The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 528. The Longevity of Happiness ｜ Dr. Arthur Brooks

00:00:00.000 Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have

00:00:04.220 a life full of meaning? What you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit,

00:00:11.540 and that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder. There's another weird angle on this though.

00:00:15.580 I've been trying to think about prayer technically. That's a complicated topic.

00:00:19.880 Gratitude is a divine thing. It's managing your effective evolved state so it doesn't manage you.

00:00:26.860 Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the eternal garden?

00:00:47.160 Hello everybody. I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks. Now,

00:00:53.320 I met Mr. Brooks several years ago when he was CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And

00:01:01.240 after that, he ended up serving as a professor of practice at the Kennedy School and at the

00:01:07.740 Business School at Harvard. And that's where he is currently. He has a very active public life as

00:01:13.320 well. And it focuses on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience of happiness. And so we talked about

00:01:24.180 that. That was the focus of our conversation. And part of that was a matter of definitional

00:01:31.360 clarification, which is crucially important because to understand happiness and to pursue it properly

00:01:39.320 means that it has to be defined correctly. You have to know what it is and what it isn't. And it isn't,

00:01:45.280 for example, in Arthur Brooks' conceptualization, reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification

00:01:52.300 in the moment. Right? And so one of the things we talked about was the distinction between pleasure

00:01:57.180 and enjoyment. And well, understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the

00:02:03.660 conversation. So pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification

00:02:11.960 in the moment. Now, the problem with that, a problem with that, for example, is that psychopaths

00:02:16.480 can be pleasure-seeking. And if pleasure is regarded as a good in and of itself, then psychopathic

00:02:22.320 pleasure-seeking also becomes a good. And that's not tenable, not least because psychopaths don't

00:02:28.360 operate in their own best interest because they fail across time. And they're terrible socially,

00:02:34.040 familially, from a community perspective, they're devastating. And so pleasure itself has to be

00:02:41.500 elevated or sanctified. That's another way of thinking about it. And the terminology that Arthur

00:02:47.780 uses for that is enjoyment. And enjoyment is the elevation of pleasure, let's say, to something

00:02:55.040 that's iterable, reciprocal, social, future-oriented, permanent, and stable. So you could think about it

00:03:03.620 as the gift that keeps on giving. And that is something that's akin to, what would you say,

00:03:10.020 a combination of wisdom and pleasure. So we talked about many elements of happiness other than that.

00:03:16.540 But that gives you a flavor of the discussion and hopefully a reason to continue listening. So

00:03:24.780 welcome aboard. All right, Mr. Brooks, I think what we should start with likely is just a brief or

00:03:32.520 lengthy, for that matter, walkthrough of, let's start with your publishing record. Let's give everybody

00:03:37.840 a sense of what it is that you're doing and how that came about. Thanks. And thanks for having me on

00:03:44.000 the program. It's a pleasure. I'm delighted. And I write about human happiness. I'm a behavioral

00:03:49.820 scientist by background. My PhD is largely, my work was dedicated to behavioral economics,

00:03:55.900 but it moved much more toward the behavioral sciences and the psychological angle, and then later

00:04:02.180 more toward neuroscience, because everybody in the behavioral sciences now has to know a lot more

00:04:07.420 neuroscience than they did when you and I were doing our PhDs, just because we recognize that

00:04:12.120 psychology is biology much more than we did in, I guess, the old days in the 80s, 90s.

00:04:17.240 I came late to what I'm doing right now, however, I've only been writing about human happiness in

00:04:23.980 the way that I am for the past five and a half years, since I've been a professor at Harvard.

00:04:27.660 I've written two big books since I came to Harvard, one called From Strength to Strength,

00:04:33.700 Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, for strivers who are trying

00:04:38.680 to understand the move from their fluid to crystallized intelligence, and why they feel like

00:04:44.340 they're burning out in the middle of their career is how they can actually get stronger and better

00:04:47.360 and happier as they get older. And the second book I actually co-authored with Oprah Winfrey

00:04:52.240 called Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is just the basic,

00:04:57.640 straight-up science of human happiness that I wanted to introduce to, you know, large groups of

00:05:01.780 people. That was, and Oprah Winfrey, she hosted the book much as she would have hosted, you know,

00:05:09.500 somebody on her show when she had a talk show back in the old days. Before I was doing this,

00:05:15.080 teaching at Harvard, and I teach a large seminar at the business school, the Harvard Business School,

00:05:19.680 called Leadership and Happiness that has 180 students, something like 450 on the waiting list

00:05:25.060 and illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of. And that's, before I was doing that, which is

00:05:32.020 fun as an academic, I was actually the president of a think tank in Washington, D.C. I was the president

00:05:38.780 of the American Enterprise Institute, a free market-oriented think tank, which I was the

00:05:43.380 chief executive of for 11 years. Before that, I was a behavioral scientist at Syracuse, and before

00:05:48.160 that, I was a professional French horn player. Right. From when I was 19 until I was 31. I went

00:05:52.860 to college by correspondence in my late 20s and early 30s, and then left music and went and got my PhD

00:05:58.420 and became a behavioral scientist. Your PhD is, what is the, what was the focus of your PhD?

00:06:04.000 Public policy analysis. Public policy analysis.

00:06:06.320 And my fields were applied microeconomics and mathematical modeling.

00:06:11.060 Right. And so that's where you moved from into behavioral psychology.

00:06:16.200 Exactly. Exactly right. So I was-

00:06:17.580 Like lots of economists. Yeah.

00:06:19.340 Right. That's happening more frequently, right?

00:06:21.320 Yeah. I was mostly interested in human behavior as an economist. I got a great technical toolkit as an

00:06:26.420 economist, but I'm not that interested in cheese markets in Bulgaria. What I'm really interested in

00:06:31.240 is why people do the weird things that they do.

00:06:33.200 Right. So motivation.

00:06:34.260 Exactly right. And I was studying things that don't have typical economic rationale, like why do people

00:06:39.820 give to charity? Why do people admire beauty? Why do people love each other? And using the empirical

00:06:46.360 methods and experimental methods that you learn in an economics milieu made it possible for me to

00:06:52.860 study these things. And the taproot of all those things turned out to be human happiness. So when I

00:06:57.740 left my think tank and I was trying to figure out what do I want to do for the rest of my life,

00:07:02.620 I actually had a long process of discernment that culminated when I walked the Camino de Santiago

00:07:09.040 across Northern Spain, hundreds of kilometers walking across Northern Spain, praying the rosary

00:07:14.200 and every day saying, Lord guide my path, which is in a process of discernment is important. You've

00:07:20.300 talked about this an awful lot in your work and you talk about how, how people try to actually find

00:07:24.500 what their purpose and meaning actually is through discernment. I found, I thought it was to go back

00:07:29.600 to my behavioral science roots and to look at what people actually most want in life using science and

00:07:35.180 ideas to give them greater access to the truths about love and happiness.

00:07:38.660 Okay. So let, let's start with that issue of discernment. So I've been trying to think about

00:07:44.180 prayer technically, let's say. And so that, that's a, that's a complicated topic, but you could

00:07:50.840 imagine this, imagine that your, your decision is to aim up, which is the opposite of iniquity. By the

00:07:59.140 way, I found out the word iniquity means fundamentally to aim down, to do bad things while you're aiming at

00:08:04.760 them. Right. Okay. So instead you decide you're going to aim up. Now you can leave that kind of

00:08:08.580 amorphous because you could do that in a spirit of ignorance. You could say, well, I would like

00:08:13.920 things to be as good as they could be, let's say, although I'm not sure what that means and I'm not

00:08:19.540 sure how to do it, but you open the door that way to the beginnings of something approximating fantasy.

00:08:26.020 I mean, part of what your imagination does is seek a pathway forward, right? And so you can set

00:08:31.040 something like an unspecified uphill goal, and that would be like a meditative or prayer practice.

00:08:36.180 And then you can say, well, um, my desire, my aim is to flesh out that conceptualization and to

00:08:44.440 specify a way forward right now. Right. Then you've set your perceptions and your imagination to work on

00:08:51.020 a particular project. Right. The goal is to walk uphill, whatever that means, to clarify the nature

00:08:55.740 of what uphill is. Right. And to discern a strategy. Right. Okay. And then you said you walk this route,

00:09:02.740 right? And that gives you time for contemplation. Okay. So, so walk me through that a little bit.

00:09:07.880 You said you were praying the rosary and you were concentrating on something like upward aim.

00:09:13.600 Right. And, and then you took time to do that. Right. So it's like you give your dreams an

00:09:18.180 opportunity to make themselves manifest in a situation like that. And that's part of that

00:09:22.140 clarification. That's right. So what happened to you when you did that? So why did you do it?

00:09:26.460 Well, as a neurocognitive matter, we actually understand what a discernment process does literally

00:09:31.840 through pilgrimage. So, you know, in the Gilchrist's work, it was phenomenal. The psychiatrist,

00:09:37.600 neuroscientist, it's a Scottish. He, you know, he wrote the master and his emissary about the right

00:09:42.120 and left hemispheres of the brain, the hemispherically lateralized brain where the right side of the brain

00:09:47.220 asks the big questions, but doesn't actually come up with the answers because the biggest questions in

00:09:52.480 life don't have answers. They only have understanding. Now the left side actually solves complicated

00:09:58.100 problems. The right side deals with complex problems. Complex and complicated are fundamentally

00:10:03.420 different insofar as complicated problems that they're hard to find the solutions to. But once

00:10:08.400 you have the solutions, you can, you can replicate them with almost effortless ease. Right, right,

00:10:12.300 right. You can make them into an algorithm. Exactly right. Yeah. And the left hemisphere is actually

00:10:16.100 specialized for algorithm production. Exactly right. And that's the reason that you use,

00:10:19.980 you use the left side of the brain disproportionately when you're looking at social media or,

00:10:24.480 or using technology. Engineering solutions are left brain solutions. The right brain problems are those

00:10:30.980 that have very easy answers. We won the football game. They lost the football game. She fell in love

00:10:37.560 with me. She didn't fall in love with me. I have something I want to do. I don't have something that

00:10:42.120 I want to do, but, but you can't answer the questions. You can only have an understanding of

00:10:46.180 the questions. And to come to the understanding of those questions, you have to sit in the right

00:10:50.020 hemisphere of your brain. And to sit in the right hemisphere of your brain, you have to be

00:10:53.440 undistracted and let your mind wander to, to, to, to stimulate the default mode network in your brain,

00:11:00.280 which is intensely uncomfortable because we hate boredom. When you were at Harvard, Dan Gilbert,

00:11:05.300 your colleague, Dan Gilbert, who's wonderful, you know, a social psychologist. He did all those

00:11:09.660 experiments about people being bored. So he would put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to

00:11:15.260 do, except they had a button in front of them. You remember these experiments? No, not specifically.

00:11:19.520 They get a painful electric shock. Oh yes. Yes. And he turned, it turned out that 80% of the

00:11:23.800 participants shocked themselves rather than letting their default mode network run free.

00:11:29.180 Even animals will do that. Yeah.

00:11:31.040 Bored animals will shock themselves. Absolutely. And, and one, they had to throw out this particular 0.51

00:11:35.280 guy because he was such an outlier, shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. We hate boredom.

00:11:41.040 Right. We hate the default mode network, but unless you engage the right hemisphere of the brain and

00:11:45.520 the default mode network by, by purposively just walking and repetitively praying, unless you, you,

00:11:53.420 you, you manually stimulate that part of your brain, you are not going to come to understanding about

00:11:57.580 the why of your life. You're going to be stuck on the how and what, and you're going to be path

00:12:01.680 dependent. And I knew that. Well, probably part, perhaps part of that discomfort. So

00:12:08.020 Carl Friston, we did some work in this regard too. Carl Friston has associated negative emotion,

00:12:15.940 anxiety more specifically with high entropy state. So, and you could think about a high entropy state

00:12:21.640 as a state of navigation where a very large number of pathways are potentially open to you.

00:12:28.220 Right. And so if you open Pandora's box, if you, if you move away from a determinate goal

00:12:33.140 and you open Pandora's box, which is what direction should I go, then that is anxiety provoking because

00:12:39.880 there's a multitude of possibilities that beckon. Now there's opportunity in that, but it can easily

00:12:44.500 overwhelm you, especially if you're tilted more strongly towards negative emotion, let's say.

00:12:51.000 So the problem with opening up a space of contemplation is that open spaces are unprotected and high

00:12:57.780 entropy. And so there's negative emotion that, well, that's why we know too, that the default

00:13:02.740 emotion associated with right hemisphere activation is negative emotion. It tends to be high negative

00:13:08.520 affect. And so you're familiar with the PANIS test, the positive affect, negative affect sequence,

00:13:12.860 which is I administer it to all my students at Harvard. I make them take this because I put them

00:13:18.140 into four categories, the high positive, high negative categories, high affect people. That's you and me,

00:13:23.440 which are the mad scientist profile, the high positive, low, low negative, which everybody

00:13:28.940 wants to be, which is actually not great for a lot of things, which is the cheerleader.

00:13:32.240 It makes the impulsive.

00:13:33.460 Yeah, yeah. That's the cheerleader. And they make bad bosses too, by the way, because they can't take 1.00

00:13:37.200 criticism or hear bad news. You have people who are high negative and low positive,

00:13:42.200 which is the poets. And then the people who are low affect, low, low, those are the judges,

00:13:47.360 you know, very, very low affect, sober, they make good surgeons, right? You don't want somebody to cut

00:13:53.500 you open and say, oh my God, that's not, that's not what you want. And so I actually categorize

00:13:57.600 people and then talk about the strengths and weaknesses that each one of these has.

00:14:00.780 Now, the people who are most likely to be able to affect discernment most, most, at least

00:14:06.300 conventionally by, by undertaking these techniques are the mad scientists, because they have access to very

00:14:11.860 high levels of affect, but they have to understand themselves to do that. This was the thing. I had

00:14:16.760 this background as a behavioral scientist, and I wanted to know the why of my life, and from that

00:14:21.420 to figure out the direction forward or uphill, as you say. So that was two questions. Yeah. The why

00:14:28.000 and the direction. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Why is that two questions rather than one? Well, the why of life

00:14:34.100 is really the meaning of all. And then once you understand the meaning, then you can figure out what

00:14:40.140 direction you're going in, because the direction per se is not meaning. The direction is just a

00:14:44.280 direction. Yeah, okay, fine, fine. So in other words, here's the one. That's the difference between

00:14:47.280 strategy and aim. Exactly. And so in sailing, there's a concept called the rum line. Are you

00:14:53.360 familiar with it? No. R-H-U-M line. And it's a very important metaphor in Spanish. It's called el rumbo

00:14:59.800 in Spanish. And that's something you use a lot, the rum line. What it is, it's a direction with the

00:15:04.900 destination. And you have to have it if you're doing navigation and sailing. Yeah. That doesn't

00:15:09.880 mean you're going to go exactly to that point, or you're not going to get blown off course.

00:15:14.320 Yes. You can't actually make any progress unless you have a rum line. And so that's the whole idea.

00:15:19.440 The meaning is the rum line. And then you can start making progress toward the goal,

00:15:25.600 notwithstanding the fact that it's not perfect. So there's an idea in the Old Testament that the

00:15:30.620 firstborn is to be sanctified to God. And I think the reason for that is that the aim sets the frame.

00:15:39.000 Right? Right. So if you start a new endeavor, which you do sequentially during the day, right? Because

00:15:44.020 your day is composed of a whole variety of journeys, essentially events towards a destination. Right.

00:15:49.740 You set the aim and that sets the frame of perception. And it sets, it actually calibrates your

00:15:55.040 emotions, right? Because positive emotion, this is another thing that Friston established, I think,

00:15:59.580 better than anyone else. This is very cool. So negative emotion indicates a high entropy state.

00:16:04.840 Too many convening rum lines, let's say. Positive emotion makes itself manifest when the entropy in

00:16:12.880 relationship to a goal is decreased. So once you establish the goal, right, there's a certain

00:16:18.640 calculated cost to getting there. Right. Right. And that cost is going to be indicated in part by

00:16:24.500 anxiety because it indicates, well, what it's going to, the risk for the endeavor. Okay. When you take

00:16:30.640 a step forward to the location, you reduce the entropy because the probability that you'll succeed

00:16:36.960 is now increased. Right. And that decrease in entropy is marked by dopaminergic activation,

00:16:42.300 positive emotion. Yeah.

00:16:43.540 So it's so cool because it means this is so cool. It's one of the things I've been lecturing to

00:16:47.540 people about as I travel. It's like, you know, I've been thinking a lot about the early days of

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00:18:12.820 Your aim sets your emotional frame. Like there's almost nothing more important to understand than

00:18:18.340 that. It's like, because your brain can't compute what's positive until it knows what the direction

00:18:24.120 is. And it sees you making progress. So no aim, first rule, there is no aim, no positive emotion.

00:18:31.140 And the second rule is progress towards an aim once specified is positive emotion. And then there's

00:18:37.500 a corollary, which is something like, well, it's like, it's like steepness of approach. Let's say you

00:18:45.520 make some approach to a goal, but the goal doesn't really matter. It's like, you're not going to get a

00:18:49.920 lot of kick, but let's say if you have a really high order goal, that would be one that would be

00:18:53.860 divinely inspired, let's say. Well, then any progress towards that is going to give you a kick.

00:18:58.060 And the progress is actually what instantiates the liking, the wanting, liking, learning process

00:19:04.500 that's from dopamine. That's what it comes from. Humans are made for progress, not for arrival.

00:19:09.540 And so the whole process is, okay, discern the rum line, figure out the instantiation of what that

00:19:17.500 means, practically speaking, and then start making progress toward it.

00:19:21.420 Yes. That's what a leader communicates to people.

00:19:23.780 That's exactly right. That's why people will run through a wall for a great leader,

00:19:27.160 but that's what you must do for yourself.

00:19:29.160 So I got something cool to tell you about that, psychobiologically. I learned this from a friend

00:19:35.260 of mine. I did a podcast with him, and he's a deep biological thinker, and he was very interested

00:19:40.920 in honeybee communication. So what honeybees do is they go find a flower patch that's a treasure

00:19:46.800 store, let's say, right? So it's an aim for the honeybees. And they go back and they communicate

00:19:53.020 about the direction and the distance. So they communicate about the energy that has to be

00:19:57.860 expended to go to this flower bed. But one question the other bees have, so to speak,

00:20:02.740 is, well, is the journey worth the effort? And the way the honeybees communicate that is that

00:20:08.520 the more rich the storehouse, the faster they dance. It's exactly the same thing that enthusiastic

00:20:14.060 leaders do when they're talking about the goal. It's like, so the way people calibrate that is

00:20:18.700 like, if I can see you enthusiastic and energetic about something, I assume that you truly believe

00:20:25.720 that the goal is worth the effort. Right. Because otherwise you wouldn't risk expending that much

00:20:30.360 energy. Exactly right. And so that's, well, I think it's so damn comical that it's stable across

00:20:34.880 like honeybees and people. Oh yeah, no, no. I mean, anybody who doesn't believe that psychology

00:20:39.060 is biology. They just don't know the biology. They just don't understand the biology. Right.

00:20:43.700 And so, but there's another weird angle on this though. See, this is one of the great paradoxes

00:20:49.880 of this. So do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you

00:20:54.400 want to have a life full of meaning? Number one, discern. Number two, create a strategy about actually

00:21:01.160 how to arrive at the object of your discernment. And number three, start making progress toward it.

00:21:06.160 Yeah, exactly. This is like one, two, three. This is what I advise you. Behavior therapy 101.

00:21:10.940 This is why I'm talking to young men. Yeah. Yes, definitely. Because all the email that I get,

00:21:13.780 all the email that you get is from young people in their twenties. You know, how do I fall in love

00:21:17.700 and stay in love? How do I find a job that's actually going to give me fulfillment? How do I

00:21:20.720 have the life that I want to have? Because I have this hollowness in my life. It's like one,

00:21:24.740 two, three. Yeah. This is what we talk about. Here's the paradox. Here's the hell of it.

00:21:30.820 If you arrive, it's a problem. Yeah, right. Because that's the arrival fallacy

00:21:35.540 that we come up with. So a lot of people will say, why do all diets fail? Because they basically

00:21:41.540 do. 95% of diets fail insofar as at one year after the inception of a diet, people weigh more

00:21:47.160 than they did at the beginning of the diet. Right? This is before the GLP-1 drugs, et cetera,

00:21:51.420 et cetera. Why? And the reason is because you will forego all of the food that you like

00:21:57.240 if you see the scale go down because progress is everything. Yeah.

00:22:01.040 Yeah. Because humans are made for progress. All of our utility, all of our, we get so much dopamine

00:22:06.120 in the wanting, liking, learning process actually from progress. The reward for actually hitting your

00:22:11.880 goal is you never get to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations.

00:22:16.540 Right, right.

00:22:16.980 That's why 30% of stringent diets lead to eating disorders because people are like, I want more

00:22:23.560 progress. And so they keep making progress. And that's when healthy eating or healthy dietary

00:22:30.240 patterns turn into unhealthy dietary patterns is because people want progress so very much.

00:22:35.700 So the paradox of all this is you better have a rum line and that rum line better be pinned

00:22:40.840 someplace else.

00:22:42.220 So, so one of the, I've been studying these ancient stories in the Old Testament a lot.

00:22:48.640 Congratulations on the new book.

00:22:49.560 Oh, thank you.

00:22:50.180 It's phenomenal.

00:22:50.800 Oh, thank you. So one of the things that I really tried to delve into was Jacob's vision.

00:22:56.080 Yeah.

00:22:56.260 It's very cool because Jacob, when he has the vision of Jacob's ladder, Jacob's a bad

00:23:00.740 guy.

00:23:01.260 Yeah.

00:23:01.560 He's in collusion with his Oedipal mother. 0.97

00:23:05.720 His mother.

00:23:06.280 He's deceived his father.

00:23:07.960 He's betrayed his brother.

00:23:09.560 He's a mama's boy. 1.00

00:23:11.400 He's an, he's intellectually arrogant. 1.00

00:23:13.480 He's a coward. 1.00

00:23:14.380 He's a bad guy. 1.00

00:23:15.380 Unlikable character.

00:23:16.300 Yes, exactly.

00:23:17.160 But then he leaves and he decides that he's going to be good.

00:23:20.900 He's going to try to be good.

00:23:21.940 Right.

00:23:22.140 That's when he has that dream.

00:23:23.260 Now, the thing that's cool about the dream that's relevant to our discussion is that,

00:23:27.600 so you have this Jacob's ladder, which, which, what would you say, spirals up into the ineffable,

00:23:33.060 right?

00:23:33.320 You can't see the pinnacle.

00:23:34.680 The pinnacle is wherever God is, but you can't see that.

00:23:37.020 And the reason I think that that's relevant and important is because of the paradox that

00:23:43.920 you just described.

00:23:45.560 If you reach your goal, you satiate the system and the motivational framework disappears.

00:23:51.280 Right.

00:23:51.460 So that means there's no direction and there's no hope.

00:23:54.940 That's the problem.

00:23:55.720 It's weird because you've attained your goal, but now you're directionless and technically

00:24:00.320 you're hopeless because hope comes in consequence of positive emotion in relationship to a goal.

00:24:05.420 So actually what you want, you might think that paradise is the land of milk and honey,

00:24:10.040 so to speak, that it's the land of infinite satiation.

00:24:13.380 But the problem with that is satiation destroys the frame and destroys hope.

00:24:18.160 So actually what you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit.

00:24:25.540 And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's ladder.

00:24:27.520 It's like, so you climb, this is slight, this is different than Sisyphus, right?

00:24:31.380 Sisyphus pushes the rock up the hill and then it rolls back down the same hill.

00:24:35.100 Right.

00:24:35.180 It's like, no, what you actually want is a mountain.

00:24:38.240 And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another mountain.

00:24:40.960 And then when you get to the top of that, you can see another one.

00:24:43.680 And that never comes to an end.

00:24:45.540 So that would be an inexhaustible source of motivation and hope.

00:24:49.380 Yeah.

00:24:49.540 And it is independent.

00:24:50.780 In a way, it's independent of accomplishment because there is no final goal.

00:24:54.960 Right.

00:24:55.080 But you don't want there to be a final goal because then you run into the problem of the paradoxical problem of satiation, right?

00:25:01.880 And it is also strange, and you were touching on this, that one of the really weird things about human beings is that we're far more seeking-oriented than satiation-oriented, right?

00:25:14.020 Is that we do want the adventure.

00:25:16.800 We want the craving.

00:25:18.300 We want the desire.

00:25:19.520 The progress.

00:25:20.140 Yeah, and the progress.

00:25:21.420 The progress.

00:25:21.680 More than we want the attainment.

00:25:23.980 Absolutely.

00:25:25.080 You know, like I had a client once, I had a funny conversation with him.

00:25:28.800 He had this dream of retiring when he was like 50, you know?

00:25:32.560 And he had a pretty cut-and-dried, ordinary, algorithmic job, you know?

00:25:37.740 And so it was okay, but it wasn't a thrill.

00:25:40.980 It wasn't the meaning of his life, you know?

00:25:42.860 And I said, well, what's your vision for retirement?

00:25:46.260 And he said, well, I imagine being on a beach in the Caribbean with like a Mai Tai in my hand.

00:25:50.580 And I thought, well, that's a travel poster, not a plan.

00:25:53.980 And so I talked to him about it.

00:25:55.540 I said, well, look, you're like a middle-aged white guy. 0.99

00:25:58.160 You're going to sit on the damn beach for one day, and you're going to be so sunburned, you're going to have to hide for two weeks. 0.99

00:26:02.600 Right. 0.99

00:26:02.800 And then what are you going to do?

00:26:04.040 You're going to drink like five Mai Tais a day or 20?

00:26:06.700 For how long?

00:26:07.860 Right.

00:26:08.220 You're going to be an alcoholic at no time flat.

00:26:10.260 You've got no orientation or goal.

00:26:12.880 There was nothing to it at all, right?

00:26:14.440 Good luck on your divorce.

00:26:15.820 Well, right, right, right.

00:26:17.120 And your cirrhosis.

00:26:18.400 These guys at Goldman have told me this for years and years.

00:26:21.020 So you can make a bunch of money in finance, of course.

00:26:23.380 And if you're smart and you're motivated and you have your MBA and you come out like raring to go, by 49 you have $400 million.

00:26:30.180 And I've seen this again and again and again.

00:26:31.740 Yeah.

00:26:31.900 That I've worked with, a privilege to work with.

00:26:33.640 They retire at 49.

00:26:35.000 Why?

00:26:35.160 Because they don't like their work.

00:26:37.040 Right.

00:26:37.320 Their work is backbreaking, and they can't see their families, and they don't have love in their lives.

00:26:41.460 Right.

00:26:41.660 But they've lost their chops on actually how to do these things because the plot has been lost in their lives.

00:26:47.160 And so they retire at 49.

00:26:48.800 Yeah.

00:26:49.240 And then they become very good at golf or tennis.

00:26:51.460 Yeah.

00:26:51.740 And they get a nice dark tan.

00:26:53.400 Yeah.

00:26:53.540 And pretty soon they're having an affair with their tennis coach.

00:26:55.820 Yeah.

00:26:55.960 And then their life really falls apart.

00:26:58.460 Yeah, right.

00:26:59.020 And here's the thing.

00:27:00.060 Here's the thing, Jordan.

00:27:00.780 Woe be unto the man whose dreams come true because he will find that he had the wrong dreams.

00:27:07.160 Yeah, right.

00:27:07.700 Exactly.

00:27:08.240 This is a real problem.

00:27:09.260 Well, that's also part and parcel of the call to religious humility.

00:27:12.500 Exactly.

00:27:12.600 It's like, I want to get what I want.

00:27:16.020 It's like, what makes you so sure you're right about what you want?

00:27:19.780 Exactly right.

00:27:19.940 So I think that notion of, this is something I've been discussing with my wife a lot because she really learned this in the last few years, is that, so we talked about setting an amorphous uphill goal.

00:27:30.320 Yeah.

00:27:30.480 Okay, so that's sort of predicated in part, you could think about that as a religious relationship with the unknown.

00:27:36.660 It's sort of predicated on part on your a priori presumption that you don't know finally what's good for you.

00:27:43.080 Now, but what you could want is to learn that and discover it, right?

00:27:47.000 But that's like an ongoing relationship.

00:27:49.320 And what that does is it provides a solution to the problem of you getting what you want and finding out that it wasn't the right thing, right?

00:27:57.460 Because you still want to journey forward.

00:27:58.960 Right.

00:27:59.060 You want to sally forth, so to speak.

00:28:00.720 Right.

00:28:00.900 But you have to do that in ignorance and humility.

00:28:04.460 And you have to do that understanding that as you make progress, you're going to shift the goal that you're seeking and that that should happen.

00:28:13.740 Right.

00:28:13.980 Because otherwise you run into it exactly the paradox that you described.

00:28:16.300 Exactly right.

00:28:16.840 And you have to recognize that heaven is not on earth.

00:28:19.620 Heaven isn't heaven.

00:28:20.240 It's fine if there's an end of the rum line, as long as it's unattainable in this particular life, because we are not geared toward it.

00:28:27.360 Yeah, well, that's a cool observation.

00:28:30.020 Yeah, well, you know, I've thought about that a lot, this notion of life, life abundant in eternity.

00:28:38.380 Like that's, we tend to read that concretized and think about that as something like life after death, but that's not what it is.

00:28:44.580 As far as I can tell, it's something like the state that exists when you posit an amorphous, indefinite goal as your ultimate goal, because that imbues everything local with a kind of global significance, right?

00:29:00.680 I'm pursuing the best, and that's how it's manifesting itself in the moment.

00:29:03.960 Yeah.

00:29:04.300 And that's life eternal, because there's an element of it that's timeless.

00:29:08.400 So, you know, in the Sermon on the Mount, it's a guide to what you just described.

00:29:14.320 Christ says, it's very specific.

00:29:16.120 He says, first of all, focus your attention on the highest imaginable.

00:29:22.140 Right.

00:29:22.460 Okay, whatever that is.

00:29:23.840 Like, you don't know exactly, right?

00:29:25.420 But it's because it's indefinite, and it's ineffable, and it's beyond you.

00:29:29.200 But that's what you want to, that's what you're orienting towards.

00:29:32.000 So you establish your, then pay attention to the moment.

00:29:35.180 Exactly.

00:29:35.580 Right, right, right.

00:29:36.120 Let me put one more twist in this.

00:29:37.380 Okay.

00:29:37.580 As part of discernment.

00:29:38.980 Yeah.

00:29:39.140 So making progress on the wrong line is, practically speaking, in worldly terms, having more.

00:29:45.820 Having more of what?

00:29:46.680 More money, power, pleasure, fame, more family relationships, more prestige, whatever it happens to be.

00:29:51.840 But the real twist is not just having more.

00:29:55.920 Satisfaction that you can actually count on in life is not having more of the things that you want.

00:30:02.540 It's wanting less.

00:30:03.420 Halves divided by wants is a much better model that's both biblical and psychologically robust.

00:30:09.900 And so the goal should be for all of us, increasing the numerator, having more with respect to our goals, moving on the run line.

00:30:18.580 Right.

00:30:18.820 And wanting less.

00:30:19.820 And wanting less.

00:30:20.280 Or learning to be, okay, so.

00:30:22.280 Wanting less.

00:30:23.000 My wife just did a talk in Salt Lake City, and what she had focused this talk on was gratitude.

00:30:28.500 And she learned this.

00:30:30.160 She started to practice being grateful when she was dying.

00:30:33.280 It's a very strange time to start practicing being grateful.

00:30:36.280 But one of the things that you can think through when you're in dire straits, this is what happens in the story of Job, by the way, is that, well, imagine everything falls apart for you.

00:30:47.240 Right.

00:30:47.680 Okay, now you could ask yourself, how could I make this worse?

00:30:52.060 And the answer to that is, well, I could be resentful and deceitful and arrogant and unhappy and bitter.

00:30:57.060 Which, by the way, is our psychological baseline from the Pleistocene, we're evolved toward resentment, we're evolved toward anger and fear.

00:31:07.640 Because literally there's more tissue in the brain devoted to negative affect in the limbic system of the brain as opposed to positive affect.

00:31:15.320 Yeah, it's protective.

00:31:16.180 It keeps you alive.

00:31:17.120 Yeah, yeah, well.

00:31:17.960 It's like Jordan Peterson exists today because Jordan Peterson's ancestors starting the Pleistocene were resentful.

00:31:23.460 And the result of that is that you're evolved to say, you know, First Class of the United Airlines has really gone downhill.

00:31:29.920 As opposed to, I'm getting there safe and fast.

00:31:33.780 And I'm sitting in the front of the plane.

00:31:35.240 I'm going to get off early and they're going to give me something to eat.

00:31:37.200 It's unbelievable.

00:31:38.360 That's why gratitude is a divine thing.

00:31:43.360 And it's a practice.

00:31:45.020 It's standing up.

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00:32:57.640 Your spirit will thank you.

00:32:58.820 To your limbic system.

00:33:01.960 It's managing your effective evolved state so it doesn't manage you.

00:33:07.300 Right.

00:33:07.760 Yeah.

00:33:08.280 So you're, well, the presumption would be exactly that, is that the default attitude, the default untrained attitude is likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotion and resentful.

00:33:19.460 Right.

00:33:19.960 Right.

00:33:20.280 But that isn't, that isn't fate.

00:33:22.960 You can train yourself out of that.

00:33:24.800 And part of the way you do that, and I saw her do this when she was dying, which was really quite something to see.

00:33:30.660 She decided as an act of will to focus on what she was grateful for and to become an expert at that.

00:33:39.520 Right.

00:33:39.660 And that isn't the sort of expertise that modern people tend to think about when they think about expertise, right?

00:33:45.700 Because they think of something like propositional knowledge rather than attitude.

00:33:49.720 But it's definitely the case that you can, you can what?

00:33:54.860 Cultivate, well, what traditional people, traditional European Christians, for example, knew that you could cultivate virtue.

00:34:04.180 And that's a very specific phrase.

00:34:05.940 Right.

00:34:06.100 It's that cultivation is practice.

00:34:07.960 Yes, absolutely.

00:34:08.420 Now, this discernment idea.

00:34:10.300 By the way, one thing, by the way.

00:34:11.540 Yeah.

00:34:12.620 When your wife was giving that talk on gratitude in the room next door at the same conference as Salt Lake City, my wife was giving a talk on forgiveness.

00:34:20.840 Uh-huh.

00:34:21.400 Which is also adapted, which is also standing up to the limits.

00:34:25.380 Right, right, right.

00:34:26.380 See, our wives, who are godly Catholic women, will be unto them being married to us. 0.85

00:34:32.000 Mm-hmm.

00:34:32.400 Imagine this.

00:34:33.320 Yeah, no, I don't like to imagine.

00:34:34.180 And they're leading us in paths of righteousness.

00:34:35.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:34:37.180 It's a beautiful parallel.

00:34:37.980 So, discernment, that's an archaic phraseology, discernment.

00:34:42.940 Yes.

00:34:43.160 And that wasn't something that I saw a psychologist study when I was in the thick of the research enterprise.

00:34:49.380 And so, why discernment specifically?

00:34:52.720 Like, why discernment?

00:34:54.340 Why that terminology?

00:34:56.260 Why happiness?

00:34:57.980 Why did those things, and how was that related?

00:35:01.120 How was your pursuit of those as an intellectual enterprise associated with that pilgrimage that you took?

00:35:08.160 So, discernment comes from a very strong view of the existence and essence dichotomy.

00:35:14.120 So, philosophically, we've been going back and forth forever.

00:35:16.920 What precedes what, essence or existence?

00:35:20.340 Of course, in the 19th and 20th century, Sartre and, you know, all of the existentialists would say that existence precedes essence.

00:35:28.500 You're born without a meaning.

00:35:30.460 Meaning in life doesn't exist until you discover it or, no, no, until you create it.

00:35:34.960 That's what Sartre said.

00:35:35.960 The ethical life is one in which you have to create your sense of meaning.

00:35:39.080 Right.

00:35:39.460 That was Nietzsche's presumption as well.

00:35:41.520 Exactly right.

00:35:42.240 Well, actually, Nietzsche was stronger.

00:35:44.040 Nietzsche said that there is no essence, so stop looking, for all intents and purposes.

00:35:48.560 It's like, stop wasting your time for Pete's sake, because actually trying to create this illusion of meaning, this illusion of essence, what you're going to be, you're feeding into this global kind of delusion that people have.

00:36:03.460 Now, the ancient Greeks, which, of course, led to, and the Hebrew tradition leading to the Christian tradition is, no, no, no, no, no, essence precedes existence.

00:36:13.460 And that means your job in life is to discover your essence.

00:36:17.120 To discern.

00:36:17.660 To discover, and that's discernment.

00:36:19.420 Okay, okay.

00:36:20.200 And that's what I believe.

00:36:21.280 Okay, it seems to me that in the story of, in the Genesis account, God basically tells Adam and Eve that they have unlimited freedom in the garden except for one thing.

00:36:33.060 Right.

00:36:33.240 Right, and I think it's associated with this idea of discernment, because they're not supposed to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which I believe means they're not to make the presumption that they can establish the fundamental axioms of the moral order.

00:36:47.480 Right.

00:36:47.640 They have to discern it.

00:36:48.920 They have to find their way.

00:36:50.620 Right.

00:36:50.860 But that way is implicit in being and reflective of its substructure, something like that.

00:36:56.420 There is truth.

00:36:57.740 There is rightness.

00:36:59.640 Yes.

00:36:59.920 There are things, there are things that actually exist.

00:37:02.780 It isn't all subjective.

00:37:04.060 We're, Edmund Husserl, I mean, in phenomenology, talks about the essence of reality is what you perceive.

00:37:10.120 That's the beginning of the problem.

00:37:11.860 Right there, that's the beginning of the problem.

00:37:14.000 We believe, you and I believe, I think that you and I would agree that there is an underlying reality and the adventure of life is figuring it out.

00:37:21.620 Yes.

00:37:21.960 And so that I want to align my perception with reality, that's my goal in me.

00:37:26.720 Yeah, well, I think that's also a good definition.

00:37:29.060 And that's discernment.

00:37:29.500 Of mental health.

00:37:30.280 Okay, fine.

00:37:30.980 I understand.

00:37:31.960 Yeah, yeah.

00:37:32.300 So, well, how did you then come to the conclusion that there was an implicit or an implicate order and that the goal was discernment rather than, because the typical intellectual, the typical Luciferian intellectual is going to make the presumption that there is no moral order, but that it can be imposed particularly by a powerful intellect.

00:37:55.400 Right.

00:37:55.520 And that, well, that is the Luciferian temptation and it tends to go very badly wrong, but I'm very curious about why it was that you took the alternative pathway.

00:38:05.100 Like what, what clued you into the fact that, well, misery can do it if you're wise, but what clued you into the fact that there was an implicate order and that the goal was discernment?

00:38:16.640 That's a, I got lucky.

00:38:19.960 I think I got lucky.

00:38:21.000 I was, my father was a mathematician and here's the funny thing.

00:38:25.940 You know, all, there's a lot of social science studies.

00:38:27.760 People ask me all the time, how do I raise my kids in the church?

00:38:30.440 So the most important thing in my life is my Christian faith.

00:38:33.500 The most important thing in my life.

00:38:34.800 That started when I was a kid.

00:38:36.660 How old?

00:38:38.040 Since before I can remember.

00:38:39.660 I mean, I.

00:38:40.100 Why was it the most important?

00:38:41.560 Because it was just the central thing in my life.

00:38:45.440 And here's the, here's probably the reason.

00:38:47.600 So what we find when people ask, how do I, how do I raise my kids in the faith?

00:38:51.560 Right.

00:38:52.520 The answer is have them see the most powerful physical person in their life.

00:38:59.200 Worshiping.

00:38:59.900 It doesn't matter what you say.

00:39:01.360 You know this about, because your dad, your father, like me, it does not matter what you say.

00:39:05.320 All that matters is what they see.

00:39:08.460 Because that's how they receive information.

00:39:10.240 And there's lots and lots.

00:39:10.920 Yeah.

00:39:11.020 Well, that indicates the status hierarchy in a very concrete matter.

00:39:14.420 Exactly right.

00:39:14.920 And my father, who was a scientist, he was a, he had a PhD in biostatistics.

00:39:20.660 He was a mathematician by background and what he taught as a university professor.

00:39:24.860 He was a proud man.

00:39:26.580 He would have been on his knees in front of no other man.

00:39:29.880 But on Sundays, he was on his knees.

00:39:32.840 And that had a huge impact on a little guy.

00:39:35.200 That had a huge impact on me.

00:39:36.860 So you respected your father.

00:39:38.280 There was something bigger than my, I mean, I thought my dad was so powerful that he could lift the house.

00:39:43.080 Right, right, right.

00:39:43.820 He was a math professor.

00:39:45.020 He could not.

00:39:46.000 Right.

00:39:46.460 And I saw my father on his knees.

00:39:48.440 And that had this impact.

00:39:50.720 Now, maybe, maybe I have the God gene.

00:39:53.840 You know, maybe what we'll actually find out with, you know, the exhaustive mapping of the human genome and the advance of science that there's a God center in the brain that we have particular proclivities for, whatever it happens to be.

00:40:04.740 But I don't think so.

00:40:07.960 I think that what I saw was that that's what I wanted to be.

00:40:11.320 I wanted to be an honorable, admirable man like my father.

00:40:16.440 And my father stood in awe of the Lord.

00:40:19.760 That's what I wanted to be.

00:40:20.860 Look, I wake up, Jordan, I wake up many days an atheist.

00:40:23.840 I wake up, I don't know.

00:40:25.320 But then I decide to worship.

00:40:28.320 And I decide to worship because that's what I believe I'm supposed to do.

00:40:32.040 That's the ultimate rum line of my life.

00:40:34.960 And behavioral science notwithstanding, that ultimately is the truth that I have to follow because that's the truth that I believe is most meritorious.

00:40:41.760 Well, I actually think that we've probably got this relatively well modeled on the neuroscientific front.

00:40:50.720 It's not completely compiled yet, but like proximal goals are nested in distal goals and distal goals are nested in still further distal goals.

00:41:01.540 And some of those are explicit, but then they fade off into implicit and they're nested in higher order, implicit goals, all the way up to the unspeakable, the ineffable.

00:41:12.440 Like one of the ways that I've been trying to conceptualize conscience, conscience is a very weird phenomenon.

00:41:18.000 I think about it as the voice of consciousness, conscience.

00:41:21.720 Yeah, it's like the voice of negative emotion.

00:41:24.500 So conscience is an orienting function that tells you when you've deviated from the path.

00:41:29.060 Okay, what path?

00:41:32.000 Well, okay, so imagine now you're pursuing a proximal goal, but in that pursuit, you betray a more distal goal.

00:41:41.480 The voice of the more distal goal will appear to you as conscience.

00:41:45.220 And, you know, the distal goal has a more distal goal because these things are nested all the way up because we have some relationship with what the future and other people and the infinite.

00:41:55.000 And so there is a voice of the infinite distal.

00:41:57.540 Yeah.

00:41:57.860 And that's conscience.

00:41:58.900 This is Thomistic.

00:41:59.660 This is purely Thomistic, right?

00:42:01.400 I mean, this is the whole idea that it goes back and it goes back and it goes back until ultimately there is a creation of the first goal.

00:42:08.740 It's the first mover, the first teleological mover.

00:42:12.260 Right.

00:42:12.500 Right, which is also operating constantly.

00:42:15.560 Yes.

00:42:15.820 I mean, the operation of the God in Genesis at the beginning of time, it's not the beginning, exactly the beginning of time.

00:42:26.540 It is that, but it's not just that.

00:42:28.120 It's all beginnings, right?

00:42:30.160 Including the beginnings that start now.

00:42:31.840 It's the same process that's operating.

00:42:33.680 Right.

00:42:33.860 And it is the voice of that process that makes itself manifest as conscience.

00:42:39.220 I think that's literally and neurologically true as well as theologically true.

00:42:44.260 I think that's right.

00:42:44.820 And I think that we could make a very compelling argument, and people have in our field, that this is entirely evolved and completely materialistic.

00:42:52.980 I think that's a totally legitimate argument.

00:42:55.460 Well, you could imagine, too.

00:42:57.320 Imagine this, is that as our cortex evolved, we moved from immediate local gratification to long-term future orientation.

00:43:10.920 Right.

00:43:11.280 Okay, so the cortex allows for that, and that's what maturation does.

00:43:14.420 Right.

00:43:14.780 But it's not just the future.

00:43:16.180 So now, everything that makes itself manifest in the present on the hedonistic front, so the satiation of immediate motivations, has to be construed in relationship to its future consequences.

00:43:28.120 Okay, so that puts, and then the future is, well, what time span?

00:43:31.820 Yeah, no, this is the time travel, which is only allowed by the 30% of our brain by weight called the prefrontal cortex.

00:43:37.920 Yeah, right, exactly.

00:43:38.640 And many people believe, by the way, that Adam and Eve became our ancestors, fully became our ancestors, with a knowledge of good and evil because of self-consciousness, which became, in the moment that the prefrontal cortex allowed that.

00:43:54.200 Right, right, that's apprehension.

00:43:56.240 Well, there's a parallel, I think, as well.

00:43:58.360 Like, I don't think there's any difference between inclusion of the future in the purview of your perceptions and inclusion of other people.

00:44:08.060 Right.

00:44:08.500 And it's partly because, so, one of the things that, I studied psychopaths for a long time, and you think of psychopaths as selfish, right, self-centered.

00:44:16.120 But it's weird because psychopaths betray themselves all the time because they don't learn from experience.

00:44:22.520 So they get what they want now, but they fail.

00:44:25.580 And so then I thought, oh, well, psychopaths don't care about other people.

00:44:29.920 They also don't care about their future selves.

00:44:32.620 Then I thought, oh, that's the same thing.

00:44:34.280 They don't learn from remorse because they don't have remorse.

00:44:36.300 They don't, well, they certainly don't have remorse.

00:44:38.460 Dark triads, or you like to talk about dark tetras, but you're bringing sadism, of course.

00:44:41.960 Yeah.

00:44:42.280 But the characteristic of people above average in psychopathy is the lack of remorse.

00:44:48.380 Yeah, well, that—

00:44:48.860 And a lack of remorse is an inability to learn.

00:44:51.320 Yes.

00:44:51.800 You hurt somebody.

00:44:52.860 You did something wrong.

00:44:53.700 It had consequences if you don't feel remorse.

00:44:56.040 That remorse is activating the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of your brain, which is making you feel social pain.

00:45:02.140 Right.

00:45:02.440 You don't feel that if you have psychopathic tendencies.

00:45:05.100 Yes, and then, well, and if that pain doesn't make itself—like, I think that pain is the felt sense of the eradication of a neurological system.

00:45:14.740 Uh-huh.

00:45:15.060 So, like, imagine that you—that a system emerges in this Darwinian sense to dominate.

00:45:21.260 Right.

00:45:21.500 So now you're under its sway.

00:45:23.880 Okay, now it has a goal in mind, and when it makes itself manifest, it fails.

00:45:28.940 Okay, the consequence of that failure should be the destruction of that system.

00:45:33.200 I think that felt pain is the psychological consequence of the death of a system that failed to meet its goals.

00:45:40.720 Right.

00:45:40.840 Now, it's going to struggle and fight to maintain itself, even in the face of failure, right, which is why it's hard to get rid of a bad habit, for example.

00:45:47.720 Right.

00:45:47.900 It's a living thing.

00:45:48.920 Right.

00:45:49.100 It's not going to give up without a struggle.

00:45:50.780 Right.

00:45:50.920 But the corollary of that would be approximately equivalent to what you just said.

00:45:58.400 There's no learning because there's no remorse, because there's no difference between remorse and learning.

00:46:03.880 The first stage of learning is, oh, I was wrong.

00:46:07.500 Yeah.

00:46:07.640 That has to go.

00:46:09.000 That's a sacrificial offering, too, right?

00:46:11.360 That part of me has to go.

00:46:12.900 Right.

00:46:13.020 And it's going, no, no, you know, I want to live.

00:46:15.820 And fair enough.

00:46:16.760 And sometimes, like, if you're really poorly oriented in your life and you fail cataclysmically, an awful lot of you has to go.

00:46:24.260 You know, when a dominant—

00:46:27.680 It's back to your wife talking about gratitude, by the way, because it's the same thing.

00:46:31.220 It's the prefrontal cortex saying, no, no, no, no, no.

00:46:34.220 You limbic system evolved to feel resentment.

00:46:37.380 That's not—that's not—that's maladaptive.

00:46:40.540 Yes.

00:46:40.880 And I have decided to reprogram the limbic system, which tends toward resentment, and I'm going to reprogram it.

00:46:47.380 It's the same basic pattern.

00:46:49.400 This is self—this is self-management.

00:46:52.840 This is the essence of self-leadership.

00:46:55.000 Doing what feels good.

00:46:56.300 If it feels good, do it.

00:46:57.920 If it feels bad, avoid it.

00:46:59.620 It's being managed by your ancestors.

00:47:01.740 Yeah, well, the problem with that attitude is, well, in relationship to who and over what time span, right?

00:47:07.820 And that's a huge problem.

00:47:09.720 If you have a dominant lobster—I did a lot of investigation into crustacean neurology because it's well mapped out.

00:47:21.020 If a dominant lobster who ages is defeated in a battle, his brain dissolves and reconstitutes as a subordinate brain.

00:47:31.000 Right, right.

00:47:32.460 Exactly the same thing happens to us—

00:47:34.580 Because the neuromodulator activity in the limbic system of the lobster brain.

00:47:38.200 Because, once again, because psychology is biology, the lobster can't do anything about that.

00:47:43.440 The big dominant alpha lobster, if there is such a thing, is going to fight to try to maintain that position. 0.97

00:47:48.560 Yes.

00:47:49.240 And if it fails—we can decide.

00:47:51.120 Well, the lobster brain is so simple that it can't be subordinate sometimes and dominant sometimes.

00:47:57.040 So it's either victor or not.

00:47:59.440 And when it loses, the victor brain is no good, so it has to go.

00:48:04.460 And so it dissolves, essentially.

00:48:04.960 And we can make decisions, and that's the divine in us.

00:48:08.100 That's the difference.

00:48:09.940 Yes.

00:48:10.620 And this is the essence of being fully human and fully alive.

00:48:13.340 St. Irenaeus said, the glory of God is a man fully alive.

00:48:16.860 What does it mean to be a man fully alive?

00:48:18.600 It is managing your limbic system.

00:48:20.640 It is not deciding that your level of affect that you have today is going to actually be the determining factor in how you treat other people.

00:48:27.420 It is actually—it is getting beyond who you were as a person.

00:48:31.280 It's deciding to worship even though you don't feel a single milligram of faith on a particular day.

00:48:39.920 So when everything falls apart for Job, his wife says—and we presume she loves him and that she knows he's a good man.

00:48:49.100 She says, there's nothing left for you but to curse God and die. 0.98

00:48:51.960 Right. 1.00

00:48:52.440 And she means it.

00:48:53.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:48:53.660 And his attitude is, no matter what's happening to me right now, no matter the depth of my suffering, I refuse to lose faith in my central goodness, and I refuse to lose faith in the essential goodness of being and becoming itself.

00:49:09.180 And that is a decision, right?

00:49:11.060 It's a decision.

00:49:12.060 Right.

00:49:12.300 Right, because it's weird, because the evidence—and this is what his wife tells him—it's like, the evidence is that you're done.

00:49:18.500 You've tried really hard.

00:49:20.400 You were a good person.

00:49:21.220 Everyone knows it, even God.

00:49:22.740 And yet, everything's been stripped away from you, and you're in the most miserable, imaginable position. 1.00

00:49:28.360 You should curse God and die. 1.00

00:49:30.020 That's what you would do if you were acting in accordance with the facts. 1.00

00:49:33.080 If you're purely limbic, there are lots and lots of people who make an absolutely logical decision to commit suicide.

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00:50:54.860 If they're purely limbic.

00:51:00.280 However, the divine in us, the divine console that allows us to manage our ancestral, our less evolved selves.

00:51:09.680 Default.

00:51:10.220 Default selves.

00:51:11.500 It's the bumper of tissue behind your forehead called the prefrontal cortex, which is the...

00:51:17.500 What a miracle.

00:51:19.240 My dog Chucho can't do that.

00:51:20.900 He can't time travel.

00:51:22.600 He can't manage his emotions.

00:51:24.020 The essence of being fully alive is doing exactly that.

00:51:27.800 This is the message that we can give to all these young people today who are so desperate.

00:51:33.180 They don't have to live like Jordan Peterson and Arthur Brooks.

00:51:35.260 They don't have to go, you know, suffer through a PhD.

00:51:37.540 They don't have to become behavioral scientists.

00:51:39.240 They have to learn to manage themselves.

00:51:41.000 They have to put their prefrontal cortex in charge of their limbic systems.

00:51:45.620 And that takes practice and that takes commitment and that takes good relationships that will actually bring that along.

00:51:52.720 It's interesting because the best indicator of somebody being able to manage in a man his limbic system is a good partner.

00:51:59.280 However, Job's wife is the one who says, curse God and die, right? 0.73

00:52:03.880 Interestingly, chapter 38 of Job is where he puts God in the dock and he says, you know, all right, everybody told me to curse you and die and all this bad stuff.

00:52:15.580 So what gives?

00:52:17.340 I'm a righteous man.

00:52:18.260 What gives?

00:52:18.820 And then God actually turns it around and says, what do you know?

00:52:22.500 Yeah, right.

00:52:22.960 You're so smart.

00:52:23.840 Where were you when I created the stars in the sky?

00:52:26.880 The whole story is not evident to you.

00:52:29.520 Yeah, exactly right.

00:52:29.980 And Job accepts that.

00:52:30.980 He says, look, I can take solace in my ignorance.

00:52:33.200 Exactly right. 0.95

00:52:33.640 Yeah, which is very useful to take solace because your ignorance is infinite. 0.95

00:52:37.840 Yeah.

00:52:37.980 There's a lot of place for solace in that.

00:52:39.680 Self-management is the essence of, well, humility requires self-management too.

00:52:45.500 We're not evolved to be humble.

00:52:47.720 Yes.

00:52:48.200 We are evolved as tribal societies to be humbled, but not to be humble.

00:52:53.360 To be voluntarily humble is a decision that can actually lead us to live our best lives.

00:52:58.680 Right, that's wisdom.

00:52:59.660 And that's the 30th chapter of Job.

00:53:01.600 That's the capstone of that thing.

00:53:03.540 That's the big point at the end of the day, where he is victorious but still doesn't understand,

00:53:09.080 puts God in the dock, and then is taught humility and accepts that humility and thrives.

00:53:14.200 Yeah.

00:53:14.740 Okay, so let's go back at happiness.

00:53:17.780 So, because what you could say that the folk understanding of happiness is something like

00:53:24.760 the gratification of a toddler's whim.

00:53:27.480 Right.

00:53:27.720 Right, a toddler's having a tantrum in a store, and his mother, defeated, gives him the chocolate

00:53:35.160 bar.

00:53:35.580 And so now the child stops squawking and bitching and being subsumed by negative emotion and

00:53:41.260 maybe smiles.

00:53:42.980 And so you think, well, that's happiness.

00:53:44.520 Right.

00:53:44.940 Okay, but that's not the kind of happiness that you're describing.

00:53:47.320 That's gratification.

00:53:48.560 Okay.

00:53:49.100 Just gratification.

00:53:49.980 And that's a feeling.

00:53:50.540 Okay, so why, look, if you're hedonistically oriented, why not be skeptical about your proposition

00:53:58.860 that it's something other than immediate hedonistic gratification that constitutes happiness?

00:54:04.600 And certainly Epicurus would have been, you know, and so the whole Epicurean tradition

00:54:08.420 of trying to maintain positive feelings as much as possible.

00:54:12.800 Yes.

00:54:13.340 And again, he wasn't a hedonist in the modern sense.

00:54:16.020 He was actually a highly moral character.

00:54:17.740 But the whole point is to have peace in your life and surround yourself with people who

00:54:21.100 like you and to have non-disagreeable conversations and to set your life up that has as little

00:54:25.380 conflict as possible, which is catastrophically wrong.

00:54:28.820 Because unless you have sanctified suffering in your life, you will not become strong, you

00:54:34.160 will not learn, you will not grow, and you'll make no progress on your life.

00:54:37.520 Well, you also won't be able to withstand suffering when it comes.

00:54:40.280 Which is inevitable.

00:54:40.760 It will.

00:54:41.480 Which is, I mean, it's like my students ask me, so Professor, are you saying I need to go

00:54:44.620 look for suffering?

00:54:45.160 I say, don't worry.

00:54:45.740 No, don't.

00:54:46.080 We'll find you.

00:54:46.520 Yeah, right.

00:54:46.980 You don't need to look for it.

00:54:48.580 Exactly, right.

00:54:49.100 Right, right.

00:54:50.000 Okay, so but then why conceptualize it exactly as happiness?

00:54:52.980 Because happiness isn't a feeling.

00:54:55.140 Feelings and happiness are like the smell of your Thanksgiving dinner and your Thanksgiving

00:54:59.700 dinner.

00:55:00.680 You would not mistake the turkey for the smell of the turkey.

00:55:04.140 The feelings are associated with something that's actually a lot more tangible.

00:55:08.280 So we know, I mean, you and I are pretty interested in nutrition, that all food is a combination

00:55:14.200 of protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

00:55:15.680 These are the macronutrients of all food, including your Thanksgiving dinner.

00:55:19.280 The macronutrients of happiness, which have residual smells, just emotions from the limbic

00:55:24.680 system.

00:55:25.700 The constituent parts of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

00:55:31.200 These are the three things that empirically we find in people who have overall a life that

00:55:36.220 they consider to be the highest levels of well-being.

00:55:38.380 Now, enjoyment is not the same thing as pleasure, on the contrary.

00:55:42.320 Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon.

00:55:44.280 It's largely a stimulation of the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum of the brain.

00:55:48.460 And you tap it in all sorts of, you can get pleasure from all sorts of things.

00:55:52.100 If your girlfriend says, I love you, or you have a big bump of cocaine, whatever it happens

00:55:55.720 to be, you'll get the same because we have a thrifty brain.

00:55:58.100 But that's not enjoyment.

00:56:00.380 Enjoyment is something that is permanent and can be experienced in the prefrontal cortex

00:56:05.380 of the brain.

00:56:06.420 In other words, it has pleasure involved, but it adds people in memory, thus making it

00:56:12.340 a permanent experience.

00:56:13.940 And that's really important because that has all kinds of practical implications that I

00:56:16.920 teach my students.

00:56:17.380 Right.

00:56:17.640 So the problem with immediate gratification, at least in part, is that it lacks the dimension

00:56:22.460 of sustainability.

00:56:23.460 Exactly right.

00:56:24.280 And iterability.

00:56:25.120 And self-management, because once it's in your prefrontal cortex, you can manage your

00:56:29.660 pleasures so your pleasures don't manage you.

00:56:32.200 So one of the things I'll tell my students is there's something that gives you a lot of

00:56:35.000 pleasure and it can be addictive, which most pleasures can be.

00:56:38.120 Not all.

00:56:38.920 I mean, walking in the woods and saying your prayers, not particularly addictive, but highly

00:56:42.840 glycemic carbohydrates and cocaine and alcohol and gambling and pornography and all

00:56:47.140 that.

00:56:48.100 If you're doing any of those things and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong

00:56:52.760 because you're not going to be able to take it from pleasure to enjoyment and it won't

00:56:57.560 be a source of happiness.

00:56:58.160 What's a mediating, what mediating role does social engagement, is that something like a

00:57:04.820 precondition for iteration?

00:57:06.240 Yeah.

00:57:06.560 Well, it's such that you, part of it is that by adding a human dimension to it, you're largely

00:57:13.820 mediating the experience using your prefrontal cortex.

00:57:16.500 I mean, that's just as an empirical observation when you take-

00:57:20.400 Why?

00:57:20.700 Because it becomes memorable when you add people into it.

00:57:24.960 It's, pleasure is not memorable, but when you add a relationship-

00:57:28.620 Okay, so let's think about the difference between pornography and sex with a partner.

00:57:34.260 Right.

00:57:34.420 Because that's a good comparison.

00:57:35.700 Okay, so, now the thing about sex with a partner is that, especially if you want it

00:57:42.800 to be repeated, you need to take the other person into account.

00:57:47.400 Right.

00:57:47.500 So there's a, you could call that a civilizing factor, right?

00:57:53.340 It's much more complicated activity.

00:57:55.760 It's a higher level of consciousness.

00:57:57.980 Yeah.

00:57:58.060 You're actually more conscious of the experience because you're not thinking about the physical

00:58:02.280 act, you're thinking about the mediating human experience that you're having.

00:58:07.080 Right.

00:58:07.360 So, okay, so you've got, all right, so you're under the thrall of the sexual impulse, right?

00:58:13.320 Right.

00:58:13.420 Which has a drive-like characteristic and which has a certain set of biological activations.

00:58:19.800 And pornography would only be that.

00:58:23.140 It strips it of everything except for those biological impulses.

00:58:27.980 Right.

00:58:28.160 So it reduces it to the lowest possible common denominator.

00:58:30.600 It reduces dimensionality, right.

00:58:31.720 Right.

00:58:32.280 Okay, the question is why that, why is that not optimal?

00:58:38.120 Right.

00:58:38.360 Right?

00:58:38.740 Because that's what we're trying to get at.

00:58:40.280 Okay, so now you introduce a partner.

00:58:42.360 Well, there's novelty in the partner, so that's dopaminergic kit because you don't know exactly

00:58:47.120 what the partner is going to do.

00:58:48.460 Right.

00:58:48.680 And then it, it complexifies it in the positive way because it brings elements of love and

00:58:56.280 relationship and mutual caring.

00:58:59.980 Which are beyond the pure limbic system.

00:59:02.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:02.960 So it's not just a purely limbic activity.

00:59:05.120 So the whole problem is when you, when you, that's sanctification in a sense or sacralization.

00:59:10.240 It really is.

00:59:10.860 Exactly.

00:59:11.220 Right.

00:59:11.420 Which is why it's placed in the context of marriage.

00:59:14.100 I mean, that's the, that's the rule on the, on the moral religious front is no sex without 0.99

00:59:20.560 marriage, which means something like no sex without commitment and mutuality and long-term

00:59:26.680 relationships.

00:59:27.280 So it's contextualizing it.

00:59:28.700 That makes it more sophisticated.

00:59:30.520 Right.

00:59:30.580 Now you also associate that, no, but the thing that's interesting about the argument you're

00:59:34.820 making is that you also associate that with a, what, a deepening and intensification of,

00:59:41.020 you call it enjoyment.

00:59:42.340 Right.

00:59:42.660 Well, I just call it enjoyment as, and, and, and, and I'm using that particular term because

00:59:47.240 this enjoyment is usually thought to be something that is more nuanced, dimensional, and sophisticated

00:59:52.920 than pure pleasure.

00:59:53.840 Now, this is a problem with the language, of course, because, you know, this is a problem

00:59:59.160 with happiness in general.

01:00:00.280 Yeah, yeah, of course.

01:00:00.940 Because there's a million different things that people have to say.

01:00:01.420 Well, that's where we have to get to the definition.

01:00:02.860 So there's not, yeah.

01:00:03.700 Well, so if you're talking to a young person that you would say, a wise man would substitute

01:00:09.100 enjoyment for pleasure.

01:00:10.640 Right.

01:00:10.920 And his logical response to that would be, why?

01:00:14.620 Right.

01:00:14.960 Okay.

01:00:15.240 So why?

01:00:16.340 And the reason is because enjoyment is permanent and pleasure is temporal, automatic, and animal.

01:00:23.840 So that's the problem.

01:00:25.160 Well, what if I, okay, but I say, so, okay, so I get it all.

01:00:28.800 My dog can feel pleasure the same way that I can.

01:00:31.000 My dog can feel pleasure the same way as I can.

01:00:33.260 My dog can't feel enjoyment in terms of the love relationships that I have with my wife 0.98

01:00:38.240 that I can, because my dog's brain is incapable of pleasure.

01:00:41.760 So is it, do you think it's fundamentally, would you reduce it to the degree that you can

01:00:46.200 reduce it to something like predictable iterability?

01:00:50.620 Like, is that the payoff?

01:00:51.940 Probably.

01:00:52.340 And I think that that's part of the miracle.

01:00:54.700 Reciprocal iterability.

01:00:55.880 So I can say, I like that.

01:00:57.200 I want to do that again for these particular reasons.

01:00:59.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:59.940 Okay.

01:01:00.200 So that would be the difference.

01:01:01.100 Okay.

01:01:01.420 So that would be the difference.

01:01:02.980 Because you could, okay.

01:01:04.020 Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:01:05.080 Here's an example.

01:01:06.360 Tell me what you think of this.

01:01:07.800 This is an example.

01:01:08.940 People who are watching will be familiar with this story, but it's such a useful story.

01:01:12.840 It doesn't matter.

01:01:13.480 When animal behavior started to study play.

01:01:19.540 Right.

01:01:20.940 They watched rats wrestle.

01:01:23.040 Right.

01:01:23.300 Okay.

01:01:23.520 Now, the assumption was that they noticed that if you take a juvenile rat, male, they like

01:01:29.620 to wrestle, if the one juvenile was 10% bigger than the other, he could reliably win in a

01:01:35.980 single bout.

01:01:36.740 Pretty much every time.

01:01:37.840 Every time.

01:01:38.480 Yeah.

01:01:38.600 He'd pin.

01:01:39.300 And that was the marker.

01:01:40.000 The studies are, yeah.

01:01:41.280 Okay, so then the conclusion from that was that play was a form of dominance behavior

01:01:46.600 and what the victorious rat did was dominate and that that was pleasurable because it was

01:01:51.280 a victory.

01:01:51.780 But then, but then, Panksepp did this.

01:01:55.260 He thought, yeah, but rats live in a social environment, so they don't play once.

01:02:00.160 They play repeatedly, which is like, he should have got a Nobel Prize for this.

01:02:04.580 It's such a brilliant insight.

01:02:05.740 It's like, well, do the rules for iterable play, are they the same as the rules for one

01:02:10.940 bout play?

01:02:11.540 And the answer was no, because what Panksepp showed was that if you paired rats together

01:02:16.120 repeatedly, the big rats that didn't let the little rats win 30% of the time didn't

01:02:22.880 get invited to play.

01:02:24.560 Right.

01:02:24.960 So then you could imagine that maybe this is a technical way of thinking about enjoyment

01:02:29.980 instead of pleasure, is that pleasure is a one-off and you could even exploit for

01:02:35.580 pleasure.

01:02:36.720 But if you want, instead, let's say you want to make an arrangement that's iterable and

01:02:41.560 if better maybe, one that iterates and improves.

01:02:45.080 Right.

01:02:45.440 Right, because obviously that's better.

01:02:47.080 If it's good once, then it should be good multiple times.

01:02:51.220 And if it's good and could be made better, that would even be better.

01:02:54.460 Right.

01:02:54.860 Right.

01:02:55.160 So that would be something like the sanctification of sexuality within a relationship.

01:02:59.220 Exactly right.

01:02:59.700 Well, you know the people who have the most sex are religious married people. 0.83

01:03:03.320 Yeah. 0.95

01:03:03.540 Which is hilarious.

01:03:04.180 That's Brad Wilcox's stuff.

01:03:05.660 That's the funniest statistic.

01:03:07.920 I know.

01:03:08.480 And it's like, nobody believes that.

01:03:10.580 I know.

01:03:10.980 It's like so much for the sexual revolution. 0.65

01:03:13.100 I know, I know, I know. 0.97

01:03:13.380 It's like, you want sex? 0.97

01:03:14.720 Be religious and married. 0.98

01:03:16.080 And be loyal to your wife.

01:03:18.020 That's right.

01:03:18.480 Oh, great.

01:03:19.420 So, but here's the thing that gets back to the work that you've done over the years.

01:03:23.440 Who is it who can't learn this?

01:03:25.560 And the answer is dark triads.

01:03:27.400 Who doesn't learn this?

01:03:28.260 Why?

01:03:28.420 Because narcissism, it's all about me.

01:03:30.760 Yeah. 0.77

01:03:31.240 Machiavellianism, I'm willing to hurt you.

01:03:32.760 Yeah. 0.98

01:03:33.660 Psychopathy, I feel no remorse.

01:03:35.800 Yeah.

01:03:36.180 Sadism, I enjoy it.

01:03:37.620 Yeah, right.

01:03:37.960 I'm not going to learn.

01:03:39.620 And so the result is that dark triads, they tend to exhibit compulsive, addictive behavior over and over again. 0.59

01:03:48.220 It's self-defeating.

01:03:49.260 They don't enjoy their lives because they actually can't make it from pleasure to enjoy.

01:03:53.900 Yeah.

01:03:54.220 They're incapable of actually.

01:03:55.560 Yeah, well, so in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, so Cain is a dark tetrad type.

01:04:02.220 He becomes a murderer and then his descendants become genocidal.

01:04:05.480 But the end of that story is extremely interesting because God sentences Cain to wander.

01:04:12.280 So he has to move from place to place, which is what psychopaths do, by the way, because they can't exploit the same people over and over.

01:04:20.840 They have to move.

01:04:22.060 But he also wanders in the land of Nod.

01:04:24.840 And the land of Nod is being traditionally associated with sleep and unconsciousness.

01:04:29.580 So the moral of the story is that if you're a psychopathic manipulator, you end up wandering unconsciously.

01:04:38.180 And your life, Cain says, my life has become a, he says, I can't stand the punishment.

01:04:44.480 I can't tolerate the consequences of my actions.

01:04:46.860 Yeah, which sounds just like an addict.

01:04:49.120 Which sounds just like an alcoholic.

01:04:51.040 It sounds just like somebody who's addicted to gambling or pornography.

01:04:54.360 Somebody who's subjugated to something, a repetitive behavior that they can't control.

01:04:59.320 Right.

01:04:59.720 That's what that sounds like.

01:05:00.980 And that's the reason, ultimately.

01:05:03.280 And so how do you break out of it?

01:05:04.500 You know, when we talk, I talk to people a lot because I've done a lot of work in addiction communities.

01:05:09.200 And people say, I got to quit drinking.

01:05:11.360 No, you need to substitute something better.

01:05:14.260 Yeah, right, right.

01:05:14.920 That's what it comes down to.

01:05:16.180 Because only when you substitute something better can you actually make this leap.

01:05:20.420 Something that actually can take you to enjoyment as opposed to getting you stuck on pleasure.

01:05:25.080 Yeah.

01:05:25.360 And that requires relationship.

01:05:29.740 And that requires love.

01:05:31.200 And that requires memory.

01:05:33.020 Why memory?

01:05:33.720 Memory is such that you can actually, enjoyment requires that you can, that it be a permanent experience.

01:05:40.260 Right.

01:05:40.600 But what's the specific role of memory?

01:05:42.540 I get the role of permanence, but you've brought up memory a couple of times.

01:05:46.460 Yeah.

01:05:46.600 It's like, is it that the experience enriches as it's multiplied?

01:05:51.440 Yeah.

01:05:51.620 Like listening to a song that you love in many different contexts?

01:05:54.760 When I was a kid, I grew up in a lower middle class home in Seattle.

01:05:59.460 And we would have Thanksgiving like every other family.

01:06:02.920 And every year, my mother was good cook. 1.00

01:06:05.620 And there would be this big turkey.

01:06:07.740 You know how we do it?

01:06:08.520 Yeah, I think you have Thanksgiving in October.

01:06:10.340 But November, it's such a big thing.

01:06:12.140 Because by November, there's nothing to be thankful for.

01:06:14.240 That's right.

01:06:14.660 At that point, you know, north of the border, it's pretty grim.

01:06:17.800 Exactly.

01:06:18.160 Every year, my mother would make this golden brown, beautiful turkey.

01:06:21.700 And my dad would say, oh, it's so beautiful, honey.

01:06:25.180 My dad loved my mom so much.

01:06:27.180 And he would go and get the Instamatic camera.

01:06:29.660 And he would take a picture of the turkey in the oven just to commemorate that moment,

01:06:34.520 that beautiful moment.

01:06:35.540 Now, what was he trying to do?

01:06:36.600 He was trying to memorialize something that was going to be highly pleasurable to eat

01:06:41.900 such that we could enjoy that moment again and again and again.

01:06:45.740 Now, we have 30 pictures of identical turkeys in the identical oven.

01:06:50.000 Okay, so memory, there's something like a marker for a marker, not just a marker for

01:06:55.840 permanence, but an actual indicator of permanence.

01:06:58.740 That's just how we make things permanent.

01:06:59.880 Okay, so basically, tell me if I'm correct about that.

01:07:03.060 You seem to be making the case that, I mean, this is a restatement of something we already

01:07:08.000 discussed, but I want to get right to the heart of the matter, is that, well, why would

01:07:11.620 you settle for pleasure?

01:07:12.780 Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could have, when you could be like

01:07:18.960 walking in the eternal garden, so to speak?

01:07:21.060 You're going to substitute permanence and maybe improving permanence for the momentary

01:07:26.700 pleasure.

01:07:27.200 Why would you?

01:07:27.460 Right, well, okay, so I've been thinking about this in terms of maturation, because I think

01:07:32.480 a lot of the things that we see as hedonistic and power mad pathologies are just, just sustained

01:07:39.820 immaturity, because toddlers are immature, and they're whim-driven, and they're not social.

01:07:47.760 They can't truly play, not until they're about three, right?

01:07:51.360 That's when they start to unify.

01:07:53.800 A three-year-old begins to be able to adopt a shared mutual goal, and that's the basis of

01:07:59.580 mutual understanding and friendship.

01:08:01.340 And true friendship emerges when that process of establishing a mutual goal iterates across

01:08:07.520 playbounds, okay?

01:08:08.580 And so you can see an extension of temporal awareness there and a broadening of social

01:08:13.040 relationship.

01:08:14.100 And the reason the two-year-old, it's weird, because the two-year-old now has to take turns,

01:08:19.660 and that's a sacrifice, because he doesn't get to be first all the time.

01:08:23.400 And that'll produce a tantrum when that's first being learned, especially with an aggressive 1.00

01:08:27.100 kid.

01:08:27.700 But the payoff is, well, you don't get to be first, but you get to have way more games. 0.87

01:08:32.900 Yeah, it's the rats.

01:08:34.060 Right.

01:08:34.440 Yes, yes.

01:08:35.000 It's the 30%.

01:08:35.420 Exactly the same thing.

01:08:36.420 The rat gets to have a friend, and so he only wins 70% of the time, but he plays 100 games

01:08:41.740 instead of one.

01:08:42.600 It works out.

01:08:43.080 Right.

01:08:43.620 Right, exactly.

01:08:44.640 Okay, so, like.

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01:09:57.880 I worked with these guys in Montreal.

01:10:00.460 We delved very deeply into the origins of antisocial and psychopathic behavior.

01:10:05.760 Okay, so the first thing that we learned was that the most aggressive human beings are two-year-olds.

01:10:11.560 Right.

01:10:12.280 Right, so if you group human beings together in age-matched groups, there is more kicking, hitting, biting, and stealing among two-year-olds than any other group.

01:10:22.520 Okay, now if you look at the two-year-olds, what you see is that most of the two-year-olds who do that are male.

01:10:28.420 Yeah.

01:10:28.740 And it's a minority of males.

01:10:30.380 Yeah.

01:10:31.140 About 5%.

01:10:31.860 Yeah, 5%.

01:10:33.120 Most of that minority is socialized by the age of four.

01:10:36.340 Right. 0.74

01:10:36.760 Okay, the ones that aren't socialized are the repeat psychopathic offenders.

01:10:41.980 And so what it seems to me is just the absence of cortical maturation.

01:10:46.980 Now, you know, classic penological theory, like I learned this kind of painfully because I was a little romantic in my attitude, I suppose, before this.

01:10:53.820 Because there's a crime age relationship.

01:10:58.200 Right.

01:10:58.620 Right, so criminality spikes like mad at 15.

01:11:02.220 Right.

01:11:02.580 And then it's, at 15 to 19 is the real, like, crucial period for being a delinquent psychopath.

01:11:09.300 So what happens is these aggressive kids, they maintain a high level of aggression.

01:11:13.380 Right.

01:11:13.580 Normal boys match that level of aggression from 15 to 19, and then it goes down, whereas the chronic antisocial types just stay high.

01:11:22.160 If you imprison them till they're in their late 20s, they mature.

01:11:27.540 Right.

01:11:27.780 Right, right.

01:11:28.480 Yeah, that's right.

01:11:29.100 And part of this is the synaptic development between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex.

01:11:33.740 That wiring is not complete in human females till age, about age 21.

01:11:38.080 In human males till, like, 70.

01:11:40.000 I don't know.

01:11:40.440 It's later.

01:11:41.160 And that's one of the reasons, by the way, two of my kids are military.

01:11:44.160 Two of my kids are U.S. Marines.

01:11:45.440 And my son, Carlos, my middle son, he's a special operator.

01:11:48.640 He was a scout sniper in the Marine Corps.

01:11:51.640 His job was to jump out of helicopters at night, down a rope, into a theater of battle, with a high-powered rifle, and then shoot with optics at night.

01:12:08.680 That's a really dangerous thing to do.

01:12:10.500 That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do.

01:12:12.420 That was super fun for him at 20.

01:12:14.820 I don't want to have anything to do with that.

01:12:16.140 Why?

01:12:16.500 Why was he willing to do this?

01:12:18.560 And the answer is because he did not have adequate synaptic development between his limbic system and his prefrontal cortex.

01:12:24.500 Well, there'd also be, there'd also likely be, like, you know, males are more expendable, and the more adventurous males, adventurousness is a high-risk, high-return investment.

01:12:35.800 And men, well, so there's these great studies, you must know about these studies, of the drug gangs in Chicago.

01:12:42.080 The guy who did the studies promised the gang leader, who's a big drug gang, that he would write a book about it.

01:12:49.940 I love it.

01:12:50.700 Yeah, yeah, you know about this.

01:12:51.940 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:52.360 Yeah, yeah, and so they found out that the default drug dealer made less than minimum wage.

01:12:59.220 Yeah.

01:12:59.400 Almost all of them.

01:13:00.320 And look at his mom.

01:13:00.780 And almost all of them were employed.

01:13:02.480 Yeah.

01:13:02.680 Right, but the reason they were willing to take the risk was because the status kick made them much more reproductively successful, and deaths among the higher-ups opened up avenues of progress.

01:13:15.880 Right.

01:13:16.240 So even though low-level drug dealing didn't even pay minimum wage, the opportunity for status was high, and the relationship between status and reproductive success was unbelievable.

01:13:26.620 Because it's like the relationship between socioeconomic position and male reproductive success is like 0.6.

01:13:32.820 It's insanely high.

01:13:35.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:35.580 Right, and so it's not surprising that young men who are looking to maximize their reproductive success when they have nothing concrete to offer are going to take a high-risk, high-adventure route because that differentiates them.

01:13:48.940 And even if it's that at the cost of their own skin.

01:13:51.560 It's like being a CEO, by the way.

01:13:52.580 If you're a CEO of a company, you're probably going to have to leave in disgrace.

01:13:57.320 If you're the prime minister of the UK, you're going to leave in disgrace.

01:14:01.420 Or Canada, for that matter.

01:14:03.920 To take a recent example.

01:14:04.780 Congratulations, by the way.

01:14:05.880 Oh, yeah.

01:14:07.200 I mean, but why do they do it?

01:14:09.280 Because the disgrace that they're almost inevitably going to face is worth what they're going to enjoy in the meantime in terms of the prestige.

01:14:16.260 That's how much neurophysiologically we want that reward.

01:14:20.800 By the way, Aquinas was really good on this.

01:14:23.440 Thomas Aquinas.

01:14:24.320 I don't think you've actually, you haven't talked very much about Thomistic thinking, right?

01:14:27.380 No.

01:14:28.200 So, Aristotle was brought to the modern world through St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae.

01:14:33.280 He was a Platonist, but he said, the pupil is greater than the master.

01:14:37.580 And introduced St. Thomas, introduced Aristotle to more modern audiences in the 13th and 14th centuries.

01:14:43.500 And he said that we are animated by four idols.

01:14:48.100 That God is what we ultimately want.

01:14:49.980 But God is inconvenient.

01:14:51.500 You know, God is hard to understand.

01:14:53.900 And a lot of one-sided conversations and a ton of rules.

01:14:57.240 And so, we take things that have kind of a God-like feeling to them, and they're fourfold.

01:15:00.880 He was an outstanding behavioral scientist.

01:15:02.700 He could stand up to anybody today.

01:15:04.920 He said that the four idols that we have, the Substitute for God, are money, power, pleasure, and prestige.

01:15:12.160 Yeah, that's pretty good.

01:15:13.000 Money, power, pleasure, and honor.

01:15:14.600 We've distinguished, we've talked about why happiness.

01:15:18.780 We talked about discernment.

01:15:20.460 We talked about the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment.

01:15:23.700 Right.

01:15:24.060 Okay, so let's bring this down to practicalities.

01:15:27.160 Now, you teach leadership courses at Harvard, and you, I presume that you take a relatively practical approach to your students in relationship to what will constitute happiness.

01:15:39.080 So, walk us through that.

01:15:41.140 Like, we talked about the necessity of establishing a goal.

01:15:45.880 Right.

01:15:46.180 And we talked about the conceptualization of happiness.

01:15:48.760 And so, how do you make that, how do you ground that in your classes?

01:15:53.640 Right.

01:15:53.740 And what have you observed as the effect?

01:15:57.220 So, there's the three macronutrients that we've talked about, are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

01:16:01.540 And we dug in on enjoyment.

01:16:02.960 We could do exactly the same thing for satisfaction, and exactly the same thing for finding meaning.

01:16:07.720 What is meaning?

01:16:09.400 How do you interrogate meaning in your life?

01:16:11.240 How do you actually find it?

01:16:12.120 And that would get us back to discernment.

01:16:14.120 Okay.

01:16:14.280 Because discernment is the essence of actually finding that particular macronutrient.

01:16:18.480 Yeah.

01:16:18.940 Then, a talk.

01:16:19.300 That's okay.

01:16:19.880 So, you mean by discernment, I think probably something very similar to what I've focused on as attention.

01:16:27.160 Yeah.

01:16:27.260 And one of the things that I used to tell my clients, for example, let's say they were having mood dysregulation problems.

01:16:33.960 One of the things I would teach them to do is to notice, this is way different than thinking about, notice when they were particularly miserable during the week and when they weren't.

01:16:44.480 Right.

01:16:44.740 And to approach that with a completely blank mind, it's like, you'll see that there's variation in your mood.

01:16:50.720 Right.

01:16:51.080 If you can catch yourself when you're less miserable than usual, then you can think, okay, what exactly, what did I do right?

01:16:59.300 Right.

01:16:59.440 Or what's the context that's informing that?

01:17:01.820 Well, that's discernment.

01:17:02.940 It's right, right?

01:17:03.480 That's kind of—

01:17:04.120 Well, you're certainly discerning something.

01:17:06.240 Yeah.

01:17:06.340 But when I'm talking about discernment, I use it in an almost theological sense, which is to actually find the essence of your life.

01:17:12.820 Well, I think it's the same thing.

01:17:13.840 I think it's the same thing, because there's something gleaming there that's calling to you, that's setting your life in order.

01:17:20.360 Yeah.

01:17:20.700 And this is what happens with Moses in the burning bush, by the way.

01:17:23.880 That's something that beckons to him, and he discerns.

01:17:26.840 That's why he goes more deeply into it.

01:17:28.540 And he goes deep enough into it so that the voice of God itself makes itself manifest to him.

01:17:33.080 Right.

01:17:33.340 And I would say, like, those moments in your life where things come together, if you're discerning enough and attentive, there's an unlimited depth to that exploration.

01:17:41.960 Right.

01:17:42.180 Okay, okay.

01:17:42.640 So anyway, back to—

01:17:43.640 So the discernment is really trying to find this essence of discovering what your essence is.

01:17:49.700 I just don't agree with Sartre.

01:17:52.100 I just don't believe that you can invent your essence.

01:17:55.500 We're not self-inventing.

01:17:57.360 I believe that we exist in ad infinitum and trying to—

01:18:02.220 Otherwise, we could just tell ourselves what to do.

01:18:04.680 Totally.

01:18:04.960 It'd be simple.

01:18:05.920 Yeah.

01:18:06.080 I'd just say to myself, be happy.

01:18:09.220 Right.

01:18:09.480 And I'd obey.

01:18:10.440 Well, that doesn't happen.

01:18:11.460 Or even worse, you would invent your essence as your identity, which is exactly what we're doing.

01:18:16.340 See, to invent your essence is a Gnostic heresy. 1.00

01:18:19.960 Yes.

01:18:20.180 To say, I am a self-inventing creature.

01:18:22.740 Right, right, right.

01:18:23.400 I'm this, I'm not that.

01:18:24.920 Yeah.

01:18:25.120 I'm one of these people.

01:18:26.540 I'm not those people.

01:18:27.580 Yes.

01:18:27.700 There's no shared story.

01:18:28.800 There's no humanity.

01:18:29.740 There's no love in that.

01:18:32.520 And that's the problem.

01:18:34.040 But—

01:18:34.740 There's no relationship either.

01:18:36.100 But to discover your essence, that's pure humanity.

01:18:39.280 Because that's what links you to everything that has always been and everything that always will be.

01:18:43.720 Yeah.

01:18:44.160 And that's exciting.

01:18:45.320 That's an adventure.

01:18:46.480 That's just—

01:18:47.060 Yes.

01:18:47.540 I think that's by definition an adventure, actually.

01:18:50.400 Yeah, that's the adventure.

01:18:51.000 That's what the hero's doing in the hero's journey.

01:18:53.640 Right, right.

01:18:54.400 That's what a quest is.

01:18:55.500 The quest is actually discovering your essence.

01:18:58.640 Discernment is you on the hero's journey.

01:19:01.940 Yeah, okay.

01:19:02.860 That's a Jungian thing.

01:19:03.560 Okay.

01:19:04.040 Right?

01:19:04.540 Okay, so—

01:19:05.140 Now, did you familiarize yourself with Jung as well?

01:19:08.300 Yeah.

01:19:08.860 I mean, everybody who's a fan of yours.

01:19:11.560 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:12.140 Well, I was wondering if there's a separate pathway to that.

01:19:14.400 Because that's not standard academic knowledge.

01:19:16.800 No, no.

01:19:17.220 No, no, no.

01:19:17.820 But when I actually came back five and a half years ago as a process of discernment to teach happiness

01:19:23.160 and to create a big public apostolate in this as well, to talk in public education,

01:19:28.580 because I'm working in the public sphere, not just at Harvard University.

01:19:31.780 I'm talking in media.

01:19:33.200 I write a column every week in The Atlantic.

01:19:35.520 I write books that I want people to watch.

01:19:37.300 I do television.

01:19:38.660 And the result of that is that I actually can't—I have to range really far from the roots of my discipline.

01:19:47.780 You know, my discipline is, you know, theorem proof in economics and running regressions.

01:19:52.260 That's just not good enough.

01:19:53.340 And so, when I looked at it, you know, I have to know where do the most interesting questions come from?

01:19:57.600 They come from theology.

01:19:58.920 They come from philosophy.

01:20:00.480 They come from art.

01:20:01.500 They come from history.

01:20:02.920 That's where the interesting questions come from.

01:20:04.460 They don't come from when you and I were writing our papers, when we were writing our papers inside the university.

01:20:09.320 We were looking at where the data were and what question we could get from the data.

01:20:12.940 That's the wrong place to start, which means I needed to become much more sophisticated in philosophy and theology than I'd ever been before.

01:20:18.900 Then I needed to understand the mechanism of causation, which is the modern neuroscience, which is the cutting edge of our field.

01:20:25.580 And only then could I expose it to the empirical scrutiny that comes from the way I was trained, and you, and behavioral science.

01:20:31.600 And then I had to talk about how do you use it?

01:20:34.620 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:35.340 Well, that's the thing I'm really curious about.

01:20:37.040 It's psychoanalytic practices, and that's Jung.

01:20:39.020 Okay, okay, okay.

01:20:40.000 So when you're doing this at the business school, or at the Kennedy School, for that matter, now you're focusing on the personal and the relational.

01:20:49.400 Right.

01:20:49.720 But you're doing that in the context of business and government.

01:20:52.480 Right.

01:20:52.840 Okay, well, how do you square that circle?

01:20:58.060 Business is just another vehicle for expressing who we are as people.

01:21:02.180 You know, the whole idea of work-life balance is a huge problem because it suggests that your work is not part of your life.

01:21:09.240 Right, right.

01:21:10.180 It presumes alienation.

01:21:11.820 Yeah, absolutely.

01:21:13.400 It presumes self-objectification, which is a deeply problematic and sinful thing to do.

01:21:18.320 Right, right, right, right.

01:21:18.660 That makes you homo economicus. 1.00

01:21:20.320 Yeah.

01:21:20.580 That's no good.

01:21:21.420 Work-life balance is a problem, is the bottom line.

01:21:24.120 So what I say to my students on the very first day…

01:21:25.760 Yeah, it also implies that work isn't life.

01:21:27.920 No, no, absolutely not.

01:21:29.300 Your life is…

01:21:30.480 Or that your home life isn't life.

01:21:32.120 One of the two.

01:21:32.840 Yeah.

01:21:33.240 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:34.080 What's life?

01:21:34.880 Leisure?

01:21:36.020 Right, and what's leisure?

01:21:37.260 I mean, there's a complicated problem.

01:21:38.400 I'll take Joseph Pieper's argument that leisure is the basis of culture, but only when it's based in learning and contemplation.

01:21:44.680 That's good as opposed to…

01:21:46.360 Right.

01:21:46.700 And leisure is not the…

01:21:48.280 People often think of leisure as the absence of work.

01:21:51.140 Yeah.

01:21:51.620 Right, it's like, well, that's actually boredom.

01:21:54.580 No, no.

01:21:55.020 I mean, I want work before the fall.

01:21:58.680 Yeah, right.

01:21:59.260 I want to tend the garden.

01:22:00.480 Right.

01:22:00.840 In the garden.

01:22:01.600 That's a blessing.

01:22:02.320 And you discover that by discernment.

01:22:03.880 Yeah.

01:22:04.200 And that's what you're teaching your business to.

01:22:06.020 What do they think of that?

01:22:07.400 Well, it's amazing.

01:22:08.540 So the first day of class, I say, look, a bunch of you, you want to start your own companies and your startup entrepreneurs.

01:22:14.880 And the rest of you idolize entrepreneurs because you're going to make your fortune working for companies that other people have started, et cetera, et cetera.

01:22:21.580 That's great.

01:22:22.200 But it's trivial because the ultimate entrepreneurial experience is the enterprise of you and you're the founder.

01:22:28.960 Start treating your life as a startup today.

01:22:32.540 Today, this is what we're going to do.

01:22:34.640 What do startup entrepreneurs do?

01:22:36.520 They're willing and able to take risk in exchange for the potential explosive rewards that come from it.

01:22:46.080 That's an adventure.

01:22:47.340 That's an adventure.

01:22:47.980 And by the way, you have to know what the denomination of your rewards are.

01:22:51.440 If you're thinking in Thomistic terms of money, power, pleasure, and fame, woe be unto you.

01:22:55.140 But if you're thinking in terms of love and happiness, game on.

01:22:58.660 Let's talk about how to get explosive returns in love and happiness for the entrepreneurial endeavor of you, Incorporated.

01:23:05.900 That's how the class starts because that's the hero's journey.

01:23:08.960 And everybody's entitled to that.

01:23:11.620 What do you mean by entitled?

01:23:12.840 You mean it's available to them?

01:23:14.320 Because we're born to it.

01:23:15.520 Because this is to be born in the divine image of God.

01:23:19.300 Where God is inherently generative.

01:23:21.100 God is inherently creative.

01:23:22.860 God is inherently loving.

01:23:24.280 And this is the gift.

01:23:25.300 Not that we're going to be happy or have happy feelings or to have positive affect all day long.

01:23:32.180 Well, I guess part of the argument you're making is that that's actually a second-rate substitute for the real thing.

01:23:37.640 Absolutely.

01:23:38.240 Right.

01:23:38.520 Hedonistic happiness is, I thought about this in terms of addiction.

01:23:41.860 It's a false adventure.

01:23:42.860 Absolutely.

01:23:43.540 Yeah.

01:23:43.900 Absolutely.

01:23:44.300 On the contrary.

01:23:45.340 And so that's one of the reasons that the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia, which is a good life well-lived, full of suffering and full of experiences.

01:23:54.640 Right, right.

01:23:55.340 And adventure, again.

01:23:56.580 That's the thing.

01:23:57.600 Yeah.

01:23:57.780 And that's what I want everybody to have.

01:23:59.420 That's what excites me.

01:24:00.360 That's what gets me up in the morning.

01:24:01.480 And the master stroke is to be able to say, I am truly grateful, Lord, for this day full of blessings and happy feelings.

01:24:08.440 Right.

01:24:08.600 And I'm also grateful for the things that are going to challenge me.

01:24:10.820 Well, you want your life to be enough of an adventure so that if you wake up in pain, you get out of bed.

01:24:17.860 Yeah.

01:24:18.100 Because you think, no, this is worth doing.

01:24:22.200 This is my life.

01:24:23.000 Right, right.

01:24:23.560 This is my journey.

01:24:24.700 This is part of the, this is the dragon I'm going to slay.

01:24:27.480 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:27.700 And, and, and that's what I'm teaching.

01:24:30.120 That's the, that's the gist of the class.

01:24:32.160 And, and so how do the students, okay, so I would suspect that the typical or many of the typical students, particularly in business, it's a bit of a stereotype, but I'm going to run with it anyways for the time being, is they're, they're going to be much more materially focused.

01:24:48.200 And maybe I'm wrong about that.

01:24:49.400 Rather than admiring entrepreneurs, like, look, I worked with a bunch of, a bunch of startups and a bunch of these incubators in Canada.

01:24:57.300 Which are all fake, by the way.

01:24:58.700 It was just, oh, it was so corrupt.

01:25:00.360 It was just beyond comprehension.

01:25:02.000 But in any case, you know, they would dangle these visions in front of these young people who were trying to start a business of, you know, making a unicorn and selling out for a hundred million dollars and then sitting on the beach and having Mai Tais.

01:25:13.300 It's like, it was just complete.

01:25:14.780 Well, it was so complete.

01:25:15.940 It was a complete lie.

01:25:17.100 Right.

01:25:17.400 It was corrupting beyond belief.

01:25:19.160 And it's counterproductive because, well, your enterprise should be the thing.

01:25:23.760 It's like, you don't, you don't want to sell your company unless you can think of a better company because you get to have your company.

01:25:29.560 Right, right.

01:25:29.980 You get to expand it and you get to bring benefit to the world.

01:25:32.880 Right.

01:25:33.320 And you get to learn.

01:25:34.380 And then it's like, okay, now when you get your students at the Kennedy School or at the School of Business, what is their ethical orientation towards the political or the business before they take your course?

01:25:47.260 So, it's the same as everybody where they want to have a good life, well lived, but they don't necessarily know what that means.

01:25:54.660 Yeah, right.

01:25:55.140 So, they're the same as all of us.

01:25:56.620 So, are they defaulting to those four things?

01:25:58.720 Of course, because we all do.

01:26:00.100 Of course, of course, of course.

01:26:01.600 So, I play a game with my students.

01:26:03.060 It's called, what's my idol?

01:26:04.500 This is what I play at the very beginning, one of the very first sessions of the class.

01:26:07.360 What's my idol?

01:26:08.280 Where I take them through a little bit of Aquinas.

01:26:09.840 They read a little bit of Aquinas.

01:26:11.040 And I say, look, this is the first modern, really great behavioral scientist is St. Thomas Aquinas.

01:26:18.320 And don't read it for the religious parts.

01:26:20.640 Let's read it for the behavioral parts of this.

01:26:22.340 And I say, okay, he says that the idols that you're going to chase are ultimately, there's going to be one that attracts you more than any other.

01:26:30.400 Yeah, right.

01:26:30.760 And that when you do, you'll always do the things that you later regret.

01:26:34.700 Then that's the thing about it.

01:26:35.960 Okay, and that's behavior.

01:26:36.660 That's what makes them idols.

01:26:37.940 I know.

01:26:38.340 Right?

01:26:38.600 They beckon falsely in the present.

01:26:40.360 And that's very empirically robust.

01:26:42.860 A very empirically robust assertion, of course.

01:26:45.220 We know this from all the literature that, you know, that when people chase these idols that they're ultimately, they don't get what they wanted.

01:26:51.440 Right, they're self-defeating.

01:26:52.400 And they have a lot of regret.

01:26:53.180 Yeah.

01:26:53.420 So I say, okay, let's play a game.

01:26:54.600 And the way to do this is not to say what's your idol, but to eliminate the ones that they're not your idol.

01:27:02.960 Okay.

01:27:03.380 Do you want to play?

01:27:03.940 Sure.

01:27:04.380 Okay.

01:27:04.760 Sure.

01:27:05.760 So money, power, pleasure, honor.

01:27:08.620 And honor is not what we say with my marine children, which is to serve with honor.

01:27:13.380 That means to be honored.

01:27:15.100 Yeah.

01:27:15.440 The narcissistic gratification.

01:27:16.740 So that means fame or what we have in academia, which is prestige, to walk in and people say, oh, it's Jordan Peterson who wrote that paper.

01:27:24.140 You know, that paper that got the award last year or whatever it happens to be.

01:27:26.700 Or the admiration of strangers or the admiration of the right group of people, right?

01:27:31.240 Which we want.

01:27:32.000 It's your lobsters, right?

01:27:33.500 That raises serotonin levels.

01:27:34.880 Okay, so think of those four.

01:27:37.940 And then let's think of the one you would first eliminate, which doesn't mean you don't have it at all, but rather that you have the population mean level of it.

01:27:46.680 So if you got rid of money, for example, you wouldn't be poor.

01:27:48.880 You just have exactly the population mean amount of that.

01:27:52.340 So you wouldn't be in, there would be no deprivation whatsoever.

01:27:55.400 Money, power, pleasure, fame.

01:27:57.420 Which one do you kick away?

01:27:59.520 Power.

01:27:59.960 Why?

01:28:02.340 I'm not interested in exerting control over others' voluntary actions.

01:28:07.960 So if I were to, you're the clinical psychologist and I'm just a working class economist, but I would say that the reason for that is because you hate when people have power over you.

01:28:17.780 Well, that's certainly an indication of the undesirability of power.

01:28:21.220 That's my lived experience.

01:28:22.760 I hate, yes, I hate that.

01:28:24.320 I hate being told what to do.

01:28:27.780 Not everybody hates that.

01:28:28.900 Yes, I understand that.

01:28:30.480 So a lot of people who really like power actually are not bothered that much when people have power over them because it feels legitimate inherently.

01:28:37.860 So it's kind of an interesting thing.

01:28:39.740 So you find that totalitarians are pretty comfortable when they're in totalitarian systems.

01:28:45.820 They would just like to be the totalitarian.

01:28:47.540 Right, right, right.

01:28:48.280 So you've had dictators admire dictators.

01:28:49.780 Funny, I was just writing about exactly that this morning.

01:28:52.360 It's like, yeah, well, this is part of our misunderstanding of totalitarian systems.

01:28:55.580 Everyone is striving to be free except the bully on the tops.

01:28:59.400 No, it's bullies all the way down.

01:29:01.260 I know.

01:29:01.800 So that's, okay.

01:29:02.740 So now we've established that about you, but you kicked away power.

01:29:05.140 Yeah.

01:29:05.400 You got three left.

01:29:06.280 Money, pleasure, and honor.

01:29:09.400 What's next?

01:29:18.480 Pleasure, probably.

01:29:20.520 Pleasure.

01:29:21.180 No, money, probably.

01:29:22.500 Money.

01:29:22.880 Why?

01:29:23.240 Why?

01:29:23.300 Taste is an excellent substitute for money.

01:29:29.440 Like you can, you can, you can, you can, you're talking about the population mean of money.

01:29:34.840 Population mean of money.

01:29:35.480 If you're wise and discerning, you're rich with that amount of money.

01:29:40.660 Yeah, yeah.

01:29:40.900 And, and I would also postulate, correct me if I'm wrong, that given the fact that your material success, among other things, has taught you using your self-awareness as a behavioral scientist, that there's not that much nice stuff that you can get with money.

01:29:55.920 It's really not that interesting.

01:29:57.280 Well, the, the big advantage to me of having money is that there are, it opens up avenues of possibility.

01:30:04.820 It makes some things easier.

01:30:06.480 Right.

01:30:06.840 Medical care.

01:30:07.540 It does.

01:30:07.960 But it opens up avenues.

01:30:09.060 It eliminates sources of unhappiness.

01:30:10.140 Yes.

01:30:10.500 Yes.

01:30:10.740 And it, it opens up avenues of adventure.

01:30:14.440 Right.

01:30:14.840 That would otherwise be impossible.

01:30:18.400 But they're not the things you care about the most.

01:30:20.940 Well, there's other ways of doing them.

01:30:22.320 Yeah, yeah.

01:30:22.800 There's other ways of doing them that are, that are they equally valuable?

01:30:29.920 Sufficiently so that that was my second choice.

01:30:32.040 Anyways.

01:30:32.640 The things that I love the most are not things you buy.

01:30:37.140 I just, if, you know, people say, if I could keep everything in a knapsack, I would be detached.

01:30:44.020 And I say, no, I would still rent everything I want.

01:30:47.080 The whole point is that, that, you know, buying stuff is not that interesting.

01:30:50.920 Well, money, money is useful to me because it enables opportunity.

01:30:55.520 Right.

01:30:55.820 It's not particularly useful to me because I can buy stuff with it.

01:30:59.060 I mean, I buy some things, but look, you know, culture like ours, you can buy virtually everything you need for nothing if you pay attention.

01:31:07.240 I know.

01:31:07.580 Like virtually everything is free.

01:31:09.680 Food, maybe not, you know.

01:31:11.340 I have a whole lecture on how to actually, how to buy happiness with money.

01:31:15.040 And it's, you have to go exactly against your limbic system.

01:31:18.780 Why?

01:31:19.000 Because your limbic system tells you to accumulate resources beyond what you need to show your evolutionary fitness such that you can get more mates and propagate your genes.

01:31:26.740 Right, right, right.

01:31:27.520 You need more buffalo jerky and animal and flints in your cave.

01:31:31.060 Right.

01:31:31.540 And the guy, anyway.

01:31:32.180 Okay, so you got two left, pleasure and honor.

01:31:35.960 Now it's hot in here because we're, these are things that you like.

01:31:39.640 Yeah.

01:31:39.860 And this is normal.

01:31:40.920 Yeah.

01:31:41.240 But you've got to get rid of one and go to the population mean, which is a… 0.97

01:31:45.440 Pleasure, probably, next.

01:31:47.780 Yeah.

01:31:48.600 And now we've established what your temptation is.

01:31:53.520 Now we've established, that doesn't mean that you can't tame it, but you must know it.

01:31:57.900 But you must say to yourself, honor, honor.

01:32:01.820 When I do the wrong thing, it's because I, it's because I pursue honor.

01:32:04.740 By the way, I'm exactly like you.

01:32:07.580 Why?

01:32:08.180 It's too bad for you.

01:32:09.500 Well, it's too bad for my wife and yours.

01:32:11.240 Yeah, and your wife.

01:32:12.180 Yeah, right.

01:32:12.400 Yeah.

01:32:12.640 I mean, it's because, you know, I hate people having power over me.

01:32:15.740 I don't want to have power over others.

01:32:16.800 I was a chief executive for 11 years.

01:32:18.300 And the thing I hated was when people called me boss.

01:32:20.540 It made me intensely uncomfortable.

01:32:22.180 It made me feel embarrassed, even humiliated when people said boss, because I felt like

01:32:27.280 they were setting up a hierarchy.

01:32:28.480 It felt passive aggressive, even when it wasn't because of this abversion.

01:32:32.300 Money.

01:32:33.900 Okay, great.

01:32:34.780 Well, you know, if you're someone's boss, it's not who's, it's not obvious who the slave is.

01:32:39.220 Right.

01:32:39.860 Right.

01:32:40.160 Because if I have to tell you what to do, then I have to tell you what to do.

01:32:45.940 It's hard enough to get myself to do things, much less bother with you.

01:32:49.480 I know.

01:32:49.880 Maybe there's some temporary thrill in ordering people around, although it's not a thrill

01:32:53.420 I've ever appreciated, but I'd rather that you did your own thing.

01:32:57.840 I'd hate, you know, I hate dictatorships and I wouldn't want to be the dictator is the

01:33:00.900 bottom line.

01:33:01.760 Money.

01:33:02.120 Okay.

01:33:02.400 Yeah.

01:33:02.700 What?

01:33:03.000 It's fun.

01:33:03.560 Pleasure.

01:33:04.240 I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm a very self-disciplined person.

01:33:07.820 You know, I wake up at 4.30 in the morning.

01:33:09.560 I work out for an hour and it hurts every day before dawn.

01:33:13.520 How old are you?

01:33:14.320 60.

01:33:15.220 And, and, and I'm in better health than when I was 30.

01:33:17.820 And part of it is because I'm not a sensualist because I can actually do that.

01:33:22.700 I mean, I like feeling good, but it's not high on my list of priorities.

01:33:26.040 You know what tempts me?

01:33:27.540 This.

01:33:28.720 That's what tempts me.

01:33:30.140 And I know it's true.

01:33:31.620 And I know I have that particular tendency and that knowledge is power.

01:33:35.660 Why?

01:33:36.120 Because that knowledge is being stored in the episodic memory of my hippocampus and it's accessible

01:33:40.860 by my prefrontal cortex and I can use it to manage my limbic system.

01:33:44.600 And that's, that's being fully alive.

01:33:48.080 As far as I'm concerned, that's being fully alive.

01:33:49.900 And when my students understand that they can not just avoid errors, they can feel like

01:33:53.280 they have control.

01:33:54.880 They can feel like they have a sword and shield on their hero's journey.

01:33:58.740 That's what this, that, that.

01:33:59.820 How do you get to start envisioning their future pathway in a more multidimensional manner?

01:34:06.100 So I, among other things, we talk about the process of discernment.

01:34:10.320 Yeah.

01:34:11.140 Discovery.

01:34:11.760 Yeah.

01:34:12.000 Discovery of their, of their own.

01:34:13.220 What do they have to do practically to engage in that?

01:34:15.720 I ask them to, to contemplate questions that don't have clear answers, but do have understanding.

01:34:22.320 Because this is the essence of how philosophically discernment works.

01:34:25.420 So I'll ask, and I've done this to my adult children as well.

01:34:29.200 When my kids were 18 years old, I would make them write a business plan.

01:34:33.040 Yeah.

01:34:33.240 As a B school professor, I can kind of get away with that, right?

01:34:35.640 Yeah.

01:34:36.240 And the whole point was, what are you going to do with the next five years of your life?

01:34:39.780 Yeah, right.

01:34:40.180 You're the entrepreneur of your enterprise, and I'm the venture capitalist kind of, so

01:34:44.140 I deserve a business plan.

01:34:45.520 Right, right.

01:34:46.160 I want you to tell me what you're going to do to find the answers to two distinct questions

01:34:50.260 or to find an understanding of the answers to two distinct questions.

01:34:54.240 Why are you alive?

01:34:56.180 And for what would you gladly give your life on this day?

01:34:59.380 I want to know the answers to those questions.

01:35:00.880 Okay, why did you come in?

01:35:02.300 Okay, explain the rationale behind those questions.

01:35:04.320 These are deeply existential questions that are rooted in almost everything.

01:35:07.920 Right, so what's more important to you than the mere continuation of your life?

01:35:11.160 Yes.

01:35:11.540 That's a hard one.

01:35:12.400 Yeah.

01:35:12.700 So that's kind of like, what would you die for?

01:35:14.920 And also, what would you live for?

01:35:16.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:16.800 Those are the same thing.

01:35:17.700 And the other one was...

01:35:18.560 Why are you alive?

01:35:20.020 Which means who created you and for what purpose in your belief?

01:35:26.240 Yeah, okay.

01:35:26.880 So one of the ways that I had my clients answer that question is, we did this in this exercise

01:35:33.520 that I made commercial, this future authoring exercise.

01:35:36.040 It's something...

01:35:36.760 And you can do this when you're arguing with your wife, for example.

01:35:39.900 Well, so one of the things I always ask my wife, and she asked me too, when we're arguing,

01:35:43.360 is like, what are your conditions for satisfaction?

01:35:46.780 Yeah.

01:35:47.140 Like, you disagree with what's going on here.

01:35:49.300 Right.

01:35:49.620 Even hypothetically, if I did what would satisfy you, what would that look like?

01:35:55.120 Right?

01:35:55.680 Well, you can ask yourself the same thing in your own life, which is like, okay, life

01:35:59.380 is difficult, and it's rife with existential doubt.

01:36:04.220 Could you imagine a situation where you were thrilled with your circumstances?

01:36:10.380 Right.

01:36:10.560 So what are your conditions for satisfaction?

01:36:12.640 That is an exercise of discernment.

01:36:14.520 It is.

01:36:14.760 You have to treat yourself like you're someone you don't know.

01:36:17.320 Right.

01:36:17.940 Right.

01:36:18.240 It's like learning to please someone else.

01:36:20.140 Right.

01:36:20.320 Like in a relationship, it's like, well, it takes a long time to know what makes your

01:36:24.660 wife happy.

01:36:25.820 Right.

01:36:26.020 Partly because it takes her a long time to know it too.

01:36:27.920 It's hard.

01:36:28.600 Because people have a nature, and what satisfies that nature has to be discerned.

01:36:34.300 You have to notice it.

01:36:36.000 You know, it's so interesting to understand that.

01:36:38.960 It's like you have to discern what it is that actually motivates you, for example, rather

01:36:44.740 than what you think should motivate you.

01:36:46.460 Those aren't the same thing.

01:36:47.380 Oh, absolutely not.

01:36:48.080 There's what you desire and what you desire to desire.

01:36:50.380 There's a whole series of iterations about that.

01:36:52.520 And a well-constructed life, the one in which you're really in charge, has good knowledge,

01:36:58.080 such that based on accurate knowledge of who you are and why you are, you can make the

01:37:02.920 alterations that are appropriate.

01:37:03.920 Yeah, right, right.

01:37:04.660 Exactly.

01:37:04.860 That's what it really comes down to.

01:37:06.100 And that's what, that's the best that has been, that we can use in behavioral science.

01:37:12.060 This is how-

01:37:12.440 So that's all that part of discernment as well.

01:37:14.500 Because one of the questions would be an analogous question to something like, well, if you were

01:37:18.460 in pain, what would get you up in the morning?

01:37:19.900 This is why it's so useful for people to have children.

01:37:22.800 It's like, because a mother, my wife said something very interesting when she had her

01:37:27.400 first child, when she had Michaela.

01:37:29.660 We went up north to where my parents were in this old, this cottage.

01:37:33.160 It was all old people up in northern Saskatchewan. 1.00

01:37:35.100 There's like 20 of them in the room.

01:37:37.040 And they're watching this little like 12-month-old toddler round, like she was on fire, right?

01:37:42.760 It's like they're just completely entranced.

01:37:45.260 Right.

01:37:45.440 And my wife said, it was a great relief for her not to be the center of attention.

01:37:49.900 That someone else had, it was a great relief to her that someone else had become far more

01:37:55.140 important in her life than she was, self-evidently.

01:37:58.080 And you know, the statistical studies show that there's no distinction between being aware

01:38:02.800 of yourself and being miserable, right?

01:38:04.900 Self-consciousness loads on neuroticism, right?

01:38:08.560 And so one of the corollaries-

01:38:09.800 This is the psychodrama.

01:38:10.500 The problem with the psychodrama is that it's me, me, me.

01:38:13.540 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:14.000 And me is the wrong answer.

01:38:15.480 Me is the wrong answer.

01:38:16.060 So that's what we talk about when we talk about faith in what I teach.

01:38:19.820 It's not about a particular religious faith, notwithstanding the fact that I practice one.

01:38:23.980 It's self-transcendence.

01:38:25.800 Self-transcendence is the essence of awe, of getting small.

01:38:30.800 I've done a lot of work in the last 11 years with the Dalai Lama.

01:38:33.460 Oh, yeah.

01:38:33.800 And he told me one time that one of the most profound experiences he had was in 1969 when

01:38:38.180 he saw that photo that the astronauts, the American astronauts, took of Earth from orbiting

01:38:45.060 the moon.

01:38:45.640 Yeah.

01:38:45.940 That famous photo.

01:38:46.900 Yeah.

01:38:47.260 And he said, I'm so little.

01:38:49.980 And it was a sense of peace that came over him.

01:38:52.940 Right.

01:38:53.160 Now, there's 7% of the population that doesn't feel that peace.

01:38:56.220 According to Scott Barry Kaufman, it's dark triads.

01:38:59.680 Oh, yes.

01:39:00.340 Right.

01:39:00.480 They can't get outside themselves.

01:39:01.560 No, no, because of the narcissism.

01:39:02.900 Yeah, right.

01:39:03.420 The narcissism component of the dark triad or dark tetrad.

01:39:06.580 So, the problem with the dark tetrad types is they can't actually be in awe of themselves. 0.96

01:39:11.980 They cannot.

01:39:12.260 How annoying.

01:39:13.080 They cannot experience the happiness that comes from self-transcendence.

01:39:16.600 Right, right, right.

01:39:17.300 And that's why they're stuck in this, the land of Nod.

01:39:20.640 Yeah.

01:39:20.980 That's why they're stuck pacing and roaming the land of Nod.

01:39:24.720 Right, right. 0.98

01:39:25.580 They're the most miserable creatures for that reason. 0.99

01:39:28.120 Right, right. 0.96

01:39:28.280 That's why they've victimized the rest of us.

01:39:30.620 That's a good place to stop.

01:39:32.140 Well, and we're pretty much exactly at the time we should stop.

01:39:35.380 I think what we should do, what we will do on the Daily Wire side, for those of you who

01:39:39.640 might join us there, is I think we should talk more specifically about Harvard and about

01:39:45.320 the relationship.

01:39:46.900 I'd like to know more about your life, about how you're conducting your business and what

01:39:50.320 you're doing and what your plans are, and how that fits in with your academic strivings

01:39:55.280 and your role as a teacher at Harvard.

01:39:57.020 Right.

01:39:57.200 What you think of the, well, of the institution.

01:39:59.700 I was there in the 90s.

01:40:00.740 I loved it.

01:40:01.340 It was firing in all cylinders, as far as I was concerned, when I was there.

01:40:04.780 It isn't obvious to me that that's the case anymore.

01:40:07.160 And I'd like to talk about that.

01:40:08.740 And so, if you all would like to join us on the Daily Wire side for an additional half

01:40:12.920 an hour, please, you're more than welcome to do that.

01:40:16.140 We would appreciate the support as well.

01:40:18.300 So, thank you very much for coming here today and talking to me.

01:40:20.980 It was a pleasure.

01:40:21.700 Thank you, Jordan.

01:40:22.160 Yeah.

01:40:22.520 Much appreciated.

01:40:23.520 Likewise.

01:40:24.100 Yeah, yeah.

01:40:24.700 Great, great.

01:40:25.240 And thank you to all of you for your time and attention, the film crew here too in Scottsdale

01:40:29.300 and to the Daily Wire for making all of this accessible, possible, professional, and well-produced

01:40:35.760 because those are the attributes that they bring to bear on this enterprise.

01:40:40.260 One note is that I've been subscribing to the Daily Wire for years and highly recommend it.

01:40:45.380 What do you recommend about it?

01:40:46.780 I recommend that it's a well-produced and high-integrity organization.

01:40:54.340 With quality that one can count on, run by people who truly believe in what they're

01:40:58.900 doing and are mission-focused.

01:41:00.260 And there's not enough of that in the world.

01:41:02.060 Ah, well, there you go.

01:41:03.180 Well, that's been my experience working with the Daily Wire as well, so genuinely.

01:41:07.000 And I'm not saying that lightly because I'm very picky.

01:41:10.200 So, all right.

01:41:10.860 Thank you, everyone.

01:41:11.640 And thank you very much, sir.

01:41:12.840 Good to have you today.

01:41:13.980 You too.

01:41:14.340 You too.

01:41:23.740 You too.

01:41:25.080 I don't know.

01:41:26.120 I don't know.

01:41:26.900 You too.

01:41:27.060 I don't know.

01:41:28.320 You too.

01:41:29.160 You too.

01:41:29.440 I don't know.

01:41:30.040 I don't know.

01:41:30.880 You too.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 10, 2025

528. The Longevity of Happiness ｜ Dr. Arthur Brooks

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