Global News Podcast: The Happy Pod

Hello, this is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service with reports and analysis

from across the world, the latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are

supported by advertising. This is Andrew Peach with the happy pod where we talk to the people

at the heart of the world's happiest news stories. And this week, we learn some new happy words

like this from Anuajava in Tbilisi in Georgia. And this from Assum in Madrid in Spain. To find out

what they mean and how you can get involved, stay with us. Also on the way in the happy pod,

we'll hear from Tana Hasse, Mexico City, Berlin and Seoul. There's one big tech story everyone's

been talking about, but where did it all start? It was a homebrew bucket full of massage oil

with a computer dangling in it, an August radiator and a fish pond pump. We've got advice from Harvard

University, but they've been studying happiness for decades. Reach out and send a little text or an

email. Make plans to have a coffee or take a walk. Any of those small actions turn out to really make

a difference in what we're calling our social fitness. And does Alison have the world's happiest

job? It does involve getting up quite early, generally with the sunrise and then you can finish

when the sun sets for the long days. Those stories and more on the way in the happy pod.

Across the world, scientists and engineers are under pressure to come up with new and

environmentally friendly ways to power the planet. This week, all eyes run a fairly average public

swimming pool in the southeast of England with a far from average solution to spiralling heating

bills. A small data centre the size of a washing machine has been installed at Exmouth Leisure

Centre by the tech firm Deep Green. This collection of computers generates enough heat to warm the

pool to around 30 Celsius, 60% of the time. It's a win-win as well because the process means the

firm doesn't have to pay for an expensive cooling system and the leisure centre gets the heat free

of charge. It sounded like a pretty happy story to us, so we wanted to find out more. I began by

asking the man behind it all, Mark beyond scored, how he got the idea. It was a friend and I in the

pub, that's how it started, an idle conversation in the pub and then the first prototype was

this incredible contraction. It was a proper kind of British garden shed moment. It was a

homebrew bucket full of massage oil with a computer dangling in it and an Argos radiator and a fishpond

pump. So that was the, I've still got it in my shed. That was the first prototype and then fast

forward five years and there's a fully fledged data centre in Exmouth Leisure Centre heating 60%

the pool, saving the pool £20,000 a year. What I love about it is the fact that we're giving

something away for free, but you're obviously everyone benefits. People have ideas in pubs

and wine bars and coffee shops the world over saying, well, what about this? What was it that made

you actually try it? I love the idea of breaking a mould. So sort of challenging a convention, but

the reality is most business, you know, there's that saying of 95% perspiration, 5% inspiration,

most of it is just keeping going. You know, that is the truth of and life really, isn't it? The

backstory is that data centres generate a lot of heat and they struggle to get rid of that heat,

an enormous amount of heat, the 3% of all carbon emissions and most data centres work by just blowing

cool air over the computers. What we figured out way back five years ago when we were dangling

that computer in a homebrew bucket was that you can immerse computers entirely in oil and they

don't blow up. That oil heats up. I've sort of compared it to C3PO in Star Wars, you know,

having his oil bath. So that's what we do. We immerse all the computers in oil and then we

flow that oil through what's called a heat exchanger that takes the hot oil and transfers

the heat into the coal pool. How did that moment feel? Because that's almost the Eureka moment to

this whole thing, isn't it? I mean, that's fun. I mean, whenever you have that sort of big unlock,

that's fun. But actually, the real kind of happiness was actually seeing it live in Exmouth.

I saw the installation about eight weeks ago when I really was quite emotional. I've never

experienced that in business where, I mean, partly relief, but also to get to it, you have to sort of

walk through the pools. So you have to see all the people that kind of enjoying themselves and

kids in the pool and your grand doing aqua aerobics. So you have to sort of see the benefit before you

see it. And yeah, I don't mind sort of saying it was quite emotional. I must admit. Let's take it

to the next level. If you can do this in one swimming pool in one leisure centre, this could

change the way that swimming pools and other things are heated the world over, couldn't it?

Whenever an entrepreneur says to you, oh, I got this great idea or you have your idea in the pub,

it seems like a big idea. But this really is enormous. I mean, if we took all of Europe's

data centres, we still would only heat 5% of Europe's homes. So when you kind of put the context

of the challenge of home heating into it, then you can actually see how, yeah, this technology is

applicable really everywhere. And where do you take this now in terms of continuing the journey

of scaling this off? Well, I'm good at the zero to one bit. And again, it kind of comes back to a

principle of happiness, doesn't it? Kind of know what you're good at and know what you're not so

good at. As the business scales, I'll almost certainly hand over the reins, because that isn't

really my skill. And actually, it's not all makes me happy, really. What makes me happy is figuring

out and trying to change the brain chemistry of people and trying to kind of look at things

differently. So that's the passion. That's where I get my kicks, I suppose. Got a lot of Marx energy.

And of course, he's now working on something new. So we look forward to having him back on the happy

pod to hear all about it. The happy news from the Oscars now, no one read out the wrong results,

and there were no fights on the stage. The night in Los Angeles belong to the sci fi fantasy

everything everywhere all at once with seven wins, including best picture, best director,

and three of the four acting categories. Michelle Yeo is the first Asian woman to be named best

actress. For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight. This is the beacon

of hope and possibilities. This is proof that dreams dream big and dreams do come true.

And ladies, don't let anybody tell you you're ever past your prime.

Wins two for Michelle's co stars, Jamie Lee Curtis with best supporting actress,

and Kayhee Kwan with an emotional acceptance speech for best supporting actor after a two

decade break from performing. My journey started on a boat. I spent a year in a refugee camp.

And somehow I ended up here on Hollywood's biggest stage. My mom is 84 years old,

and she's at home watching. Mom, I just won an Oscar.

A former professional Australian surfer has broken the world record for the longest surf

session. Blake Johnston is thought to have ridden more than 500 waves during his watery marathon

as he raises money for youth mental health projects. He's eclipsed the previous record

of 30 hours and 11 minutes at Cronulla Beach in Sydney. As we record this podcast,

he's still going, hoping to do 40. Yeah, I still got a job to do that. I said 40,

so I'll go and give it a crack. Yeah, pretty cooked. Pretty cooked. Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks. Thanks everyone. You're the best. Everyone deserves to feel awesome. So

deserve to take care of yourselves. Best of luck to Blake. Now, when we ask if you'll send in the

sounds that make you happy, I'll be honest. We weren't expecting this.

If you're not familiar with these words, it's the preamble, the words that start

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings around the world. Julia listens to us in Berlin. We're just able

to use her first name here. And she tells us why this is the sound that makes her happy.

The reason why I love the sound of the preamble read at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous is

it symbolizes for me that from a person who wanted to die and for whom life was cheap and

meaningless, I have become a person who wants to live and who can contribute to the world. And

for whom life has become rich and colorful and worth living, I have become a person who can

contribute to life constructively, make the world a better place. Actually, now I am the

person who can enrich situations. And that's the jackpot of life.

Well, we did the invitation for people to send in the sounds that make them happy. I thought we

might get some sounds of children and wildlife and those kind of things. We were a little bit

surprised to get the sound of someone's unborn baby in Canada. And we were a bit surprised to

get the sound of the knife sharpeners in the town square in Argentina because I've not heard that

before. I don't think we imagined for a second that we would get the sound of the preamble

from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And I suppose the reason you wouldn't have expected that is

you might think of that as being a negative thing. I don't know. You obviously don't. And now you

talk about it. I'm beginning to see why. Yeah. Everybody thinks that Alcoholics are really

hopeless. And this is, I mean, even for me, I've been in AA now for 37 years. And even today,

in my family, they look at me sometimes at family parties, I mean, over the years. And they would

look at me and my children, especially my children, because they were so sure my children were going

to be messed up, completely messed up. So they look at me and they look at my children and say,

oh, my God, you've really turned out well. Like with this look of awe and surprise,

because it's such a terrible disease and it's so hopeless. And people don't think that these kind

of changes are actually possible. And so there's so much hope about that. And do you really put the

hope that you're describing and the improvements that you've made in your life? Do you put that down

to going to the meetings and to going to them regularly for so long? People always say, I mean,

you're still going to these meetings. You know, you don't need it. The chance I get in meetings

is to save lives every day, because it makes a complete difference. If I go to a meeting and

I go up to a newcomer, a young woman, and I say hi to her, I welcome her warmly. I give her my

telephone number and I look her in the eyes and say, I'm glad you're here. Give me a call whenever

you feel like it and you're always welcome and to mean it. I mean, I go to AA now I'm an old

timer, I'm an old cat. I'm like, but I know that I'm so important to people because people look at

me with so much hope. And they say, well, she can do it. I can do it. And it's really like that.

And what AA is doing for me, which is priceless, is that every day I can be

really, really useful. Julia, it was great talking to you. Thank you for listening to The Happy Pod,

our email address, globalpodcastatbbc.co.uk. There are studies pretty much every week into

what makes a happy life. This is the world's longest running at Harvard University since 1938.

Surprise, surprise, the key isn't money, what you do for a living or even your hobbies.

Happiness is all about our relationships with other people. Dr. Robert Woldinger is Director

of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. One of the strongest predictors, perhaps the strongest

predictor of human thriving, is having good connections with other people. The best hypothesis

is that relationships, good ones, help us manage stress. That stress is a natural part of life.

We go into fight-or-flight mode, our bodies ramp up when we meet a stressor, but then we're meant

to come back to baseline. And what we've found is that social isolation, loneliness, not having

good relationships, creates a kind of chronic stress situation where our bodies never go back

to equilibrium. Whereas if we have good relationships, we have people we can turn to,

talk to, get help from when we are under stress. Depending on who we are, the number of people

we need in our life varies tremendously. Shy people find being with lots of people stressful,

whereas extroverts want lots of people. They get energy from many relationships.

What we believe from our research is that everybody needs at least one relationship

that feels secure. At one point we asked people, list all the people in your life who you could

call at three o'clock in the morning if you were sick or scared. And most of our participants could

list a number of people, but some people couldn't list anyone. And what our data show is that

everybody needs at least one or two people in their lives who they feel will be there for them

when the going gets tough. Invest in relationships. Really reach out and keep current with the people

who you want to stay in your life. You know, reach out and send a little text or an email.

Make plans to have a coffee or take a walk. Any of those small actions turn out to really make

a difference in what we're calling our social fitness. Seeing it as a practice like physical

fitness where you take care of your relationships actively. So friends and family are the key to

happiness. Who is the person in your life that makes you happy? We'd love to hear about them.

Global podcast at bbc.co.uk. We also love hearing the sounds that make you happy. This is joyous

from Madison McCoy, who's a student at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Madison shares

a house with 20 other girls. So the sound that makes her happy is when they're all together

watching the TV.

They're watching the US drama The Last of Us here and Madison's graduating soon

and says she'll really miss these happy times. Hi, this is Turgay from Vienna, Austria. The best

sound for me is the sound of nature. The birds singing, other animals joining, the wind blowing

through the leaves of the trees, water flowing. I find this very harmonious and relaxing.

Thanks, Turgay. Good to hear too from Pablo in Mexico City. He says this is the sound that makes

him happy. It's his two-year-old daughter Paloma pretending to be a monster and trying to scare

her six-month-old brother Diego. Email globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk.

This is the happy pod with me, Andrew Peach, on the way how a robot elephant

is helping the real thing. This elephant can flap its ears, lift its trunk to give blessings,

even the pupils and the eyelid flushes. And we've got some unique words coming up from Japan,

Finland and Sweden.

Tourette syndrome causes someone to make involuntary sounds and movements. Now the results of a

clinical trial to try to control those ticks have been described as extremely promising.

It's a wrist device which delivers electrical pulses. 13-year-old Milo has been trying it out

and told us how it's helping him. It's like a watch and you just strap it on, put these pads on

and it sends these little electrical shocks in your arm and the best way I can describe it is

almost like a TV, imagine if a TV static was on your arm and I thought it worked really well.

I mean it certainly ticked less frequently when I had it on and even afterwards and it

was suddenly less severe. So I think I take a few times a day and it would just really help.

There are so many times where I've just not been able to do things or I've had to step out in the

cinema to take and to feel the fact that you can just like put it on and then you can just do all

these things. It's marvellous.

Best wishes to Milo. A ballet performance in Seoul ended with France's most notable ballet

company appointing the first black dancer to its highest rank, the Dancer A-12 star dancer.

Harry Bly has the story.

The distinguished Dancer A-12 is given to those who demonstrate rare excellence in their ballet.

It's described as the supreme title and not by competition but by outstanding performance

in a leading role. It was during a performance of Giselle, a romantic but tragic ballet telling

the story of Duke Albrecht of Silesia, falling in love with a shy peasant girl named Giselle

at a theatre in the South Korean capital Seoul. And just before the curtain fell, officials from

the Paris Opera Ballet came on stage to announce that 23-year-old Guillaume Diop, who played Albrecht,

was receiving this high honour.

Guillaume seemingly unaware that this was about to happen, buries his face in his hands

as his fellow dancers applaud and embrace him.

This appointment is special for a few reasons. It's the first time a black performer has received

a title. Guillaume is half Senegalese on his father's side. He is also one of only a handful

of dancers to have been promoted directly to the top rank, skipping the previous rank of

Premier Dancer. Guillaume began his ballet career at just four years old and has played a number

of leading roles in Bayardère, Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet.

Reacting to his new title, Guillaume told Le Figaro newspaper that he had not been expecting it

and hoped his achievement would reassure the parents of children like him who wanted to follow

a career in ballet.

Now the hashtag happy is proving pretty helpful as we search for the world's

happiest stories for our podcast. This week it was used by Allison who posted a picture

of her windowsill with a cup of tea, a piece of cake and a book. Outside in the picture it's raining

but there are also green fields because Allison is a shepherdess. I've been outside farming in

the morning and it was pouring down with rain lashing and I've been reading a brilliant book

by Melissa Harrison called Rain about appreciating the rain and how beautiful it is. At the same time

I've been baking a cake because a friend was coming to visit who I hadn't seen for a long time

and just the pouring down outside, the fact I was inside where it's warm because I spent most

of my life outside being a farmer and baking this cake, anticipating a friend and watching the rain

to the window just made me incredibly happy. And tell me a little bit about your job because

being a shepherd sounds pretty hard work. I suspect it involves a lot of outside time,

a lot of early mornings, all sorts of things that might be quite hard going.

Yes it does. I've been farming here on my own. I am the farmer or shepherd, shepherdess

for 24 years now so it's very hard work. I love it and I have to say it's something that I feel

very lucky to do and it does involve getting up quite early, generally with the sunrise

and then you kind of finish when the sun sets so they're long days. Winter can be more telling

than the rest with the mud, the frost, the ice, the snow and you're caring for a large flock of sheep

but they're not for meat. My sheep are wolf flocks so they're what we call a fiber flock

so they're like my friends really and in exchange for me looking after them they give me their

bootiful wool and then I make things from their wool. So it's a demanding job but it's a very

fulfilling job. You're very close to nature and I think it's where that you know the word happy

comes in a lot because if I wasn't happy doing this job I think it could be quite miserable.

Let me ask you this, from your world with your sheep what's the sound that makes you happy?

One is the sound of the sheep, just the sheep actually calling talking to me and the sound

of lambs because any day I'll be expecting to hear the first bleep of spring and that

makes my heart sort of sore really. The sound of a curlew calling hyable again it's a call for spring

it's quite a haunting piping sound. Skylarks again when they return to the moors are quite

beautiful sound above my head and the thunder of waterfalls. We have a lot of water here in the

dales famous for waterfalls and they make me incredibly happy. Thanks to Alison email global

podcast at bbc.co.uk send us a voice note if you can. Elephants are common features of temples in

India usually painted and attached by a chain to one of the front pillars. Animal rights activists

say they're often treated harshly and some temple elephants try to escape and end up running amuck

500 people were killed in the last 15 years in Kerala state alone. The solution could lie in a

lifelike alternative as Rachel Wright explains. The moment the curtains were drawn back and the new

elephant was revealed at a temple in the state of Kerala. The rituals and ceremony were

unchanged but the elephant was slightly different. Iringadapali Raman is run by electricity.

Kuchbu Gupta from Peter India was at the ceremony. Peter India has donated this mechanical robotic

elephant his name is Iryanapali Raman. This is after the temple pledged that they will never keep

our higher life elephants or any other animals for processions or any other purposes. This elephant

can flap its ears, lift its trunk to give blessings, even the pupils and the eyelid

flushes. It wags its tail. The robotic elephant can even squirt water at people through its trunk.

Peter India made the decision because of what they say are the appalling conditions the

temple elephants are kept in. They're kept chained, forced to obey commands through beatings and

weapons. Sometimes they continuously bob their head or swear their trunks in the air,

which are signs of psychological distress. Unsurprisingly, many lash out in frustration,

injuring and even killing nearby humans. According to action for elephants UK,

there are an estimated 800 elephants that are still held captive in India. Peter India hopes

Iringadapali Raman will inspire other temples to use a mechanical animal and send the real

elephants to live unchained in sanctuaries. Rachel Wright reporting. Sundoku is a Japanese word,

which means acquiring books without actually ever getting round to reading them. Something

many of us are guilty of. The thing about Sundoku is that you can't easily translate it into other

languages. Nigel Adelie has been looking for more words like that. The Finns seem to have a flair

for displaying a pragmatic approach to their language and developing words relevant to what

goes on there. Kalsari Kanit is in the dictionary. Its rough translation is getting drunk in your

pants and refers to the national tradition of drinking to excess at home whilst wearing only

underwear. It's a word which even has its own emoji. The British have long been considered a

nation of cures, but it's the Germans who talk about the Active Ansteia, who are people who

always seem to pick the right one and never get stuck behind the person counting out their change

at the supermarket. If you're a parent, are you a flipper for elder? That's a Swedish word,

which translates as pinball parent and refers to those who give their children plenty of freedom.

And here's what you've come up with. Hi, my name is Anna Lejava and I'm from Tbilisi, Georgia.

Georgian word that doesn't have translation in English is Shemomejama, which means I didn't

want to, but I accidentally ate it. Hi, my name is Asim and I'm from Madrid in Spain. I wanted to

tell you about one that we use in Spain that does not translate very well. It's Sobri Misa and it's

the time we spend still on the table, chatting away and having a drink after we were done eating.

If it happens, it's usually a sign that everyone is having so much fun that no one wants to leave.

Thanks, Asim and thanks, Anna Lejava.

Thanks also to Junior in Germany, Madison in the US, Turga in Austria and Pablo in Mexico for

being part of the happy pod this week. We'd love you to get involved, so do tell us about the person

who makes you happy or send us the sound you love to hear. The email address is globalpodcastatbbc.co.uk

and if you can send us a voice note, we might be able to include you next time. The happy squad,

our studio director, Matt Cavman, produces Tracy Gordon and Olivia Noon and editor,

Karen Martin. My name is Andrew Peach. Thank you for listening. A happy pod is back next week.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.