Pushkin.
I'm Dr.
Laurie Santos.
I'm Tim Harford.
And this is another crossover episode of my podcast, The Happiness Lab.
And my podcast, Cautionary Tales.
Laurie, last time I took the lead,
I told you a story about the tensions between everyone taking a vacation at the same time and an idea from Stalin's Soviet Union,
where it was decreed that workers had to stagger their days off no matter what that meant
for missing leisure time with their friends and families.
So this time, it's the return match, as it were.
So what cautionary tale of happiness have you got in store for me?
Oh, it's a good one.
It's a story of how we're all biased towards action and how we sometimes struggle to do less,
especially when it involves doing nothing at all.
It's a tale that will take us to where the blue skies start turning to inky black,
because today we're going to go to the very edge of space.
My story today involves one of my favorite American heroes, Major Charles E.
Yeager.
As a young fighter pilot in World War II, Chuck not only shot down a huge number of enemy aircraft,