Episode Transcript
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create. Pushkin. When
1:37
you turn off my notifications I don't drive
1:40
you guys crazy. One of
1:42
the coolest things about hosting the happiness lab is that
1:44
I get to meet guests I really admire and
1:46
from whom I learn a lot. Take
1:48
one of my favorite interviewees. Hey, I'm
1:50
Tony Hale and happy to be here. I
1:52
spoke to Emmy award-winning actor Tony Hale for
1:54
an episode about being in the present moment.
1:57
The star of Veep and Arrested Development puts an impact
1:59
on the audience. impressive amount of effort into following mindfulness
2:02
practices in order to tame his negative thoughts. I can
2:04
honestly say that I felt like I was a victim
2:06
to my thoughts and my feelings. I was so drowning
2:08
in my thoughts and my feelings. And when I became
2:10
more of an observer of them and took a seat
2:13
and didn't identify with them so much, you're never going
2:15
to be fully in the driver's seat, but it felt
2:17
like I was a little more in the driver's seat.
2:20
But there was another part of our conversation that left
2:22
a huge impression on me. It was
2:24
about the depth and importance of Tony's religious
2:26
beliefs. The truth is, my
2:28
faith is everything to me. My faith is
2:31
really what, for me, centers me
2:33
in as a cornerstone for me. Tony
2:36
gets many, many unexpected happiness
2:38
benefits from his Christianity. Building
2:40
relationships better, listening more, not
2:42
being so isolated. Like, it
2:44
really opened me up and
2:46
I get a lot of comfort
2:48
thinking of the big picture. Study
2:50
after study shows that people who
2:52
practice a religious faith are significantly
2:54
happier than non-religious individuals, irrespective
2:57
of what religion they practice. People
2:59
who attend religious services report lower levels of
3:01
stress and depression. They tend
3:04
to recover faster from illnesses like cancer
3:06
and live, on average, about five years
3:08
longer. Plus, they often report feeling
3:10
more supported and less lonely. I mean, I
3:12
think about in life, if I'm going somewhere
3:14
and I don't know where I'm going, but
3:16
I'm with somebody who knows where they're going, I relax.
3:19
If I'm in a car and I know somebody knows
3:21
exactly where we're going, I sit back
3:24
and I'm like, okay, now I can enjoy
3:26
the journey a little more. And that's how
3:28
I feel with God. Him seeing the bigger picture of my
3:30
life, it's going to be tough. But
3:32
I know that he is
3:35
with me and he sees where I'm going. That is
3:37
a real balm for me. People have
3:39
said before, which I get, they'll say, well, they see faith
3:41
as a crutch. And the truth
3:43
is I'll take two. I'll take
3:45
two crutches because life is hard. We
3:47
live in a world where independence is
3:50
really praised, but
3:52
healthy dependence is
3:54
okay. There's nothing wrong with being healthily
3:56
dependent on something. And I'm very healthily
3:58
dependent on God. God because that's a
4:00
relationship that gives me a lot of
4:03
comfort. I
4:05
was particularly struck by the importance of Tony's
4:07
faith, in part because I don't really have
4:09
that same spiritual comfort in my own life.
4:12
You see, I'm an atheist. Unlike
4:14
Tony, I don't believe there's a benevolent God who's
4:16
watching over me and helping me to make sense
4:19
of the big picture. But as
4:21
a well-being expert, I also know that I'm
4:23
really missing out on the happiness benefits that
4:25
believers like Tony experience on a daily basis.
4:29
So is there any way I can experience at
4:31
least some of the emotional perks that come for
4:33
spiritual practice? It turns out, yes
4:35
there is. But to get those
4:37
benefits, I'll have to learn to tap into
4:39
an emotion that's key to spirituality. So
4:42
join me on my journey to find awe. And
4:44
bonus, along the way, we'll also get to
4:47
hear about some very cool, very nerdy space
4:49
stuff. When I look up at the stars
4:51
at my icy furnaces that
4:53
are all making the same stuff that
4:56
we're made of. Our
4:59
minds are constantly telling us what to do to be
5:02
happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if
5:04
our minds are lying to us, leading us away from
5:06
what will really make us happy? The
5:08
good news is that understanding the science of the mind
5:10
can point us all back in the right direction. You're
5:13
listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie
5:15
Sanchez. We're
5:22
in this sterile classroom. It's 1979 and UC Santa
5:24
Barbara student Dacher
5:27
Keltner has signed up for a meditation
5:29
class. This guy in this white clothing,
5:32
you know, white linen clothing starts having
5:34
his chant, I am a being of
5:36
purple fire. And that
5:38
was too much for my friend, Memo and I, you
5:40
know, we start laughing, I am a
5:42
being of purple fire, you know, and
5:45
he tosses us out of the
5:47
classroom. Despite this disappointing experience, Dacher
5:49
spent the intervening decades trying to
5:51
understand the special emotion people experience
5:53
during transcendent spiritual moments. Today,
5:56
Dacher is a professor of psychology at
5:58
the University of California at Berkeley. He's
6:00
also the author of Awe, the new science
6:02
of everyday wonder and how it can transform
6:04
your life. Awe is the emotion
6:07
we feel when we
6:09
encounter vast mysteries
6:12
that we can't make sense of with our current knowledge
6:14
structures. Religious people like Tony
6:16
Hale experience awe when they connect with the divine
6:18
through their faith. But awe can
6:21
also occur outside religious contexts. People
6:23
experience awe when they see a beautiful work of art
6:26
or take a walk in nature or look up
6:28
at the vast night sky or hear a stunning
6:30
piece of music. And here's where
6:32
it gets really interesting, Laurie. When
6:34
people feel awe, their wordless, their
6:37
mouths drop, they feel silent.
6:40
And I love the word that my former
6:42
grad student Sarah Gottlieb used to describe it,
6:45
which is destabilizing. Most
6:48
of the emotions we experience as humans feel either
6:50
good or bad. An emotion like
6:52
sadness or anger, that's mostly bad. A
6:55
feeling like gratitude or laughter, mostly good.
6:58
But awe is kind of weird. Experiencing
7:01
awe does feel pleasurable, but it
7:03
also feels threatening and scary. In
7:05
some cases, awe can feel closer to dread. There's
7:08
a really interesting little sliver of time during
7:10
the unfolding of awe where you just are
7:12
like, I can't make sense of what I'm
7:14
seeing. Despite not being religious
7:17
in the traditional sense, Dacher grew
7:19
up with plenty of opportunities to experience
7:21
the secular version of awe. My
7:23
mom taught romanticism and Blake and
7:25
Shelley and Wordsworth. My dad was
7:27
a painter, loved Goya
7:29
and Francis Bacon. And I grew
7:31
up in Laurel Canyon, a very
7:34
wild place in the late 1960s. I
7:38
just could not, not study awe
7:40
given my background. Today
7:42
Dacher regularly seeks out awe, visiting breathtaking
7:44
natural places like the Sierras and the
7:47
Alps and immersing himself in art,
7:49
like the works of Dutch master Peter
7:51
de Hooch. He has these paintings in
7:53
a period of his life when he was really poor
7:55
of just everyday life, and they blew my mind. Dacher
7:58
also experiences awe. reading great literature.
8:01
I love Walt Whitman, who taught us,
8:03
if the soul is not in
8:05
the body, where is the soul? You
8:08
know, what a deep idea. But
8:10
Dacher's Awe also springs from less-gential art forms,
8:13
too. I was in England in 1978, and
8:16
I heard the sex pistols, God Save the Queen, and
8:18
I was just like, this is it. This
8:21
is the truth. You know,
8:23
when I saw Iggy Pop, he stage dives.
8:25
I'm like holding him up by his chest.
8:27
I'm like, that is awesome. Totally slamming. He
8:30
starts bleeding, blood gets on me, and I have
8:32
a classic Awe experience where I touch his arm,
8:36
and his skin felt like God.
8:40
He felt supernatural.
8:44
I'm no Iggy Pop, but Dacher even got
8:46
an Awe boost from our short interview. You
8:48
know, I'm embarrassed. Lori, I just got
8:50
goosebumps with your question. I'm
8:53
not kidding. So vulnerable am I
8:55
to Awe. But experiencing Awe and
8:57
examining it scientifically are two different
8:59
things. First of all, people thought
9:01
you couldn't measure Awe, that it
9:03
was ineffable. I think there was this sense
9:06
that you were bumping into realms
9:09
that are beyond science, the sacred
9:12
spirituality, the sublime.
9:15
But heck, you know, I'm at Berkeley. I
9:18
grew up like this. I have long hair. It's like, you
9:20
know, I should do this. So Dacher became one of the
9:22
first scholars to study Awe. His
9:24
initial task was to characterize this
9:26
emotion's physical manifestations. Awe's
9:29
bodily signs are spectacular, the chills. These
9:31
little rushes of goosebumps that go up
9:33
your arms and up your neck and
9:35
into your scalp. Awe is such a
9:38
strange emotion. Those goosebumps and chills
9:40
are the same reactions we have to a
9:42
scary threat. But Awe can
9:44
also feel reassuring. Witnessing a
9:46
profound event can put the petty concerns of
9:48
daily life into perspective. It reduces
9:51
your sense of stress, stressful things. My
9:53
work colleague, that parking ticket, don't stress
9:55
you out. All this reminds
9:58
me of the calm feeling that Tony Hale gets. Yosemite,
12:00
picked sets of circles with super high degrees
12:02
of overlap. You're not looking at people, you're
12:04
looking at a big slab of rock, and
12:07
you're suddenly aware if I'm part of a community.
12:10
I think we need more of that
12:12
in our world today. I think people
12:14
are really hungering for it, pressing for
12:16
it, and here's an emotion you can
12:18
get in a couple minutes that makes you open
12:20
to that. So feeling awe will
12:22
make me stress less, great. It'll help
12:24
me stop beating myself up about the past and future,
12:27
ideal, and it will help me feel
12:29
more deeply connected to the people around me. Sounds
12:32
perfect, but where exactly can
12:34
I lay my hands on some more awe?
12:37
The Happiness Lab will be right back. You
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can find inspiring stories almost anywhere. For
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instance, check out the co-founders of
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further with T-Mobile for Business. Red
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Bull harnessed the strength of the T-Mobile
13:29
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13:31
give fans unmatched views of their extreme
13:34
sports while broadcasting in real time from
13:36
some of the most remote locations in
13:38
America. This is
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heart-pounding fan experiences. This
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not just the ultra-fast charging capability and
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adventure-seeking spirit. A
24:00
freaking awesome space
24:03
telescope! But I think his 2011 video
24:05
on the top five awesome things about
24:08
the Webb telescope was his best work
24:10
ever. It is awesome. That
24:12
was how I first learned about this
24:14
amazing project. In the truest sense of
24:17
the word awesome. Hank made
24:19
his famous video long before the telescope
24:21
launched into space. But today,
24:23
that amazing device is up there, gliding
24:25
along a million miles from Earth and
24:27
sending back the most amazing images. As
24:30
I started thinking about how much I loved hearing
24:33
about the telescope and talking about it and marveling
24:35
at it, I started to
24:37
realize that the James Webb may be
24:39
my version of touching Iggy Pop, walking
24:41
in Yosemite, and admiring a Dutch painting
24:43
all rolled into one. And
24:45
so I wanted to spend some time sharing
24:47
my awe about this invention, not just with
24:49
you, my listeners, but also with someone who
24:51
really gets my passion. Hey Mike, how's it
24:54
going? Good, can you hear me, Lori? I
24:56
first met Mike at a small workshop. I
24:58
had no idea who he was, but when
25:00
I learned what he did for a living,
25:02
I completely swooned. My luck with these Zoom
25:04
meetings is marginal at best. I admire Mike
25:06
a lot, but I did expect him to
25:08
be a bit better with technology. You can
25:10
still hear me, right? Mike,
25:13
are you still there? You kind of cut out with your audio.
25:16
Okay, I think I got it. So
25:18
anytime you're ready. Cool, we usually just
25:20
start by just having you say your
25:23
name and your title so you can
25:25
introduce yourself. Yeah, my name is Mike
25:27
Menzel, and I am the mission systems
25:29
engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope.
25:32
That's right, Mike was the lead engineer
25:34
on the James Webb Space Telescope. He
25:36
spent 25 years building the most powerful
25:38
and most insanely ambitious deep space telescope
25:40
that our species has ever created. So
25:43
yeah, he kind of gets a pass on the whole Zoom thing.
25:46
The James Webb may be the most amazing
25:48
object our species has ever designed, but I'm
25:50
guessing that at least some of my listeners
25:52
may not know why it's so incredibly awesome.
25:55
So I'm going to channel my inner Hank
25:57
Green and take some time to unpack my
25:59
wonder about this.
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