A Stoic Mantra For Your Sh*ttiest Moments (And Other Ancient Wisdom That Holds Up) | Jonathan Haidt

Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the 10% happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. This whole show, and in fact, my my whole post TV news anchorman career, is based on the mix of ancient wisdom and modern science, which really are two great tastes that taste great together, as they used to say in the Reese's peanut butter cups ads when I was a kid. And there's so much to be learned at the intersection of of these two fields, which is why I was really excited when I heard from Jonathan Haidt, who wanted to come on to talk about his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which really takes pillars of ancient wisdom and then pressure tests them against modern research. You might know Jonathan Haidt. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. He has written many, many best selling books, including The Anxious Generation. But today, we're really gonna focus on the happiness hypothesis, which is actually twenty years old. It's celebrating its twentieth anniversary, and he has just put out a revised edition of the book. Jonathan Haidt, welcome back to the show. Dan, thanks so much for having me on. Tell me about the idea for this book of... I think I might have given away the headline, but the basic idea, as I said, is let's look at some pillars of ancient wisdom and see how they hold up in light of today's science. Mhmm. That's right. So the book grows out of my teaching psych one zero one at the University of Virginia. My first academic job beginning in 1995 was there. I was assigned to teach psych one zero one. I have to teach a room of three hundred 19 year olds, everything from physiological psychology through love and dieting, everything. And I would often quote, you know, Shakespeare or Buddha. So it was clear that, like, there are certain ideas. Like, for example, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so Mhmm. From Hamlet. And that is the foundation of stoicism, of Buddhism, of cognitive therapy, like that idea. And when I was coming up for tenure, I didn't have a lot of of experimental publications, and I thought I might not get tenure. And if I don't get tenure, don't wanna just transfer to a lower ranked university. You know what? I'll I'll drop out, and I'll try to write up this trade book. Collect all these ideas and and write it up. So I did get tenure, although it was just barely. I happened to know my vote because they made a mistake and revealed it to me accidentally. But, anyway, I I got tenure at UVA, and I decided to write the book anyway. And it was so much fun. I basically just read every work from ancient China, India, everything that... You know, religious texts, anything that had sort of statements about humanity in it. And I had a big …