How To Live A Happy Life

Quinn: [00:00:00] How can we live happier lives? That's today's big question, and my guest is Dr. Marc Schulz, the co-author with Dr. Robert Waldinger of “The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.” They're the most recent generation of co-directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study of happiness ever conducted. Marc is the Associate Director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the Sue Kardus PhD 1971 Chair in Psychology at Bryn Mawr College, where he also directs the data science program. And previously chaired the Psychology Department and Clinical Development Psychology PhD program at Bryn Mawr.

Marc received his BA from Amherst and his PhD in clinical psychology from Berkeley. He is a practicing therapist still with all of this, with post-doctoral training and health and clinical psychology at Harvard Medical School. [00:01:00] Now, look, how can we lead happier lives is obviously nuanced, complicated question.

But I don't think it'll surprise you that almost 90 years of data from this study, incredible, has shown that well-nourished relationships inside and outside the home are a major key, if not, the major key to what you might call a happy life. It's not money, it's not work or any of these things, it's the people we relate to.

So what does it mean to have strong relationships in a late Covid era, in an era increasingly dominated by loneliness, in part by devices and social media? With huge generations of Boomers retiring to the suburbs, and on the other hand, young people hanging out less in real life and having less sex.

What can 90 years of comprehensive research teach us about protecting and nourishing our most important relationships in this time of radical change? Whether that's, as you'll hear [00:02:00] about, having kids or about climate change. This is the most important thing. Welcome to Important, Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for you and me and everyone. Along the way, we'll discover the tips, strategies, and stories like these you can use to get involved to become better for yourself, for your family, for your city, your company, and our world.

Marc, welcome to the show.

Marc Schulz: Oh, thank you. Pleasure to be with you. Looking forward to it, Quinn.

Quinn: Like I said offline a few moments ago, I have been hearing about this study, obviously for a long time. I read the book a long time ago, reread it. Maybe you're like this or if, I don’t know if you have time.

It's always interesting to see how some of the world's most invested researchers, what they have time to read in their off time. But for me it's been a fascinating [00:03:00] experiment over the past, especially 10 years, getting married, having kids moving around, rereading things that I read previously in my life or, you know, understanding topics that I might have understood differently in college or elsewhere.

And coming back to your team's work. Now specifically with everything we've been through in the past couple years and everything that continues to accelerate has been truly fascinating. So it's really helpful to, to dive back into it. So we have one question we ask everybody before we get started. It's a little ridiculous.

It's a little tongue in cheek, but I will say 160 whatever times, we end up getting some pretty thought provoking answers. So I'd like to ask Marc, why are you vital to the survival of the species? And I encourage you to be bold and honest because you're here for a reason.

Marc Schulz: The honest response is, of course, I'm not vital to the human species.

There's no way that I can be. But I think that there are places where particularly recently, I'm making a [00:04:00] contribution and I think that's part of why we're talking today. So there's work that I do as part of my day job, which is helping to run a study that's been going on for over eight decades that's tried to look intensively at what helps people flourish in life.

Simple question. How do we live the good life? How do we lead a life that's happy and fulfilling? And I've been involved in that project the last 20 years and we had a book that came out about the project, The Good Life, that includes lessons from those 85 years of research from closely following it's 724 people originally, and we're now studying 1300 children of those original participants.

So there are lots of scientific lessons and we decided my colleague, Bob Welder and I, a few years ago, to try and figure out a way to bring them, make them work accessible to large groups of people, to bring that science to the masses. And that's the contribution that I hope I'm making. Is to figure out a way to bring that science in a way that's responsible and engaging and accessible to people so they can live a [00:05:00] better life.

Quinn: I have a few takeaways there. One that's such a thoughtful answer. I told you we usually get there, so I really appreciate it. The truly, usually people laugh or smirk and they say, I'm not, the ones that say I am are really interesting. I'm always curious about that. And sometimes they are to be, truthfully, some of the people we've talked to are incredible, like yourself.

Two. I also feel like I have 1300 children sometimes, so I admire the work you do and instead though, all they do is ask me questions and sometimes I just need a break. And three, you hinted at it for a moment and I would love to jump right into that. After 86 years, again, obviously you two and your team have not been doing all that for that long, but you have been doing it for 20ish years.

What was the moment when you looked at each other? How did it evolve? And you said it's time to bring this to the mass market.

Marc Schulz: It took us a while. You know, my colleague Bob Waldinger and I have been working together for, I think it's close to 30 years now. And we're scientists, we're very careful conservative scientists, you know, make a living by doing [00:06:00] exacting research, being careful about the conclusions that they draw from it.

And yet we were also getting frustrated that a lot of the research that we thought was important was staying in these academic journals and not being read by people outside of academia. So I think it was about seven or eight years ago, Bob got invited to give a local TED talk. It wasn't a kind of big deal, it was in the gym of a local high school.

And Bob read a draft of that talk to me and I made the worst prediction I've ever made. I said, I think this could work. That prediction, this was our first attempt to really bring some of the basic messages from our research and other related research as well. That Ted Talk is now, I think it's the eighth most watched Ted Talk of all time.

It clearly resonated with people and that really encouraged us to think about writing a book and that enterprise writing book is hard and part of that exploration was thinking again about the message that we wanted to deliver and the science that we were going to build on. Was that a science that we could, relied on studies outside of our own, so not just based on our own research.

[00:07:00] All studies are idiosyncratic, so good science is really based on replication of across multiple studies, across participants from diverse backgrounds, from diverse eras using different methods. And lo and behold, yeah, we thought there was a signal to tell people and then of course we had to figure out how to tell it.

But that's the short story. So about four years ago, we committed to trying to write the book and we sold it about a year later and basically spent the pandemic. It's not a bad time to write a book. We spent the pandemic writing the book.

Quinn: Sure. It does seem like not a bad time to write a book, much less this book again, which is so broad and deep and inclusive now, but also so topical and also so specific. So it just seems like such a fascinating confluence of events. I hate to, but also, you have to look at sometimes and go, it is really interesting, some of the things that have come out of the past three years and the things that will eventually obviously come out.

And part of that is why I'm so interested to dig into [00:08:00] this today. I mean, I don't know if you ever watched the show Arrested Development. There's this amazing character, Gob Bluth whose catchphrase is often, I've made an enormous mistake. And I feel like that's what most people who decide to write a book, much less sell a book, feel like. It seems like such a great idea at the time.

And yours even more complicated because you go, great, how do we dial 86 years of research into this mass market airport novel that people can read? I don't even know those still exist. Obviously you took a shot at that collectively when your partner gave your, as you said, TEDx talk in a gym.

It's a great proving ground for it, but where do you start? I mean, you make such an effort and we'll get into the book, but I am so interested in this part of it, the, I guess the working on the work instead of necessarily just in the work. Where do you start?

Marc Schulz: We started in two places and one was kind of a science place, which is trying to look at whether, again, there was a set of findings that was common to much of, there are hundreds of papers that have come out of this study, so was there a common core of one ingredient [00:09:00] that seemed to be most important in helping flourishing?

If we look outside our study is that same ingredient present in other studies as well? So we were looking for that signal and it involves doing lots of research on other people's research and looking careful at carefully at large reviews of the literature. And then the other task is really figuring out how to do it, how to deliver the narrative and how to engage people and, you know, Bob and I prided ourselves on being good writers, and we often get that review when we submit things into, you know, journals. The editors or the reviewers will say, this is well written, and then they'll sock you with the concern that they have about the science. But this was a different kind of writing.

And the big advantage that we knew we had is that we had been following these 724 families very carefully for 85 years. So we had these stories that were incredibly compelling and both Bob and I are clinicians and really enjoy learning about what's gone on inside people's heads. So we figured that the task was to be able to communicate the respect and interest that we had in the [00:10:00] participants' lives that we've cultivated over all the years that we've worked with the data, and figure out a way to do justice to them by telling their stories and use those stories in the service of telling a story about research. So the life stories themselves are not science, that science can be told by using those life stories. And when we figured that out, the book kind of got written, it was kind of ready. That was the arc that we wanted to take. So that was exciting.

Quinn: I assume it's a little bit like my wife is a incredibly hardworking, deservedly successful, Hollywood screenwriter and producer, and there's two very different, very difficult tasks, writing original fiction or adapting either some sort of intellectual property or a biography or some other sort of nonfiction, which seems great because you're like, I've already, the story's in front of me. It's the newspaper article and outside magazine or whatever is, until you start doing it and you realize how much more complicated and complex narrative can be and people can be and things like that.

So I imagine on one hand [00:11:00] it's easy to be like, we got 86 years of data and like you said, the stories are not the science, but they can help tell the science and all that. But going, what do we include and when do we do not? And I thought it was very admirable in the book how often and heavily you emphasized and caveated, we really can't boil this, everyone's lives, especially from this study and all the other stuff we brought into these 10 core commandments. But at the same time, there is a signal here. So was that intuitive to you from the start, having already worked on this? Was that, did you know that was the story you were going to tell?

Marc Schulz: I think this is a place that I give some credit to my colleague, Bob Waldinger, is just really good at pushing us always. He pushes himself, he pushes us when we do this work, what's the point here? What can we say, what can't we say? What's the limit of what's justified by the science and how can we say it in the simplest way?

So, you know, Bob and I have lots of writing experience together. We also have some separate history. He's written the bestselling textbook [00:12:00] for psychiatry before we ever worked together, and he has a knack for taking complicated ideas and boiling them down without losing the complexity. So really love what you said about that, you know, there's a kind of complexity that we want to present but we don't want to lose in that complexity a message if it's there.

And the message is there. So I want to give a little spoiler. We haven't talked about what the main finding is. But the simple message is that it's relationships that keep us healthier and happier through our lifespan. We found that in our study and we're finding it in lots of other studies that are doing, you know, different kinds of research, different populations, different methods.

So it's that signal that we found repeated, and we don't want to lose that signal even as we kind of complexify what is complicated data, lives are complicated, they're messy. We each have kind of individualistic flavors and wants and desires, so we need to acknowledge the complexity. But there's also, amongst that, there's a theme.

So that theme and variation is always exciting, and I [00:13:00] think Bob and I do well in trying to figure out both the theme and the variation there, and hopefully that's a book as you've described. I love the description that's what we've done in the book.

Quinn: I love it. If Bob could look over my blog post before I write them, that would be fantastic because it seems like it's quite the skill.

I mean, as anyone who does any sort of, creative work, writing of any sort, you know, knowing what not to include is just as important as what to include. I mean, you know, it's the history of sculpture, right?

Marc Schulz: I think the other obvious advantage is writing with someone, right? So, Bob and I have worked together for 30 years.

We have a strong relationship, which is important when you're going to write together. And we each have strengths that we bring to the table. So I think having that opportunity to write with someone, to concede things, to outline chapters together, to edit things, you know, not just once, but, you know, tens and sometimes dozens of times.

You know, it really helps to have a partner in that. And that's even before the editor got a chance to look at stuff. So there was a process that we went through and we had some experience doing this. And this [00:14:00] book was, you know, it's always challenging to write, but it was a book that once we figured out that balance between narrative and science and even stories about science, we were excited about what was coming out.

Quinn: I'm going to touch for a moment on something ridiculous as I usually do, and then into why I thought of it. So, I am a pagan, atheist, religious studies major from a liberal arts college, right? It was important to me who, I thought I was going to do political science, to study, taking a bigger step back, right?

The history of why people have done what they do and why they do what they do, and what religion means in one part of the world versus another. One of the first things you learn. In studying the Old Testament and the New Testament, right, is objectively these things were written far after the events supposedly happened.

Whether some of these people were real life historical figures or not, or whatever magical powers they might have had. It's interesting, and it's important to understand that when you're reading these things and you're learning about them and you're deciding whether to take them literally and how much you should apply them to [00:15:00] their lives, right?

Because so much of it is about, these stories are about leadership and trust and relationships and things like that. There's an amazing book that's out there called Lamb and it is the story of Jesus's childhood best friend Biff. It's a comedy, but it's really thoughtful in the sense that it's actually a, you know, a supposed real time telling of the first actual period of Jesus's life from Biff’s perspective.

And I thought about that insanely enough, reading about in the first part of the book, you guys talk about all the different pieces of study you have. Double blind stuff, meta studies, questions you don't ask anymore, but you still look at to understand why did we ask him? And then what did they mean?

Blood samples. I think you said you have actual brains, which is kind of insane. But the most important are these prospective questions, which is essentially, you're like Doc Brown, right? You asked questions about the past, in the past and I wonder why is that [00:16:00] so powerful? Cause like you said, those stories are not science, but why are they so powerful when you look back to understand and try to find these signals?

Why are they so powerful aggregated over time?

Marc Schulz: Yeah. It's such an interesting question. Even though, you know, I was wandering, my mind was wandering as you were laying out the question.

Quinn: Sorry. It's completely insane.

Marc Schulz: But no, I'd love it. I mean, it, in some ways we are interpreting history here when we're working with the participants.

I feel like it's a mix of being a psychologist, being an anthropologist, and being a historian. So if we ask a question that was worded a particular way, like what gets you up in the morning? We asked in the 1930s, and we asked that same question in the 2020s. It's a different question. It's a different era.

That question has different meaning. So, we're doing a lot of this sort of interpretation, you know, through the lens of what it must have been like at that particular time. So what it really means is we need to immerse ourselves in these participants' lives. We need to understand the era that they grew up in.

You know, I'd like, there's a story we tell at the very beginning of the [00:17:00] book. These are guys that were born in the 1910s and twenties. The study originally was all male. And mostly white guys. And I teach at Bryn Mawr College, which is a very diverse college. It's still a women's college. So I have students that say, I'm really interested in this research, but you know, I don't know if I really want to study white guys that were from a hundred years ago, their lives are very different than mine.

And I say, just read one of these, you know, folders of stories and what they read is a kind of challenge in, they'll start the beginning. So the challenge that when they were in their teens trying to figure out, you know, how to get along with peers, trying to figure out how to navigate their love lives, how to figure out what they want to do in their life, and the same story repeats itself.

A student comes back and says, I really want to work with this. They're struggling with exactly the same things that I'm struggling with today. So human beings haven't changed that much. It's the kind of clothes that dress up, how we animate those challenges that have changed. And I think. I love that.

I mean, to me that's exciting. [00:18:00] So for me, I was at a liberal arts college, I studied religion, I studied anthropology, history, and trying to compare anything across time or across place or across culture requires an effort and trying to get inside the head of what it must have been like. And that's the essential task here.

And again, what we tried to do in the book was to communicate people's experiences. So I'll tell you one example, Quinn, at one of the most gratifying parts of writing the book, we disguise key details to protect the anonymity of our participants. That's partly how we keep a study like this going for 85 years.

So these are details that we don't think are critical, like someone's name, or maybe we adjust where they came from. But some of the stories are harder to disguise than others. And we worried about the anonymity of the participant, particularly these are stories about the original participants. So we worried about the kids, what it might be like to read about their parents in this way.

So some of them we reached out to them and we said, look we're writing a book. Yeah, your father's story, your mother's story is very compelling and here's what we [00:19:00] would like to write about them. You may know some of these details, you may not know all of them. And when we do that, and we did it rarely, but we did it with a few people, one person in particular said, you nailed it.

This is my parents. These are the parents that I know. I don't know all the details that you're describing. Because I wasn't around for a part of their life, but they've been gone for a while. But this is my parents. You've caught it. And you've also captured me as well. Cause the daughter was a participant in our study as well.

So that's our goal there, is to communicate people's experience in a way that is true to who they are. Feels authentic. This person in particular said it was weird to see my name as I'm not going to reveal who she was, but you know, that was me. That person that you described as “Susie” was me.

That's great. That felt so good.

Quinn: It seems after all this work, after all, we've all been through in the past few years and having our ability to relate with one [00:20:00] another physically in the past few years, especially taken away in certain ways, whether it's because of Covid lockdowns or because of actually just not being able to be near people who are sick.

And also understanding just the mechanisms of how air works, right? And like why we should open windows. All these things of like, it's always about how we relate to one another. And again, like you said, these stories are not science, but I thought, I loved how much time you spend in the book describing them many ways, the specific ways, and this is not a self-help book, right?

But the way your subjects throughout history, the thirties or the 2020s have either nourished or purposefully or inadvertently failed to nourish relationships in their life, right? And I was really particular and again, not to overshare here, but, you know, I've got three kids under 10, and at one point that was three kids under three.

So my wife and I, you know, we talk about this sort of thing a lot about how do we not take [00:21:00] relationships for granted either with our kids who as usual, they're getting old too fast and our own, how do we give attention, or like you said, pay attention, and I loved your analogy there to actually how we spend money.

How do we choose each other each day, and what does that mean practically? Because again, the time can fly by and you can be one of those people when your book, again, not to get too granular with it, but who looks up and says like, oh, my relationship with my sister is the most important thing in my life.

And the researcher looks at their notes and says, you haven't talked to them in 20 years. You know, it's very easy for that to happen. I have seen that in my life, but I'm also very conscious of, I've had some loss. We all obviously have at this point. Very paranoid about time and how it gets away. What would you say you have learned and your researchers have learned that you have had of takeaways personally from these sort of stories about how to really practically nourish relationships and take care of them so you're not a test case?

Marc Schulz: I think the first thing is doing exactly what you're describing. [00:22:00] That would be our poster child. You are, you and your wife, for how to think about this. I don't think it's paranoid at all that when you study life, when you think about life and you're brave enough to really think about what it means.

We all have an ending. We know it's going to come. As we get older, that ending becomes more and more present in our lives. We think about it more and older people tend to prioritize things that are really critical to them because they know that their path is shortened at that point. So when it comes to relationships, I think we need to be much more proactive and less on automatic pilot that never more true today than it's ever been.

There's so many distractions in our lives. Phones are the big one, and phones connect us to distractions that people just have never had the history of kind of human experience. So those distractions are driven by folks that are trying to make money by grabbing our attention. So we really need to be proactive in thinking about how to harness our own attention for the things that are most [00:23:00] important to us.

So the first step is really thinking about it and not just being on automatic pilot. And it's certainly having young children is a overwhelming time for most people. So many demands, big new role responsibilities and changes, and trying to figure out what it means to be a parent and how to do it. And it's easy to say, all those connections that I had, I'll come back to, later on or in 10 years. And what people, what we find when we study people is that decades can pass before they go back to those connections. So we need to lean into them, we need to be intentional about it. And then there are all sorts of tricks that we can do.

But the first starts with prioritizing those relationships that are critical to us. So reflecting and being proactive, really the first important step.

Quinn: I love that. And again, it's not rocket science. It is though finding the time, finding the energy, finding the bandwidth, finding partners or other people, whether it's friends, I mean, I have a group of friends that will all listen to this. We have specifically made a text message group, I think it was slightly after November, 2016, [00:24:00] called the Oasis. And they're very strict parameters on which we're allowed to talk about in this text message group. And it is my siblings and my best friends in the world.

And we don't see each other very often, but it is very important.

Marc Schulz: It's a lifeline. Yeah.

Quinn: Once a year we look around and go, when was the last time we all saw each other? Like, we actually have to do this thing. And that vehicle didn't really exist 10, 15 years ago to be able to have that sort of thing.

So I do find as much as technology can be a nightmare and social media can be that way and screens can be that way, there are probably some helpful things there as well. I hope.

Marc Schulz: I think there are like all technologies, so I always want to be careful about coming off as a kind of technology basher, but we need to recognize that technology always bring with it great promise and also challenge. And you know, in our group, when we studied them again across eight decades, newspapers, televisions, those were intrusions into people's lives. When newspapers were first introduced, then people would commute to work on the, you know, when there was the trolleys or whatever it was, right?

[00:25:00] People complain, no one's paying attention to anyone anymore. They have their faces buried in newspapers, so these are discussions we've had before. What's different is how ubiquitous these technologies are in our life. We never are far from them, right? Our phones are typically in our pocket or next to us as we sleep.

And I think you're right, that kind of text chain that you described as lovely, and that's a use of technologies that's really wonderful. I might add that we could have done this with regular mail in the old days. We could have had a mail chain and kept people together that way, but there's an ease with these new technologies that's terrific. So we want to take advantage of that. But I think we're also learning that depending on these virtual connections, they're just not the same as in-person real-time connections. There's research that we've done, there's research that other groups are doing, and I think we're going to learn more about this.

There's less emotion communicated on these technologies. We feel less close. We have fewer channels of synchronizing, which are important to us. And I think probably the best way of thinking about this is if we think [00:26:00] about the evolutionary pressures that we're under as humans, it was important for us to figure out friend or faux quickly.

And seeing whole bodies is great for that. Seeing truncated parts of bodies on Zoom screens, I think makes us a little bit anxious. And I think we're going to find that through research, there hints already of that. And of course the technologies will change. There are already technologies in the world that are going to be fully animated beings on your Zoom screen.

Maybe we'll navigate and overcome some of the current challenges. But there'll be others as well.

Quinn: There's trade offs to everything. I mean, to me it always seems to come back to, and again, the same way, like I have folks on the show who I mean, I had this young woman who has figured out how to use sound cannons on drones to push wildfires back.

And I'm like, that's incredible. Like, where would I even start? We barely got this podcast conversation off the ground, like, and she's figuring this stuff out every day. It's amazing. So to me it's about the self-awareness, about the limitations, the trade-off, and then using it intentionally.

Like if you're going to use a text message train or your Instagram feed or whatever it might [00:27:00] be, with awareness and with intentionality. You understand it can't be a substitute, like, how do I use it as a vehicle, as a jumping off point for other things.

Marc Schulz: I think that's right, Quinn. The one thing I want to add is, you know, the caution here is that we have record numbers of people experiencing loneliness. So loneliness is just the subjective sense that no one really knows me, no one has my back, no one cares about what happens to me. And the levels of reported loneliness are just astronomical. So in the states we're talking about 20 to 50%, the adult population experiences loneliness in a week.

These figures are similar across most industrialized countries. It's gone up over the last 20, 30 years. Certainly the pandemic had an impact on that, but these were things that were trending in the wrong direction before that. So our Surgeon General, just in the last two months, put out a public advisory about the crisis in social connections.

And the U.K. they have a Minister of Loneliness that reflects the kind of recognition of how rampant this is. And the reason it's a concern is it's not just unfortunately [00:28:00] popular being lonely. It's also a serious health risk, so it's associated with disease outcomes like cancer and diseases of aging, and even early death.

So premature aging or dying on the same level that smoking about 15 cigarettes a day or obesity is. So, this is a really serious public health crisis. And even though we can tell each other to be thoughtful and careful, high numbers of the population, high proportions of that population are struggling right now with connections with others.

Quinn: It's interesting, the things I've thought a lot about and tried to write about to understand my own feelings on it and what it can mean practically to people. But it's interesting how we are, and you touched on this in the book, often uncomfortable talking about some things or how eager we can be to move on from, for instance, when the New York Times prints a hundred thousand names and say, how can this be possible?

And now we're nearing 2 million and we're ready to move on. But also [00:29:00] specific figures in your book who declined to answer some of these very self-reflective questions because, it can be pretty hard and humbling to talk about and to say, I'm lonely. And what does that mean for someone who has got all the parties or is popular in the office or whatever it means, it doesn't actually matter. And it's not just old folks in a home or who are living in a huge suburban house by themselves. It's huge numbers of young folks and I thought about recently and wrote a bit about, not sure if you saw Apple's announcement that they're going to try to do with their new software about all the self-reflection that it's built in. And I don't think I included this, but I, it made me think about when they put out their watch a couple years ago, they included this new feature it was like car crash detection basically. And there were a lot of folks who were like, oh, this is pretty dark.

Like, why would they include that? And it's going well it's the most powerful company that’s ever been looking around and saying, whatever the number is, a hundred thousand people die in America every year from car crashes. Why wouldn't we do that if we can? And there's this obviously inherent tension of, so we're going to build this suite of mental health tools, some of which have [00:30:00] already existed, of course, we're going to do our version, bring 'em into one place. It requires you to be on your phone more often, but at the same time, the trade off might be a layer of data of, like you said, prospective data we've never had, because clinical trials are impossible to get people for and expensive. What if all of a sudden 10 million people minimum are doing this overnight?

And I wonder what that can mean about loneliness to shed light on this if we're uncomfortable talking about it. I don't know.

Marc Schulz: Yeah, so there are lots of discussions going on. The latest news from Apple is one of them, but there are lots of technology companies that are trying to think about how to harness particularly smart watch technologies or smart body technologies in the service of dealing with loneliness.

I spent some time with another technology company along with some other researchers that are in this space and, you know, really kind of exciting ideas. So prompts to, you know, it's like, you know, your mother says, call me. Now can you imagine if your phone said, call your mother or call your friend, you know, this is the simple [00:31:00] idea.

It's trying to leverage more screen time or focus screen time for more interaction with other folks. And I think it can include check-ins. Like some people don't know how isolated they've become. They haven't thought about the last time they really spent time with someone else or called someone to initiate a social engagement.

So there are lots of ways that we can queue people with these technologies. And I think there are a lot of folks out there that are being thoughtful and playing with these ideas. It is a kind of basic idea. You know, we all have this, you know, notion, I'm just going to stay in tonight. I'm kind of spent, I don't want to go to this party, or I'm not going to call that person.

You know, they're probably not going to be interested in hearing from me. We just need to overcome that inertia. Most of us have things going on in our head that tell us that people just aren't going to find us as interesting as we hope. Part of it is really pushing and technologies can nudge us in that right direction if they're used correctly.

I want to say, I just had this conversation with my wife recently. [00:32:00] Now for some people a watch notification like an Apple watch is a great thing. It allows them actually to focus more on the conversation in front of them. For other people, it's the worst possible thing. They're not going to be able to focus on anything with that watch right in front of them.

It's much better to have the phone in the pocket. So we need to figure out ways that are going to work for, you know, variety of people. But we also need to work on our intentional skills and our ability to just say, I don't need to know what's going on my phone for the next hour. It's okay. Or two hours.

Life will be okay.

Quinn: We're working on that at home a lot, both because we want our attention back, one, two, so we can put our attention more on our children three, but also because they're getting older to model that because they're going to start asking for this kind of shit and be like you're on your phone all the time.

And again, how do we intentionally and practically, personally among our family and then holding these companies to task, to say, you have to make this something that is proactively more intentional for folks. They don't get overwhelmed with notifications about sales and shit like that. While [00:33:00] they're missing the ones about, Hey, check in.

How are you feeling? It's a big one. I wonder again to sort of reverse it a little bit, because I do think this is important. Over almost 90 years of study, which is incredible. We've seen a lot. So that means you and your predecessors have asked these prospective questions during some fairly intense periods.

90 years is World War 2. It's Vietnam, it's a lot of elections. Yep. It's, the Depression. It's hiding under desks for nukes. It's 9/11 and obviously we've got Covid. If this is all pretty nuanced, but healthy relationships are a fundamental key, I wonder how already Covid is affecting folks in your study.

And with some perspective on earlier traumatic eras. I mean, look, COVID has taken in the US alone, four times as many people as died in World War 2 soldiers. Right? And Vietnam. Not to mention people hurt. And then you've got this data on the children who, what they said something like 300,000 children have lost a caregiver in the US alone.

What does that [00:34:00] say about how folks might eventually find ways to live their lives, or adapt? How can we support them?

Marc Schulz: I think, you know, there are a few take-homes. The first one is that we have this myth or maybe hope that life will be free of real challenge and loss. And I think it's not true when you look at the arc of people's lives, that we know how all people's life is going to end.

And we also know that for every generation, there are major challenges, this generation, we happened to follow. Think about it, as you described, they grew up in the Depression. They served in World War 2, so one third of the sample were students at Harvard University. 91% of them served in World War 2. Most of them volunteered to serve in World War 2, which is extraordinary for young people today to think about.

So they had to kind of raise their game to the challenge that they faced, and it was a daunting challenge. It was the scariest experience of their lives. They told us when we asked them about it afterwards. But they also in the same breath, and this is an important part of this [00:35:00] take home. They said it was also in some weird way, the best experience of their life.

What was good about it? A sense of purpose and meaning, right? They were saving the world. And I think they had a clarity of vision about that, that made them feel like they were doing something really important. But they also said in the same breath, they were doing it with other people, with the support of other people, the experience of depending on other people.

For their lives and their wellbeing. Literally, that person on the foxhole next to them bonded them in a way that was extraordinary. And those bonds helped them through this incredibly challenging experience. They talked about it after the war that way, when we asked them 30 years later to reflect back on it, that's what they talked about, the bonds that they had with the other people that they served with.

And I think that's the lesson here is that one of the things that was challenging about Covid is that it pulled us apart physically. And it made it hard to connect with other people. And we learned, that's part of what our research tells us, and it's part of what the book is about, that we deal with [00:36:00] challenges by depending on the support of others.

All of us do this in different ways. It might be the emotions we're experiencing. It might be the advice we solicit from others. It might be just getting a ride to a doctor's appointment or having someone drop off a meal if we've been sick for a long time. Or just checking in because we haven't seen anyone for a while cause we've been so sick.

So we depend on others when we meet challenges and every generation will have challenges. This Covid pandemic created challenges that were different depending on where you were in the lifespan. So one of the things we're particularly interested in, in the 1300 children of the original participants is thinking about how they navigated during the pandemic, and particularly for younger people.

How the influence of the pandemic and the technologies that they're using that may influence their adaptation during this kind of challenge. So young people are more than older people trying to figure out how to navigate in the social world, how to deal with their emotions when they have a conflict with someone else.

And these were all taken [00:37:00] offline or online for, you know, a more intense period of three years. It was the only way that they could communicate with peers. So I'm an educator at a university. We're all trying to figure out how to be together again, still after the pandemic. But young people are really trying to figure out how to be together in real time, what to do when they're with other people being in a class, everyone's got their phone in front of them instead of the newspaper, it's their phone.

We're all trying to figure out how to connect with others again. Lots of challenges. Some kind of key developmental period challenges that younger people face. Those are key periods of socialization, and I think they're catching up on learning how to do some of the skills that we had no choice. We always had that kind of in-person context to develop those skills.

Quinn: That's such an interesting point. Right? So one of my children was pre-kindergarten when everything went down and obviously there's, you know, been this, and again, we'll see how much, what parts of it hold up. But it's a very [00:38:00] important period for some social developmental skills. Right. That if you are able to actually go to preschool in this country or pre-K of some version, how important that can be.

Right? Forget the math stuff. It's how do you talk to other kids? How do you play with them? How do you deal with disputes and handle your emotions? And I can see him who's incredibly privileged, still dealing with those things, but that period as well. 17, you know, or 15 to 20 is just as important in a thousand different ways.

And that was taken away from them as well. And instead, I mean, again, probably some benefit to have these devices, to have some sort of connection and FaceTime and things like that. But on the other hand, that seems to have remained the default because of what happened. And so I imagine you see day to day, like you were just saying, how do they learn those things much less call them back if they never experienced them in the first place?

Marc Schulz: I think part of it is recognizing the value of them. So before the pandemic, I do a talk about the study and I remember one particular talk I did at a medical school down in DC [00:39:00] and it was a big audience and there was someone sitting at the back who clearly had an important question to ask when we got to the question and answer period. He said you know, love the talk, Dr. Schulz. I just think you overestimate how important it is for younger people, this generation, to have those in-person connections that were different than previous generations. And my answer then was, this was about five years ago, I said, let's see, you know, that's an empirical question that I think it's one that we want to study and it's one we are studying in the second generation study, but that, I have my doubts that you really are different. You may have new tools at your disposal. And those tools, again, might bring you close together, might allow you to keep up friendships from far away, but they also may make us lazy in certain ways that mean that we're not having the kinds of connections that we really need.

Young people are also faced with uncertainty that feels bigger than it's been for generations before this, and I think they're reasons why that may be true. And they're leaning into work. They really want to make sure that they provide themselves with a secure path in the [00:40:00] future. And for a lot of young people that means I'm not going to worry about my relationships, I'm not going to worry about finding a partner in life.

I'll do that later. Once I figure out this work stuff, and again, life has an unfortunate way of passing by really quickly and people often end up decades later feeling like they're quite lonely and missing important elements of their life. We asked our participants in their eighties, so we followed them again from their adolescence all the way through to the end of their life.

And in their eighties, we asked them if they had any regrets, and sure enough they all had regrets to share. Most of those regrets were about relationships that they hadn't nurtured or they hadn't paid enough attention to, or they just weren't kind enough. Yeah. So they were simple declarations. You know, I wish I had spent more time with my kids.

I wish I had kept up my friendships. They just, you know, kind of willowed or kind of waned in my life and I just didn't keep up in a way that I wish I had. So those regrets are real, and I think for young people it needs to include their lives need [00:41:00] to include a recognition that the social connections they're making.

Not just in friendships, but at work as well, are really important for them to flourish in life.

Quinn: It's interesting, again, so much of my job and explaining to my children is that 10 things can be true at once, which is very few things are black and white. I do believe there's a world of, there are some bad guys out there, and they're the helpers as Fred would say.

But there's so much nuance and it's so easy to say. It is so awesome to see. And I work with and invest in and advise and talk to people in startups all the time, remote teams around the world, and can you believe this person is coding this from Brazil while you're sleeping and this and this?

But at the same time, I remember so fondly a couple of my first jobs, but one in particular was, it's just like five of us under 30 worked at ESPN. We built all these interactive fantasy sports and video games and stuff like that and what it was like to come to the office every day and have that experience.

And by the way, we were morons on the one hand, but making the company a lot of money on the other. And [00:42:00] so we had to figure out how to do those things at the same time with like in suits, which we definitely didn't want to wear. But too bad you're an adult now, congratulations. And that's hard to do.

And I think the same way about. That's not for everyone. Of course, you might have some a condition or whatever it might be that precludes you from doing that or whatever it might be. It's the same thing for college, and I was very lucky to go to an incredible college and I didn't come out with some enormous amount of debt, and it was an incredible life-changing experience.

But obviously it's not for everyone, nor can everyone afford it. But also, we need a couple million nurses and electricians and all these blue collar people who don't do these things and who just want to make things with their hands or do these specific things. And again, thinking about this, these younger generations, like how do we tell them, Hey, find something that works with purpose, but also a lot of things are unaffordable, but also don't be on your devices too much. It's a struggle. I don't know.

Marc Schulz: You talked about modeling for your kids, you know, a healthy relationship with technologies and I think being models are really important. So again, I'm a professor at university. I've [00:43:00] been doing this for over 25 years now, and lots of students have come to me and said, I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my life.

This is what I'm interested in, but I can't figure out what to do. And part of that discussion that's really important to me is to think about not just the content of their interests. You know? So I see a lot of psychology majors and people interested in data and working, you know, in research, but it's thinking about what the context is that you're going to do that work in.

And this is the part that I feel like I model for them. I said you were in class with me. You know that I look around in class, I like to connect with students. I can't be that professor that just sits up in the front of the room and lectures. To me that's kind of boring. You could read the lecture and I don't get anything out of lecturing to you other than the prep I do.

But in the moment I don't get anything out of it. Whereas you all have interesting questions and thoughts, so if we can figure out a way to talk about them, we're both going to grow and learn. So as people think about their careers, I think that's important as well, that you know, I was really interested in neuroscience when I was young and the first neuroscience job I got, I was so excited.[00:44:00]

I was working in a lab to figure out the vision of goldfish and intellectually really exciting. But it turns out goldfish don't talk back to you. And it was really boring. It wasn't very exciting. So I figured out in my research, I need to work with people. Right now I'm lucky enough to work with the stories of, you know, close to 3000 people and I find that really fulfilling.

So I think we both want to model for younger people how to pursue things that are meaningful, how to give back in ways that help others. I think that's also important to model if you're lucky enough to be in that position and the joy that you get from doing that. So I love being a teacher. It's a great experience.

I feel very privileged to be able to do that. Certainly challenging and it's become more challenging in some ways, but the opportunity to do that for me is so exciting. So I want to share that with other people and I want to show them what gets me excited as I do that teaching. So modeling, sharing, you know, our own journeys, knowing that, you know, when I was 20 years old for much of my twenties, I didn't know what I was going to do.

[00:45:00] And that's daunting. But it's also exciting to have the opportunity to explore those kinds of things as well.

Quinn: I wonder, and I loved how you dug into this in the book, because again, early on you were like, Hey these aren't just questions we're asking, and I understand it was this small, homogenous group to start.

It's grown intentionally more inclusive by design and over time, but also, hey, here's all these other studies around the world that validate it. But also here's biological data and MRI data and things like that validate our ability to say. Hey, this one thing is not the only thing, but it might be the most important.

I wonder in your teaching, and I don't know how much one in one work you're doing with clients, but even with students or your family or yourself, do you think about those biological markers and neurological markers that you have also discovered? I mean, the one about you know, the gentleman in the MRI machine, you know, holding hands with I believe his wife, just a partner, and how that measurably reduced pain signals or what you have it. That's incredible. Like how much [00:46:00] emphasis do you give to that when people go, oh no, I, we are a different generation. It's like, no, actually this stuff matters.

Marc Schulz: This link between mind and body and the way that connections in particular get under our skin, shape our health, are really important and front of mind for me when I'm thinking about priorities in my life and I'm helping others think about it.

So I was interested in this when I was in college. Even though I didn't study psychology, I was interested in mind and body. I explored it through philosophy and the way kind of ancients talked about these connections and were trying to figure it out. And then I was lucky enough to get into psychology, kind of not in the most thoughtful way, but eventually I got there and it allowed me to think about it.

But it was the early days of this, even in our research 20, 30 years ago, when we began to find these connections, real doubts about whether they were going to survive, other studies be replicated and whether this was something idiosyncratic. So I think we're at a really exciting time where there's no doubt that there are connections between, for example, [00:47:00] holding the hand of another and how much pain we experience when we go through a difficult procedure or how quickly a wound heals, might be impacted by the quality of your connections with others.

We know that from lots of research and it's just extraordinary. What's especially cool, and now I'll geek out, is that we're beginning to figure out those mechanisms. We're beginning to understand the kind of immunological, hormonal, physiological pathways in which this influence is happening in our body.

So I think it's quite real. I think it's important. I certainly teach students about it and I think about it in my own life when I hear people you know, experiencing challenges, physical challenges in their life, I'm 60 and thinking about growing older and I think hard about, you know, the risks of inflammation and high levels of stress take a toll on our body and relationships are part of the antidote for that.

So, yeah, this is something I think is really important.

Quinn: It's pretty incredible, right? Because it's easy to relate and read any relationship book and say, oh, it's not the [00:48:00] designated sex night with your wife that matters as much as the little touches throughout the day, right? And little things like that.

It's easy to put those on autopilot as well. But we do see over and over, you know when children are feel loved, you know, when they can feel and touch a relationship from birth. And you talked about that as well, how important that is. I remember when my kids were born and still they put the baby right on the birthing mom and how incredible that is.

And it's wild because it keeps holding up over time. How much, again, you have so much data and so many stories. And on the other hand, so many issues in science and questions in science and studies, especially psychology, have dealt with a real replication problem recently. Yeah. Which I think is probably an opportunity, as frustrating as it may have been for those folks or people who've built their careers on it.

How much do you consciously plan for and think about validation and replication in your work, even though. It's about as comprehensive as it gets.

Marc Schulz: Again, I think it's really important. So there's a replication crisis still going on in the sciences generally. It's not [00:49:00] just psychology. And we want to do really good research, thoughtful research.

It begins with an idea that's plausible, not an implausible idea. So it has to be consistent with what we already know. Certainly there's room for creative thinking and then really rigorous research is important. So yeah, the study's been going on for 85 years. There are lots of separate papers and smaller studies that have come out that tend to overlap and that's important.

There's a kind of depth. And consistency. And again, that signal that's really critical from this study. But it also means that we try, Bob Waldinger and I, who run the study now for the last 20 years, we try really hard to bring the best science we can to the study. So it's not just asking questions, you know, on a computer or remotely it's doing interviews, it's bringing people into the lab, watching how they react to a stressor.

So best stressors for humans is public speaking and we bring people into a lab, we give them a public speaking task, and for those that are calm during that, [00:50:00] we give them a really difficult arithmetic task and everyone gets stressed out by at least one of those, usually both. And we watch how their bodies react across time.

So we're monitoring their blood pressure, their pulse rate. We're asking them how their emotions are. And we're also watching them as well. So we try and triangulate across a bunch of measures and we're looking for consistency in the signal within each study. And then once we have a finding, how consistent is this with other studies out there?

Good science builds on replication. That's the real lesson of the crisis here in replication is that replication is critical. We can't, you know, decide based on one study that Diet X is good and then tomorrow tell people Diet X isn't so good. You're looking for a preponderance of evidence across time.

So this book was written because when we looked at the importance of relationships for our emotional wellbeing and our physical wellbeing, we looked to hundreds of other studies and lots of big reviews that showed, for example, The connection between [00:51:00] loneliness and physical disease outcomes across hundreds of studies, across many countries.

So we're talking about an area of science in which I think there has been a lot of replication and a lot of different methods as you're suggesting too, because we can use animal research, we can look at, you know, adoption studies in countries that have unusual orphanage experiences. There's a kind of accumulation of research in this area that's quite extraordinary and that's why we wrote the book now.

Quinn: Right. To go back to the initial question, I love that. And like you said, it's not just psychology under fire here, I mean, and it's, there's a million variations in a million different ways. I mean, we look at what we've you know, what has been revealed with the Alzheimer's work in the past year and a half about just turns out the original images we based hundreds of billions of dollars on were doctored, which is an absolute nightmare, but also explains why we haven't been able to get there.

As difficult as the brain is, obviously you pull one string and it turns out there's 50 more, but it explains a lot. At the same time, like you said, your data keeps compiling, keeps becoming more [00:52:00] inclusive, reinforcing itself. How much are you guys trying to, as the study goes, think about still trying to prove yourself wrong, trying to find new signals, things like that?

Because obviously you want to be open-minded on that front instead of continually going, see, I told you.

Marc Schulz: We certainly keep an open mind and we're always reflective and critical about what we're doing, so we want to make sure we're asking the right questions, right? Science begins with asking a set of questions, and if you don't ask a question, you can never get the answer to that question.

So part of what we do is we collaborate with other people. We bring people in to talk about the areas that we're doing research and the methods that we're using. So we try hard not to be provincial in the kind of work that we're doing. I think the key at this point is we know that relationships matter.

We're trying to refine our knowledge of how they matter, under what conditions are there differences across different kinds of people, introverts or extroverts or across different cultures. Does gender matter in certain ways? Those are the kinds of more fine grain questions that I think [00:53:00] are important to answer that we still need evidence for.

And of course, humans are moving targets, so we continue to change. So gender differences in the realm of relationships have shrunk over the last three decades. I think they'll continue to shrink, but the very meaning of what we think about as gender is also changing. So we just need to be thoughtful about the science and I think not to be too provincial.

Meaning get happy with our own ideas and our own knowledge and keep asking the same question without thinking about other questions that might be important. So we decided actually, not to go in this direction, but really interesting microbiome research that's being done about certainly health. We had an opportunity to think about that.

It's tricky in some ways still to do microbiome research in terms of the load on participants and the expertise that's required. But we're always looking for collaborators that bring expertise to the table. So we're working with people that are interested in epigenetics. Genes get switched on and off depending on the relationships that you're in, the quality of your connections or [00:54:00] the kinds of adversities that you may have experienced during your lifetime. So that's the science from our standpoint, how we continue to try and evolve. We're not always going to get it right, like the study, you know, the study asked some silly questions and hindsight we've asked some questions or we've asked them in the wrong way.

But the nice part about science, when you're in it for the long term, and this is four decades for me, is that you get to come back and to ask that question in a different way. Or to follow up.

Quinn: So you are not going to lead this study forever. Hopefully it continues on because like you said, once we've settled on relationships are it, there are just a almost infinite number of hows and whys and what's and ways we interact with each other to explore and what's true and what's not true anymore.

And like you said, humans are very much moving target in a thousand different ways. I can't keep up online. Every time I get online, I'm like, I don't know who that person is anymore. It's impossible. All my children do is make fun of me. You know, we got a lot of folks who listen to this. There's senators, scientists, there's also a ton of young people who, it's the pathless path, right?

I've done 50 different [00:55:00] things and my children are like, I'm going to be a paleontologist, which is not unlike what you do, but I'm like you're also going to be a waiter and have 40 other things and that's great, but if you were looking for the next person to lead this study or you were starting this over yourself, what are you really looking for in that person to be able to take on work of this magnitude?

Marc Schulz: Yeah, that's a really good question. So I would say that first of all, a kind of deep interest in trying to understand people is really critical. So one of the things that really distinguishes this study is not just the length of the study, but you know, beginning in the thirties, they were interested in why people thrived, which was very unusual in the midst of the Depression and, you know, on the eve of World War 2.

And they were interested in the lived experience of participants. So that kind of research requires time and energy. They went to the homes of all 724 participants, interviewed the parents, watched the kids interact with the parents. We've done similar things, bringing folks into the laboratory, asking them [00:56:00] big questions about life, regrets that they have, challenges that they had in their past.

So being interested in trying to get inside the heads of people has been really important to the study and the reason why the data is still so valuable is we had very careful notes originally, and now we have audio tapes and transcripts and digital tapes and videotapes of, you know, all of these discussions and interviews that we've had with people.

So really being interested in that, and this is just, you know, what gets me up in the morning, an opportunity to do another deep dive about one of our 724 members of our family here is how I think about it. I think a breadth of knowledge and interest in broad things is really critical. So both Bob and I, our interest in lots of questions. Know when we don't know the answer to something or don't have the expertise. So we bring in that expertise and I think those are the kinds of skills that are really important. Being interested in lots of things, being willing to hear another perspective or another approach, and being willing to bring in that expertise so [00:57:00] that you can enlarge your skillset as well.

So those are some of the skills. And then there's maybe more mundane tasks. You know, you have to raise money to do a study like this. And leadership of staff, really important. And this study, you know, certainly a little bit of luck, but the leadership over its four generations of leaders now over those 85 years, the leadership teams before Bob and I, extraordinary job keeping a study like this going.

Quinn: How much do you weigh someone who's just loaded with curiosity and perhaps more importantly, empathy versus this person has to be trained in psychology to lead this study. I'm assuming for the rest of the team, you've a variety of hitters throughout the lineup, but how much does it matter to be trained, at least trained, if not, you know, certified in some way in psychology?

Marc Schulz: Yeah, so absolutely. We bring in expertise from a range of disciplines, important to acknowledge Bob is a psychiatrist. It doesn't have to be psychology, but that that background in knowing and learning about other people's experiences. I think we could have a discussion about someone who's well trained [00:58:00] in, for example anthropology and field experience and interviewing people might be interesting to lead the study as well.

I think, you know, there's a kind of balance of talents and skills and a kind of allegiance to the original ideas and themes of the study. So the original team was a diverse team as well. There were psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers and anthropologists involved, and they had, you know, kind of crazy ideas about how the different configurations of heads and the actual physical dimensions might matter for how well you adapt to challenges.

And that came out of anthropology and fascist ideas that were not just in Europe at that time in the thirties. I think we'd be open to folks from other disciplines and could bring a new experience, but I think again it's a kind of deep commitment to trying to understand what leads to people ticking and what motivates them in life and what they worry about at night. For me, I learned a lot of that by working closely with patients. That therapy taught me a lot directly learning from [00:59:00] those encounters that I had with clients and also clients doing therapy forces you to reflect on your own experiences and ways that I think allows you to learn about, you know, what makes you tick and what might motivate you.

So there are advantages of that background, but I'm not sure it would have to be. Yeah, someone with that background.

Quinn: It's helpful, I appreciate you being so, so thoughtful and candid about it. You know, it turns out over, compared to yours, very relatively short amount of time. But what we attempt to do, it turns out why people come here the most, is to answer the question, what can I do?

And as I always say, you can phrase that a bunch of different ways. You can say, what can I do? Or what can I do, which is a little more desperate? What can I do? Which is a little bit like, what could someone like me possibly do about climate or food or loneliness, whatever it might be. The jet stream, all these different things.

And we just try to help folks answer that. And luckily in this confluence of events, sort of late-ish Covid as it is and early to mid loneliness and climate and all these different things. There's a [01:00:00] lot of things you can do. The question is what are you into and what are you good at?

And I will point you towards 70,000 very reputable places where you can work with incredible people who are already doing the work or interested or need a co-founder or funding or whatever it might be. And that's always interesting to me to have someone really answer that question when something has been not just the same over time, but you know, on the surface requires a specific set of skills as they might say.

Because even more specifically, I hear all the time someone go I've only worked at accounting at Facebook. I'm like is it social media you're good at or is it accounting? Because if it's accounting, I can push you at a climate company today. You know, that doesn't matter. So I'm trying to look at these lateral moves or graduation moves in a slightly more open-minded, positive, progressive way.

Marc Schulz: I think that's great. And I think they're also, you know, I'm big on, on helping for, particularly for young people, trying to think about all the things that you're learning regardless of the setting that you're in. So when I worked with the goldfish, I didn't learn so much about conversational skills.

I couldn't learn that there. But I did [01:01:00] learn about, you know, there are aspects of the visual system that were really interesting to learn and that knowledge by it's never directly impacted the research that I do. There's a kind of model there for understanding how the brain affects other systems.

That's been really useful. So I think being able to take the most out of an experience, no matter what it is. One of my kids was really good at math in school and he was getting bored in his math class and, you know, beginning to moan about it. And I said to him, I said, Sam, you know, there's so many things that you can figure out to make this more interesting for yourself.

It's not always up to the teacher to figure out the ways to make this interesting and challenging. And he's done that and he's done that in creative ways, which have been great for him. So we all need to think about, you know, whatever our experiences, whether they're work or others, there are lots of things that we can learn if we step back and think hard about what's the thing that I want to get out of this that can be useful?

And the same applies to social connections. I want to go back to, you know, what we were talking about before, that there are many people who are lonely [01:02:00] among a crowd. They work in a client facing industry. But they don't feel like the connections that they're making are real authentic connections.

They need to sell someone or they need to you know, make connections to network. Part of growing more mature, part of learning is figuring out ways to do that and make an authentic connection, right? To be able to do whatever the task is that's part of the enterprise that you're working on, but also to do this in a way that you are interested and connected and mostly engaged with that person that sits opposite you.

Those of us that can do that are going to flourish. Those are real opportunities for connection. We all need to figure out how to do that. I can't imagine teaching for over 30 years if I didn't value those connections I have with students. If I thought the students were horrible people and they were only out to get grades or, you know, weren't really interested in things, boy what a horrible job it would be.

I have to figure out a way like everyone to engage with the people I work with in ways that are going to be [01:03:00] mutually beneficial.

Quinn: And that's what's going to get us there. I'm such a huge proponent in a lot of the conversations and offline work we do with these there's economists. Mariana Mazzucato talks about having clear, measurable outcomes and reversing all of your teams and processes from there, I don't think this is necessarily it. Obviously having better and more relationships and more productive and helpful and supportive relationships isn't, I guess, an outcome, but it's also a process that's never really going to end. But like you said the opportunities for the how are just so wide ranging in so many different ways. To me it seems to be about the self-awareness of what is this one for? What is this one? What can this one do? What can this technology do? Whether it's swipe and left or right. I don’t know what those things do on the dating apps. It's very unclear to me. It's not about that.

It's like, what is it? What are you trying to find there and how are you trying to use that? And instead of just it being the thing, I guess, I mean, I'll watch Instagram recipe videos all day, but clearly I should try to cook with people at some point. Marc, I got a few last questions I want to ask you before we get out of here.

We ask [01:04:00] everybody and then we're all done. You've given us so much time. I really appreciate it. When was the first time in your life when you realized you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful, however you want to measure that? For some kids it was running for class office in fourth grade and they actually got the extra snack machines they promised or whatever it might have been.

For some people it was very recently. I'm curious. What was your spark?

Marc Schulz: For me there are two kind of moments I can remember. One is certainly the first time I started teaching, which was in graduate school. But I wasn't sure I'd be a good teacher. I wasn't sure I could be like these professors that I admired for years.

And getting up in front of a group of students that weren't much younger than me and didn't know much more than, you know, I didn't know much more than them to recognize that there were things that I could do to help them learn, to engage them, to get them excited about things, to really change their perspective on things.

That was really exciting for me and that was a moment of thought, maybe this is what I want to do, is to teach. So that's one for sure and that's continued throughout my career. Thankfully [01:05:00] even, you know, my 30th year of teaching, I still feel that sort of excitement about making a difference in someone's life.

And then I've been lucky enough to do therapy work and I have the same experience in the beginning. So challenging to learn how to help people who are in stress to learn how to, you know, modulate your own sort of normal impulses of friendship and reaching out or making people, you know, uncomfortable or not uncomfortable.

Learning how to do that in ways that people were grateful for the assistance. Pretty powerful. Feels pretty magical in some ways. That took a lot of work and it takes for everyone a lot of work to get there. Certainly took that for me. But those were pretty exciting moments when I learned that I could make a difference in that way.

Quinn: All these years later. Do you still enjoy doing therapy?

Marc Schulz: I do. I, you know, I feel like I learn a lot. It's a different kind of anthropology for me. Some patients have challenges that feel very familiar to me. They're similar to challenges I might have and others are experiencing things in life that are very different than the kinds of [01:06:00] experiences that I have.

And I have really valued the opportunity to experience them. And then I have the double bonus of then I can teach about them because I'm teaching content that's similar to some of the challenges that some people may be facing, hearing voices or having paranoia. I get to teach about this in a way that further helps me understand it.

So I feel really lucky I get to continually learn about things that are beyond my own experience. Most of us, I read and, you know, I learn that through reading novels or watching movies. But I get to live some of that as well in my work life. Certainly still I appreciate that.

Quinn: I imagine, like you said, there's some universalities like work is stressful and then humans are moving target and there's entirely new things you may have never considered. Like you said, the way the gender landscape has changed so much publicly since in the, like you said, the 30 years since you've been doing this. That's got to be just fascinating and so helpful to folks.

Marc, who is someone in your life that has positively impacted your work in the past six months? Getting specific.

Marc Schulz: Wife, top of mind there. [01:07:00] Wife is so critical in terms of just helping me through life. This is an example of living the message here. Relationship's really critical for navigating all sorts of challenges.

First, you know, book for a popular audience. I've done other books before, but very narrow audience. So all sorts of new challenges for me and my wife has been there to keep me level-headed, to help me figure out how to make decisions. So really valuable. My colleague who I wrote the book with also, you know, we've been collaborating for 30 years.

Very true that we bring out the best in each other. The work we do together, we both know is better than the work we can do ourselves. So Bob continues to inspire me. This book is better for having written the, you know, by the two of us. And so I'm lucky that I have those people in my life for sure.

Quinn: I love that. That's always an important one to get out there. Last one, what is, in all of your free time, a book you have read in the past year or so that has either opened your mind to maybe a topic you hadn't considered before or has actually changed your [01:08:00] thinking whether that's fundamentally or approach wise in some way.

We got a whole list up on Bookshop.

Marc Schulz: I'm a slow reader because I play with ideas as I read. So again, for me, it's like being a therapist or being a researcher, working with people. I like to play with the ideas and so there are lots of books that I've read that allow me to do that. I was late to reading Emperor of All Maladies.

I read it last summer and you know, inspiring as someone who was trying to write a book that was going to reach a large audience about complicated ideas. You know, Siddhartha Mukherjee is this incredible writer and the stories in that book also exciting about the roles that scientists can play, but also about the complexity of science.

So I had actually worked in Boston during the time of some of the introduction of some of the big drugs that have improved survivals for cancer, particularly for kids. I was working with kids at Dana Farber in Boston for a while. So that was an important book. And I took, it's a long book. It's a dense book, and I took my time reading it and thinking about [01:09:00] it, and even just, it's something I teach about when I teach about the causes of mental illness.

I use cancer as a model actually, because if we think about the causes of cancer, it's so complicated. And we're now thinking more and more about the causes of cancer as a series of gates that mutations go through, begin to grow unchecked. That's a model that goes far beyond the traditional germ theory model where you're exposed to a virus and you get sick.

So that model of the complexity of a disease or the complexity of a phenomena is something that I've embraced and I partly love reading that book for that.

Quinn: I appreciate you sharing that. I have a, my very brief story with that book was, it's incredible. And like you said, so dense and I don't know, I don’t know how someone possibly walks the line of writing that book.

It's incredible. But it came out a couple years after, one of my best friends very suddenly died of cancer and for a while it was on the bookshelf and I was like, can't read it this year. Still can't read it this year, just was not very, not able to deal with it. And then finally taking it on.

And like you said, just the [01:10:00] absolute manifest complexities within it, but also the hints of like, here's what we're starting to understand, here's what we might be able to understand and the very basic things of it is something that's growing out of control and what does that mean for other things is just so fascinating.

Marc Schulz: And it kind of recognition that you can communicate complicated ideas if you have the right vehicle. And it was usually stories about people or about a discovery. So he has an incredible ability to build a narrative around ideas that are accessible and engaging. So yeah, but that's what I'll do.

I'll play with the content in the book. I'll play with the way the book is written. I've of course lost people or had people in my life that have struggled with cancer, so I'm thinking about them. So I'm always a slow reader. I enjoy kind of, maybe it's a relishing of a book like that.

Quinn: But that's what I love, you know, because again I always preface this with people who come asking for help.

It's like, not scientist, not even a journalist, not any of these other things. I am a liberal arts generalist who can go semi deep on these extraordinary things. But I [01:11:00] love that feeling of maybe tying things together and ruminating on them. Like you said, taking forever with them. It is. I feel lucky to do that.

Thank you so much. This has been just truly wonderful. I've been paying attention to the study for some time. The book is wonderful. I feel like I wrote down 70 different things that I need to do better each day, but also just like you said, that the time flies by and if there's this one fundamental thing we can do to improve not only our own day-to-day outcomes, but long-term, but inherently someone else's because it is about relationships, then it's probably the least we can do.

So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Marc Schulz: Thank you for the kind thoughts about the book and real pleasure talking to you. It was fun covering the material we did and honored to be here. Thank you, Quinn.

Quinn: Oh, that's very kind of you. That's it. Important, Not Important is hosted by me. It is produced by Willow Beck, it is edited by Anthony Luciani.

And the music is by Tim Blaine. You can read our critically acclaimed [01:12:00] newsletter and get notified about new podcast convos at important not important dot com slash subscribe. We've got t-shirts and hoodies and coffee stuff at our store. I'm on Twitter at Quinn Emmett. I'm also there at what is the new one?

Blue Sky, whatever it is. I'm also on LinkedIn. Search me or important, non important wherever you want. You can send us feedback or questions or guest suggestions, whatever you want on Twitter or to questions at important not important dot com. That's it. Thanks for giving a shit and have a great day.