Nature of happiness

The speech is called Champagne Problems.

It's all about the bad things that happen and really just a few weird things that happen when all of your dreams come true, which they might. So listen up. Most people in the audience I think I know something about you. I think I know that you have chosen to attend a conference for young professionals in the middle of the day, organized by the Chamber of Commerce, and that tells me that you are probably ambitious like you're a gunner. You really want to make it, whatever it is to you. Am I right about that? I said am I right about that? There it is.

Well, I stand here before you, a specimen of a human who has very recently made it. A few years ago I had a good career. I had a solid university salary, but I had very little control over my own destiny and almost no money in the bank. Kids. Today I own my own company with my wife. We work for ourselves. We work as much or as little as we want to. We have a fair bit of money in the bank.

I spend my days following my own curiosity and my creative impulse, wherever they lead me. I make whatever things I want to make and literally millions of people all over the world gobble up my wares gratefully. I sit on the side of the river that y'all are trying to reach. I intend now to give you some idea of what it's actually like over here and thereby help you to develop a mental image of what success might actually look like for you, so that you can know what to expect if you actually get where you're trying to go by being in this room right now. It's mostly good over here, on this side of the river of struggle, definitely better than on the other side. I have no intention of ever going back to the other side if I can avoid it. But over here on the better side, things are not perfect. These are problems that one might rightfully characterize as champagne problems, but they are problems nonetheless, and I will describe four of them for you now.

I'm not trying to gin up sympathy for all of those poor, rich folks, all those atlases laboring under their globes. Rather I will describe these four champagne problems so that you might be better prepared if you achieve the success that you are trying to achieve by being here today. Champagne problem number one, you're still stuck with yourself. Success changes your circumstances far more than it changes you. You can buy yourself one of those big mansions up on Lyons View Pike overlooking the river. You know what I'm talking about? You could buy one, you could tear it down, build a nicer one as I believe someone is doing right now, behind one of those tall stone walls. You can buy one of those, but I regret to inform you that you'll still be the one living in it . And all of your endogenic problems will remain with you.

Well, what does that mean? Well, there is a large and growing volume of scientific literature on the topic of happiness. What makes people truly happy? To study this scientists look at self-reported data. Of course you ask people how happy they are and what they think makes them happy.

But you certainly do not stop your

Investigation there, because people are very often wrong about what they think makes them happy.

A pathological gambler thinks that one more spin of that wheel will make them happy and they are wrong about that. A pathological eater thinks that slamming an entire pizza will make them happy, and it may in the very short term, but in the long term not so much, and I may speak from experience on that one. Scientists look at endogenic versus exogenic causes of happiness. Exogenic causes are things that happen to you.

Endogenic are the things that happen within you. Because even if you get a break, you get a stroke of luck, you still have to dig deep inside yourself to capitalize on that luck unless you are very, very, very lucky, unless you say inherit hundreds of millions of dollars from a parent. In that event it's possible to do just about everything wrong from that point forward and remain very wealthy and powerful. You don't have to play the game all that well if you start with a really full health bar. But the kind of luck that you can more realistically hope for is the kind of luck you have to actively capitalize on, and it's the kind of luck that you have to help make. My stroke of luck did not come out of nowhere. 

 Though I certainly had no idea that this particular thing is what I was working toward that whole time. I was a music major. How about you? Success particularly success based on fame is highly unpredictable. You can create the conditions for success, like you can create the conditions for a good sourdough starter, but what microorganisms ultimately colonize your starter, that is exogenic. Anyway. Happiness research, happiness research. One of the things that scientists look at to quantify happiness is certain biomarkers, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, those are all neurotransmitters positively associated with happiness.

Cortisol, adrenaline, hormones, negatively correlated with happiness. Though of course those are crude generalities. I can think of a few activities that spike my adrenaline that I also I think make me happy. But anyway. There's a well known 2014 literature review performed by Iranian scientists looking at biomarkers of happiness, endogenic versus exogenic causes. And what their review indicated is that between 35 and 50% of biologically evident happiness may be attributable to genetics alone. I'm sure plenty of psychologists and other scientists would dispute the specifics, but I doubt any would challenge the core assertion that genetics play a really big role in a person's capacity to feel good. That's problem number one.

You should anticipate with success your underlying predisposition toward one mood or another, toward one mode of behavior or another, that will not change. You can still make a hell out of a mansion up on Lyons View and I guarantee you that someone up there is probably doing so right now. You can improve your behavior with hard work and with therapy, but nothing can buy you a new genome. Which leads us to champagne problem number two. Money fixes so many problems, just not all of them.

There's a famous 2018 study out of

Here in the us, it's from purdue university and uva, psychologists here tried to find out how much money is enough to make you happy.

And there are many similar such studies,

But this one was remarkable in its scope.

They looked at the whole world and they naturally found that the level of annual income positively correlated with happiness varies considerably from place to place.

Happiness is more expensive in Northern. America than it is in Southeast Asia for example. Specifically it is $35,000 a year more expensive in Northern America compared to Southeast Asia according to this particular study. This was a study of 1.7 million people worldwide, and so they're not looking at biomarkers of happiness here. They did not collect 1.7 million urine samples so they could see how much adrenaline people are excreting. Rather the data came from the Gallup World Poll. We're talking about survey data here, like self-reported information. However good psychologists don't just ask people how happy they are and then take their word for it.

They ask more detailed questions to try to suss out the truth. For example, this particular poll used what's called Cantril's. Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, where zero is your worst life and 10 is your best life. They ask you which rung of that ladder you think you're on. Other studies that have really dug a lot deeper into individual human subjects have found that responses on this particular scale do tend to be generally pretty accurate. The authors of this paper also looked at what's called affective wellbeing. They dug into people's answers on questions like, what kinds of experiences have you had lately? How did those experiences make you feel? Did you spend more time yesterday laughing or stressing out or being sad? That kind of thing. The researchers dug into all of those responses and compared people's apparent level of happiness to their level of income and here's what they found.

In Northern America, so US and Canada, you got to make at least 105,000 US dollars a year to feel like you're living your best life. It's described in the paper as life evaluation satiation. And I guess I could describe the finding more precisely as once you make at least 105K a year, your income ceases to be a predictor of whether you feel like you're living your best life. You may feel like you're living your best life making way less money, making way more money, but these findings indicate that on average 105K a year is the most money that can help you live your best life. After that you're on your own. Money can get you pretty far toward happiness, but it can't get everyone all the way there. Just because I know people are curious, here's that life evaluation satiation income level for some other regions of the world. It's 100,000 US dollars in Western Europe, 45,000 in Eastern Europe in the Balkans, 110K in East Asia, 115K in West Asia/ North Africa, 40K in sub-Saharan Africa and $35,000 a year in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On the level of large regions of the globe, Latin Americans need the least amount of money to be happy, despite the fact that Latin America is not the poorest or cheapest part of the world. Latin Americans seem to need a lot less money to be happy relative to their cost of living. Why? Is a very interesting question that is the subject of ongoing scientific investigation. I'm not saying it's the food, I'm just saying it might be the food. Incidentally in my new band is called It Might Be Tacos. We're playing at The Outpost next weekend. No cover. That's a joke.

I don't know who's playing at The Outpost.

Sorry.

That's the money that it takes to live your best life. It takes a lot less money to feel basically not bad, to not feel scared all the time, to feel basically secure, to have the bottom of Maslow's pyramid on lockdown, to have your food, your shelter, your physical security, that kind of thing. These same researchers put income numbers on what they call negative affect association. This is the maximum amount of money that people need to make a year that reliably predicts an absence of self-reported bad feelings, like lots of stress and sadness, overwhelming everything else. In Northern America that's $95,000 a year, just to not feel bad. In Western Europe and Scandinavia, it's only 50,000 a year.

Western Europeans and. Americans need about the same amount of money to feel like they're living their best life. But Western Europeans need way less money to just not feel bad, to feel basically secure. An obvious explanation supported by other research would be the far more robust social welfare states in. Western European countries. That's what higher taxes can buy you, less fear for most people. I say this approvingly as someone who has recently started paying so much money in taxes. And it hurts too.

Let me tell you, it hurts because it's not like being withheld from my paycheck like it used to be. Right? We have to sit down now and actually actively send hundreds of thousands of dollars to one government or another and I fully support it, but it hurts. Sorry to interrupt, Adam. Adam, here.

Anyway, I was telling all the young people about how much money actually makes you happy. According to science. My annual income has recently shot well above the point at which money is a reliable predictor of any kind of happiness.

Am I happy? Do I feel like I'm living my best life? Not totally, no. For reasons that we're going to get to. It's great, great to not be afraid anymore. I spent so much of my life afraid about my ability to make rent, my ability to pay off Sallie Mae, my ability to not get fired from my job, my job that provides healthcare to my children because somebody in the United States thought that was a good system. At some point. I hated being afraid and I will never go back to the fear if I can avoid it. But that becomes its own kind of fear. Leading me to champagne problem number three, loss of moderating external forces.

Financial freedom is freedom, and with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility to not act like a jerk even though you can. For most of my adult life if I acted like a jerk, there was a good chance that I would eventually lose my job. I'm sure there's a point at which I could behave badly enough now that my audience on YouTube would abandon me. I think I'm in no real danger of hitting that upper limit anytime soon. I have achieved what the kids these days I'm told call. F you money though they don't normally express that with an initialism. When you have.

F you money, you can afford to speak your mind to tell everybody what you really think of them. Does that sound like the dream to anybody here? Does it sound like the dream? Be honest. It's not. It's not the dream. Stop dreaming it. The few times in my life when I have exercised the rights and privileges afforded to me by F you money, whenever I have told people what I really think of them, I have immediately regretted it. Don't do that.

Doesn't feel good.

Live your truth, absolutely live your truth, but that's not the same thing as speaking your truth without any care for other people's feelings. In some cases speaking my truth has hurt other people's feelings and in some cases I don't really care about their feelings because I do think that some of the people in question are garbage people. But I still think it was bad for me. It was bad for my soul, for lack of a better word, that I said what I said and it was bad for the general civility within my society. For what it's worth it's just funny that this mirrors my feelings on capital punishment. I think that there are people in this world, a few people who deserve to die for their crimes. But I think that putting people to death diminishes us. The people making and executing the sentence and therefore we shouldn't do it.

Also it's absurdly expensive to put people to death and we convict innocent people all the time. And once you kill them, there's no way to make it right and the whole system is super racist. So there are lots of other good reasons to not do capital punishment. Anyway, money. When you ask successful people about their regrets in life, they generally talk about how they treated other people.Because people whose lives turned out really well typically don't regret missing one opportunity or another. How can you regret that when your journey led you here and here is great? There were times when I regretted dropping out of grad school, for example, but not anymore. That was a stop on the path that got me here and here is great. I do regret how I treated other people.

It's not all big things like I regret interrupting someone else in a meeting so that I could get a chance to show everyone at the table how smart I am. Those are the kind of memories that keep me awake at night. And that's the stuff I did before I even had F you money. When you win money you lose external forces that moderate your behavior and that means you have to work harder to moderate your behavior yourself. That includes being good to others and it includes being good to yourself, not overworking yourself. My definition of success isn't just about money, it's about freedom. I work for myself. I can work as much or as little as I want and I will be paid accordingly.

I can make is how much I'm willing to work. And apparently I'm willing to work way, way too much as evidenced by the fact that I'm operating this camera while giving a speech. I don't work too much because I'm greedy. I'm not terribly greedy. I work too much because I am scared. I'm afraid that something will happen and I'll have to go back to being afraid again.

Afraid about whether there's enough money in the account to cover that check that I just wrote to pay the power bill or whatever.

I'm afraid of being afraid again.

Sometimes I feel like I'm on one

Of those game shows where they lock you into a plexiglass box with a wind machine and a bunch of paper currency flying around and you get to keep whatever you can grab within 60 seconds and i must look like a cat chasing a dangling toy.

I'm scared that the money machine will stop blowing, which could happen. If you notice my eyes are watering a lot and I'm blinking a lot, it's because I cut my eyeball the other day. It was not a kitchen accident. I know that's what you're thinking. According to the doctor I've got some kind of scar tissue on my right eye perhaps from an old injury and it dried out in the night and I was sleeping and I blinked and my eyelid just caught on the scar tissue and stuck to it because it was dry and it just tore my eye open, a little.

Hurt real bad. I couldn't even open my good eye. I had to keep them both shut because when you open one eye the other eye moves with it, even if you keep the lid closed. And that was just agonizing pain. I was blind for a day, couldn't do anything that I normally do to make money. And this is not the kind of job where you can call in sick and they still pay you. This is different from other kinds of success where say you work really, really hard, you maybe earn an advanced degree and then a large institution just pays you a generous flat annual salary. That's what my brother does.

I'm not that happy.

I'm not nearly as happy as I should be. I'm just so exhausted all the time.

I have no external force moderating my naturally workaholic tendencies. The workday doesn't end. And that is bad. I have to learn to say no more. And so may you one day. You may also have your own employees one day, and side note, if you're ever mad because they don't work as hard as you do at the business that you own, remember that you work more because work is literally more rewarding for you. Right? Nobody wants to work anymore people say. Well make work more rewarding and I think people will want to do it.

I'd rather have money than no money, I'd rather have freedom than no freedom, but the fact remains that there are particular things that are hard about having money and freedom. It's hard to make decisions when you have money and freedom. Like, how should you pay your employees? That's a hard choice. Made harder when lots of options are available to you. Fewer options can really be a blessing. You know what I'm talking about? A giant menu at the restaurant is great, but clap if you'd rather see a small menu. Me too. I'm with you.

I have a job where I could live anywhere in the world, anywhere I want. All I need is internet and light. Cost is a factor. So maybe not every neighborhood in the world is open to me, but every city is, sure. Imagine yourself in the same situation. You have a job and an income that would allow you to live anywhere in the world. That's like a realistic scenario, right? Because I bet a lot of you already work jobs that you could kind of do from anywhere that has internet. Where would you choose to live? Seriously somebody shout it out.

Where would you choose to live if you could live and work anywhere? I hear San Diego. What was that over here? Anna Maria Island. I don't know what that is, but it sounds beautiful. Maine. Don't play to the crowd, sir. Saying "Knoxville, Tennessee.". You'll see what plane to the crowd gets you.

I chose Knoxville, Tennessee.

True story.

We could have chosen to live anywhere and we chose here for a few reasons. It's very beautiful, lots of architectural beauty, lots of natural beauty. I like mountains, I like rivers, I like trees, I like flowers. Got lots of those here. You got all four seasons here. But summers are long and winters are short. I really like that.

Great public schools for the kids, very big research university a mile from the house. I've lived in college towns my entire life, it's good to be around young people and it's good to be around smart people. College towns have both, though they are not always the same people. There's really no big city amenity that we lack for here, and yet it feels something more manageable than a big city. I spent a decade of my life dealing with Atlanta traffic never again. And of course we have family here. My wife Lauren grew up in Blount County. So really we asked ourselves, where in the whole world would we like to live where we also have family? And that narrowed the options considerably.

And that was good. It narrowed the options considerably because no matter how much money you make, your family remains your family. This goes back to champagne problem number one. You remain yourself and yourself includes your family. You can't buy yourself a new family. Not that I would want to if I could. You remain yourself when you cross into the domain of champagne problems. But your relationship to everyone else changes, and that is champagne problem number four and final, social disorientation.

I'm the same person but I'm not the same person in relation to you. And I'm still getting used to that. I'm still reorienting myself, figuring out my new role in all of this. I can't complain about the state of the world as much as I used to. Who the hell is in charge here if not me? I'm in the 1%. The richest 1% of people in the whole world who run the whole world and have most of the money. That's me now. And that is terrifying.

It's rather like an experience I had in my early 30s, I was sitting in the house one day, there was a knock on the door and I opened the door and there were three kids holding a puppy. Hey mister, you want this puppy? We found it near the dumpsters at our apartment complex and we're not allowed to have dogs there. So you want a puppy mister? And in that moment I thought to myself, oh no, I'm the adult in this situation.

This puppy is my problem because I'm

The grown up here.

Whatever I was planning to do today has to stop because I have to find out who this puppy belongs to or find it a new home, which we did. We found it a new home. When you join the world's richest 1%, you acquire an ownership stake in the system whether you want that ownership stake or not. And when the system goes awry, you can't just say somebody ought to do something about this, you ought to do something about this because it's your system whether you want it to be or not, it is disorienting.

You also just kind of forget sometimes that you don't have to be cheap anymore. I was booking a plane flight from Knoxville to Detroit the other day for a shoot. It's going to be my first plane flight in a long time. And out of habit I booked the worst possible flight. I think it was going to stop over in Toronto or something. No bags, no carry-ons included, middle seat, back of the plane where it smells weird. And Lauren, my wife, she saw me booking this ticket. She looked over my shoulder at what I was doing on the laptop and she said, are you crazy? Just buy the good ticket.

And what's crazy is, the good ticket was only like $80 more, first class. What do you mean? My first time in my entire life flying first class is going to be to the D to make a article about Detroit style pizza. It's a $500 ticket, but the difference between the terrible flight and the great flight is only like 80 bucks. I never knew that. Sorry, Adam. It's Adam, again.

I was telling the young professionals about why I always used to buy the worst, cheapest airplane ticket. Why have I been taking the terrible flight in my whole life? It's because I'm frugal, which up until very recently was a virtue. I have to realize that now it's a vice. The same behavior isn't frugal anymore, it's stingy, because there's lots of other people in the world who would like some of that money. Some of them may feel that they deserve it and they might be right. So what do you do in this situation? Well, for one thing, my new baseline for tipping is 50%. I always used to tip at least 20%.

Now I always tip at least 50%. Some of you may applaud this, but others of you are probably thinking, so I have to deliver a pizza to you to enjoy your largess. I have to perform some menial act of service to get a tiny taste of your ill gotten gains you capitalist. Some of you were thinking that, don't lie, I would be. Lauren and I have started having serious conversations about major and ongoing philanthropic commitments. Not least because we are still married and like each other, but also because we're in the 1% but we're at the very bottom of the 1%. When you're in the 99, all the 1% looks the same, right? But then you get in the 1% and you're like, oh no, it is not.

It is not all the same. Our brains are not wired to comprehend exponential differences in numbers like four is twice as much as two. That's a big difference. But it's only a difference of two. Eight is twice as much as four, which sounds like the same difference, but it's actually a difference of four, not two. And keep going. And eventually you get into some incoherently huge numbers. The truth is I'm not a master of the universe.

I'm not in charge here.

Elon Musk is in charge.

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Larry Page, actually no, not Larry Page. Larry Page owns Google and Google owns YouTube. Larry Page is the best. But all those other guys, they're the jerks in charge. Not me, don't blame me. But put me and my ridiculous YouTube income into a corrugated metal shack in a township outside a.

Cape Town or wherever and see if I make the same argument to the people in that room. Those are some of the champagne problems that await you young professionals of Knoxville, Tennessee. I sincerely hope they await you because they are so much better than the other kinds of problems. I thank you for your attention and I think we've got time for a couple of questions. Just remember that this is being recorded so if you don't want to be on my YouTube channel, don't say anything. Anybody got a question? You can just stand up and shout it. I'll repeat it in the mic. Okay, so the question is, was cooking always your passion? And if so, did you ever feel that you would just burn out on your passion? And when you turn your passion into your livelihood and is certainly the case that work is work, no matter how great work is, it will start to feel like work.

Okay? And things that you would have done for fun the other day like you feel I have to get out and do the fun thing again because it's work. That's just a fact of life. It's the way it is. I've always been interested in food and cooking, yes. It was not always my main interest. It was not where I thought I would end up. But fame chooses you, you don't choose it. And so here we are.

Do I get burned out? I get burned out in the sense that I'm working too much. But I've actually been able to avoid getting burned out on thinking about food all the time, because I was very fortunate to stumble into success on a topic like food that connects to every other thing that's important about life on this planet. When I say I do food and food adjacent things, that basically opens up almost everything. And my audience, bless them, have been willing to go there with me even when the leap was not as obvious as it is on other weeks. And as I've been doing this more and more and they're been along with you for a long time and I can push a little bit more. And so. I've been going further and further afield and that's been keeping me interested for sure. I mentioned that I was a music major in school and grad school, composition.

I was like a prodigious kid who burned out and disappointed everyone, mostly myself. But part of the problem there was that it's just I could never focus on the thing that I needed to do because I was interested in lots too many other things. It wasn't that was lazy, I was just sort of, squirrel.

That made me bad at school and

I always thought it was a vice.

But then I stumbled Bass-Ackwards into the

Public radio station in indiana university where all the misfit toys go, overeducated people with nothing to offer any place else in the world.

I started reporting and. I got a job where my job was to become interested in a new totally different thing every day and then forget about it and then do it again the next day. And all of a sudden this personality trait that I thought was a bad thing about me became an asset.

I've tried to remember that, to remember that I am not broken, you are probably not broken. Some of you may, if you're a serial killer, that's a bad thing. Try not to be that. But short of that I'm pretty confident that you're not broken and there's like a place where your little puzzle piece fits. Where you're not fighting who you are naturally, where who you are naturally is who they need there. I would encourage you to hold out and look for that, because it's probably out there, especially in this insanely specialized economy that we're in. I used to go around for Mercer recruiting undergraduate students and going to a lot of schools with 100% free and reduced lunch. That's the kind of student population, talking about where we really wanted more kids and where we're trying to develop talent.

I'd go there and I'd say, what do y'all want to do? And they would just say, I want to be a nurse or a doctor. And it's not that they all had healing as their passion, I think that's the jobs that they knew about. Those are the jobs they've seen, those are the jobs they've seen on TV. And what I always just tried to say was, look, just whatever vague subject area is most interesting to you, just walk in that general direction because the economy of today is such that most of the jobs that y'all are going to have are things that might not even exist right now and there's certainly things you've never heard of.

So just go walk in that direction, the direction that you feel pulled, and don't be a jerk to anyone, be the kind of person that people want to work with and you will probably find your place. I hope. But I am also cognizant that that's a privileged perspective. There it is.

Question over here. Yes, I will be your guest speaker at your public relations class at the University of Tennessee. But the question was, can you diversify in a job like this? Can you sell products? Can you sell merch? Can you sell books? Can you get into other businesses and make more money that way? But also probably, I think more significantly as implied by the question, can you avoid burnout? Can you just do different things? I would say that yes you can do all of those things.

A much more famous food YouTuber named Joshua Weissman has a cookbook, top the New York. Times bestseller list and dude is is making a lot of money from that, and that's great. I would say that if I was younger, I would probably be exploring more such opportunities. But this happened to me in my late 30s and I'm grateful for that every day. Because I can't imagine the psychological burden of the attention and the stuff people say about you on the internet.

If this had happened to me when I was 27, or god forbid 17, I don't know how people survived that frankly. I don't know, I'm old and I don't want to work that much longer. I don't want to open up a whole lot of other doors. I want to stop. And I've sold merch and stuff, but I do it more as a fan service because people want it. You don't make as much money from that stuff as you make from the other stuff. Selling media is a really good job because you don't have to track packages, you don't have to deal with people.

There was a guy in Michigan and

He is like, i'm a developmentally disabled person.

 

I love your channel. I ordered your chef's knife and it was stolen off the porch of my house. I know you say you sold all of them, but is there anything you can do? You can't not figure out a solution there. So we found one that had a minor factory defect in it and we sent it to him and he was super grateful. I was glad to do that, but I don't want to be doing that all the time and multiply that times a thousand or a million. That's just a much harder job. I'm very interested in fitness media too, and I've been transitioning my channel there a little bit. My audience seems interested in fitness content.

In the fitness world, there's a reason that all of the companies, they'll sell you their little powders or their t-shirts or whatever, but what they really want to sell you is their workout plan pdf, right? Because that's a thing you make one time and then all you do is upload it and people download it.

You do nothing else and you just watch the money come in. It's good work if you can get it. Probably time for one more question. Do you think? One more. Okay. You were first. Yeah.

How do I balance my gratitude for what I have with my ambition for achieving more? I do have a little ambition for achieving more, especially given that I was a reporter for so many years and I worked in nonprofit media for so many years. I worked in public broadcasting and that involves begging people for money all the time, asking people for money to support what we do. I suddenly find myself in a position where I can be the one who gives, not the one who begs. And that's really exciting. That's like, wow, what could I do? What could I fund that no one else is funding? That's really tantalizing. I think if I were a little younger or a little more ambitious, I would probably just branch out and try to become an empire and make a ton of money and then be a social entrepreneur, like fund companies that make the things that. I want to see in the world. But I'm too old for that.