How Boredom Works

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Josh Clark (0:11)

Hey, and welcome to the podcast, and I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we are going to do the opposite of making you bored with this episode on Boredom.

Chuck Bryant (0:23)

That's right. Before we get going though, we want to recommend a podcast to our listeners from our always friend and former colleague.

Josh Clark (0:32)

Forever friend.

Chuck Bryant (0:33)

Forever. Yeah, he's our FF.

But former colleague, we used to work with Mangesh Hadakadur at House of Forks, and I'm not lying when I think we'll all agree, because Jerry's listening to, that Mangesh is one of the sweetest, sweethearts, kindest, most intelligent, nicest dudes of all time. And that's reason enough to listen to anything that he does.

Josh Clark (0:58)

He's a high-quality person.

Chuck Bryant (1:00)

He's the best. Mangesh is great. So he has a show out called How to Live Forever, which is not like, here's how you live forever. It's more like trying to understand this sort of movement that's going around of people that want to try and extend life into hundreds of years or forever, which is super up Stuff You Should Know listeners alley, I think.

Josh Clark (1:20)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (1:21)

And it's a great show. He wants to recommend in particular, if you want to just give it a shot, he said the third and the fifth episodes are really standouts.

Josh Clark (1:28)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (1:28)

And I listened to episode five because it sounded super interesting. And it is, buddy, because in episode five, Mangesh kind of goes investigator to track down this startup that's trying to create brain dead clones for billionaires.

So that when you get to be like, 90 years old, you can do a body replacement and transfer. Like, this is real Futurama kind of stuff to transfer the head of a billionaire to a younger body. And this is actually happening. Peter Thiel is a funder of this thing. So is Arpa H, and it's just kind of crazy stuff. So that's episode five. But the podcast is How to Live Forever, and it's awesome.

Josh Clark (2:14)

Yeah. And Mangesh is super interesting and entertaining. And if you're like, I'm not quite convinced of this Mangesh guy, put this in your pipe and smoke it. He, along with another colleague of ours, Will Pearson, co-founded Mental Floss back in the day when he was in college.

Chuck Bryant (2:29)

Yeah, man. That's all you need to know. Yeah, Mangesh is the best. So check out How to Live Forever.

I'm going to get all corporate here and say, wherever you get your podcasts.

Josh Clark (2:38)

Oh, is it guaranteed human?

Chuck Bryant (2:41)

I think so.

Josh Clark (2:42)

Okay, great.

Okay, Chuck, so we're talking about boredom. I found it exceedingly hard to concentrate while I was studying this, did you?

Chuck Bryant (2:52)

Yeah, it was, I hated to say it, but it was kind of boring.

Josh Clark (2:56)

I actually liked it.

Chuck Bryant (2:58)

Oh, really?

Josh Clark (2:58)

Yes, I did. At first, I was like, this is kind of boring. It's very dry. But if you put it all together, it actually boredom did become a little more interesting to me than it had been before. Let me just say it like that. How about that?

Chuck Bryant (3:11)

Okay, well, that's good.

Josh Clark (3:12)

But it's like when we researched sushi or yawning or whatever, I wanted sushi, I couldn't stop yawning.

Chuck Bryant (3:18)

Right, right.

Josh Clark (3:20)

Like reading about boredom actually makes you like, it's hard to concentrate, which is one of the traits of boredom. I just thought that was very interesting.

Chuck Bryant (3:29)

For sure.

If you want to talk about just how boredom is sort of defined, it is the experience of wanting to engage in a something that is like satisfying to you, but not being able to and being left in a state. In this case, it's called an adaptive state.

Josh Clark (3:47)

Yeah.

Chuck Bryant (3:48)

Where, you know, you don't have an optimal energy level. It may be, there may be some discomfort.

This is a big part of boredom, is it urges new action, because as we'll see, just being bored can lead to you doing really dumb things, just so something is happening.

Josh Clark (4:10)

If you put all that together, man, it really just sounds like you need a Snickers.

Chuck Bryant (4:15)

Right?

Josh Clark (4:16)

You know?

Chuck Bryant (4:18)

Yeah, maybe so, because boredom definitely urges you to pursue something different than what's going on. That's sort of the whole point behind it.