Yeah. We looked at pictures of other mammals and we got a little older. Um, one 32, a chapter one 32 of this podcast, we interviewed a professor Robin Dunbar.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Oxford evolutionary psychologist, uh, famous for the social brain hypothesis, right. And, and brought in Dunbar's number, you know, he, he jokes that of course, you know, anyone else with a number named after them is dead. So he's not too fond of having a number of days after them.

Yeah. Shout out to Avogadro. And, um, I do wonder, I wondered if you thought about this, like, you know, AI, um, you can't get through a conversation without talking about AI.

You can't get through a day without using AI, you know, um, uh, AJ Jacobs, who's famous for doing these one year long experiments. He wrote the book, the year of living biblically, for example, he, he tried to do like a one day without using AI. And he wrote about it for the New York times.

It was like fricking impossible because you can't wear the, you can't wear normal clothes because they're like, you know, uh, produced, uh, and factories that are of course, uh, using AI technology. And, you know, um, you know, so he's walking around like a burlap sack and you know what I mean? Like, it's like, what do you trace?

That's obviously the purpose of his experiment. You trace up the supply chain, AI is affecting everything already. And of course it's so recursive and so using itself that the errors that it creates and communicates just end up amplifying.

And so we're just, you know, I met a judge recently and she was like, my job is so much worse with AI because I get briefs submitted to me by like crown prosecutors with citing case law. And I go and tell the fit footnotes and there's like 34 photos of 34 cases. And I have to read every single one now because one of the 34 is totally made up.

Huh? Huh. But you don't know which one.

Yeah. Yeah. You know?

And so what's AI doing to mammals? That's a good question. Well, certainly to us, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's way too early to sell, to tell, and I'm not going to pontificate too much on that.

Uh, there are lots of other people who know a lot more about this than I do. And I will say that I try to, I don't use it really for anything yet. Uh, there's not a word in that book that is AI generated.

Um, I don't use it for email. I, I, I don't use it for anything. I'm going to feel like now I feel like a dinosaur.

And three years ago, we weren't talking about this at all. And now I feel a bit like a dinosaur. Um, so, you know, I don't know.

I'm not the right person. I mean, I'm not the right person to say, but one thing I do know is that technology itself is affecting us as human beings in all kinds of different ways. Um, in particular, being able to have the world's knowledge at your fingertips at all times, uh, in your phone, uh, is clearly making us a little less social than we used to be.

You see that in all kinds of ways, we're increasingly isolating ourselves from others. And this is not something as far as I know, that's happening to any other mammal on the planet, except for us. Um, we're spending more time alone in front of screens.

We're spending less time talking to each other, fewer words, exchange Matthias meal. Who's a, who's a psychologist at, uh, university of Arizona recently published a paper where he, he found that across his experiments that he'd run with people wearing these, this device that keeps track of, of, of their speech, right? It doesn't, it doesn't track exactly.

It doesn't allow you to listen in on exactly what people are saying, but it can through filters, allow you to tell words that are being said, right? How many words are being said? He found that, that were between 2019 and 2007, we're speaking an average of 338 words less a day, which is about 120,000 words less a year, uh, between 2019 and 2007.

So technology making the world more and more efficient, making us more and more independent is also making us less and less social than we used to be. Yeah. And, uh, you've probably seen over the past weeks, although it goes viral, like every year.

So it's, it's not new data, but it's, it's, it's throughout Jonathan Heights book, um, uh, the anxious generation as well. Uh, Jonathan, I was our guest in chapter 103 and, it's that, it's that teenagers, uh, having less sex, uh, having, consuming less alcohol, uh, spending less time together, spending less time in groups, spending less time out of the home, all these like things are going down. There's some good, some bad, I guess, like, as like alcohol is going down.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

Maybe that's good. Or maybe everyone's just vaping now. You know what I mean?

It's like, you know, I don't really know, but, but, but there is something to do with the fact that not only is this, uh, lack of social connection happening, partly exacerbated by technology, but it's also happening right when we need it. Right? Like, isn't it like, you know, age 12, 13, 14, you've got the kids.

It, it is. How did you prevent your kids from falling into this trap? Am I about to enter this important puberty era?

It is, but I will say, and it is also true for adults too. I mean, how many times you sit down next to somebody somewhere and everyone's staring at their phones, right? And these are a bunch of, bunch of adults.

So we're, we're using it to stay disconnected from each other too. I think the big thing, at least from my perspective, that technology does is it allows us to choose whether to interact or not a lot more often than we used to. And so if there are any mistakes or biases that we have, when we think about reaching out and engaging with somebody else, it amplifies the importance of those.

And the bias that we've been studying for, for decades now is that we tend to be overly pessimistic about how other people will respond to us when you reach out and connect to them, particularly strangers. And when you have this device in your hand that allows you to, to, you know, keep your mind busy at any moment without having to reach out and connect with somebody else. Well, you're going to take it a little, a little more often perhaps than you ought to.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, like I'm, I'm picturing, you know, the graph on page 70 or 69 of your book where our expectations of how we will feel with solitude is, is more positive than average and how we will feel with connection is lower than average. But of course, in actual fact, our true experience is that solitude, we're less positive than average.

Don't tell Susan Cain and our connection is much higher than average. So I relate, agree completely. I'm like fueled by, by connection.

And you have another graph, just a few pages earlier in a little more social on page 52, where you have this incredible graph on the, on the X axis, it says one to 10, how enjoyable is this? And on the Y axis, zero to 35 percentage giving each response. And the question is how enjoyable will this conversation be?

You know, and of course people think it's going to be like, well, this kind of spread across the zero to 10. Yeah. But then what actually happens is everyone loves it.

That's right. Yeah. You know, we love talking to each other.

We just don't think we do. That's right. Because of this incredible study that I read about in your book, about the $50 gift card.

Oh, the uncertainty effect. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So what we've been studying for the last, last couple of decades is trying to figure out why it is that highly social mammals like us who are made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with others. We are the most social primate species on the planet without really a very close second.

Why highly social creatures like us so often choose not to be. And there are a number of reasons why this might happen, but the one that we have observed over and over again is, is failing to appreciate just how well these will turn out. So in the figure you just showed there, those were people who we were asking to have a deep conversation of the kind that we started this conversation with those, those questions about, you know, what you're most grateful for in your life.

And can you tell me about when the last time you cried in front of another person and the way conversation, the way people think conversation works, at least in their expectations is if, you know, if you and I are going to have this conversation, it's easy to imagine, man, it could go anywhere, right? It, it could go anywhere. It could be terrible.

You could not, not want to do this. You could laugh at me when I tell you I'm grateful for my wife and, you know, my big family and, you know, or that I teared up thinking about our son last week. You know, you could give me the middle finger and decide you didn't want to have this conversation at all.

It could be really bad or it could be really great. We could have really nice. And anywhere in between, you just, I don't, you know, anything could happen.

That figure that you, that you just held up there shows that people's expectations, their beliefs about the percentage of people who give each of these responses on how much they'd enjoy this conversation is kind of flat across the entire distribution. But the way conversation actually works is that once you're engaging with somebody, once you reach out to actually connect with someone, they tend to reach back to you. Reciprocity is the dominant social norm for our species.

Conversations tend to end the same place they begin. So if it begins positively with a positive outreach, it tends to end pretty favorably too. And so people's experiences aren't all over the place.

They're mostly crushed up in the top end, the top half. And so people go into these conversations with a lot more uncertainty because they don't really appreciate the power of reciprocity and actual conversation, reciprocity, and responsiveness. And so we, we just think that there's a whole, whole range of, of outcomes that we might experience that just don't really show up in real life.

Amen. Uh, absolutely. Um, what one of the people that is one of our mutual friends is Sonja Lebomirsky, who was a guest in chapter 158, who has in her new book, how to feel loved the concept of the relationship seesaw with the C being spelled S E A.

Um, because the more you share about yourself, the more somebody else sees you and then is encouraged to tip and share information about themselves. And so goes the dynamic of a loving relationship, if I'm paraphrasing correctly, the book. Um, yeah.

And then, but yet this hilarious gift card research study, which I wouldn't mind just telling people about, because it was like, it was like, honestly, I blew me away. I blew me away. When given the option of like flipping a coin for a $50 gift card, people ask, how much is that worth?

They're like, on our people said 26 bucks, like flipping a coin. You can win a gift card on heads. If you get a gift card tails, you don't.

So people are like, Oh, that's worth about 26 bucks to play that game. But when you, you're asked, Hey, what do you think it's worth to play a game where it's like, you can win 50 or a hundred dollars, a gift cards, right?

[Neil Pasricha]

Less.

[Nick Epley]

They say it's worth less. They say it's worth less. They say it's worth like 17 bucks.

Why? Well, because so great is the fear of uncertainty that it massively reduces our own ability to see the positive, the huge implications for almost everything in life. Yeah, no, I agree.

Um, the only thing that we hate is the fear of uncertainty, then the worst possible outcome is the uncertainty that we might experience the worst possible outcome. yeah. And people, and so there's a, there's a whole literature on this.

There are a bunch of experiments analogous to this, that will also blow your mind where people, for instance, will, will prefer, um, the worst outcome in a gamble, say over, uncertainty about whether they'll get the worst thing or something better, right? It's uncertainty itself is negative for most people. And, uh, it's, it's aversive, aversive, aversive on its own.

And so that shows up a lot in social interaction, a social interaction almost always have, has some uncertainty to it, which pushes us in a negative direction, our expectations. And that is an evolutionary adaptation or something. I don't know.

I always struggle with these kinds of things. I can wave my hand at any evolutionary explanation. Mostly evolutionary explanations are really good at explaining sex and certain aspects of longevity.

But the further you get away from having sex and leaving babies, the more of a stretch it tends to get. so I, my, my intent generally doesn't go there. If I want to explain what you're doing in any given moment, uh, I want to know how you're thinking about the problem in that moment.

And I get a lot of traction out of that. Speaking of sex, your book also mentions that the number one thing people like to do, I mean, I'm terrified is sex, but the number two and three and four are all like social connection. Well, obviously sex, obviously sex is social connection, but it's like, it's number one.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

That's from, those are from surveys. Uh, if you, if you ask people, you know, think back on yesterday and say what you were doing each of these, you know, hours of your day and how positive you were feeling and how negative you were feeling up on the top, uh, top of that list is going to be, uh, as Danny Kahneman, uh, former Nobel, well, Nobel prize winner in economics, uh, not an economist himself. He was dead.

He was a psychologist, um, intimate relations as they write about, it comes up on top intimate relations. That's how, that's how academics write about sex. Uh, but then, yeah, second place on that is socializing.

Socializing is, you know, about 85% as good, about 85% as much positive to negative affect as intimate relations. Uh, and yeah, the social stuff tends to show up on top, uh, in terms of the most enjoyable things we do over the course of the day. That's true, by the way, for introverts as well as extroverts, both equally.

Yeah. Cause I was going to bring up Susan Cain. Um, of course she's, uh, best known for writing the book quiet and she was our guest in chapter 102.

I just wondered, you know, after reading quiet and everybody loves it, the book, but all this stuff is like, Hey Susan. I mean, I love Susan. I know Susan really well.

You know, I love, but it's just like, this kind of, does it not push that line of thinking a little bit the other way? Like I know her book is really about like, uh, the power of being quiet in a world that can't stop talking and the power of introversion in a world that can't survive. He's not, she's not coming at your topic in an antithetical way, perhaps, but I just wondered how your work and her work kind of mixes.

There are some, some important differences. So first off, um, our work focuses primarily on wellbeing and happiness, trying to understand why, why people avoid social interaction when often it turns out well and is kind of the, tends to be one of the things that the most enjoyable and meaningful in our, in our lives. That's an interesting paradox in my mind.

And the big, um, the, the thing we, we find over and over again is that people's mistaken beliefs matter here. And introverts, introversion and extroversion, the thing that really seems to differentiate introverts and extroverts is not actually their experience in social interaction. So it is not true.

For instance, that's extroverts get their energy from other people and introverts get their energy from being alone. There's just no data at all to support that introverts and extroverts experience social interaction, largely similarly and are generally engaged and excited, physiologically aroused. When you're interacting with another person, extroverts and introverts then get tired afterwards, just like exercise makes you tired.

They get tired at about similar rates. Uh, afterwards, what differentiates extroverts and introverts are their beliefs about themselves. These are really labels we put on ourselves, um, that may or may not bear that much relation to our, our actual, um, choices or our experience.

People tend to think actually that they are more introverted than they actually are relative to the rest of the population. We tend to think we are above average in introversion for instance. Um, and that's because we, we see ourselves being introverted, but we only see other people when they are being extroverted, right?

We, we are by ourselves when we come home after the party and need to take a nap, right? We don't see other people going home after a party and taking a nap. And so because we only see other people's extroversion, but we see our introversion, we tend to think that we are uniquely introverted, which isn't quite right.

We're more introverted than we actually are. And did you just say something that I, I started to have my mind blown here, but did you just say the commonly held belief that introversion is someone who gains energy from solitude and extroverts gain energy from interaction? That's not true.

No, that's not true. Meanwhile, I've been, I've been thinking that for, I've been thinking that for so long. That's not true.

No, that's a, that's in chapter two of the book. If you get in there and if you, and if you read chapter two, I skipped, did I miss this? I missed this important line.

If you get into the footnotes. So one thing about what, if it, when an academic writes a book, there are actually three books that you write. There's, there's the, the one third of the book that was too long.

When you wrote the first draft that gets thrown out, there's the next third of the book that was too long for the main chapter that gets buried in the footnotes. That's the second book. Oh, and then the third book is the one third of the text you wrote that actually stays in the main chapter.

That's hilarious. Yeah. In chapter two, I go through, I go through the data on introversion and extroversion and wellbeing.

So there's, so there's a common belief, for instance, that this is the chapter of the choice, the choice. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So yeah, I'm like looking through all my highlights frantically trying to find this, this topic. I have like four, five, six highlights.

I missed it. Sorry. No, no.

I went, I missed, that's the thing. I probably missed like most of most books. Yeah.

Yeah. No, you listen, just like you watch a movie and you pick up new things the second time. I mean, that would be totally true for, for a book.

I picked up the correlation on a father, son height. Pretty good. That was a highlight on that one, you know?

Yeah. So that one, I brought that one out. That was a big, that was a big highlight for me.

I brought, I see that. I brought that one out because that's the size of the correlation between extroversion and happiness, essentially. Positive mood.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

One page 33, one meta analysis that aggregated results from 347 studies conducted with more than 120,000 people around the world. Then that the average correlation between extroversion and happiness was 0.49. Yeah. To put that in perspective, the correlation between heights of fathers and sons is roughly 0.5, zero, but exactly the same. Well, correlations typically identified are in the 0.2, 0.3 range. A correlation of 0.49 is big, huge. So you mentioned we've, we've opened a lot up a lot here.

We've opened up, um, Susan Kane. We've opened up your work on extroversion. We've opened up the work in your new book.

We've opened up your book of mammals. We've opened up Danny Kahneman. I want to just pick on that for a sec because Danny Kahneman is resonant to your second most formative book, which of course is how we know what isn't.

So by Thomas Gilovich, how we know what isn't. So published in 1991 by free press in New York, the cover is split black and red. The title, um, is in a large gold Serafie font on the left, a red triangular panel on the right, hold the white subtitle, the fallibility of human reason in everyday life.

Thomas Gilovich was born in 1954. He's a 71 year old, I believe professor emeritus at Cornell university.

[Neil Pasricha]

Not emeritus yet, but he's getting there.

[Nick Epley]

sorry. I shouldn't, I shouldn't say that.

[Neil Pasricha]

I shouldn't say that.

[Nick Epley]

He's still, he's still teaching, which I'm happy to hear. Um, Gil, Gilovich's work is known by many, whether they know it or not, because he popularized the concept, how popular is the concept of confirmation bias. I know him from the spotlight, the spotlight effect.

You know, that's kind of what I remember him from. And you know, if you're, if you're a Dewey decimal guy like me, you could put this one in a one, five, three for philosophy and psychology slash mental processes, slash intelligence and cognition. This book explores the psychological mechanisms that lead people to form false beliefs and cling to them.

Even in the face of contradictory evidence, Nick, please tell us about your relationship with how we know what isn't. So by Thomas Gilovich, when I was, uh, when I was an undergraduate at St. Olaf college in Southern Minnesota, Northfield, Minnesota, I got really interested in psychology. My very first intro psych class was a self study.

I, they just handed me Phil Zimbardo's psychology in life textbook and said, basically read through it and, uh, and watch all these videos, including, you know, had had videos of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, uh, Danny, who I later came to know, uh, quite well. Um, and I, and I was supposed to take me all, all semester long to get through this, the, all the material I got through it in like a month. And then the professor said, Oh, we're in trouble.

We got two more months. Um, and so that, that was where I learned that I'm really interested in psychology. So then I got in, I got, I got to do in research really early when I was in college, there weren't graduate students.

So I worked with a lot of, uh, the professors. And one of my professors, Chuck Huff, uh, was his name who just retired recently. A great guy.

He was a Princeton PhD. One day I walked into his office. He was my senior honors thesis advisor, and he pulled this book off of my shelf and he handed it to him.

And he said, Nick, I think you'll find this book to be interesting. And it was Tom's book, how we know it isn't. So, and it blew me away.

I read the thing cover to cover in a day. And I thought that, that is the kind of work that I want to be doing. What Tom does in that book is describes this, this field in psychology.

It was a significant chunk of psychology and judgment, decision-making, and social psychology that tries to identify the psychological processes that give rise to our beliefs, our expectations, our attitudes, our thoughts. Um, and how that can sometime deviate from reality. And it's that gap.

It's that gap between our beliefs about the way the world works and the reality of the world. That's where wisdom sits. And if we've got anything to produce as psychologists, that's a value.

It's wisdom is to identify the places where I think our brains lead us astray and how we can, how we can then do a, do a little bit better. And I think the scientific method allows us to identify some of those gaps and, and it has. And, and so I, so I read this book.

I thought that is, that is what I want to do. I applied to PhD programs. Um, I got into a few, I got rejected by most, but got into two in particular university of Minnesota and Cornell.

And Tom is a professor at Cornell and I was wait-listed at Cornell. Um, eventually somebody, thank you. Whoever it was turned down their offer.

And I was able to get admitted. Jen and I, my wife, uh, we were engaged at the time in college. We actually, we, we were thinking about this in the evening.

We decided before going our separate ways to go to bed. That we were going to go to Minnesota and not Cornell. We woke up the next morning and we just didn't feel good about it.

We wanted the adventure of going to a place like Cornell. And that was the work I wanted to do. And man, what a blessing it is to have now had Tom as my PhD advisor.

He is the reason, he is the reason why I do the work that I do. Um, and he was, he's, he's his mate is amazing, a mentor, um, and a, and a, and a kind of, uh, an academic father figure of sorts, kind of how to live the academic life. uh, he's, he's as good in that as, as he is as a, as a writer.

I was so blessed to have him as an, as a PhD advisor. Wow. What a story.

Yeah. That is beautiful. And, and like, just to go from like the book off the shelf to that thing, your PhD advisor is such a cool, that's, I mean, he was alive.

You know what I mean? Like it could have been, it could have been a book. Like if someone handed somebody, people were handing thinking fast and slow to people all the time now.

But Kahneman's gone. So you can't, there's no, even, and Kahneman, you probably know, of course, that, you know, Tom Gilovich was at Stanford, his, his first class there. Kahneman comes in, he starts talking, Gilovich immediately changes his major.

Yeah. With, yeah, he was there. Danny was there.

He was not, Danny was not on the faculty at, uh, Stanford, but Amos Tversky was. And Danny and Amos are the one, they collaborated with each other for years and, and, uh, yeah, started, started behavioral economics and, and a whole, whole wing of psychology that Tom was part of. Tom worked with Amos.

As a PhD. And Tom, you know, um, Kahneman's work is popular in and of itself. Um, uh, it was popularized even further by Michael Lewis writing about.

The Undoing Project. Yep. The, the Undoing Project.

And, uh, and then I was, you know, I, I, I followed Kahneman, you know, my friend Shane had him on, uh, his pockets, the Knowledge Project. And I was like, I was like, Shane, how was it like going down to New York and interviewing? He was like, it was kind of rough, honestly, Neil.

He was like, it was tough. He was in a bad mood that day. It was a bit of a temper.

His phone was ringing in the background. I was like, Oh really? I was like, Dan, Danny Kahneman, like that's like the most illustrious kind of, uh, you know, you know, and Shane's like, yeah, it was a bit tough interview.

And then I, I read later that he passed away. And then I read a year later in the New York Times, I think everyone was shocked by this or at least you, maybe you weren't, but I was like that. He, he took his life, like he took his life, like thoughtfully and with a lot of intention and, and thought, uh, because I think I understood that his wife had suffered from dementia.

He had dementia genes or something. And so we chose to fly to, I think Sweden or Switzerland or one of these places and. Switzerland.

Kind of. Yeah. And commit, I guess you'd call it euthanasia.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't really want to focus on that.

That was Danny's own decision. And I'm, and lots of people who knew Danny very well, loved him very much, really struggled with that decision, but that was Danny's, Danny's choice. And I don't, I don't have knowledge on that.

Nick, can you tell us anything more about Danny? We don't, we don't know much about what he's, he's this figure that I haven't looming in my life. Anything you can share.

Let me, let me tell you one, one beautiful story about Danny that I'll, I'll just never forget. My very first job interview coming out of grad school was at Princeton. This is my fourth year of graduate school.

And I was, I was not ready to go. I was a small town, rural Iowa kid, you know, kind of got lucky getting into Cornell, felt like a fish out of water there always. And now in my fourth year of graduate school, which is young to be getting an interview for a faculty job, was going to Princeton.

Uh, the eighth or ninth person they had brought in for that position that year, they had declined everybody else. And it was really late in the year. It was like late March or something.

And I was so nervous for this. I lost 20 pounds leading up to this interview because I didn't sleep or eat for weeks. I was just a wreck.

And I was very anxious public speaker at the time, even though I was very. And the, and the position was what? It was an assistant professor position at Princeton.

Oh, you're going for professor at Princeton.

[Neil Pasricha]

Oh my gosh.

[Nick Epley]

Right, right from your, right from your studies at Cornell. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, and, uh, and I was so nervous for this. And I remember the, the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson school, bless his heart. He was an economist.

He, he, he was so tired when I met him. He did not want to, he did not want to be with me. Like he had so many other things.

So here's this, you know, 26 year old kid coming in and talking about research. He wasn't that he fell asleep in our meeting. I just, I felt so bad.

He was so tired. Like, I just, I, like, let me please spare you. Let me go.

You take a nap. Anyway. Uh, yeah.

Later I spoke at Danny's retirement, by the way. And, and that economist was sitting in the front row. As I was telling the story, we had a, we had a hilarious laugh about it.

So all well-meaning and sweet, but, um, but I gave this job talk then. And I'm, and I'm, you know, I'm in, I'm in green hall at Princeton university. Uh, totally kind of blowing my mind that I'm, I'm even doing this and Danny's sitting in the front row.

Um, and Danny had a massive smile on his face the whole time. I've never felt so uplifted by somebody than to look at him, enjoying the talk I was giving and being interested in it and engaged. Um, it was, it was just really uplifting.

And I, and he could be, you know, he could be very rough on people. He was very, he wasn't into niceties. He was very serious and thoughtful and he would tell you like it was.

Um, but to, to see him smiling there, just, just, just, it put me totally at ease. Once I was given the talk, I was, I was comfortable. Uh, and then afterwards he comes up to me, uh, you know, Danny Kahneman, holy cow, comes up to me and he asked, uh, he asked what I'm doing after the talk, you know, like I got something more important to do.

And he said, you know, would you like to come over, come over and just talk for a little bit? Like, uh, yeah, sure. You betcha.

So, so we go and we hop into his little light blue Honda Civic. I think it was tiny little car. We drive over to his house, which is not far away from, from campus.

And we, he pours a couple of glasses of wine for us. And we sit there overlooking the water behind his, behind his house. And he sits me down and he says, tell me everything you know about anchoring.

Cause I was studying anchoring at the anchoring, uh, as a psychological process. I was studying that at the time as part of my dissertation. And we had like a 45 minute conversation in his living room.

And he treated me with as much respect as, as, as any person possibly could hear Danny and this fourth year graduate student. And, you know, and, you know, to, to have, he, he was not, um, he was not certainly for all the times I knew him, not pretentious person. He was just very honest and serious and thoughtful.

And what, yeah. And it was, it was great. I mean, he could, he could be rough on people because he, he would run kind of hot and cold.

Sometimes he could be very excited and then be very critical. And he would really waffle back and forth between those two things. So if, you know, people who worked with him a lot, you know, had, you know, had harder days with him.

Like, you know, like, like the person in the podcast that you mentioned.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

Shane did. Yeah. Um, but yeah, my experience with Danny was, was that he treated a kid, um, with just utmost respect.

And I, I, yeah, I've admired him ever, ever since from that day on. I'm going to tell Shane this story. And I think, I think Shane remains a big fan of him, but I think what you mean about hot and cold and seeing somebody in the full kind of sphere of their experience, you know, sitting in the front row, the big smile, treating you as an equal.

I mean, you were 26. I mean, he died in 2024 at age 90. So he must've been like, if not double your age, like close to, Oh yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[Neil Pasricha]

Right.

[Nick Epley]

Like he's probably in sixties or seventies or something. Yeah. And he, I mean, he was, he was, this was 2002, this is year 2000.

So he was, you know, crazy well-established by then. He was the. Yeah.

He's the GOAT. He's the GOAT. And I'll tell, I'll tell that to Shane after actually, um, I'll text him because I remember in chapter 63, I was talking to Brandon Stanton, who's most famous for the online blog, humans of New York.

And he had this great story about how he met Obama. And he was all excited to meet Obama. He's canvassed for Obama.

He'd run doorbells for Obama. He'd been on the staff team. He'd like, you know, he's kind of dedicated some of his, his project towards Obama.

He goes to the White House. He's invited to meet Obama and Obama, like, it doesn't give him two cents. And it's kind of in a gruff and an angry mood.

And he kind of like walks by. Yeah. And it, and what was interesting though, was that many years later, because of the success of his project and et cetera, he was invited to the West for a totally other separate, totally unrelated event.

And, you know, Obama was not even planning to be there. Obama comes out of the side door. And he's like, Brandon, my man, high fives.

I mean, he's like, Oh my gosh. Like, he's like, I've been, I've been following humans of New York. I love the new book.

And he's been going online. He's like, yeah, thanks again for coming by and everybody here. Hi, everybody.

He's like, Brandon, like, it was like, oh, they left. And then, and Brandon's like, man, I was the same guy, but because I had two 32nd interactions with them, I would have, I would have held them in such different regard because of the one little one.

[Neil Pasricha]

Yeah.

[Nick Epley]

I tell you what, be, be careful of your 32nd moments when you're out there in the world. People are watching. People are watching, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, listen the exact opposite of a 32nd moment would be, of course, reading the 962 page. I try, I work hard on my transitions here, you can tell. The structure of my podcast makes me forced into it.

I am holding this book called Far From the Tree, which is a reference to the old adage that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, of course, but in this book, we're focusing on far from the tree, parents, children, and the search for identity by Andrew Solomon. I say 162 pages, but it only goes up to page 700 because, of course, the second of the three books is at the back. The back is epic.

It's just a stylized photo of the author in a black turtleneck in what looks like a ski chalet in Aspen with his finger on the side of his head, like, I'm thinking about this, and I've been thinking about it for a long time. The guy did thousands of interviews over decades. This is one of the most well-researched books, period.

I have the hardcover, but no wonder the paperback, which is bright orange, almost like a scrawled drawing of an infant. There must be some real famous reason for this image. It has all kinds of bursts on it.

One of the hundred best books of the century, one of the top 10 best reads in the New Times Book Review. I mean, this is a real prominent contribution to the conversation. What is it about?

Well, Far from the Tree is a profound exploration of families raising children who are different from themselves, whether due to disability, identity, or extraordinary ability. He interviews people who have raised kids that became serial killers, dwarfism, obviously sexuality. He has this idea that some traits, maybe like the height when we talked about it earlier, are vertical, and some traits are horizontal, meaning that there's elements of your child who may have nothing to do with who you are or were.

If I have that right, I might be confusing the vertical and the horizontal. Oh, so vertical identities would be like skin pigment, right? Passed down from generation to generation.

Horizontal identities, like IQ or sexuality, might be traits that children don't share with their parents. Horizontal identities drive the book. He talks about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, children who are prodigies, children who are conceived in rape, children who become criminals, or even those who are transgender.

Not even. Just I'm listing them out here. Key quotes from the book are, difference is what unites us, and he separates love and acceptance as two different things.

A fascinating, gigantic, research-based epic. Please, Nick, tell us about your relationship with Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. So if I think if I was lost on a deserted island where I was going to spend the rest of my life and I could only have one book with me, that would be the one.

Because there are 700 plus pages in it, yes, but there are really like 10 or 15 individual books there. Each chapter on its own is one that you can read as a complete book, and it is amazing. I mean, he is such a talented writer, but the way he weaves individual stories in with research and data and evidence is just unbelievable.

And that book has been a source of strength for me in some ways. So in July 11, 2016, we lost a baby six months into my wife's pregnancy who had Down syndrome. And three months before then, when we had the amniocentesis, was when we learned that our daughter, Sophie, had Down syndrome.

And that was a blow. And any parent who gets that diagnosis, unless they were somehow expecting it, which I think most probably aren't, is a blow to you. You mentioned, and I don't mean to call this out in a negative way, you mentioned who are coping with these things, and Down syndrome was one of them.

And when you get that diagnosis, you feel like it is something you have to cope with. And certainly there are challenges to raising a child with Down syndrome, no doubt about it, serious challenges and plenty of variability. But when you get that diagnosis, it is kind of a blow to you.

I remember my wife, we were standing down in our laundry room when she told me about the diagnosis, and I kind of lost my legs out from under me. I fell back against the wall. It just felt like gravity had gotten 20 times heavier, and I fell against the wall.

And we didn't know how we were going to handle this. I'm here to support my wife, and so I will do whatever she wants to do in this case. I'm the wingman here in this regard.

But I was really nervous about it. I was very pessimistic about we'd be able to handle this. This is not something that I wanted to do.

And I was nervous. I was scared about it. And my wife was much more open and enthusiastic and all these good traits that she has.

But we started calling families. I mean, I knew for myself, I'll just speak for my own mind, for myself, I know as a psychologist, we can't anticipate very well how we're going to feel in situations we haven't been in. And a better way to figure out what we're going to feel like in a situation we're not in is to talk to people who are in that situation.

Dan Gilbert, who I mentioned earlier, my friend and Harvard Psych professor who wrote Stumbling on Happiness, refers to this as surrogation, talking to people who are in a situation or learning from people who are in a situation how they feel and using that as a guide to how you will feel. And so we decided to do some surrogation. We decided to get some perspective from people who were raising kids with Down syndrome.

We called them up and started talking to them and they all referred to their child as a blessing. I mean, it was almost like they were reading off of a script. And the Far From the Tree book, Solomon's book, has a chapter on Down syndrome in there and so many others, too.

And I tell you, what comes through that book over and over again, even the really hard chapters to read, is what parental love for their child looks like, even really, really hard moments. Down syndrome is not one of those hard moments. The parents that we talked to who talked about their kids as a blessing, man, I get it now and I'll explain why in a bit.

But some of those are hard and the love that parents have for their kids is just really unbelievable. That comes through in that book. Situations you couldn't imagine.

And the story about Down syndrome, the chapter about Down syndrome was one that also read so much like the parents that we talked to. And it gave me some courage there. So we were pursuing that pregnancy.

We're continuing that pregnancy. We're getting excited to have this child that was going to really change our lives in kind of profound ways. We already had four children by that time.

And so we were we were ready to go again. And then we lost her at six months into my wife's pregnancy. A Down syndrome pregnancy is high risk for death at any time during the pregnancy.

And that was terrible. That just sucked in no uncertain terms. It was just terrible, top to bottom.

And we mourned that loss for a year. And then I remember one day I went I went into my into the sunroom. My wife was sitting in the chair in the sunroom.

And I asked her if she would consider if she would consider adopting again. That we had been ready. We're ready to be parents.

We'd kind of been in a funk here. We were ready to go again. And then that was taken from us.

But we could do this again. And there's still kids who need parents. We could do this again.

And without missing a beat, she said. Would you consider adopting a child with Down syndrome? And my mind was not that my mind was not there.

That's not what I was thinking about at the time. And somewhat amazingly, my mind went right back to the all the same kind of doubts and fears that I had at three months. And and and I realized kind of in that moment, I had this I had this aha experience that I felt like I kind of was a participant in one of my own experiments, underestimating how how well things would turn out when I when we reached out to this child and and pulled them into our lives.

And the Ian Solomon book and the parents that we had talked to before, those were part of that, too. I mean, that was all in there as well. All of the data, all these these experiences that we'd had.

And it gave me some some data driven courage. I felt that that, yeah, we yeah, we could do this. You know, Jen and I had a very strong marriage.

We had the resources that we needed to to do this. We had good family support. It was only my fear that was keeping me holding me back.

And and the Solomon book played a role in in that in that decision, at least for me to feel more comfortable going ahead with this. And so about a year, about a year later, we boarded a plane. I went to China, Jen and I and our four other kids to meet Lindsey, who was two years old, born to a woman that we will that we will never know or meet, who abandoned her daughter under circumstances we don't know either.

And Lindsey has been amazing. It's just just amazing. And I can show you.

That's my little Lindsey right there. Oh, she's beautiful. Total sweetheart.

Total sweetheart. How old is she now? She's 10 now.

She's 10 now. You boarded a plane with your family, with your wife, Jen, your four children you've shared earlier in the conversation to biological to previously adopted post miscarriage, late stage miscarriage at six months with the child with Down syndrome, which presumably they'd done that test for that reason at three months. Right.

I'll do. And and then you fly to China, which I'm assuming was some sort of bureaucratical logistical thing to figure that out. Yeah.

And then with your whole family, to meet a two year old child. Yeah. Who had been living in foster care.

Well, a mix of orphanages and foster care is actually when we when we first met her, her cheeks were just rubbed totally raw. And they're still scarred a little bit to this day from that, which we can only presume was just from from a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of crying alone, probably and probably in an orphanage before she before she got to us. But but still within a relentless smile.

I mean, she is she is. She's unflappable. She has she has her moments.

She's very she can be very stubborn. She doesn't want to do things she doesn't want to do. But my my goodness, is she resilient and and tough as nails and and amazing.

And, you know, reflections, counsel, advice, thoughts, wisdom, things you'd share with people that are, you know, navigating. I won't say something similar because every story is different. But you were kind of taking a page from this book, Far From the Tree.

You know, he marries kind of love and acceptance. Differences are what bind us together. That's the key kind of quote from the book.

Yeah. Again, I think that I mean, the the again, this is this is going to depend on what what your situation is. For me, the the fears about bringing Lindsay into our life were about how well this would go.

Right. And would we would we really get would we really fall in love in the in the way you do with your kids? You know, to this child that was so different from us in so many ways and bring these unique challenges.

Look, it's not a joke. I don't mean to make this sound saccharine and beautiful all the time. Raising kids is hard work.

You know, as well as anybody, you know, raising a child with intellectual disabilities brings its own challenges. She becomes kind of all consuming for us. But so it's not a joke.

It's it's hard, really hard. But it also I mean, the the the kind of love that Solomon describes and Far From the Tree chapter after chapter across these situations that are much harder than what what we're dealing with. Lindsay is is about as easy a kid to love as as you can find, you know, that the the chorus that comes through that book over and over again through every chapter is just the love that the parents have for their kids.

And and that is going to be stronger than you think beforehand. So if that's the thing that's holding you back, that's probably miscalibrated. And if you knew, you know, kind of as I had a sense beforehand, if you knew how strong that connection would be, you might choose differently.

And we chose we chose differently. Hmm. Nick Epley, you know, I knew coming in a few things about you, like like three out of 10.

I was like, OK, is one of the world's foremost researcher on the power of social relationships and the kind of like, you know, the complexities are about that and researching you. I learned that you had five kids. But I didn't know, nor could I have because we hadn't met really the openness and vulnerability and thoughtfulness with which you consider your thoughts.

I like that you have emphasized for me my own happy wife, happy life principle inside myself. You strike me. You know, you're extremely generous and extremely kind of spirit.

Your new book, a little more social, I will be trumpeting from the rooftops. I think it's a wonderful book. Thank you.

I think it will be a great book to give to somebody like I think it's Julia. I think who you mentioned in the book, the people who think if I if I'm quoting the right name, people who think that they can't, you know, just say yes to Jessica, Jessica.

[Neil Pasricha]

Sorry, I said the wrong name.

[Nick Epley]

I said the wrong name. Yeah. But like, you know, hey, Neil, how do I be happier?

Hey, how do I like read this book and then try this day, try this year of yes or try this day of yes or try saying yes to coffees and tries that, you know, Shonda Rhimes, I believe, is always talking about like the year of yes or a day of yes. Right. Like leaning into it as we close off this conversation where we've kind of plumbed back through your own personal archive and journey.

Is there any thoughts you'd want to leave us with, whether about the new book, about your research or about advice? Of course, the audience for this show, I probably should have said at the beginning is book lovers, writers, makers, sellers and librarians. It's a bookish community.

We're spread globally. They will love the chat. But I wondered if you wanted to close us off here today.

Yeah. So a real challenge of being a behavioral scientist like me is taking the research and putting it into practice and your own life and giving you advice on how to do that. It's hard to do.

Right. So as a as a scientist, I look through a microscope and I try to understand stuff. And we learn things with the precision that everyday experience doesn't always give us.

And that's very powerful. And what we found in our research is that when we test some of the doubts that people have in their minds that keep them from reaching out and connecting with other people, whether it's talking to strangers or picking up the phone and calling them or having a deeper conversation or expressing gratitude or asking for help or being honest in your relationships, we find that those expectations are consistently off. And the way to think about this, I think, in your own life is not necessary to apply every one of our experiments. I don't quite know what what are the barriers that are keeping you from connecting with other people.

But when you have one of those flags go off, test it, because you might find like I have in my own life that those are often miscalibrated. And when you notice those, it changes the way you live your life. And our data don't suggest that connecting always turns out, well, you should be doing it all the time.

I suggest we get the odds wrong and that we ought to reach out a little more often, maybe when we're on the fence. And so the so the advice I think I would like to leave folks with is that when in doubt, reach out. That's that's my advice.

That's why we always have time for a very good rhyme. When in doubt, reach out. The eminent Nick Epley, author of A Little More Social.

Thank you so much for coming on Three Books. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you.

[Nick Epley]

This has been great fun. I really appreciate it. Hey, everybody.

It's just me, just Neil again, hanging out back in my basement, listening back to the wise and wonderful Nick Epley, who filled us with so much wisdom. How many quotes jumped out to you? I got a bunch here.

How about reaching out and lifting other people up benefits your own well-being? Something we kind of know is true, but just a good reminder. Reach out, make that phone call, reach out, ask a friend out for dinner.

How about this one? We are increasingly isolating ourselves from others, and that is not something that is happening to any other mammal on the planet. Talked about the Book of Mammals.

Of course, this guy knows mammals. No other mammals doing this. Just us.

The only thing that we hate worse than the worst possible outcome is the uncertainty that we might experience the worst possible outcome. So uncertainty is worse for us, basically, than knowing it's going to be bad. Hence that fascinating research paper that we talked about, which will be in the show notes where, you know, people will like kind of take a lower expected value to know that they're going to have kind of an injurious financial proposition.

They're going to be hurt financially, but they'd rather do that than not know what's going to happen. Reciprocity is the dominant social norm for our species. Conversations tend to end the same place they begin.

So if it begins positively with positive outreach, it tends to end pretty favorably, too. Two more I'll give you. It's the gap between our beliefs about the way the world works and the reality of the world.

That's where wisdom sits. And finally, as we closed, when in doubt, reach out. When in doubt, reach out.

You can always reach out to me. 1-883-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T. It really is my phone number.

We always play phone calls at our end of the podcast club, which is always available on our audio version, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. I don't tack them on to YouTube because I feel like watching that is a bit weird. But hey, it's kind of like a it's a it's a secret society.

We also have the cover to cover club and we also have the secret club. I can't say more about that other than listen to the listen to the end of the podcast club and you might get a clue. Nick Epley, thank you so much for adding three more books to our top 1000.

If you want to go to threebooks.co slash the top 1000, you will now find National Geographic's Book of Mammals by the National Geographic Society, How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilevich and Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon. S-O-L-O-M-O-N. Thank you, all of you for listening and thank you to Nick Epley for being here.

Are you still here? Did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club.

This is the after party, people. We're here. We're hanging out.

Let's kick it off, as we always do, by going to the phones.

[Neil Pasricha]

Good morning, Neal. This is Tom Colling from Bloss, and I was just reading this poem that I'm going to read to you here because it reminds me of what you said on your podcast recently about wanting to have a blank page or two in the center of one of your books and that the publisher wouldn't let you or something like that. I didn't think it was a good idea.

Anyway, listen to this. It's called A Lesson from James Wright by Mary Oliver. If James Wright could put in his book of poems a blank page dedicated to the horse David who ate one of my poems, I am ready to follow him along the sweet path he cut through the dryness and suggest that you sit down now very quietly in some lovely wild place and listen to the silence.

And I say this, too, is a poem. Isn't that awesome? Totally awesome.

Anyway, I hope you're having a great day. Thank you so much for your podcast. I love it.

[Nick Epley]

All right. Thank you so much to Chantel from Guelph for calling in and giving us that great reading from Mary Oliver. Funny name poem, A Lesson from James Wright.

Yeah, you're right. It was hard for me to convince the publishers for the book of awesome to have a couple of blank pages in the middle, but they did do it. I've been lucky in publishing.

You know, I did like an upside down post in the book of even more awesome. I did a secret chapter in the happiness equation, which I was able to convince the publisher to like not list anywhere in the index or in the table of contents. You just had to like bump into it in the middle of the book, like I had no page numbers on it.

And we counted the page numbers after that didn't include that. It's like a secret track in an album. So I've been lucky, but it's hard.

You have to convince them. You got to try to break the mold. Got to try to break that mold.

Thank you, Chantel, for the call. All right. Now, where are we going?

We're going to do a letter. Let's do a letter of the chapter. This chapter's letter comes from Jacqueline Hill.

Happy Saturday, Neil. It is your grade 10 math teacher, Mrs. Hill. This is amazing to get this.

I'm in two different book clubs. I took the opportunity to get your book club monthly book reads newsletter. Now, just like you were giving parenting books to those having babies, we as a family had a favorite cookbook.

It was Companies Coming, the Jean-Pierre Crockpot book. While our kids were growing up, we used to write each recipe and work out the average score in our heads. And I would record it on the page.

As a busy family, we enjoyed over 50 recipes from the book. Funny, I'm gifting one to a young man along with the crockpot as he moves into his own place. I've even used the recipes in the Instapot.

It's a great book when you're looking for a hearty meal to share with family and friends. Yours in mathematical fun, Mrs. Hill. P.S. Leslie has wonderful taste in books. You have found a great soulmate. Well, that just gives me so much joy to get a letter from, you know, my my old math teacher. I shouldn't say old, my math teacher.

She was an epic math teacher, too. We were learning like the quadratic equations. She took us out to the parking lot and she made us like stomp around, like left, right, left, right, left.

And it was like she was teaching us to memorize the formula for the quadratic formula, whatever it was called. And of course, it worked. Everybody memorized it because we had to stomp around to it for a while.

She was a very creative, creative math teacher, which is really special to hear from her. Also, crockpots. I got to get more into crockpot cooking.

Thank you, Miss Hill, for the tip. All right. Now it's time for the for the word of the chapter and for this chapter's word.

Let's go back to Professor Nick Epley. Element of pro-sociality. Yes, indeed.

It is pro-social, pro-social, pro-social, P-R-O-S-O-C-I-A-L or pro-sociality, if you want to use it that way. A little extension on the word that means intended to help or benefit another person or group. Also relating to or promoting behavior that benefits others or society.

Really, it just means doing voluntary stuff that benefits others, helps society or helps the environment, encompassing actions like helping, sharing, comforting, volunteering, and driven by underlying motives such as empathy, compassion and moral conviction. You know what the number one way is to grow empathy, compassion, moral conviction? Reading, especially fiction.

We know reading books helps us grow those because when we read books, we're not us, we're another gender, another religion, another time in the world, another place in the world. A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

That quote, of course, comes from Game of Thrones. Hence me using the he, always. It's always he because it's just an exact quote.

But pro-social behavior, it's an interesting phrase. Scientists use it, researchers use it. And I like the thinking behind it, which is that, you know, it's stuff that you do that benefits society.

Picking up litter, helping someone across the street, volunteering at a soup kitchen. I'd like to be doing more pro-social behavior in my life. I'm sure you do too.

Let's think about that in the back of our head as we lean forward and keep going on this 22 year long pilgrimage to uncover and discuss the thousand most formative books in the world. I'm so grateful to have you alongside me and to be alongside you as we keep plucking along, picking out the greatest books, the most formative books in the world and discussing them, opening them up like flowers and figuring out all of life's biggest themes through them. Thank you so much for being here.

And until next time, remember that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!