Kurt Nelson 0:00 Houlihan, Kurt Nelson 0:07 welcome to behavioral grooves. I'm Kurt Nelson Tim Houlihan 0:10 and I'm Tim Houlihan. Hey, Kurt, let me ask you something. When was the last time you almost said something to someone, but Kurt Nelson 0:18 then did it Tim Houlihan 0:19 like then, for this exercise, think about someone as being someone that you didn't know. Oh, Kurt Nelson 0:25 okay, so probably would have happened like in an airport or something like, you know, right? So a stranger, you want me to know? When the last time I had an encounter with a stranger, yes, where I thought maybe I could say something, but then I just clammed up. Is that it exactly Tim Houlihan 0:46 that? That's what I would like you to reflect on? Okay, Kurt Nelson 0:49 so let me think has to be like an airport or, well, at a store, yeah, something like that, right? So Mark, okay, all right, no, here it is. We're at a conference for behavior shift, for the, you know, the company that we're doing, and we're, we're trying to get these products that we have, these journals, into college bookstores. Okay, and it's in Phoenix, and I am flying home from the conference, and I'm waiting in the airport lounge, you know, waiting for the plane to go. And I see a woman across from me with this cam X bag. So I know she was at the conference with, Tim Houlihan 1:39 oh, I didn't meet Kurt Nelson 1:41 her, but she was a part of that conference, Tim Houlihan 1:44 okay? Kurt Nelson 1:45 And I thought I should just go up and talk to her. I should say, how did you, you know, how was the conference? How did you do that? You Kurt Nelson 1:50 know, Tim Houlihan 1:50 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:51 but I don't know if I was too, just intimidated. I just like, I don't know something's it. Didn't, I didn't do it. Long, long, long, short, I did not do that, right? So, okay, I don't know just so we didn't say anything. Tim Houlihan 2:10 But you know what the research says behind Kurt Nelson 2:13 this? God, yes, I know. I think I even thought about that. I swear to God, I think I was in my head, I'm going, Oh, shit. What would Nick say about this? He would be giving me, be giving me a hard time, Tim Houlihan 2:28 right? Well, just like we could be rationalizing like, oh, actually, we're practicing, like, good social awareness, or Kurt Nelson 2:36 I was tired. It was, you know, do I really want to have a conversation. Yes. I mean, that would I know all the research it would anyway. Tim Houlihan 2:44 Yeah. Well, so as you're saying, Nick Epley is our guest in this episode, and he spent years of his life researching this topic at the University of Chicago, where he teaches psychology. So and his research is conducted in the real world, in airports, on trains, on busses and coffee shops and grocery stores, basically in everyday life. Kurt Nelson 3:07 Yeah, at our 500th episode, reunion session, we did an experiment with our guests there so and what Nick's Nick finds is kind of astonishing, if you ask me, right? It's when, when people imagine talking to a stranger. What do they think? They expect it to be awkward, uncomfortable, maybe even unpleasant. They might get mad at you. You know that that's what they think. And what his research finds, though, is that we are consistently wrong about this, Kurt Nelson 3:46 yeah, Tim Houlihan 3:46 and that we actually have that conversation with a stranger. You know, people report that it's better than expected, and not just a little bit better. Tim, what is it? It's a lot it's a lot better. Yeah, and this gap between what we expect and what actually happens is where a lot of missed opportunities lived, right? Maybe more importantly, it's also where leadership lives. Because if you think about it, leadership is filled with all these moments where we ask ourselves, oh, do I reach out or do I stay quiet? Do I should I check in with that person? Or I'm just going to assume that they're busy, or should I be really honest with them, or just keep it to myself, that stuff plays out in our heads. Kurt Nelson 4:30 Yeah, and Nick calls this under sociality, and he says that we undervalue our needs to connect with other people, that we are social creatures, we know that, right? And by not saying something, it keeps us from being those social creatures that we actually want to be. And this, this is the one big thing. So if listeners, if you want to take anything away from our conversation with Nick, it's take this, right? Kurt Nelson 4:59 Yeah. Kurt Nelson 5:00 When we suppress that instinct, and we, you know, we keep quiet, and we are when we suppress that instinct, and we to keep quiet, right? And we actually do reach out when we connect with others, when they're strangers, even when they're not strangers, when we're just a little bit more open, we're going to walk away from that interaction feeling better than we anticipated, Tim Houlihan 5:28 yeah, and so like the way that you frame that, it means that the real risk isn't reaching out. The real risk is not reaching out. Kurt Nelson 5:37 Yes, yes, Kurt Nelson 5:40 the Yeah, the real risk is not reaching out. And that's, that's this piece. And we, we don't think about that in our mind. We think it's the opposite, and that's what Nick's research points to. Is No, the real, the real risk is not reaching out. So and today's conversation is going to be about that gap, the gap between expectations and reality, and what happens when we start closing it? Tim Houlihan 6:03 Yeah, because if we reach out, we might just find out that the world and maybe a whole bunch of people in it are just a lot more welcoming than we think. Kurt Nelson 6:14 Oh, everybody, but you right? Tim Houlihan 6:17 Everybody, Kurt Nelson 6:18 or me, maybe I don't know. Obviously, I didn't reach out to that woman in the in the airport, and I even had a connection Anyway, anyway. All right, so, so listeners, sit back, relax, have a generous pour of abundant sociality and conversation with strangers, and enjoy our conversation with Dr Nick Eppley. Tim Houlihan 6:50 Nick Eppley, welcome back to behavioral grooves. Nick Epley 6:52 Thanks so much. It's great fun to be back here. Tim Houlihan 6:55 Good to hear you. I think the last time we were together was October back in Minneapolis, and Nick Epley 7:00 it was, yeah, it was a blast, yeah, bar right. Kurt Nelson 7:06 Conversations, yes, Tim Houlihan 7:08 with 100 of our closest friends. Nick Epley 7:12 The last time they cried in front of another Kurt Nelson 7:15 person, I will tell you, my daughter still is talking about that? Yeah, so right there you go. I don't Nick Epley 7:24 remember if she actually had the conversation. Did she? She Kurt Nelson 7:27 did she was having the conversation. You you actually put her with another person and made that happen? But yes, it happened, and it's interesting. So Tim Houlihan 7:41 okay, Speed Round Question Nick Epley 7:43 one, yeah, Tim Houlihan 7:43 ready, Kurt Nelson 7:44 if Tim Houlihan 7:45 you had to live a year without a laptop or without a mobile phone, which would you Nick Epley 7:51 choose? Tim Houlihan 7:52 You Live Without Nick Epley 7:53 a mobile phone? I prefer to live a year without a mobile paying for that. Kurt Nelson 7:59 Can I pay somebody so I don't have to do that? I Nick Epley 8:02 get worked out on my laptop. I waste my life away on my phone. You Tim Houlihan 8:05 know, we Tim Houlihan 8:05 actually talked to Danny Opperman at CMU actually did this. He and his wife, like they had a sabbatical in the UK. They dropped their phones, and it was like life was great. So there's evidence that it can work. Nick Epley 8:19 Yeah, I keep mine in my bag, not in my pocket. That's, Kurt Nelson 8:22 yeah, Nick Epley 8:22 my move. Tim Houlihan 8:25 That's a pro move, Kurt Nelson 8:26 very smart move. All right, second of our speed, round questions here, if you had the choice to live in a 35 year old body with a 95 year old mind or live in a 95 year old body with a 35 year old mind. Do you have a preference? Nick Epley 8:43 Physical decline is much worse than cognitive decline. So I take Danny kahneman's 95 year old mind, Kurt Nelson 8:50 yeah, Nick Epley 8:50 and you know Brad Pitt's 35 year old body. You know, if we're, if we're purely hypothetical, that's what I would do mine. Kurt Nelson 8:59 I love the Kurt Nelson 9:00 two I love the two people that you chose. There too, like, really good examples of what we want. I love it. I love it. Kurt Nelson 9:07 I Tim Houlihan 9:08 don't know the rules allowed a mix and match on Kurt Nelson 9:10 that. Kurt Nelson 9:11 Are there rules in this? Tip, come on. There are no rules in this. Do whatever we want. Tim Houlihan 9:17 That's true. Okay. Third speed round question, if you're a contestant on The Voice, and you're getting interest from two or more coaches. Is it more likely you'll choose the coach that you connect with the most, or the coach that you have the most connection with their experience the most Nick Epley 9:34 who you have the most connection with, Tim Houlihan 9:37 so most connection with or Kurt Nelson 9:38 the most Kurt Nelson 9:39 experience, versus their most connected? Their Tim Houlihan 9:42 even if they, even if the one that has more experience in your genre is standing right there saying, I want to work with you, Nick Epley 9:49 yeah, if you're a country singer and the rapper thinks you're fabulous, you're going with the rapper. Tim Houlihan 9:56 Yeah, okay, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about that more. Nick Epley 10:00 We got all right, Kurt Nelson 10:01 yeah, yeah. The last, the last of these Speed Round questions here, is Bill Nye, the Science Guy, right when he says, Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't, but we don't learn what others have to teach us if we keep to ourselves, Nick Epley 10:17 he's absolutely right on that absolutely everybody's got a story to tell you. Your job in conversation is to figure it out, and people often don't take people often don't take that opportunity that they have. Bill Nye is a smart guy. Tim Houlihan 10:31 He is a smart guy. Very much. So we are talking with Nicholas Epley about his new book. A little social, at least that's the US title. A Nick Epley 10:39 little more social. Yes, a little Tim Houlihan 10:40 more social is the US title. Hello, being the British title, UK title. So just for the sake of our listeners, Kurt Nelson 10:48 British listeners, who we have quite a few, Tim Houlihan 10:50 yes, the opening line of the preface is something about this fabulous paradox of being human, and we've you, the three of us have talked about this in the past, but we have this natural born desire, need to connect with others, and a tremendous reluctance to do so. Tell us about that. What's the source of that issue? That? What's the source of that paradox? Nick Epley 11:16 Well, so the paradox itself is something that anyone who walks around in the world for any amount of time we'll see multiple times a day, right walk down the sidewalk. You see friendly people walking by each other, never saying anything to each other. And yet, you know that when you're talking to a friend, you're happier than when you're not. You know you you sit down in a waiting room somewhere, and you got a bunch of people sitting there saying nothing to each other when they could engage with each other. You've you've got a kind thought that you could share with somebody else, that you'd feel better about, you know, giving somebody a compliment on or expressing your gratitude, and yet people are nervous and hold it back. You got an easy kind thing you could do to some for someone, and you're reluctant to do it. The Eureka moment for me on this was one day riding the train into into the University of Chicago, where I work as a behavioral scientist, sitting, sitting in a seat, which I'd done day after day after day for several years now, and and suddenly looking around and notice that you've got all these highly social animals. We're the most social primate on the planet. We're made happier and healthier when we connect with each other, and yet, here we all were totally ignoring each other. That's crazy. That's crazy. Well, I don't know if it's crazy. I didn't I didn't know. Then if it was crazy, it's interesting, Tim Houlihan 12:30 right, right, right. Okay, so, so we have this, we are this big, social primates, and yet we're not engaging socially. We're Nick Epley 12:42 often choosing not to. Tim Houlihan 12:43 We're choosing not to. Okay, so your book starts with a section on why. Why are we not doing it? Nick Epley 12:50 Yeah, the reason, I think, I think the main reason, is that we underestimate how positively other people will respond to us when we reach out. So let's take this, go to go to my trains, my train coming into the University of Chicago here, we did run some experiments on on the trains and busses and cabs here in Chicago, and what we consistently found was that people essentially didn't think others wanted to talk to them. People were in a in a in what in a situation that psychologists refer to as pluralistic ignorance. So a majority of people said that they would be happy to talk to somebody else, but they thought a minority of people would want to talk to them. And it's hard for me to tell you and I are walking around you're not talking to me, right? I assume you maybe aren't interested in talking to me, and that makes me reluctant to reach out to you. But what we find is that people really underestimate the power that they have to reach out and engage with other people in ways that will encourage them to respond positively back. Another person might not say hi to you, but if you say hi to them first, what are they? What are they going to do? Right? Like 98% will say hi to you back right? If you want people to be friendlier to you, say hello to them first. Nobody waves everybody waves back. But we miss that. We misunderstand the power that we have to connect with other people when we when we reach out to them, and it starts from thinking other people don't want to be bothered. They won't respond. Well, if we reach out if I reach out to them, and we're just wrong about that. Tim Houlihan 14:23 So the I love your hat should be in the, you know, conversation starters Hall of Fame, right? I love your hat, Nick Epley 14:30 yeah. So that was, that was the eureka moment. I mean, I'm eternally grateful to this woman who I talked with on a train ride, on the way in one morning where, you know, I had this kind of Eureka moment. I was writing my last book mind wise. Describe In this Chapter, describing how social we are, how we have brains uniquely equipped with connecting with the minds of others, how we're made happier and healthier when we connect with the minds of others. And yet here we all were not doing any of it. And that particular morning. I put people in experiments for a living, but that morning, I decided to put myself in one and I had a woman come sit down next to me mid 50th. I would say I was probably 35 ish at the time. You know Brad Pitt style body. Yeah. Anyway, she sits down next to me. She's got this fabulous Red Hat, this big, wide red brim on it. And I said, I'm gonna try to do something different. I'm gonna try to miss you. What happens if I just try to have a conversation with her? And so the first thing I said was, I love your hat. I have one just like it. And you know that is not, that is not the conversation starter Hall of Fame. It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. What was shocking to me in that moment, and this was, this was more stuff I reflected on afterwards, but it's almost like when you reach out to engage with somebody in a moment like that, their face can change so much that they almost look like a different person, that they go from from being having like a dead face. It turns out people's resting bitch face is pretty bitchy. It turns out, is not very positive, but when you reach out to engage with them, it's like you're flipping a switch on their back. Often, right? They'll turn. She turned and smiled to me. Just totally lit up. Kind of laughed along with me for a minute. It turns out people don't laugh at things are funny. Mostly what we laugh at are attempts to connect with other people. So she was connecting with me, and then the conversation, you know, I had all these fears about about engaging with her beforehand. Maybe she'd think I was a creep trying to hit on her or something, or we'd have nothing to talk about, or, Tim Houlihan 16:47 you Nick Epley 16:47 know, whatever, all the, all these, all these, these bars that get up in front of us in our minds, that keep us from reaching out to engage with other people. It's like a little prison we keep ourselves in. And once I actually engage, those bars just kind of fell away. She'd say something, I think about something similar, would carry on to the next topic, right? And, and it just flowed really, really easily. And, and the thing I remember that I was so struck with it. It was this year. It was really a eureka moment when I'm getting up to leave, she says, Thank you so much for talking with me today. And I don't think she was BS ing me. I mean, we both, I think genuine. That was just nice, that 30 minute ride. I mean, look, that's not going Kurt Nelson 17:29 to Nick Epley 17:29 change our lives. No. Well, my character and it changed my career all at once. But most conversations don't do that. That was a powerhouse for me, because it had all these downstream consequences. Sometimes it can, by the way, I've talked to lots of people who met their spouse on a plane trip, Nick Epley 17:48 a shocking Nick Epley 17:49 number of people. Wow, it can. But you know that anyway, it made that 30 minute commute, which would otherwise have been dull, better, and then it just seemed dumb. If I could do that, why wouldn't I do that more often? And I was struck. What really struck me, and this is, this is really the driving force behind our research, wasn't just that the wasn't just that the conversation was positive, it was that was surprisingly positive. What I was struck by was this gap between my pessimistic beliefs that were keeping me from reaching out to begin with, engaging with another person, using my social brain for what it's good for, and the positive experience that I actually had from actually connecting with another person. Kurt Nelson 18:34 And Nick, that's not just your experience. This is what you find in the research that you're doing, is those expectations versus reality, they don't line up? Is that right? Nick Epley 18:45 Right? So I mean, anecdotes are fun and they're interesting, but, you know, I can't I'm weird in all sorts of ways, right? Common mind, weird in all sorts of ways and different and so as researchers, as scientists, it is often the case that our observations of the world and our experience in it are often triggers for hypotheses. We kind of look around in the world for the What the hell are we doing, kinds of moments, and then try to figure that out. That is, that is grist for our empirical mill, but just a single case is that's not evidence. That's just an anecdote. And so to actually get some evidence, we had to run experiments, do the thing we do as scientists, to see if this is a replicable, robust, reliable, sort of pattern. So the very first experiment we did now pushing probably 15 years ago, because this, this was just the tip. This was a tip of what became a massive iceberg for us in our research. Yeah, was we went to the trains, but I ride every day just to the station just north of us. We live in Flossmoor, Illinois, to the on the south side of Chicago, and we went to the Homewood, Illinois train station, which is north of us. And we we ran an experiment there. Where we were in two experiments, there's a way to think of it. In one experiment, we recruited people, gave them a survey on their commuting experience, and asked them to imagine, how would you feel if on this commute today, we asked you to just enjoy your solitude today, and they reported how positive it would be, kept to themselves, enjoyable, how positive would be, how sad, how happy they would feel, how sad they would feel, pleasant it would be compared to normal. That's one we asked them to imagine how you would feel if you just did whatever you normally did, which is mostly keep to themselves, or how you would feel if you actually tried to connect with another person in conversation. What I did with the with woman in the Red Hat, and the results there were crystal clear. People thought talking to the person that nesting them would suck. Like, no, I would rather not do that. That's like funneling a bag of, you know, pus, I just don't know. No, thank you. I'll use my phone instead, please. And so instead, they thought keeping to themselves would be the best. So those are people's beliefs, right? That's like, what? That's one bar, okay, in this that's the that's the expectation bar. We then ran another experiment where we recruited people and actually had them do these three things to test whether those beliefs that people held were calibrated with reality. So we actually had them try to try to make a connection with the person sitting next to them, try to have a conversation, to do whatever they normally did or to enjoy their solitude, and at the end of their commute, they actually reported having the most positive experience when they talked to the person sitting next Kurt Nelson 21:30 to them, and the Nick Epley 21:30 least positive experience when they kept to themselves and enjoyed their solitude. So it wasn't it wasn't just that people's expectations were wrong. They were precisely backwards, yeah, but in a way that allows you to understand their behavior. If I think that you know, reaching out to you Kurt to talking would be unpleasant, I wouldn't do it. And of course, I'd never find out that I was wrong about that if I don't try right. And so that was, that was really so that suggested, that was the first piece of evidence that we had that suggested I might not be crazy, right, that that this might not just be something that Kurt Nelson 22:06 you actually did have Danny Kahneman brain, and you were, yeah, it was Tim Houlihan 22:10 body, Nick Epley 22:12 yeah. So we, you know, and then, and then you start to ask questions. Well, okay, what if we go somewhere else, like, what if we, what if we go to another kind of dead space, like a gray space, where people could engage with each other, but instead, they're choosing to do nothing. So we went to the busses in Chicago. If you think there are weirdos on the trains in Chicago, you should try riding the bus. But even on the busses, they were, they actually took a bus into our lab. So we got, got better response rates out of this, almost perfect response rates. We found the same pattern there. Tim Houlihan 22:47 Well, what do you mean by perfect response rates? Nick Epley 22:49 So in the trains, we had people fill out surveys. So this is the old days. Now we do this on phones, and people fill out the survey online in real time. But on the trains, you know, we put people on the train and then we let them go, yeah, like, hey, you know, you know, our captive participants were out in the wild. Now, Tim Houlihan 23:08 you Nick Epley 23:09 know, we don't have them in the lab anymore, so we needed to hear back from them. And when you run a field experiment like that, not everybody responds to you. So we had about 85% of people get back to us. So they we gave them a survey that they dropped in the mail back to us a stamp. Now they just again, do it on their phones, but we had about 85% of people get back to us, and you'd worry about that as a researcher, particularly if the response rates were differing across conditions, maybe people were more likely to respond to one condition than another. People, maybe who had terrible experiences weren't, weren't filling out the survey and writing it back whatever, right? You'd worry about that kind of selective sampling. But still, we had good response rates, about 85% and equal in each condition. So that was good. Nevertheless, when we went and did it on the busses, we had people commute into our lab, and so we have, we had a lab downtown, and we had people leave their homes right on the bus. We called them before they left. We gave them instructions about what to do on the bus when they got to the lab. We had them, had them fill it out, and virtually everybody who started, well, certainly everybody who went through the bus and arrived at the lab filled out the survey. And nearly everybody who started the bus trip also came into the lab, so we had near perfect response rates there, which gives us a little more faith. And the results that we're hearing from everybody who participated Tim Houlihan 24:30 in it, it is kind of cool, though. You didn't bring people into a lab and sit them down and say, let's pretend that you're going to do this. And this is a this is a classic field experiment. You're literally out in the bus stations, in the train stations, asking these people, it is their actual experience. What Kurt Nelson 24:48 is Tim Houlihan 24:49 what we did in Minneapolis when you walked, you know, 100 plus people in that bar through this they all did it. They did it right there in front of us. Yeah. Things, and we got to see them have these interactions. Nick Epley 25:03 It's real. Yeah, no, it's real. I mean, it is. It is hard to do that kind of research. In some ways. I have the good fortune of being at a university that supports research well, so I have good resources to do that. But, you know, it's hard, it takes a while, but it's also the most interesting. I mean, these are, these are real, at least. I think, I think they're interesting. They're real. They're not people's imagination only. They're people's actual experience. And you can see it like, I mean, when we did it, when we did it together in, you know, in October, with people having deep conversations with another person you didn't. You kind of don't need the surveys, right? Yeah, Kurt Nelson 25:48 yeah. You had to, you had to stop those conversations. They because they were going and the number of people that I know, like, again, hundreds of people, lots of our friends, but they didn't know each other, so they were talking with people they did not know, and the the connections that were made from that, I still talking with people today, going I met this person, and we're now like we've gone out to coffee a couple times in different pieces, just from that 15 minutes of interaction that we we forced upon them. You talk in the book about this concept of under sociality. Can you explain what that is for our listeners, and why is it a problem? And I know you talked you started to go into why connections are important as you talked about that, as you were looking at that from wine wise, your last book, but maybe get into some of that as well. So Nick Epley 26:41 let's start with why sociality turns out to be important. It is essential for our happiness and our health. Spending a day alone is comparable to the feeling that you have when you spend a day with a headache, right? It's unpleasant where you feel where you spend a whole day alone. It feels bad over time. You aggregate those things up over time, and it turns out that being alone chronically is a physiological stressor. It compromises your immune system functioning. It compromises your cardiovascular functioning. Makes you therefore more susceptible to catch all kinds of illnesses, which means that being lonely is a severe risk factor, both for morbidity, bad bad health, and for mortality, dying sooner. Morbidity or mortality risks that are comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, right? It's it's big. We are social creatures. When we're connecting with others, we our body is telling us, yes, do more of this. This is great. This. Let's please continue, continue with this. I've got a friend. This is nice. I'm learning things. And when we're alone, our body is on high alert, telling us we got to stop doing this. Reach out and engage with other people. This isn't very nice. And so there's that sociality, that's why it's important for us. And yet, if we're if we're pessimistic about how social interactions will actually turn out. We might not do the things that actually create those social connections. We might not talk to the woman who sits down next to us in the Red Hat and have that uplifting 30 minute period, who might not do little things like on my way into the office, I've picked up a habit of saying hello to people as I come in. I know basically everybody in the building now, because I say hello to them all the time, but that just that little, that little walk in is uplifting in some ways, we won't do those things in our relationships. We might not be open and honest with people, and so we keep our true selves to ourselves in ways that make our relationships weaker, as we saw in the bar that evening, right? When we had all of your friends come together who kind of knew each other but didn't really know each other, right? They proved Bill nye's point when we actually gave them questions that encouraged them to learn something meaningful about these folks. They learned stuff they never would have guessed. Kurt Nelson 28:54 Yeah, Nick Epley 28:55 right. You actually, you killed a lot of strangers that night. We turned a lot of strangers, people who didn't know each other, into acquaintances or acquaintances into better friends. Yeah, right, because you went a little beyond but if you're reluctant, if you're nervous about how those interactions are going to go, you might not make the choice to engage in those interactions, and therefore might not be social enough for your own good. And that's the way in which we use this term under sociality, we're not social enough, I think, for our own good, in lots of Kurt Nelson 29:25 ways. Tim Houlihan 29:25 Are we in a crisis of under sociality? Is that overstating it? I'm just curious. How bad is it from your perspective? Nick Epley 29:35 So whenever I see people doing things that I know aren't I said I taught. I taught a class yesterday. Here at booth, right? I teach a class called Designing a good life. It's an ethics and happiness class, and one of the demonstrations we did yesterday required people in order to make money for themselves, required them to trust another person. Kurt Nelson 29:59 Yeah. Right? Nick Epley 30:00 When you trust another person, they tend to trust you back, right? So people had $10 they had to decide how much to give to another person, the other person, then had that amount tripled, and then they could choose to give some back. Okay, many of my students, I would say, most of my students, didn't trust their fellow students, and so they didn't transfer much money over, and they didn't get much money back. But some of our students really did trust they gave all of their money away, and in return, got a lot more money back. Felt better about In fact, one of the students who we randomly selected as the winner gave back more than he was given upfront, benefiting the other person more, because he's so appreciated, being trusted, okay? And when I see instances like that, so that's in my classroom, I can see the data, and I can see the cost of that, it feels like a tragedy to me. Kurt Nelson 30:52 Yeah, Nick Epley 30:53 you could have been kinder to another person, and you chose not to, and that hurt yourself and them at the same time, you could have had this nice conversation to a person sitting next to you, and you chose not to, and that moment was worse. That feels like a lost opportunity. Tragedy may be too big, but you scale this up over the course of somebody's life. If we're doing this chronically, you just live a much worse life than you could have, and a worse life for everybody around you. You scale this up right now in the US, arguably more divided than we've ever been, falsely divided in many ways because we don't engage with each other, we don't talk with each other, we don't connect with each other, and so are we at a crisis moment when I see people interacting with other human beings who are decent, I think, at their core, but by and large, not not all, but are more decent than we might imagine, choosing to do things that stoke division, disconnection, unhappiness, incivility. Yeah, that feels like a tragedy to me, and I would and it's a, it's a, like a it's a false crisis. I don't know how to solve this problem at the collective level. I don't know how to make people be wiser with each other at the societal level, but I do think I have a good sense about how to do it for you at the at the individual level, Kurt Nelson 32:20 which which actually brings me to my next question, because I've we've talked for years now about this. I've read your work. I understand the value of what you're saying. I know that it would be demonstrably better for me to have a conversation with the person sitting next to me, or attempting to have a conversation with the person sitting next to me on the airplane ride that I just took back two nights ago. And yet I don't, not always. I do more than I did before, but it is not a every single time thing. Why is that so difficult for me? Even if I understand, I understand, I believe it's not that I'm my expectation is, no, I know that the research says this will be better. I believe that, yet I still don't do it. I mean, and maybe it's just me because I'm an idiot. But you know, Tim Houlihan 33:16 bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, we have a winner. Kurt Nelson 33:19 All right, I know what the little visual is going to be now, done, but anyway, I'm sorry. Keep going. No, Nick Epley 33:28 look, Nick Epley 33:28 I hear that all the time. I hear that all the time, right? And part of it is I don't, I don't think the way. So I don't think our data suggests you should talk to everybody every time they don't. You got stuff to do, right? I mean, life's a series of choices that you got to make about how to spend your time. Our data just suggests that one of these, one of these things that that guide our decisions, one of the pieces of our decision making, is off, but not necessarily all of them. You got to work on. You know, you got to get a podcast interview ready to go. You got to write on the book you guys are working on, I mean, you got stuff to do, or this person might seem particularly busy or mean, or whatever, so you got, you have that stuff going on too. Our data suggests that you're off by a bit, Kurt Nelson 34:11 okay? Nick Epley 34:11 And if you correct a bit, you'll be a little more social. And I think that's what our data suggests you'll take opportunities to engage with other people that you might not have before, and I think that's the margin that you have for improvement now. I do think if you practice this more, Kurt Nelson 34:28 yeah, Nick Epley 34:30 you will become better at it. It'll become a habit. And you'll, you'll, you'll develop more skill, and then, and then you'll engage with other people when you got a chance far more often. Kurt Nelson 34:40 I want to dig into something that you just said, because it reminded me again, of so I was just down in Nashville. I was down there for work doing this thing I, you know, with clients. They have a big social thing at night, so I'm going down to the bar to eat my dinner, sitting at the bar and with everything. Thing that's going on in Minnesota right now. There's a lot of we've had, Tim and I have done a couple different episodes on it, and there's this tension of different opinions on things. Wonderful couple comes up, by the way, in Nashville right now, cattle con is going on, biggest cattle convention that you know, lots of big cowboy hats and cowboy boots and different things. Yeah, so wonderful woman and gentlemen, come sit next to me, older than me, probably in their 60s. He's wearing a big cowboy hat. His big mustache coming down. She's this just the wonderful little they asked me about my food and like, what are you eating? And we're sharing this wonderful conversation. I've got, oh, it's a steak and it has truffles, but it's not too heavy, so it's really good. She's, I'm going to try this way goo burger, because we have a we have a calf that that halfway goo, you know, his name is Philip. We're still going to eat him, but I'm going to try it here, you know, so having this whole wonderful conversation, which is just exactly like you talk about, and then they're going, Oh, I I asked them, Where are you from? And they said, Oh, Missouri. And they go, where are you from? And I go, Minnesota. And then it was like, they go, Oh, Minnesota. We've talked to people like our friends from there, and I shut down. I shut down because I was because I didn't. I made an assumption about where their political leaning was, and my political leaning and the interpretation of this, and I was just like, I don't have the energy right now to have this conversation that was going on in my head. Nick Epley 36:37 Sure was Kurt Nelson 36:38 that, given what you were just saying, is that something that you think is appropriate, or should I have maybe tried and again, you know, I've told myself I want to have these conversations, because I want people to understand the lived experience that I have of being in Minneapolis, and I want them to see that and to realize that. But I walked away from that, Nick Epley 37:02 yeah, um, I think the way to think about that particular situation is that you, you weren't totally honest with them. Kurt Nelson 37:11 No, Nick Epley 37:11 I think that might have been, you weren't, you weren't totally open with them. And I think, I think you might be very surprised by how well that would go even if they disagreed with you politically, at least we find in conversations, when people are open and honest with folks who disagreed with them, they tend to find a lot more in common than they'd imagine. Often, when people disagree about something, it's not that one person sees sees this one way and the other person sees exactly the same thing totally differently. It's often they're looking at different sides of an issue. Most of the complicated issues out there in the world is not a piece of paper. They're like 20 sided dice, Kurt Nelson 37:49 yeah, Nick Epley 37:50 and you're looking at it in slightly different ways, on slightly different angle. And when you learn what somebody else's perspective on the situation is, it's often, you often learn something right? Everyone you've you know, everyone you ever meet has knows something that you don't Kurt Right, Kurt Nelson 38:08 exactly. Nick Epley 38:09 And also everyone you meet also values openness and honesty, a sense of authenticity. So if you just said, you know, I live in Minneapolis, and we are going through a really hard time right now, and I'm just feeling so exhausted about it. I'm not sure I can talk about it now. Kurt Nelson 38:29 Yeah, Nick Epley 38:30 you had just been honest, right? You had filtered yourself, filtered yourself based on some assumptions, and that is the part that maybe I would suggest to you would be worth thinking about overcoming in the future I've been in. This Kurt Nelson 38:45 is why I love talking with you. This is this is just perfect. This is like perfect. Anyway, Nick Epley 38:51 you don't you don't have to guess what's in their mind, because those guesses are often likely to be wrong, particularly when you're across political divides, you tend to think they're probably more extreme, and I think you would have been really surprised at how similarly they would have seen the situation from you, and also how much they would have been willing to learn if you had felt comfortable, or you had just, you know, you just had invited them in to a conversation, even just by saying, Look, I'm so tired about that. They might have said, it looks really hard. I'm sorry you're feeling that way. Kurt Nelson 39:23 Yeah, Nick Epley 39:24 maybe they would have followed up with you know, do you have any personal experience with this? Can you? I don't know what they would have Kurt Nelson 39:30 said, Yeah, Nick Epley 39:30 but it probably wouldn't have been you suck right? Old bodied man with a Brad Pitt mind. I had, I had, I tell this story in the book. I had a situation like yours. That was one, is one of the best conversations about politics I've had across this kind of political divide. It's kind of conversation we often don't have. I had it with a guy carrying a gun. Kurt Nelson 39:57 Yeah, at the Nick Epley 39:58 end of my driveway. I. I was on Wisconsin. This was the fall of, fall of 2020, right, the the election, just before the election, and we had, we had Biden signs out in front of in front of the house, and somebody had run them over the day before, driven, driven down to the dish and run them over and then stolen them the next day. Right? They weren't like, there weren't offensive signs, or there just Yeah, and and so I called up, I just called up the sheriff. And I thought you might just want to know, no, this is going on. And he said, turns out I'm just up the road from you, just up the hill. So he comes down. We were there during during covid, is when this was he comes down and is in the sheriff's car, parks at the end of the driveway, comes out, you know, he's, you know, he's cops, so he's, he's fully armed. He's got an AR 15 in the back of the car. And we walk over, he shows and I show him where it is, and he says, it's really interesting. This is the first, these are the first Biden signs I've seen. Van lies. We see a lot of Trump signs. Kurt Nelson 40:58 Oh, I Nick Epley 40:59 didn't know that, right? Everyone you meet knows something you don't, right? So that was interesting. And then he turned to me, and he said, What is it about Trump you don't like and knowing what I do about conversation, he was open. I could tell to this, right? I'd taken that signal to having a conversation. And so we so we did. We went there. We spent an hour and 15 minutes at the end of my driveway. My wife, I get back to the house, she was, she was the point I'm about ready to call, yeah, while you're talking to this Sheriff, right? No, it was like an hour and 15 minute conversation I learned. I learned another part of the 20 sided dice from talking to him that I that I never, never understood before. So this was, this was, you know, after the George Floyd protest during, during the during covid, you know. And he was, he was saying, you know, I got into this job because I wanted to help people, Kurt Nelson 42:03 yeah, Nick Epley 42:04 and now, you know, we see something happen. We're worried about pulling people over on the side of the road, stopping somebody who's in a, you know, in a car without a license or whatever, because I'm worried about, you know, people coming down and surrounding the car. Because, you know, worried about doing my job here, Kurt Nelson 42:24 yeah, Nick Epley 42:24 like, it was a, you know, we have family who been in law enforcement. I've seen the toll that can take on you, and I just, I got a different perspective on this than I'd have, than I'd have thought before. He got a different perspective on this from me. He said, I've always, always interested in talking to people. He was open and talking to me, and we had a good conversation, right? In fact, we had the kind of conversation that you ought to have with your family members who believe who you love and who think things differently than you do. But often we're not good in those conversations. Here, we were open. We're willing to have the conversation. I would listen. He would listen. We didn't have our phones out for our social media followers or any of that nonsense. And it was fabulous. It was fabulous. You know, next day I call up the sheriff's office, and I make sure to tell them just how much I appreciated him coming Kurt Nelson 43:13 by. Yeah, Nick Epley 43:14 that's cool. So I don't know where your conversation would have gone, Kurt, but my bet is you'd have left feeling better if you had gotten Kurt Nelson 43:22 Well, Kurt Nelson 43:23 obviously, I'm, I'm I'm reminiscing or thinking about this in retrospect, going, why didn't I? I think I should have all of these different pieces. And I think the way that you just position that is a really nice way for people who are in the situation, because a lot of my friends are, you know, who are my neighbors are in situations like this, where we are exhausted, we are tired, and maybe we don't want to have those conversations with people, family members or high school buddies, or whatever it is. But maybe it's that honesty part of, hey, we're going through a lot. I'm exhausted, and maybe it is just being honest with that, and that can help in in moving these forward, and at least having the opportunity to share and to get the, as you said, that 20 sided dice, I think, is a fantastic element, because even in, you know, some of the stuff that Tim and I have done, we put some some posts out there, and we're getting responses back that are like, all over the board, and lots of its bots and lots of its different things on social media, which is a whole different thing. We can go into it at some point too, but one of those is like, where are people focusing their fear? Right? And there's a different perspective, a lens of people, like, I'm saving people from being raped and murdered to I'm saving people from being abused and and detained unlawfully. Nick Epley 44:48 Yes, yes. And when you do that right, it's both of you are, are, have, have good intent. You're viewing it from a different side of the dice. Kurt Nelson 44:55 And that, yeah, I. Kurt Nelson 45:00 Hey, grooves. We want to take a moment away from our conversation to thank you for listening to behavioral grooves. If you enjoy the conversations we're having and want to help us keep the groove going, here are a few simple ways that you can support the show. Tim Houlihan 45:13 First off, subscribing to our sub stack is a great way to stay connected with us between episodes. The weekly newsletter provides you with cool insights that are beyond the episodes, and they get delivered straight to your inbox. Kurt Nelson 45:26 And if you haven't already leaving a review or a rating of the podcast on a platform like Apple or Spotify or YouTube, helps other curious minds discover us. And there's two great things about that. One, it gives us a boost, and two, it costs nothing Tim Houlihan 45:42 and it only takes a second, but it makes a huge difference for us. Plus, we love hearing from you, so don't be shy. Leave us a review or give us a quick thumbs up. Kurt Nelson 45:52 We're coming up on 500 episodes, and we're doing this because we love the conversations we have with our guests. Tim Houlihan 45:58 Yeah, we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful behavior, changing content every week, and we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove, pull us back in. Tim, joining us, joining us. Here on behavioral grooves is Dr Nick Eppley. We're talking about his new book, us. Title, little more social. UK. Title, hello, loving that. And I want to just switch themes just a little bit. I'm curious about the distribution curve on this. If we go, if we go two standard deviations away from the mean, is there somebody who's going to go through your experiment and say, you know, Dr Eppley, as much of bullshit. I am not happy I did. I did not like talking to that person. I learned nothing. I'm never going to do this again. So any one off conversation, I mean people, we have bad conversations. The woman in the Red Hat didn't have, have to have responded Kurt Nelson 46:59 to Nick Epley 47:00 me, but 95% of the time they will and what we find in our research, if you actually look at the distribution, what you see is that there's a lot more variability in people's beliefs about how these social interactions will unfold than there is in people's actual experiences, And that's massive, and that's important for personality, for instance. So there, you know, there's a strong belief that people differ in how much they enjoy social interaction, engaging with other people. That's called extroversion. That's that dimension. What we find in our research, though, is that extroversion and introversion mostly describes people's beliefs about social interaction, their expectations, much more than it describes their actual experiences. The way to think about personality is that they're your habits. It's not it's not who you are, it's who you've kind of trained yourself to be over time, and habits are governed by the choices that you make. That's what it's choices. So introverts think they're not going to like social interaction. They choose not to have them, but when we actually ask them to have them, we find that they enjoy it just as much as an extrovert would. And so there's this big spread on people's beliefs about this, and those beliefs guide people's behavior right. Notice, if you're nervous about social interaction, if you're more introverted, you think of yourself that way, you're not going to have that conversation. You won't find out that you could be wrong. I wouldn't have that conversation with the lady in the Red Hat, the cop at the end of my driveway and found out that the fear I had was mistaken. I would have carried that with me, and it would have affected my next interaction, my next and my next, and I would have become introverted. But when we actually look at people's experiences, there's not a ton of variability around it, right? So people's expectations on a on a scale of how much you'll enjoy it, say, go from zero to 10, right? We give people scale like that. People fill out every every response option in their expectations from zero to 10. People's experiences generally range from about seven to 10. So the people who are most mistaken are the people who go into it most pessimistic. To begin Tim Houlihan 49:11 right, Nick Epley 49:13 the gap is crazy. Big, crazy, big. There is a little insight. I mean, people who who go in thinking they're going to enjoy it a zero. Do like it a little less enjoy it a little less than people. People go in thinking it's 10. Kurt Nelson 49:26 Yeah, Nick Epley 49:27 difference in expectations is more like a seven and a half to an eight and a half, not from zero to 10. Tim Houlihan 49:35 Okay, tell us about Maslow. I learned about about the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Probably in high school, it was like, Man, that pyramid, this is gospel, Nick Epley 49:47 all right, social connection is not, is not in the bottom. You need food first, and gotta have food. Gotta have shelter, yeah, yeah. Tim Houlihan 49:55 And then, if you're lucky, you get to self actualization, Nick Epley 49:58 right? Autonomy. Meaning, purpose, Tim Houlihan 50:00 way up there, way up there, in the, in the, you know, the clouds, if you can possibly imagine self actualization, if you could ever get there, Nick Epley 50:09 yep. Tim Houlihan 50:10 All right, what did Maslow get wrong? Nick Epley 50:14 Pretty much everything. Well, let me, let me back off. Yeah. So Maslow was a great human being. He was, he was a wonderful man. So the note, right? This is his, this is, this is a, this is a great intuitive idea, Kurt Nelson 50:29 right? Nick Epley 50:30 And he got our intuitions exactly right. That's how we tend to think about motivation, right? That they're kind of basic needs. And when you're hungry, you can only think about food. You can't think about anything else, you know, and and and self actualization, this sense of meaning and purpose, right? Wanting meaning and purpose is something you can only have if you have these other basic needs and social connection, belongingness. He put in the middle of this hierarchy. He believed it was, it operated in a step rise fashion, and that turns out to be how people think about other people. It just isn't how their own motives operate and this and this. So what's interesting about Maslow is it makes a lot of intuitive sense. You can describe it. Everybody goes, Oh, yeah, that seems right. But when he proposed this in the 1950s but when psychologists actually started testing whether motivation, right, whether their their desire for meaning and purpose in their life was related to their, you know, need for for security, right? If they felt safe, safe and secure, then they could care about meaning and purpose, or could people who cared about safety and security or food, also care about meaning and purpose. They found that there was not this hydraulic relationship. It's more like a, you know, a box of needs. There's their whole bunch of needs that are in there that are important for us, and we can care about them at the same time. And when psychologists started testing these after Maslow proposed that they found, they found evidence that just wasn't consistent with it, and they kept finding. 1974 a meta analysis was published of all the data collected that time that said there's only one problem with Maslow's hierarchy. The data don't seem to support it. I Nick Epley 52:14 was Nick Epley 52:15 born in intro psych textbooks. And you know when you think about it more carefully, and we found this in our own research, that people, people actually that that that Maslow's hierarchy is a little dehumanizing, because people tend to think that folks who are lower on the socio economic totem pole, for instance, are also kind of lesser human beings. Kurt Nelson 52:42 Yeah, they're Nick Epley 52:42 more animalistic. Animals have those basic needs, right? Food security, but humans are the ones who have the top but people tend to think folks who are lower in socioeconomic status are don't have those higher order needs. They don't really care about belonging. They need food, and they just, Kurt Nelson 52:59 they have to, they have to fight for that food. That's like, that's a struggle. So that's where their focus is. And they don't have time or energy to go, yeah? Nick Epley 53:07 But it turns out they need love too, Kurt Nelson 53:09 yeah? And Nick Epley 53:09 it turns out, if you want to make a poor person happier, giving them some meaning and purpose in their life goes an awful long ways. Right? We all need the house. Yes, that's true, but it's just flat out dehumanizing to think about people in terms of this Maslow's period, this Maslow's pyramid. So not only is that inconsistent with the data, people care about all of these things. A person who's hungry also cares that their life is meaningless. In fact, that's what they would take their own life for. Yeah, right. Wow. It's feeling that it's not meaningful. So not only is it inconsistent with the data, but thinking this way, I think, is dehumanizing. So, you know, we think folks who are poor, what all they need is food. So we'll get, you know, give them a lot of nice, nice, you know, we'll give them food and things like that. What they need is a job that's got some purpose to it too. And so when I, when I, when I talk about this in class, I often put up the Maslow hierarchy with a toilet flush in the background. Just, let's just take a moment to expunge this from our minds. Maybe you can add that to the podcast, right? Matt, yeah, we've got Tim Houlihan 54:19 a fantastic effects department. So Kurt Nelson 54:22 it's Nick Epley 54:23 called Kurt. Kurt Nelson 54:25 You don't want me to be doing the effects that would be, yeah, that'd be my voice over here. Nick, have you ever watched the TV show alone? Have you seen it? Or do you know what it Tim Houlihan 54:35 is? It's called alone. Yeah. Kurt Nelson 54:38 So let me, let me tell you the premise of this, and for our listeners, too, who haven't so alone, is this show. Basically it takes 10 people all kind of these survivalist people, puts them out into the wilderness to live alone off of the land. They get, like, 10 things that they can bring with them, a tarp and, you know, fish. Hooks and different pieces of this. They're all separate. Tim Houlihan 55:02 This is not a community Kurt Nelson 55:03 separate. They're all part. So they're video cameras that they have to self record. So they're recording themselves doing all this stuff every day, but they're not talking to people, and they're out in the wilderness alone, and they don't know how the other people are doing, and they're not saying, oh, three of them have left, right? And the idea is, the person who lasts longest wins 500k and what I find interesting, because it's just, it's a psychological show for I mean, I think you would love it from the psychology part of it, but is that you would assume that the best survivalist would win. It's the person who has the most fish and food and has the shelter that keeps them warm and and like, one guy was creating games to keep himself occupied. He was like, carving, you know, dice and doing all sorts of things because he was had enough food and everything. That's usually not the case. Usually the person those people like, no, they're they're like, I miss my family. I miss people. I miss my friends, whatever that would be. And it's the ones who can weather that storm of loneliness, that kind of Outlast that does so, given that Does that surprise you? And then B is this, should this show be banned because it's psychological torture? Well, Nick Epley 56:14 people are entering into it voluntarily, not knowing the harm that's going to befall them. But what I what, what I think is probably interesting about what would be interesting about that, from my perspective, would be to look at at people's beliefs about who's going to survive. I'm sure they think it's, it's the guy who knows how to make a tent out of grass and leaves, right? Not the one who can, you know, keep their minds entertained by writing notes to their loved ones and feel connected even when they're isolated, or maybe the ones who have some religious faith that allows them to feel connected at a time when otherwise they're alone. I'm sure people would underestimate that part that is that's super interesting. I myself, I spend a lot of time outdoors. Myself, I grew up in rural Iowa. All my extended family are farmers. I love spending time in the woods. It's not that I don't enjoy my solitude. I do. I'm very engaged. I spend a lot of time hunting and fishing, do conservation work on land we own. I love being alone, but I also know that I love being out in the woods with my kids even more. Yeah, like small bands. I Kurt Nelson 57:21 always talk in a lot of the business work we do, and people you know, and this idea of the American cowboy who's a lone ranger out there, and different pieces. And I always tell them, I go, that's fantastic. But what happened at night, they would come back around the fire, Kurt Nelson 57:39 yes, Kurt Nelson 57:40 sing songs and beans and tell Nick Epley 57:42 jokes, yeah, go into town and try to find a lady to be with, right? Yeah, for sure, that's exactly what they would do. Tim Houlihan 57:49 Well, does this? How Tim Houlihan 57:50 is it? Is this? How, like a monastic communities work then, because that there's this purpose, this sense of purpose that's associated with it, Nick Epley 57:59 they're also together, right? They're also together. But it is one thing that this is more anecdotal. Folks who do go out into the desert to try to live a monastic life often have religious experiences, connections to the divine. They feel a connection to to the divine. You know, when you're alone, you imagine beings that are out there to connect with when you're by yourself. I think the monastic life of people connected together is a hard one for people, very, very hard one for people, right? In a way people don't appreciate. People do select into that, but they're also often not, typically truly alone. That is not a common way to live. That is not the common way to live is to live in massive cities with lots of people around. Yeah, right, Tim Houlihan 58:44 yeah. Hermits are the they're way, Nick Epley 58:47 very, very rare exceptions. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 58:49 yeah. Kurt Nelson 58:50 So, Nick, you wrote that your research had a profound impact on your personal life. When you think about that impact, looking back on that. How did that impact you? And are you happy about that was a good impact on your life? Nick Epley 59:07 So nothing I've ever been involved with has changed the way I live my life more than this. Kurt Nelson 59:12 Wow. I mean, Nick Epley 59:13 like every aspect of my life, day after day, is different in small ways and in big ways, small ways. Let's just start this morning, right? I'm coming in on the train, sitting across a train car from someone I'd seen a couple days before, but I never said hello to a smaller African American woman. She had her hat on. I couldn't tell she had her headphones in. If I knew she had her headphones in, I might not have talked. I waved at her first. She was looking at her phone just to say hi, but then she looked at the conductor, and I caught her. I just said hello. We started talking, right? We had a lovely 30 minute ride. Her name is Susan. She works a paralegal downtown. I'll see her next Tuesday, when she'll be back on the train again, right? So Tim Houlihan 59:51 when Nick Epley 59:53 I get on the train now, it just feels different, like I know all these people on the train I don't. I. Not like I'm riding with a bunch of strangers. Kurt Nelson 1:00:02 Yeah, Nick Epley 1:00:02 I've talked to three quarters of them, it seems. And if I see somebody who I don't know, I can make that dull moment better. I'm walking into the train. I bump into a student of mine who's there with his wife and with two other two other women who who are coming into campus, student and a spouse of another MBA student, who's also in my class, had a lovely little conversation with them. In fact, talked to them about how to connect partners of MBA students to the university a little bit better. That was that was nice. I get up to my office, I pass an economist down the hall on my Hello tour on the way into the office, saying hi to everybody. Her name is Virginia. She's fabulous young economist that we have here. Say hi to her, you know, a minute or two later, she comes back down my office and she said, Hey, I just heard about your research the other day. I wanted to tell you about on this other podcast that I was listening to. Is super fascinating. She had some questions for me, right? So those little things, they enrich my life. So, and there are lots of those. My plane rides aren't quiet when I'm feeling something, I'll share it with somebody. My friendships are better because I don't. I don't hold back thoughts or beliefs or feelings that I have from other people. My marriage, I think, is better. I'm thinking about how, how it can make my wife happy or lift her up in certain ways that I might have underestimated before. I don't, I don't underestimate them. Sat around breakfast this morning, we have flowers in the middle of the table from my first Monday flowers. My wife loves flowers. And we have a neighbor who has a flower shop, and she I ordered routine first Monday of the month. We get flowers delivered. She loves it. And all of these things have come from, I think me recognizing the power I have to engage other people and lift them up in ways I wouldn't have appreciated before. And it becomes such a common thing, it becomes part of your characters. I just, I just do things. I just do things differently, automatically. I don't think about it anymore. I talk with anybody, anywhere, anytime, and I don't, I don't keep things to myself. I have meaningful conversations and and even big things it has, it has affected. So I do write in the book about about a tragedy that hit our family. We we lost a baby. Her name was Sophie, six months into my wife's pregnancy. At three months, we learned that that Sophie had Down syndrome. That was the first kind of blow to us. We hadn't we. So we we have five children now. We've had had four at the time, we didn't adopt a two, and so we have a have had an interesting family journey, but we're three, three months into pregnancy with Sophie, and we had not thought about having a child with intellectual disability. That's not what enters into your mind. And so that was the first kind of moment. Do we, do we continue with this, or do we do what the doctors assume that we would have done? And then the pregnancy? I won't speak for my wife, but I will speak for me. I was nervous. I was very nervous about how this would go. I know from our research, it's hard to tell what it's going to be like to be in a situation you're not in. Would we welcome this little one into our lives and be able to handle it? So we called other parents, these other parents, almost to a person like they were reading off of some sort of script, said that their child with Down syndrome, who they were, you know, were worried whether they can handle had been a total blessing in their lives. They all use the word blessing like it was. I just I so distinctly remember that they all described their child as a blessing. And then at six months, we lost our daughter. She, she died in utero, and that is the worst thing that's ever happened in our lives, without a without a close comparison. It's horrible. I mean, it's the worst thing, worst thing that happens to a parent. And we, we sat with that for for a long time after reaching out, you know, we didn't get a chance for her to reach back to us. And we sat with us for eight, nine months, maybe just kind of morning this. And one morning I went, remember this very clear that my wife was sitting in a chair that she likes in our sun room. And and I went in and I said to her that, you know, we did we have, I thought about reaching out again. We could do this again. We were prepared to bring a child into the world. We'd adopt it before we could do this again. And I asked her, you know, would you be, would you be? We're ready to go as parents again. There are children out there who need parents. We're ready to be parents again. Would you be interested in adopting you? Would you want to consider that. And she, as my wife usually is, was already half a mile ahead of me. And she said, Actually, I've been speaking with an adoption agency in that that would allow us to adopt a child with Down syndrome from China. That was not actually what I was thinking. That was not what I had in mind. And so. Again, I had to confront this. I had this, you know, these kind of bars in my mind. Can we handle? Can we do this? And you know, it to anybody who's not a researcher, it's going to sound weird to think that somehow, like the cold calculus of data, like these bar graphs, where I see these gaps between people's beliefs about what it'd be like if I reach out to connect to connect to somebody, and what it's actually to think that consulting that in my mind would would change how I how we behave. I think it would sound bizarre crazy, but to me, it gave me a lot of it gave me some data driven strength that look these fears I have right now are probably off when you reach out to love another human being. What do they tend to do? They tend to love you back. We already knew that we could do this. We had the research raising a child with an intellectual ability is no jokes. It's no joke. It's not it's not both hands full. It's both arms full. I mean, it is serious business. Nobody should take this lightly at the same time, I had a sense that the fears that were making me reluctant to do this when my wife was on board, were probably misplaced, and so thinking about our work made me much more open more I don't know that it would have made a difference, you know, in the decision in the end, but it certainly made me feel much more confident that, yeah, we can do This. Tim Houlihan 1:06:18 Yeah, Nick Epley 1:06:19 we can do this. And so, so we made the decision to go ahead and adopt. We actually, we called up the adoption agency the next the next day. As I recall, I think Jen and I were talking about this on a Sunday, if I remember right, and the woman who answered the phone, she said, Thank you so much for calling. We've been praying for you. Just I never forget that. And, you know, held up a picture Lindsay needs parents. We called her Lindsay. This young girl needs parents. Would you be up for it? And we weren't. So, you know, some months later, we're on the plane with a whole family, other four kids. They're like a traveling circus. All of us, right, going over, adopting, opting adopting Lindsay, who is now I can hold up a little picture of her, yeah, she's been a blessing. Oh, what can you say? Other parents were right. She's been total blessing. So, so it is. It has changed the way I live my life, kind of from top to bottom. Not just, you know, morning routine coming into the office, but also the structure of our family in the course of our future, Tim Houlihan 1:07:29 that little bundle of Hello, Nick Epley 1:07:31 she's pretty great. Yeah, I do mention that she's, she's the most fun, fun person I like. I see our work exhibited through our daughter, through Lindsay, all the time. She has no filter on her low Kurt. She just Kurt Nelson 1:07:47 like, oh yeah, hello. Nick Epley 1:07:48 I take her, I take her grocery chef, take her grocery shopping, and she walks down the aisle saying, Hello to everybody. And they just brighten up, as if they've just been injected with some kind of substance, right? That they go from kind of this dead face looking for their groceries to just being delighted that this little, you know, little angel has said, Hello, you should have a little and it just, it's, yeah, life is better with her. Tim Houlihan 1:08:13 It doesn't end. Let me just, let me just say that I'm predicting that your experience will be a lifetime of experience, because as the older brother of a Down Syndrome man, Nick Epley 1:08:25 right, Tim Houlihan 1:08:25 yeah. So Nick Epley 1:08:27 my Tim Houlihan 1:08:27 youngest brother, 10 years younger than me, just came to visit. Moved we moved here to Chapel Hill, and he came to visit and took her, took him around to see some neighbors. And every neighbor was just delightful, like, you know, of course, warm and everything. But Matthew, my youngest brother, is like, just like the king of the block, like, I know that you've welcomed me into your home, so I'm here to bring a, you know, a bright light of happiness. So let's sit down and have a conversation. And it's so he, he's done this his whole life and and I've seen it with lots of his, you know, friends and colleagues as well. So Nick Epley 1:09:09 yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:09:09 I hope that you and Lindsay have a big hello life for a long time. Nick Epley 1:09:15 I have no doubt. I have no doubt about that. And, you know, like, like your family, we and our family, we have the, you know, I was very strong marriage. You know, Jen and I have been married for 30 years. Marriage has never, never been better than, than even it is right now and and so we also had, we know, we had resources. You know, raising a raising a child, raising a brother with intellectual ability, is here, so don't We don't want to take that lightly. It's not all, all all hugs and kisses and roses and sunshine. There are challenges, but boy, the fears, the fears that I had about it were misplaced. When you reach out to love somebody, they tend to love you back. Kurt Nelson 1:09:51 Yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:09:53 and can I just say it's something that separates this book from a lot of other books that people might read that. The authenticity that you bring to the to the book, as a writer, as an author, as just a real human being, is just tremendous. And aside from all the science that we just love, we really love that you engaged on such a personal level. So thanks for for just being you, Nick, I guess Nick Epley 1:10:19 Thank you. I appreciate that. Tim Houlihan 1:10:20 I Kurt Do you have a no, Kurt Nelson 1:10:25 you need to go to music. I do any better on the main content than what we just did. So Tim Houlihan 1:10:33 you have a lot of lovely musical references in the book Beatles, Billy, Joel, Luke combs, Darryl Davis. Darrell Davis, one of my, one of my favorite, even, yeah, blues, rhythm and blues guy, fantastic story. He was, I think he was on Maya Shankar very first episode of her podcast, on a slight change of plans. So I want to encourage anybody to check that out. But, but I did actually want to just find out if you would be willing to reenact your 25th wedding anniversary song for us right now. Nick Epley 1:11:15 I will leave that to Ben full. God, yeah, that was like, oh so cringy. I still can't. So, you know, Kurt, this is one of these things, just like, you know, it's it's okay, it's good, right, to talk to somebody else, but you still feel that anxiety. I knew that my wife would like this, so I sort of listeners who don't ever read the book I for my for our 25th anniversary, I sang to my wife the Ben Folds song the luckiest, because I thought it encapsulated in my mind how I best felt about my wife. It is a beautiful song, Tim Houlihan 1:11:50 great tune. Kurt Nelson 1:11:51 I Nick Epley 1:11:52 thought it was like, Yeah, I think of her when i Whenever I listen, and I like, Ben Folds too, but I'm not a good singer. I I sing happy birthday in front of my class sometimes, but that's hard one put it to you know, slideshow with pictures and even just telling you about it just it hurts. Not enough money in the world for me to show you that video. Okay, but at the same time, I knew that she would like it, and so I got over, I got over that. No, I will not sing it for you now. Kurt Nelson 1:12:35 Okay, Tim Houlihan 1:12:35 all right. Well, then if you were stranded on a desert island for a relatively short period so you wouldn't get too, too strong of isolation. Yeah, and you had a listening device that could store two artists their entire catalog, but you only get two musicians. What? Which two would you choose? And this is another go to the grave question. This Nick Epley 1:12:57 is I got, all right, two. Okay. So one is Matt Carney, K, E, A, R, N, E, y, I don't know if you guys know Matt. He's in Nashville Kurt where you said you were just a little Kurt Nelson 1:13:06 bit Nick Epley 1:13:06 okay. He's a singer songwriter who we who we love. In fact, I've carried him over my head at a concert one time. Whoa, yeah. He does this thing where he, like, crowd surfs at the end. We were up in Wisconsin at a show of his, and I happened to help, help him move along in the crowd. Was it nothing? Tim Houlihan 1:13:24 Was it nothing left to lose? What Nick Epley 1:13:25 was that's one of them. Yeah, that's one of his albums. I just, I really like him a lot. I think, I think he's great, and he's got a really good catalog. He's, he's kind of gone through different different genres over the years, but, you know, little upbeat Lindsay. Lindsay also loves his media, yeah. And so she, she often asked for the Hey song, which is a song called count on me. Which she really likes, which is, which is lovely song. She asked for the hay song. It has Hey, hey in the lyrics. So if you listen to you so, so Matt Carney is one, just because I really like he's our go to when we're on a long trip put in the car to just listen to and enjoy. The other one would be Rufus Wainwright. Rufus Wainwright is just he. He requires a little more energy to listen to sometimes because got a killer voice. Like it's not always easy listening. But man, is that guy talented? Tim Houlihan 1:14:23 Can we just clarify? Is it Rufus rain, number one or number three? Nick Epley 1:14:28 Number three, number three. Yeah, third Nick Epley 1:14:30 one, still making music. Now, we saw him at Ravinia, which is a which is a concert venue here on the north side of Chicago. And some musicians, I won't say who we've experienced live have been worse than their albums. Yeah, Rufus Wainwright is talented on his albums, but if you hear him live, holy cow, he is phenomenal. So I also enjoy his music very heart failure. Felt amazingly talented, varied. Tim Houlihan 1:15:06 Two singer songwriters, interesting. You did, Nick Epley 1:15:08 yeah, you didn't try Tim Houlihan 1:15:09 to play the variety thing or novelty. You just like, This is what you like Kurt Nelson 1:15:15 short enough time. Tim, so I'm gonna be stuck with, I want somebody Nick Epley 1:15:21 who's thoughtful, right and thoughtful and talented? Maybe I don't know. Yeah, I like them both. Tim Houlihan 1:15:25 Yeah, that's good stuff. Nick Epley, thank you so much once again, for being a guest on behavioral grooves. Nick Epley 1:15:32 Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me looking forward to the next time Kurt Nelson 1:15:35 you Kurt Nelson 1:15:42 Tim, welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Nick. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our stranger danger brains. You know, there's a part of this I wonder, and I don't think we have never talked with Nick about this, but we're kind of conditioned from childhood, Tim Houlihan 1:16:09 don't talk to strangers, Kurt Nelson 1:16:11 to don't talk to strangers. Tim Houlihan 1:16:12 I taught my kids that, yeah. Kurt Nelson 1:16:14 I mean, that's one of the things we learned growing up, strangers are dangerous. Don't talk to them. Tim Houlihan 1:16:22 Yeah. And Nick is not advocating that children should take on risky conversations with strangers, with Kurt Nelson 1:16:34 adults and different things. I think he would say that they should talk to other kids, right? Yeah, or their age in various appropriate social situations. Tim Houlihan 1:16:44 I think so. I think that he would, and I don't. And I would also suggest that believe that Nick is not advocating that we just talk to anybody at any time what we can still be a bit discerning about this, like you're in the airport and you see someone who has the bag from the conference that you were just at like, you know that there's a connection there. And you might not have had your bag out to sort of demonstrate that you had an emblem of credibility, but I wouldn't have taken long to Kurt Nelson 1:17:17 to establish that I was I could have said, Hey, I was at the conference, you know, how did you, how did it go for you, what did you, what did you take away, Tim Houlihan 1:17:25 right? Would Kurt Nelson 1:17:25 have been a fantastic conversation. Tim Houlihan 1:17:27 Could have, could have been, Kurt Nelson 1:17:30 it would have been probably right. The the research that Nick brings to this indicates that it would most likely have been Tim Houlihan 1:17:41 right, right? So, so while we were talking about this before, before we started recording, I think some the one of the most interesting things that we might be able to take from this is thinking about having these conversations from a leadership perspective. Yeah, if you're a leader in an organization, you're human too. Or, Kurt Nelson 1:18:04 I don't know, I've met some leaders. I don't know if they're really human, Tim Houlihan 1:18:09 but, but there's that that could be happening, like you could be, you could be having that, oh gosh. I don't want to interrupt them. I know, I know that my team's really busy. I don't want to bug them about this. Or, you know, Kurt Nelson 1:18:21 it's, it's that I Tim Houlihan 1:18:23 think that's gonna be problematic. Kurt Nelson 1:18:24 It's that expectation gap again, and this isn't with strangers. I mean, hopefully it's your leader and the people that work for you are not strangers, right? However, we do make assumptions, and we then make behavioral choices based upon those assumptions, and those assumptions often are this will be awkward. This. They're too busy. They already know this. There's a whole host of different elements that stop leaders from having really important conversations, or we could reverse this, Tim Houlihan 1:19:13 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:19:13 and have employees having conversations with their leaders. And I think you find maybe even more components that would inhibit those assumptions that are being made Tim Houlihan 1:19:28 to Kurt Nelson 1:19:29 stop that conversation from happening, to take, as we called in the in the opening session, that risk of not engaging, right? It's the risk of not reaching out Tim Houlihan 1:19:40 this and when you when you turn the tables, when you just did that lovely switch of it's not just leaders being reluctant to have those vulnerable or are authentic conversations with their own employees, but the opposite, and that reminds me of my conversation with Tom Rieger. When we was talking about fear, right? Like fear Kurt Nelson 1:20:04 is, boom, it's a Tim Houlihan 1:20:05 terrible driver. It's a horrible driver of behavior in a lot of these situations. Because, and I think leaders have the responsibility of setting the tone. It's going to be up to the leader to make themselves credible and vulnerable and authentic and available and compassionately curious. Let's get back to Kwame Kurt, me 100% Kurt Nelson 1:20:30 Tim 100% it as much as we like to think that employees should have that inner sense that they can come and talk to us as leaders, that they can bring up anything it is the leaders accountability to making sure that the environment that they've set up, that the team culture that they are creating, that their own behaviors are driving that sense of trust, driving that sense of openness and psychological safety that we've talked about on so many different shows, right for their team, for their employees, and I think that starts with what your initial premise was, is leaders need to get over their own fear of having those conversations Tim Houlihan 1:21:30 beautifully said. And along with that, along with that, being willing to get over it, I think that they need to. Leaders also need to acknowledge that they are. They're going to have this bias. They're going to have this, this sort of screwed up forecast in their in their heads, right, that, Oh, I can't have that conversation. Or they won't respect me. My team won't respect me. If I, you know, if I ask this trivial question, or if I you know, if I want to engage them in this in this way, you got to get you got to get over the I you know that because I'm a leader, I have to be a mind reader. Kurt Nelson 1:22:06 The way that you, you talked about that forecast, I love that. It's, it's almost as if there's a weather forecast and there's a 3% chance of rain. So I'm not going to go out today because there's a 3% chance of rain. I'm not going to go and do that activity that I want to do outside. Yeah, I'm just going to stay inside. So I'm going to stay silent because there's a three, five, 10% chance that I might encounter I might be awkward. It might somebody might be too busy that somebody doesn't want to have that conversation, and I'm going to make it worse when in reality, that forecast is it's the framing effect, right? It's not three to 5% chance of rain, it's 95 to 97% chance that it's sunny and awesome. Yeah, right. Tim Houlihan 1:23:00 It is framing. And are you also kind of making a pitch for thinking in bets here too? Kurt Nelson 1:23:07 Yeah, I don't know. It's how we've we have come around to that, haven't Tim Houlihan 1:23:11 we? We Kurt Nelson 1:23:12 talk about this. I mean, we talk about the probabilities of things. Tim Houlihan 1:23:15 Probabilistic thinking is much better than the on or off. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:23:20 yeah. So here's the thing, I think, this idea that leaders don't engage in these conversations, or maybe even employees, and it feels like that's professionalism. It feels right Kurt Nelson 1:23:39 to Kurt Nelson 1:23:40 a certain degree. It's spoken about like, Oh, we're being efficient. I'm focused in on the on the transactions. I'm going to, you know, do this. And oftentimes those conversations that we want to have and need to have aren't necessarily about the business. Those are ones that I and this is my own personal opinion, so disagree with me. If you think I'm wrong, Tim Houlihan 1:24:06 you're wrong. Oh, I'm sorry. I'll wait. I'll wait till I hear Kurt Nelson 1:24:13 your Yeah, you're probably right. We'll just listen to my thing here, that I think we have, that leaders feel more comfortable about those transactional conversations. It is about the work that's being done. It is about the task at hand. It is when it becomes a personal conversation, something that might have to deal with emotions or feelings, or some of the softer aspects of teamwork or tension and various different things that it becomes harder again, I don't have research to point out and say, yep. That's it. That's just from me experiencing, Tim Houlihan 1:25:03 well, there's 30 years of working with Kurt Nelson 1:25:05 executives. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:25:06 I would agree with most of what you said, because, because I, I think that the business environment tends to have a self fulfilling prophecy of when we're at work, we're going to talk about work, we're to focus on work. If we're not talking about work, we're not being again. You mentioned this earlier, efficiency and and productivity, and if we're not focused on those things, then why are we wasting our time talking about it when actually asking? And what I hear you advocating is that the leader having a conversation with a team or with team members about, how do you feel about this? How are you reading the room? How are you like we talked about that. That's a scary discussion because it's not technically part of the business discussion. Kurt Nelson 1:25:57 Yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:25:58 Am I? Am I reading that right? Kurt Nelson 1:26:00 100% right? Mr. Houlihan, I mean that. I think it's those small moments that build trust, that build belonging, that build psychological safety, that I'm sharing some vulnerability. Maybe I'm coming at this with some compassionate curiosity that I'm being authentic about the real me and not the face that I put on at work, and those conversations need to happen for the team to operate at its best? Tim Houlihan 1:26:41 Yeah, I don't. I'm thinking back to a story that Nick told us about how, when he started this research and he started engaging people, he began doing it kind of everywhere. And of course, he works at the University of Chicago. He's in a building. He's, you know, there's people that work in the building. There's, you know, there might be a security guard at the front door. There might be janitors. There might be, you know, the janitorial crew that's emptying waste baskets and that kind of thing. And there's professors and students, and he says hi to all of them. And after all these years, God Kurt, and now I'm thinking, I don't remember when we talked to Nick about this, and we've had so many conversations with him, I don't know, actually, just recently or not, but, but he said it takes him a long time to get into get to his office, because he's saying hi to so many people on the way to his office. Kurt Nelson 1:27:35 Would that be great Tim Houlihan 1:27:36 burden to bear? Right? I Kurt Nelson 1:27:38 yeah, I was just gonna say the same thing. What a wonderful reason for being late to your office. Yeah, I was having conversations with the you know, security guard up in front. I was having a long conversation with that student who, you know, always drinks coffee down in the lobby. I was having conversation with that other assistant professor who I walk by every morning. We build relationships that way, and all of the research we've had multiple guests on the show, and we've talked about it multiple times, the biggest indicator, the best predictor, of a long healthy life, is not how much you exercise or how well you Eat. It all focuses in on the social connections that and the broader, larger, more connected, more intimate that those connections are, the better your life is, demonstrably in almost every instance. Tim Houlihan 1:28:57 Yeah, so I noticed when I was at truest, going into the office back in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I started asking people around me, you know, to tell them, tell me about themselves. Pulled the Kwame Christian being compassionately curious about what their lives were like. It was really cool for me to feel like we were becoming friends. We were we were becoming we were developing a relationship in a really healthy way just by having those exchanges. And then that led to interesting volunteer things, like I remember one woman brought in a handwritten recipe for her Margarita recipe. She's like, I'll bet you'd like this. We never talked about margaritas, Kurt Nelson 1:29:47 no, but she could tell that you you definitely liked your alcohol, right. There you Tim Houlihan 1:29:51 go. She does and, and it was just, I still have that. I have her handwritten, you know, Margarita recipe. And. It by it is an ass kicking recipe. By the way, it really is. Think Kurt Nelson 1:30:05 about that you got an ass kicking recipe because you reached out to have a conversation, Tim Houlihan 1:30:14 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:30:15 with somebody. Yeah, that's amazing. You wouldn't have gotten that gas recipe, Tim Houlihan 1:30:22 and yet it's not amazing at all. It's just being human. It's just human. Kurt Nelson 1:30:28 Oh Kurt Nelson 1:30:28 my gosh. Tim Houlihan 1:30:29 All we have to do is just be human. Okay, Kurt, what else? Anything else you'd like to reflect Kurt Nelson 1:30:34 so? So I think one of the things that you pointed out with this last conversation, that Nick talked about this being laid into work all the time because of these is the fact that he's consistent about this, that he does this on a regular basis. And it's one thing to do this once in a while. And I would encourage anybody who's listening to do this once in a while, and to do it more than once in a while, if you can, to start building this in as a consistent part of your daily routine, Nick Epley 1:31:14 like a Kurt Nelson 1:31:14 default. That's the default that, instead of getting in my head and going, I just it's, I'm too tired. I don't want to talk to this person. I don't want to they're not going to want to talk to me that that inner dialog that we all have in those situations, shut that off and just have the damn conversation with the woman who has the cam X bag that's right there that you're going we were just at this conference together. Let's share our thoughts about this. And that conversation could have ended in 30 seconds. It could have gone on for 10 minutes. It might have built. I mean, she was, probably, she was, maybe she was transferring through in Minneapolis, but she was flying back to Minneapolis. Maybe she lives here. I could have had a friend that I found and maybe gotten a kick ass Margarita. You recipe Tim Houlihan 1:32:10 could have, you may have. It's entirely possible that you could have wound up with an absolutely fantastic Margarita recipe by the end of that conversation, who knows? Okay, grooves, so thanks for thanks for listening. And we just want to remind you of a couple of things here before we go. We have a sub stack newsletter that goes out every every Monday. Kurt Nelson 1:32:39 Awesome articles. Information. There's a musical, you know, links in there every time, Tim Houlihan 1:32:46 every time. Kurt Nelson 1:32:47 And, yeah, you can, not only can you get great information, but you can expand your musical collection. Is that? What are your Tim Houlihan 1:32:56 you might? Kurt Nelson 1:32:57 Yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:32:57 yes, you just, you just might. And, and this is, this is Kurt's absolute love of his life. Is the behavioral grooves community Facebook page. And it is fantastic, because he's almost every day you've got an interesting groove question out there. I Kurt Nelson 1:33:15 don't know if it's the love of my life, Tim, I think Aaron might have a different opinion on that, and my my kids might, and Kurt Nelson 1:33:25 you Tim Houlihan 1:33:26 they don't mind a mistress in the form of the Facebook community page. Kurt Nelson 1:33:32 All right, yeah, I do love it. And I think the there are a number of fantastic people who are part of that community, who consistently, so, again, constantly, are adding their thoughts and their questions and their insights. And so it's this learning opportunity that we all have of just mostly because we are asking questions, we're asking some deep questions. Sometimes they're fun, sometimes they're light, but Kurt Nelson 1:34:05 yeah, Kurt Nelson 1:34:05 oftentimes they're like self reflection, and how you are able to take those and point that mirror back at yourself and go, Oh, how do I act like the one of the questions this past week is, what would you what would you name the chapter of this part of your life? Tim Houlihan 1:34:26 Yeah, I Kurt Nelson 1:34:27 love that Kurt Nelson 1:34:27 some of the answers are awesome. So yeah, Tim Houlihan 1:34:31 truly, just to come up with the title for the chapter of the life of your life, I love that. I think it's fantastic. Also along those lines, you know, we talk about this stuff because we like the community aspect of it, but I would also say that we like getting likes like, like is a currency for us, because we're not getting paid to do this. So, you know, showing up and participating reinforcing. Versus a lot of stuff for us. I know that that sounds selfish, doesn't it? Kurt Nelson 1:35:05 Well, no, I was just thinking about how I can pay my mortgage with likes. I was wondering, Can I, can I use my Hey guys, I have 32 likes here. Can I get that? You know, burger at McDonald's with 32 likes, 52 likes, maybe, maybe it needs 100 likes. That's why we're not getting the currency. Is I like that? I like it? Yeah, so Tim Houlihan 1:35:31 I would consider it a non monetary, non monetary type of currency. But we, we absolutely relish it and appreciate it Kurt Nelson 1:35:43 when Tim Houlihan 1:35:43 people do Kurt Nelson 1:35:45 all right. Listeners grooves out there, we hope that you can take some of Nick's ideas and implement them in your life by talking to strangers or even non strangers more this week, as you go out and find your group, you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai