John R. Miles

And then there's something much more ordinary, which is sitting on a train next to someone and choosing not to say a word to them.

Or it could be a plane, which I experienced more frequently.

What are those two moments reveal about how we're living today?

Not sure if you're a fan of the band Alice in Chains or not.

Yeah.

When I think about the lead singer's demise, he wasn't discovered two years from the time he died, but it was like weeks.

And I just think you have someone here who is so famous and you would have thought so loved yet in such despair with this heroin addiction that in the last elements of his life, he was completely alone.

I was listening to your podcast episode that you did with Laurie Santos probably a year ago, might've been a little bit longer than that.

And you were talking about the famous train study you did, but one part of the conversation really piqued my interest.

You had said that the Chicago transportation people brought you in after you had done this, and they said that they were going to implement a quiet car.

which kind of goes counterintuitive to everything that we're going to be talking about today.

But you said, why don't you do the opposite?

What happened when you asked that?

Nick, I have spent more time on airplanes than I would like to admit.

And it's so interesting.

I just took a trip last week.

I recently released a children's book and I went out to talk to this elementary school that I'd heard about on NPR because they had done 2000 acts of kindness.

And I wanted to go out and tell the kids that their ripple traveled all the way from Colorado to Florida and to let them know how much they matter because my book is on mattering and

And on this trip, man, everyone was just wearing headphones all the time.

So before you even had a chance to speak to someone, they were wearing headphones.