The Ledger, every show

“There's a really interesting papers that we've seen recently, the dark triads, they're disproportionately social activists.”

“Do you like to post anonymously on the internet? Because the answer is yes, you're overwhelmingly likely to be talking to a dark triad. You're overwhelmingly likely to be talking to a pathological personality, somebody who really likes to stir up trouble and h…”

“Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're largely governed in different hemispheres of the brain, as a matter of fact. So to say, if I got rid of the screens and had fewer aggravations and mood disorders, I would be happier. That's wrong. You'd be l…”

“We find that non-religious people tend to be less happy than religious people because they don't think that there's something big and good and beautiful that, that, that lies in store for all of us if we live right”

“You know, the average, by the way, the average number of questions asked by a man on a first date, according to my colleague, Alison Woodbrooks at HBS? Zero. That's the average. That's the median number of questions asked by a man on a first date with a woman.”

“You find that people from about, you know, 25 to 32, that's the kind of the range where people are most likely to have successful relationships because they're a startup. They're not merging to fully formed lives and careers.”

“For example, if men over 30 who've never either cohabitated or been married, they have a one in three likelihood of a substance abuse disorder.”

“80% of the overtures toward men go to 10% of the male population, and those are not the right guys. Those are a lot of dark triads. The dark triads are the ones who show the best in every format, including in, in, in dating profiles.”

“Over the past 20 years or so, women have converged downward to the unhappiness levels of men. So they've converged, and at first I thought, great, men are getting happier. Women are getting unhappier is what we find, and they're getting unhappier very quickly.”

“But what you've found is that over the past 20 years or so, women have converged downward to the unhappiness levels of men. So they've converged, and at first I thought, great, men are getting happier. Women are getting unhappier is what we find, and they're g…”

“We have, the poverty rate has bounced around between 10 and 15% every year since then. Despite the fact that we spent somewhere around 20 trillion dollars in the war on poverty.”

“This blended, by the way, with the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, such that basically 80% of the income distribution, the bottom 80% has experienced zero economic growth.”

“As a matter of fact, the best predictor of depression, anxiety, For young adults is the answer yes to the question. Does your life feel meaningless? That's the best predictor.”

“Depression has increased by about a factor of three for people under 30. Anxiety by about a factor of two.”

“That's one of the reasons that the happiest marriage is one of the characteristics is that they, that the partners get more religious across the decades together. They get more religious together, right?”

“The average kid in America under 12 spends between four and seven minutes a day in, in, in nature, and between four and seven hours a day on screens.”

“Two-thirds of the guys Would prefer to shock themselves painfully. One guy shocked himself a 190 times in 15 minutes, had to be thrown out of the experiment for being a sick and twisted freak.”

“Watch the left side of people's faces when you're talking to them, and they will not be able to involuntarily control the activity. Slight twitches, a little bit more left face activity when they're experiencing negative emotions when you're talking to them.”

“And then when people hang around graduate school for long enough, their unhappiness starts to rise again.”

“Almost any euphoric that you use to change your consciousness is a neurotoxin and bad for you. You know, it makes you feel high. It's a neurotoxin. That's what it comes down to.”

“If you're a merger, one of the tells of being a merger is you have separate finances and that's a, not a good predictor of actually, of growing together”

“There was early data that turns out to not have been replicated very well, that men are happier when they're married than women are, that, that, that marriage is good for men, but it's not good for women. That's wrong. It's good for both.”

“The people tend to be happiest and most prosperous when they have solid, stable families, and that really starts with, you know, mom and dad who are in love with each other.”

“American happiness has been falling for 30 years. Usually little by little by little because of the retreat from institutions like faith and family and friendship and, you know, the relationship with work.”

“60% of men my age, their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband.”

“You find that men and women are diverging politically really, really quickly. You find that women are getting much more politically Progressive and men are getting more conservative.”

“Today, the person at the 10th percentile economically in America lives in the same square footage of housing as the person at the 50th percentile in 1980.”

“And 50% of your happiness is genetic, by the way.”

“Nobody has kids because kids bring immediate happiness. On the contrary, you find all the evidence suggests that every additional kid you add to your house lowers your happiness.”

“Adam Smith was not an economist. Adam Smith was a moral theologian.”

“The American Welding Association, I just learned this, There are 300,000 skilled welding jobs that are open today.”

“The free enterprise system has done in pulling two billion people out of poverty since 1970.”

“The Dan Gilbert, my colleague at Harvard, who's a visionary social psychologist, he's done boredom experiments, where he puts people in a room in a chair for 15 minutes with nothing to do and nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, and the only choice they h…”

“Only 20% of people really have a significant fear of their physical death. That's called thanatophobia. It's that actual diagnosable malady. But 80% of us don't have that.”

“One of the greatest sources of unhappiness is mood disorder, meaning generalized anxiety and clinical depression. This is a hugely important problem, especially for people under 35 today. We've all heard about the explosion of mood disorders, especially since …”

“About 50% of your baseline mood levels is genetic. We know this from identical twins that were separated at birth and given personality tests as twins at about age 40.”

“There actually isn't very much correlation at all between cognitive ability and happiness.”

“To be just above the population average across all three, then you're going to be in about seven percent of the population, you'll be deemed a dark triad”

“What you find is that people are about half as likely to be married in their twenties. They're less likely to be cohabitating. They're less likely to be having sex. They're less likely to say they're in love than ever before.”

“The fever's going to break and people are going to start falling in love again.”

“Sub-Saharan Africa is getting happier because they're in the, they're actually, their wellbeing levels are rising. Because economic development is eliminating lots of sources of basic unhappiness that you would find in any deeply impoverished populations.”

“That's why we sort of tick down a half a percentage point a year in, in, in, in happiness in the United States and most of the West.”

“I mean, rates of person-to-person friendship are still way below where they were in 2019”

“You have literally more brain tissue dedicated to threats than you do to opportunities.”

“The episodic memories are actually stored in the hippocampus of the brain and you reassemble them de novo every time you think about it and you reassemble them in a different way with new knowledge.”

“You find that men and women are diverging politically really, really quickly. You find that women are getting much more politically progressive and men are getting more conservative.”

“And this happens, by the way, in seven percent of the population. No joke. Scott Barry Kaufman, who has that wonderful psychology podcast, he's sort of the world's leading expert on the prevalence. He's, he'd be a great guest, actually. So the prevalence of th…”

“You find that about 93% of Americans hate how divided we becomes a country. That means that seven percent don't hate it.”