So PJ, hello, hello Alex. PJ, how is this year been for you in terms of your mood?

I mean, you're laughing, it must have been great. This year has sucked. This year has been bleak and bad, and winter feels bleak and better.

Yeah, winter is really freaking me out. I'm actually very scared about what winter is going to be like.

How are you doing?

Well, it's funny you should ask. So I read this article last week in the times about these researchers who are trying to like measure and plot everybody's happiness on a day-to-day level.

Everyone in the world.

Yeah. And they made this thing that they call the hedonometer?

Like hedonism.

Yes, exactly. Heedonism. Okay. And I was like, okay, I want to talk to these guys because first of all, happiness seems like a very slippery concept that I can't even begin to imagine how one would measure for.

And second of all, if they can measure happiness, like how can this help me a person who is generally very unhappy?

So I reached out to these researchers and I ended up talking to one of them. His name's Peter Dodds. Hi, guys. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate it.

It's a pleasure. Yeah.

Peter's a data scientist. He teaches at the University of Vermont. Do you think of yourself as a happy person?

No, I think I've friends have described me as melancholy, I suppose, and that, you know, so I think miserable happiness is perhaps a lofty call.

But I'm irrelevant. Let me say this. I'm irrelevant. Like I'm totally irrelevant.

And I think this is one of the most important things when you study social phenomena at large scale.

You have all these little stories from your own life, which really matter, you know, I mean, obviously to you.

But when you're trying to get out and think about how systems work, you have to kind of throw them away.

Hold on just a second. My infant daughter just ran up here. Hi, Paul. I'm in the middle of an interview. Can you go downstairs?

No.

Okay, please. No.

All right, hold on a second. I have to get a little bit.

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