Wallace J. Nichols
speaker
40 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Wallace J. Nichols’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
pull your emotions around, and music that we like to get us going in the morning, and music that helps us relax, and music that makes us sad, other songs that make us happy. You can feel the music kind of hitting you when you're at a concert. That's really the best comparison would be to music. Water and music together, well, that's really extra special.
That's right. You can play music that bothers you. Sometimes my kids play music. It's not my style. I ask them to turn it down or turn it off. You can blow your eardrums out if it's too loud. It can be distracting and annoying. And like water, it's dangerous. There is a downside. And I think that tension adds to the experience. With the ocean, the ocean deserves our respect.
A big river, a frozen lake requires our knowledge and our respect in order to approach it correctly and safely. So that tension actually adds a component to this experience.
And hopefully you're starting to understand why. We started at how is this conversation any more than just a tweet? And now here we go. Now we're going down the path and understanding why sitting by that lake means
it holds you in that place and pulls you back and psychologists call it soft fascination so it holds you in that place it doesn't overwhelm you the lake isn't chattering and telling you things and and distracting you it's holding your attention though it's giving you just enough visual and auditory stimulation that you go this is this is interesting but it's not requiring you to process words and images and language
and and solve puzzles so it allows you to kick back and create and or have a conversation with someone you care about while being held in this place of soft fascination that's mildly mesmerizing and soothing and you know to kind of extend that
It also pulls us at romantic moments, at memorialization moments where we want to go deeper emotionally with someone or with a group of people, sacred vows or commitments to each other. So it's almost a cliche that ceremonies are held by the water and honeymoons go to the water and memorializations happen by the water.
And we don't really think about that, but we just kind of go there to do those things because the water brings this multisensory experience that doesn't overwhelm us. It's not like loud music or a big show. It's just the perfect backdrop to these important moments in our lives from birth all the way through death.
That's right. They will pay sometimes 1,000% premium for that water view in some locations. On average, across the US, it's a 40% premium. And it's lakes, rivers, oceans, bays, any kind of water. The proximity to water imparts a very significant financial or economic premium on real estate. And if you ask people, why are you willing to pay, let's say, double for this, they aren't exactly sure.
but they are willing to pay it if of course they have the money. And sometimes when they don't, they'll go further into debt, pay a bigger mortgage in order to have this feeling. And so it's an emotional response that drives real world hard money decisions.
And again, to me, that's worth understanding a bit better because it's such a big part of who we are and the decisions we make and how we live.
It's the biggest premium in real estate terms. Of course, access to good public transportation and good schools and great restaurants and so-called green space parks. Yes, of course, we'd like those too. Walkability is an index that you see. Is the community walkable? Well, that's really great too. There's a premium there. But you throw an ocean view outside your window,
And in places like Del Mar, California, it's literally 1,000% premium compared to that second row, the house right behind that one. It might be a million-dollar house, but the one in the front row is a $10 million house. You go, what the heck is going on there that makes that premium pop so much?
And, you know, to my mind, I just I want to understand that better because it is such a strong driver of how we live.
Right. And if you took that family that just piled it in the car together and pulled them aside each one at a time and said, what are you getting out of this? You'd get a variety of answers. Right. Maybe mom and dad are going to say, this is de-stress. It's a hard work week. It's been a rough month. And I get a little bit of relief from my stressful life.
The kids are going to go for the play part. It's joyful, it's playful. They get to run around, a sense of freedom. Maybe life in the city is just a little more boxed up, but life at the beach, you can run in every direction and you can jump in the water and you can dig and you can play and you can throw the ball, throw the Frisbee, whatever it is.
um maybe you get to see dolphins maybe you get to see crabs scurrying around there's a there's an element of play to it and then in the evening the sunset maybe there's some some calm romantic moment there that pulls people together and and then the other piece of this conversation uh sleep comes comes on better.
People say they sleep better when they've spent the day in the water or near the water, or they can hear the sound of the water. That plays out in all these popular sleep apps. The number one downloads are ocean sounds, rain sounds, creek sounds, nature sounds. We know that when we vacation by the water, we sleep better. All of that. That's why we pile into the car.
and take the journey and go to the edge of the water.
Well, I guess my mission in life right now is to make this common knowledge. I'd like every human being, all eight billion of us, to understand their own blue mind and then apply it accordingly where they live and how they live.
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