Season 4, #6- Resilience & Purpose: A Little more Social

In this episode of The Founder’s Sandbox, host Brenda McCabe sits down with behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to explore the surprising power of human connection.

Drawing on decades of research and his new book A Little More Social, Epley reveals why we consistently underestimate how positive social interactions can be—and how small choices, like expressing gratitude or starting a conversation, can significantly improve our well-being, relationships, and workplace culture.

Together, they discuss the science behind social connection, the hidden barriers that hold us back, and practical ways leaders and professionals can build more resilient, purpose-driven organizations through simple, intentional human interactions.

 

You can find out more about Nicholas and his book at:

 about Nicholas Epley

Accolades Nicholas Epley

Book him for for speaking events at:

https://www.wsb.com/speakers/nicholas-epley/

or pre order his new Book out May 19, 2026: A Little More Social  Here: Amazon, Bookshop)

You can also find his book Mindwise here: Amazon, Bookshop

 

transcript: 

00:04
Welcome back to the Founders Sandbox. I am Brenda McCabe, your host. Now in the fourth season,  my mission with this podcast is really to bring in company owners, founders,

00:31
professionals,  board directors that like me share a common mission, which is making change in the world through enterprises, small, medium or large. em And  each of my guests um have em in their own ways  built resilient, scalable, well-governed businesses um to really make that change. And I'm absolutely delighted to have Professor Epley, Nicholas Epley,

01:01
from the University of Chicago as my guest for this month. um Welcome to the Founder's Sandbox. Thank you, Brenda. This is a delight for me to have a former student back  with me in conversation. I love it. It's amazing. I've been pursuing you for at least two years, and I kept getting  delayed because  of his writing a book. And today we're going to talk about um his new book that will be launching on May 19th, A Little More Social.

01:31
So before we get into the material, I need to make a proper introduction as I do to all my guests, all right?  So um Nicholas Eppoli, he is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Faculty Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is an author. We'll get into some of his work today. And he has many other accolades.

01:59
that are just too many to go through here because we'll eat into valuable time. And he has back to back podcast to announce his new book. I do want to call out one accolade. You were named by Ethicast, I guess, a business leader in ethics back in 2018. And business ethics, as we all know, corporate governance is very near and dear to my heart. So those accolades will be in the show notes.

02:29
em Dr. Epley, or Professor Epley as I'll call you, right? You study social cognition, how thinking people think about other thinking people to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. He teaches an ethics and happiness course to MBA students called Designing a Good Life.  I was a...

02:56
an alumnus. I took your course back, think in 2017, 2018. So you're going to be forever a professor to me.  All right. So I often speak of your class designing a good life and the pro-social exercises  and other stats  and experiments that now that you have this book out, I realized you were using the classrooms. Yes, I was. Yeah, I was doing a lot of the experiments in the class.  I mean, the best way to teach

03:25
people something is not to tell them the thing, but to show them the thing. And so I could tell you  that reaching out and expressing gratitude makes you feel better, makes other people feel better than you think, but more powerful is actually have you do it.  Right. So we're going to talk about the book. And I think it's in chapter seven that you talk specifically about how gratitude  is such a powerful mechanism. um Again, my guest here, I like to uh

03:56
kind of identify resiliency, purpose driven or scalable. m I think that what you teach and what we're gonna hear about here for my listeners is an example of resiliency practices.  And  I believe it's very much key in bringing it back to my listeners,  Professor Upley is I  work with a lot of company owners, business leaders who I think would benefit from learning some of these practices outside of the classroom today.  anyway.

04:23
I took your class back in, I think, in 2017, pre-pandemic and in person.  And my life has uh really been impacted in an incredibly positive way. I bring it into my personal life, some of these experiments that you're going to share with my listeners, as well as the classroom, where I do teach business ethics.  And I have them um do a personal responsibility statement uh at the end of their.

04:51
their semester with me. That is awesome. So again, accolades. Thank you to you. So with my guests, I want  you to make a little introduction and share your origin story. Why did you choose to become what's called  a behavioral scientist?  I won't make it too long.  I do remember I got to college. I wanted to be a football player, college football player, small college division three.

05:20
at St. Olaf.  I went to St. Olaf because I liked the football coach.  I thought I was going to be a biologist. I took those classes. They were totally boring, but I took an intro psychology class, which was all self paced.  It was supposed to take a semester to do. I was done with it  about a third of the way through the semester. I just ate it all up.  I  went through it like wildfire, which I took as an indication that this is something I might be interested in.

05:51
I started reaching out to faculty, started doing research. And one day my senior year, early my senior year in college, my em undergraduate advisor grabbed a book down from the shelf and handed it to me and said, I think you might find this to be interesting. It was Tom Gilovich's book, How We Know What Isn't So.  And the book describes how the psychological processes that give us beliefs and expectations and opinions about the world, thoughts about other people.

06:20
can often lead us astray, give us perceptions and beliefs that differ from the way the world actually is. And I found the work so fascinating. I read that book in a day.  I took it and I went right through it. And I thought, that is the thing I wanna do. I wanna do research like that. I couldn't think of anything else more interesting to do than that. So I applied to a PhD program  to Cornell University, which is where Tom  is on the faculty. I applied to a bunch of others too.

06:49
em I was fortunate enough uh that I was waitlisted at Cornell, somebody declined their offer, and I got in as a PhD student.  And the rest then is kind of one lucky break after another, after another, after another, after another, things working out well. And me just following things that seemed interesting at the time. em I was lucky to have Tom as a PhD advisor.

07:16
We started working on really interesting things. My first year there, turns out we underestimate how positively others judge us when we do something that we're kind of embarrassed about. Other people cut us a lot more slack than we think. And that interest in understanding, and in particular, understanding how well we understand the minds of others was something we were working on right away. And that interest...

07:44
just as grown and grown and grown and grown and grown. I've stopped thinking about other things. It's the only thing I kind of can think about. And the mistakes we make about the minds of other people are all around us and problematic. And so that's how I got here. Thank you for sharing that. um And specifically at this time in 2026, uh

08:11
So how does the mind  of a behavioral scientist work? What experiments do you whip up to test some of the hypotheses? All right.  for your first book, right, there was some, right. And the preface of your second book, you said, that morning I decided to test a different approach. As a psychologist, I try to understand human behavior using experiments.

08:34
But this time I decided to put myself into an experiment instead of ignoring the person who just sat down next to me, I would try to connect. So  how does work? So one,  I think the important thing about being a researcher, we're all researchers out there in the world in our own ways, right? So founders are starting companies and they're doing research constantly about what works and what doesn't.

08:59
As a scientist, we get to run experiments that sometimes have a little more control over them than what you have out there in the world. But the thing that is common to both the scientist and the founder or to  almost anyone out there in the world is that you ask why questions. And so as a scientist, it's not so much the experiments we conduct that are critical, although those are critical. The critical thing is that you...

09:28
We look at the world in a slightly different way than others might and therefore notice things that other people might not notice. And that's where our hypotheses, our ideas come from. So one morning on the train, for instance, I was coming in  to the University of Chicago where you know all too well  where I work uh and I live on the far South side. And I was writing a chapter for MindWise, which was my first book describing how we have this mind uniquely equipped for brain uniquely equipped for connecting with the minds of others.

09:58
And I was describing how we often and why we misunderstand each other. And I was writing one of those chapters describing how we've got this brain uniquely equipped for connecting with others, made happier and healthier by connecting with others. And yet I was sitting on the train and I had this kind of eureka moment.  Here we all were, and I've been doing this for years by now. Here we all were sitting on this train, highly social animals, made happier and healthier connecting  with each other. And we were all ignoring each other. We're not connecting at all, treating the person next to us.

10:27
Like a lamp shade, right?  And that was where I thought  that seems weird. Does this make sense that we do this?  Social connection is a choice.  It's a decision about whether we reach out and engage with somebody or hold back. And that was the thing that I noticed. That was the perspective that other people might not have is that that's a choice  and understanding that our perceptions are sometimes wrong or miscalibrated.

10:55
suggests that sometimes we can make those choices wrong, make them incorrectly or unwise. And so that morning I decided to enroll myself in an experiment. I had a woman come sit down next to me. I was probably at this time, I'm 51 right now, I was probably in my mid 30s, 35 or something like that at the time. This woman, she's probably  55 or so, African-American woman, uh clearly dressed for work, uh really looking sharp, had this beautiful red hat on.

11:24
almost like a bonnet, had this big wide brim. It was beautiful. uh And I decided that morning to put myself in an experiment. What would happen if I actually engaged in conversation and to really pay attention to what happened, right? Because that's another thing we do as researchers is we  measure things closely. We pay close attention in our measurement. So  I just started having conversation.  I opened up with a pretty weak joke. uh I said, I love your hat. I have one just like it, right?

11:54
Yeah, not in the conversation hall of fame there, right? uh But she turned to me and she just like lit up.  I remember so distinctly the reaction was  like she'd almost looked like a different person. Her face,  the face that we carry around with us, the dead face, right? Our resting Grinch face is kind of Grinchy, right?  But as soon as you engage with somebody, you perk up, your face smiles, your eyes lighten, you look.

12:23
almost like a different person.  So she turned to me lit up  and uh the conversation then just flowed pretty easily.  We had a nice conversation, half hour, time went really fast.  As I got up to leave,  I remember she held my wrist uh as I was getting up just to express some sincerity and she said, thank you so much for talking with me today. It wasn't just like, hey,  that was lovely.  We really meant it, like it was nice.

12:52
And the thing that I remember so clearly is that it wasn't just nice, it was surprisingly nice. That surprisingly part is critical because there was a gap between how I believed the conversation might turn out. I a nervous, what do I have in common with this person? I don't know. Will it go well? Do they really want to talk to me? Probably not. Will she misunderstand while I'm talking to her? Maybe.

13:17
You know, mistakenly think I'm hitting on her or something or make her feel uncomfortable instead of just having a nice conversation between two human beings. So all that stuff was going through my head, but it was misplaced. It was wrong.  And so the conversation wasn't just positive. It was surprisingly positive. And that insight that social connection is a choice and that our choices could be wrong led me to run a bunch of experiments to test whether this is just something unique.

13:45
to me  as a kind of weirdo or whether this is something we might see a little more widely.  And so  we started running experiments  on the train that I ride. We recruited people for an experiment. We randomly assigned them to do one of three things,  to either try to have a conversation with a person who sits down next to them that morning, so this is the connection condition, to...

14:11
keep to themselves that morning and just enjoy their solitude or to do whatever they normally do.

14:17
At the end of the survey, they reported how the conversation actually made them feel, how positive it made them feel on a couple of different measures. And then we asked another group, we asked them to predict how they would feel if they were actually in that situation. To report their beliefs, their expectations about how they would feel. Because that's what actually drives your behavior. It's not how you actually feel. You don't know how you're gonna feel. You're projecting, right? Yes. It's not gonna happen, yeah. Exactly. So you sit down and you think, well.

14:45
what would happen if I did this? Those are your expectations. And people's behavior is driven by their expectations. And  what people expected was that they would have a more positive commute if they kept to themselves than if they had a conversation with somebody, which is what people are doing, right? So they're behaving rationally in line with their expectations. But when we actually had people do these things and report how they actually felt at the end, it was those in the connection condition.

15:12
that actually had the more positive commute and those in the solitude condition who kept it themselves had the least positive commute. People's expectations weren't just wrong, they were precisely backwards. They thought that keeping it in themselves would make them happier. In fact, connecting with somebody else is what would make them happier. And that was just the tip of a very big iceberg. For the last decade and a half, it just, we've been seeing these things all over the place. I'm like a guy with a hammer who sees nothing but nails.

15:41
I can find these phenomena all over the place now. So it's nearly two decades of research.  That first experiment,  you speak to it in the second book. don't know whether you also put it into the first book. It is wise  to understand what others think, believe, feel and want, which is your first book. um So two decades later and  pushing your five years of writing and you were  avoiding.

16:09
being a guest on my podcast and that rightly so. Yes, took a long time. But as then. of 2026, your book, A Little More Social is being released. And we'll have how to get that book in the show notes as well after this podcast goes live. So what I wanted to do is really ask you what made you want to release it now in 2026, right? And

16:39
Again, I was able to get a pre-read of some of the material  and uh while not stealing your thunder, what I was, I like how you've set the sections or the why questions. So back to the empirical, right? Research you do as a social scientist. Why, why not? What if, what now are the four sections of the book? But I will tell you this, I read the prologue and when I started reading chapter one, I was depressed. It was really hard to go on.

17:08
So I'm warning,  just so with that, I'm not gonna give the spoiler alert. What made you  want to publish this year  finally after two decades and  right? So I will say that I think the message of the book is fundamentally empowering, not depressing. It was just first chapter. I was like, wow. Just the first chapter maybe about the importance of social connection and how we're not choosing it. But once you see that,

17:38
Once you see that your beliefs about other people might be off a little bit, it's an invitation to test those.  And to see places where you and your life are holding yourself back, not because  social connection is unpleasant or you're not good at it, but because you're not even trying and finding out that you could be wrong. And once you start to see that the bars in front of you that are holding you back from reaching out and engaging with others,

18:05
having stronger relationships, communicating more clearly, having more joy and enjoyment in your life and making people around you better. Once you start seeing that those bars that are holding you back sometimes, making you overly fearful about engaging are actually made out of pasta noodles,  it's easy to break through them.  It is empowering. The people I talk to a lot in this book who spend a lot of time talking to other people, almost all describe themselves as having a superpower that other people don't have.

18:35
They're not afraid of engaging. And hence they don't hold themselves back from opportunities that they could have in the better life that tends to follow when we're connected well with other people. As to why 2026, I wish I could say it was something like market timing. I was getting exactly right. The world is a disaster, is a dumpster fire at the moment.  are uh going deeper, deeper into loneliness in our lives. The world's a mess.

19:03
hostile and violent and unfriendly and we're trying to pull back from this. I wish I could say it was market timing. uh It wasn't market timing exactly. It was more, uh I don't know what the right word for it is in the innovator world, but I didn't have the product until today. Right. Or serendipitous as well. Serendipitous. Yes, serendipitous.  I do think there's a timeless element to this too,  which is,  it is always the case, I think.

19:32
I don't think these phenomena are totally new. There are new elements to them, but there are times where we can always make our relationships a little bit better. But yes, right now there is some serendipity, I think. We could really use it right now. I agree. Tell me how it is to make a choice. So we all are different human beings, right? Talk about human beings.

20:01
condition, right? We're very social and some of us are more introverted than extroverted. how,  and with your book, how can we be more empowered to make that choice?  So I think the important insight from behavioral science here is that social connection and therefore the happiness and wellbeing and relationships that follow from that is to some extent a choice that we make. All social interactions that we have a choice over

20:29
you get to a point where you have to decide, I refer to it as the choice, because I think it is arguably the most important choice we make over and over and over and over again,  which is, do I reach out and engage with you or do I hold back?  And that choice, the choice shows up in lots of different forms. Do I talk with a stranger? Do I type to you or pick up the phone and talk to you? Do I...

20:56
ask deep and meaningful questions or do I hold back? Do I share this compliment or this  feeling of gratitude or request for help or honest piece of advice for you, honest feedback? Do I share those things or do I hold them back? So the choice masquerades in lots and lots of different ways, but at its core is this conflict between approaching, wanting to engage  and fear or avoidance, being nervous about it, right? And when both of those things are strong, we get

21:26
approach avoidance conflicts where we'd like to do this thing, but we're nervous. I'd like to go up and talk to that other CEO I'd like to meet, but  maybe they don't want to talk to me. That's approach avoidance conflict. What we find in our work is that, well, other researchers have found that these two systems in our brain are independent of each other. That's approach and avoidance. Approach and avoidance. Yeah. The factors that govern approach, the system that governs approach in our brain is different from the system that governs avoidance. Okay.

21:55
That's how you can get both of them being very strong at the same time. They're not dynamic with each other. They can operate independently. And when you don't  have any interest to approach or any interest to avoid, then you're indifferent, right?  But the opposite of that is approach avoidance.  And um people do vary a little bit in the strength of these two motives, uh in what guides their choice.

22:21
Extroverts tend, for instance, to have a little bit stronger approach orientation or rather a little less of the avoidance orientation.  But I think the important insight is that what extroversion and introversion is really about is how you make the choice. And this is something that people, think, routinely misunderstand about what personality actually is, or at least the way we measure it as psychologists. I think that's the important thing, the way we often measure it as psychologists.

22:49
It's not describing the type of person you are. It is describing the type of choices that you make.  So for instance, people might often think that introverts and extroverts, actually enjoy different things. That extroverts like talking to people, whereas introverts like talking to people less.  That turns out not to be quite right. When you put people in experiments and you actually have them talk, introverts and extroverts both enjoy talking to people, right?

23:17
They both get tired talking to people later, but they're energized during it. They both actually feel more authentic when they're talking to someone and engaging in social interaction than when they're not. What differs between the two is how they make the choice and therefore what they think they will like or enjoy and therefore the habits they create and what they do. And that I think- that's kind of a revelation. uh

23:47
But psychologists have been discovering this  for decades. So you go back to 1980 was the first published paper testing whether happiness or wellbeing was related to personality. Now in theory, you wouldn't expect it to be, right? Actroverts like talking to people. Proverts like uh reading books and keeping to themselves, more quiet time,  Enjoying more solitude. Great, there should be no differences in happiness. We get what we want out of life.

24:16
That turns out not to be true. Extroverts tend to feel more positive, have more positive affect, more happiness in their lives than introverts full stop. And it is not a small effect, it is a huge effect. The correlation between extroversion and positive affect,  essentially happiness in your life, positive mood in your life, is around 0.5, which is as big as the correlation between the heights of fathers and their sons. It's huge.  It's huge, right? And so...

24:43
Psychologists learn then over time that that comes in part because extroverts  tend to choose to act a little more extroverted. If you ask people to act more extroverted, everybody tends to get a little happier, uh introverts and extroverts alike. If you ask people to act more introverted, people tend to get a little less happy, introverts and extroverts alike. So I think that's a really important insight that introversion and extroversion is really about choices and habits.

25:12
more than actual experience. You know, m I  extroverts  to choose to do it more often. Is it a? Is it oh a game of numbers? Is it like betting? Is it just showing up for yourself more frequently? Independent of being an extrovert or introvert where I'm going is how can we apply this in the workforce with our workmates and things? Right? Is it just,  you know, just choosing independent of what the outcome may be?

25:42
more often. So our data suggests that our assessment of the odds  and all of life is kind of a gamble. Our choices are gambles on the future based on what we think is going to be relatively positive or not, what's going to be relatively rewarding or not. And our data suggests that we get the odds a little wrong. Extroverts and introverts both do.  And actually, I don't want to focus too much on that because it's a much weaker, it's a much weaker phenomena than we actually

26:12
You might imagine  that it is.  People tend to think on average they're more introverted actually than they really are em because extroversion is public but introversion is private. So we all know our own private introverted side. It makes us feel unique, more unique than we actually are. But I think our data suggests not that you go out and you talk to people all the time or you share every detail about yourself.  It suggests we get the odds a little bit off.

26:40
It suggests when it's easy, when it's possible to connect or to engage or when you have a thought that you could share that you think might turn, you know, be positive. If you recognize that that avoidance motivation is a little too strong.

26:55
Recognize you have to dial that back that your first thought might be overly avoidant your second thought a lot of times might suggest No, I'll give this a try. I'll give it a try.  I'll give it try. I like that. Somebody said me lose right? So  with that why not right part two of your book? Do you want to talk about a little bit about?  The the how well you've talked about the have connection, but hello stranger, you know really just making it happen. I

27:23
I don't know whether you can make an inference into the workplace.  I would like you to do that for me. Yeah. Yeah. Because we are human beings and whether we work in hybrid, we're totally remote, or we are working back in the office,  we get things done through interactions with our colleagues. And so how might your work and a little more social uh make  our, uh I guess, our interactions

27:53
more empowering uh and just overall lifting up. I think our data suggests that you can look for times in your life where  there's kind of dead space or kind of gray space. Time where you could engage or connect with someone but are choosing not to in ways that wouldn't take you away from something. That's a place to start.  Like I'm on the train in the morning coming in.

28:18
I'm just sitting there. Usually I'm not doing squat anyway. I'm scrolling my phone or reading the news. I think it's really important, but  come on.  Sometimes we do things, but often we're not.  And that's a place that's easy for me. Like I did this morning, I had a conversation with Brenda on my train. um Brenda I've known for a while. I don't see her that often, but this morning she was on the train and we had a lovely 30 minute conversation. She gave me a hug at the end and she said I was really what she needed today.

28:48
Oh, right. And that's amazing. Yeah, she's a lovely human being. She's a great name.  Yeah, she's great. But I don't see her a lot. Maybe  a few times a year we'll be on the same train. But every time I see her, I know her. I remember I wrote her name down and I can have that conversation. It's easy.  But that's something where I wouldn't have been.

29:13
social otherwise, it's easy to do. And if I know it's gonna be more positive than I think, then I would choose to do that than something else. When I get to my office here at the Harper Center here at Booth, I walk into the door on the way in and I got maybe a 250 yard walk up to my office here on the fourth floor. And I've started making it a habit that I take a hello walk when I come in. When I walk by people, I don't just sit there and just walk to my office.

29:42
I greet people when I'm going by. So I say hi to Nigel who's sitting there at the same table every day this winter quarter uh down uh in the winter garden here at the University of Chicago. I say hi to Keith and Mario and Linda on my way to the elevator often who are down there. These are often our staff people or uh other folks around in the business school. When I get up the elevator onto my floor, I walk  past uh Jane's office and Eric's office.

30:11
uh Emma's office, Virginia's office on my way. And I say hi to people, right? Hi, Eric. Hi, Jane. Hi, Emma. Morning, Virginia, when I go by. Now, it's not taking me a lot of time, right? It's not slowing me up from anything. It's not really interrupting them too much. They're just getting started with their day. But it makes that moment brighter, right? It makes that walk better. Virginia came by my office the other day. I've gotten to know her. She's one of our new junior faculty. She came by my office. uh

30:40
to talk about  the book that I've been working on to talk through it, because she found that interesting, she's an economist. I don't think she'd have done that before if I hadn't  said hi. It's  been nice. So, you know.  So there's small, little initiatives, you just have to make  the choice. They don't have to be massive things. There are many opportunities  that are easy, seem small to us, they end up being, I think,

31:09
much, much bigger than we imagine them to be. And we just choose not to take them. And that seems like a tragedy. And once you start looking for these moments, these opportunities,  you  walk to get coffee at the office or something. Take a friend with you.  Ask a colleague to walk with you.  Ideas come out of those. Connections come out of those. Well, being comes out of those. You never know where it's going to go. Can you,  for my listeners, discuss or share the  experiment and how

31:38
people underestimate how much they'll enjoy talking to strangers  or the letters of gratitude.  It's your choice, you can do both. I mean, can share my own personal, know, living that. um It  remains with me.  I would love that. You do that. That would be great. know,  the  enjoying talking to strangers  is uh during the last week of the course of designing, right?

32:06
a good life, we literally had to, um I think we had to report back and we had to  do a kind act towards somebody that we didn't even know. Right? Yeah. Yeah. We were randomly assigned or we,  right. I think you were, right.  In that case, I asked you to go on and a random act of kindness for somebody. Exactly. An act of kindness.  And it was amazing that then the person reacted.  so it was a very, it was aha moment. Again, I'm

32:36
This was seven years ago, eight years ago. So I'm  drawing a blank, but I just recall it was  an amazing experience. we  all kind of got to know each other's names. We were like 80 students in the classroom at that time. Another thing that I do recall with fondness is writing a thank you letter, graduate letter.  you gave us the op, it was prior to getting to campus, we were to write a letter.

33:03
we could actually share with you who we writing that to. And that person had the opportunity to share with you what they felt or not. So it was kind of blind. And I did go ahead and write a thank you letter to a color out Betsy Berkamer. She's also been in my podcast, influential person in my life. uh And uh lo and behold, she wrote to you and  as did other people that were recipients of a thank you letter that was two paragraphs.  It made their day.

33:32
But the questions you ask, how did, you you had to get the guts up to write that letter, right? Because you had to really be touchy-feely and share a specific event for which you felt gratitude. So,  yeah. So that's an, so these, the, the choice to reach out and engage with other people or hold back crops up in lots of places.  So  one of the things we know as psychologists is if you want to have a good day, one thing to do is to think about somebody else who you really appreciate and feel grateful to and make their day.

34:02
by writing a note to them and explaining why you feel grateful to them.  What's interesting- that here on the podcast on the Founder's Standby. So this is major. Say that again.  If you wanna have a good day, reach out to somebody else and make them have a good day by explaining why you're grateful to them.  What's interesting though is if you ask people, can you think about somebody you feel grateful to, but who for whatever reason you haven't reached out to  express this? Almost everybody can right away think, oh yeah, I can think of somebody.  Why do those people exist?

34:32
Why haven't you told them? There are lots of reasons why, but one is often, it's gonna be weird. Is this the right time? What am I gonna say? Can I really put into words? All of these  steel bars in front of us that we think are so powerful, but they turn out to be pasta noodles  when you actually sit down to write them. So what I have you do  in my class towards the end is I have you think about this person, sit down, write a note to them.

34:59
anticipate how they're gonna feel, right? If you think that they're not gonna, you you underestimate how positive it's gonna be for them, or you overestimate how awkward or weird it's gonna be, right? That creates friction. That's a barrier to reaching out and engaging them. That's your avoidance voice shouting a little too loudly in your ear, that cringe voice, that you shouldn't do this.  And we can find out whether that's calibrated. So I had you predict how the recipient would feel, how- um

35:28
the extent to which they'd be surprised  to learn what you're grateful for, extent to which they'd be surprised to receive how positive or negative they would feel and also how awkward they would feel. I then,  if you were willing to share with me the recipient's email address, I reached out and said, well, student of my class, um sent you a gratitude note as part of a class exercise. uh They thought of you for this. And I would love it if you could just tell me how that made you feel. Maybe terrible, maybe great.

35:58
but they go to the survey, they fill it out. And then we just compare those numbers essentially. And the students are not confused. You weren't confused that this would be positive. You thought it would be good.  What was surprising or what's super robust is that it's even more positive than that.  So Brenda, your little two paragraphs that seemed like nice, nice,  but they were really, really nice to the person who received it.  You thought they would be, uh

36:27
kind of powerful, they were really powerful. She probably printed that out. I had a student this year say in class that their recipient, who was a relative of theirs actually, their recipient asked, can I print it out and put it on the wall? Oh, that's amazing. Of course they do. Yes. It matters a lot. Surprisingly a lot. That's the important thing. Surprisingly a lot.

36:56
I could go on and on  with more examples of the experiments that Professor Epley made us do in class that have marked uh my life. uh I use a lot of these things with  my clients or even my students. And one of which is I do have the personal responsibility statement that we wrote at the end of our... uh

37:20
with you  and it had to be short and sweet. You framed it, gave it to us. want it.  If we ever want to change it, we had, you know, uh a beeline to you. You can send me a note. I'll change it for you. I'll send you new one for sure. And I framed it, framed it and printed out because otherwise you never would. Right.  And then it's almost like it's an accountability manager. Right. We have Professor Epley who holds us accountable. Here, by the way, is mine. Yeah. You want to see mine?

37:48
I didn't know you were going to mention it, but yeah, here it is right here. Yeah,  mine's here. And actually, because I asked my students, oops, I don't know whether you see it too well. There it is. Yeah. There it is. Signature, sorry. Sorry, because I have that screen. uh And yes, I even have some students that say, Professor McKay, but it's really hard for me to write mine when you share yours. of course, I'll share it. Yeah.

38:13
You may remember I put mine up in class. I showed you  in the last class what mine was. Yeah. Yes. Yes. So yes, tell me. Yes. Go on.  So the purpose of that is  this is really about sustainability, I think, and resilience in organizations that  the business case for ethics for being good out there isn't just that it feels good, sometimes even surprisingly good,  which is really what's in the book and in a little more social.

38:43
which I describe in lots of different ways. But uh the business case for ethics is really one about resilience and sustainability. That you can be a schmuck for a little while and take money from people and succeed. You can lie and cheat and steal for a little bit. It's very hard to do that for a long time. Wow. People don't want to work with you. They don't want to work for you. uh They don't want to lend you money uh if they think you're uh unethical and shady.

39:13
And so for an organization, way to design one, for  founders, the way to design one that is resilient and sustainable is to make sure that your values, your mission is front and center in front of everything that you do. so identifying a powerful,  identifying an actionable mission statement, like your personal responsibility statement, this is at the organizational level, is a critical first step because everything else can be woven out of that.

39:43
Those ethics have to be kept top of mind all the time, woven into how you hire people and fire people and promote people and evaluate people and what you talk about day to day and what your norms are in the organizations, what activities you do, how you financially compensate people, what kinds of non-financial incentives you have in your organization. All those need to be tied to the mission statement and to the values that those suggest so that they're kept top of mind when you're out there in the world. So they become more of your first thought.

40:13
rather than needing to be your second thought. And the personal responsibility statement functions at an individual level that way. uh It prompts you to think about what is the thing you wanna have top of  mind guiding you when you're out there in the world. So mine is to teach and research  so that people are inspired to make wiser decisions and live better lives. Okay, that's what I focus on.

40:39
m Mine is always be original creative,  loving, giving back, thankful, spontaneous, daring yourself while being content with enough. And my podcast is actually one of those creative outlets for me. now into my fourth season, it's been  amazing.  You know what I like with, you know what I didn't see, m wouldn't have seen when you wrote that, but do now is the last part being satisfied with enough. That's an important bit of self.

41:06
compassion there to  recognize we do what we can do, nothing more, nothing less. And we give it all we got and that  is enough. So  the idea is that just like with a mission statement, if you can keep that top of mind guiding  your behavior, you'll be a better organization if you design that well. Same thing is true for individuals.  Well, before we go to my last three questions, which is really uh the essence of what I do with... uh

41:34
Next Act Advisors, my consulting firm around resilience, purpose, and scalable. I really wanted to give you an opportunity to let my listeners know how to connect with you. It will be in the show notes. And specifically, you do speaking, you're a keynote speaker and you can be hired in different, so can you?

41:58
share a little bit of how we can connect with you and to what do you typically like to speak about when you are um hired as a speaker? Yeah, so I do a lot of uh public speaking,  which I think of as just another avenue for teaching about our research,  which I think is meaningful for people and can be very powerful.  The speaking agency that I use is WSB. They're in Washington, DC. They're fabulous people. And I can talk about

42:28
A few things I can talk about why we misunderstand each other and how to help people understand each other better, which is really about management and leadership, all of those essential skills. And then the work that I'm doing now about human sociality is really a lot about organizational culture, uh happiness and learning.  But a lot of it's about organizational culture,  I think of it as. And how we uh might  act in ways

42:56
uh that don't optimize our culture in ways that make it sustainable or keep us resilient or keep us happy and motivated in organization or learning as much as we could. The individual stuff people also take out of this as well. The book is really written  at the individual level for you to think about yourself and your own life and why we might just like we don't act maybe exercise as much as we ought to, why you might not be as social as you could. Thankfully, exercising sucks, it's unpleasant. So we all know that.

43:26
That's hard.  reaching out and connecting with other people.  know. I know. Thank you. But reaching out and connecting with other people is positive. know, like, you know,  it's surprisingly positive. So that's an easy habit. That's an easy habit to make. So I talk a lot about how, you know, where these barriers come from and what you can do  in my presentations, what you can do to turn these into habits to make your life consistently better, resiliently.

43:54
And then for connecting with me, do use LinkedIn. I don't use a lot of social media because it makes me miserable. But I do, I have been having fun a little bit recently using LinkedIn. So that's a way, but you can also email me. That's probably the easiest way. All right. So all of this will be in the show notes and, and your book, a little more social will be released on May 19th. There'll be a launch party. I believe it's, it's available on Amazon and bookshop.

44:23
and you have your own website. again, this will be provided in the show notes. Well, I like to do around the Robin lightning question, so my guests, all of my guests get to answer three questions. I'm passionate about resilience, purpose, and scalable or sustainable. And so I'd like to ask you, Professor Apley, what does resilience mean to you? It means being able to accept the negative things that happen in our life by

44:51
but by  continuing to carry on with it.  So one habit that I've picked up,  I don't remember that I actually did it deliberately.  I sign off all of my emails, typically, not always, but usually, and I type these out. This isn't like a form with onward. um And it's kind of a mantra I keep in my mind. uh Research is hard. There's a lot of failure. There's a lot of frustration.

45:21
Writing papers is hard, getting published is hard, speaking is hard, teaching is hard.  It's all hard stuff. I mean, we're all doing lots of hard things, but they're those hard things. And there are lots of setbacks. And in academia, it gets personal because the ideas are yours, just like founders, right? These ideas are your baby. They are precious to you. And when they don't work or when they're threatened, that is hard and it's threatening. But you can't get mired in that. It's easy to get stuck in that. And so I try to...

45:50
This is just a little thing I do to keep myself focused on, all right, what's next? Now what? Onward. We're gonna carry on with this. That's resilience to me. I love it. Thank you. Purpose. What does purpose mean to you? Yeah, purpose is more, I think, the long run drive. Like, why am I doing this? um What's the meaning of my work? Which is usually not something you see right in the work itself.  It is above the work. It's bigger than the work. It's what's in your personal responsibility statement,  right?

46:21
My research is really oriented towards  trying to identify wisdom, right? That's understanding. That's what all scientists try to do. We try to understand. I don't try to advocate. I don't tell you what to do.  I try to figure out what the facts are as best I can.  And so that concept of wisdom, for me, that's my purpose. Just to try to figure out wisdom. That's the long run goal, the high level goal. I think that is essential for me. It's also, it is perfectly aligned with

46:50
what I'm trying to do as a researcher. Amazing.  So my second to last question, scalable or sustainable?  can be anything. So scalable I struggle with. As a behavioral scientist, that is hard. It's hard to take individual stuff and increase it at scale, in part because the things that you do to increase something at scale are not the things you do to make an individual life better. So at scale,

47:18
You typically don't target people's beliefs. You  navigate around them in some way. So you don't tell people they ought to play more with their neighbors. You build a playground.  So they're different approaches. uh So scalable, I struggle with a little bit.  try to,  in my research, because I'm understanding individual minds, that's where I focus. And so I make it purposefully personal, our researches.  Sustainable, though,

47:47
I think our research is really all about in many ways is that at the end of the day, at the end  of our experiments are questions, dependent variables. And those dependent variables are typically these days about wellbeing, some measure  of wellbeing and happiness.  And that is the thing  that you need for sustainability to keep things going, right? To sustain yourself.

48:17
is some  positive reward. That's what sustains action. m And that's what our work focuses on, think, sustainability in part because for understanding social misunderstanding,  the social misunderstanding creates friction.  It ruins relationships,  causes ah conflict and hostility, which is not itself sustainable. We're trying to encourage some insight into what the opposite would look

48:48
Last question, Professor Epley, did you have fun in the sandbox today? It's very fun,  It's great seeing you, Brenda. Makes me regret I didn't do it uh the other times you asked, but  it is a lot of work to write a book.  It is exhausting.  it leads my students to, my PhD students and postdoc doing research with me to contemplate  homicide if I don't get to their paper soon. So  anyway. Well, with that.

49:17
I let's sign off.  You did enjoy yourself to my listeners. If you like this episode with Professor Epley, Nicholas Epley, sign up for the monthly release where founders, business owners and professionals um share their own experiences on building scalable, resilient, purpose-driven organizations, profits for good,  and making the world a better place. So thank you until next month.