The Peter Attia Drive - #226 ‒ The science of happiness

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:15.480 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.800 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health

00:00:24.600 and wellness, full stop. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen.

00:00:28.880 If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more

00:00:33.280 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level at

00:00:37.320 the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. My guest this week is Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a social scientist,

00:00:54.060 Harvard professor, bestselling author, columnist at the Atlantic, and host of the podcast,

00:00:59.380 How to Build a Happy Life with Arthur Brooks. He's the author of 12 books, including his most recent

00:01:04.540 book, the New York Times bestseller, From Strength to Strength. In this episode, we sit down and we

00:01:09.000 focus the conversation around happiness and how we define happiness, including talking about

00:01:13.720 enjoyment, sense of purpose, and satisfaction, kind of the trifecta of happiness. We also talk

00:01:18.920 about friendship, companionship, and envy, and the dangers of having a success addiction, something

00:01:24.300 I can't relate to at all. Just kidding. One thing I'll say before we start is that happiness can be

00:01:29.200 a much harder concept for people to address and to quote unquote fix than many of the other things

00:01:33.860 we talk about in the podcast, such as poor sleep or high ApoB or low muscle mass or strength and

00:01:39.020 things like that. However, I think Arthur is so eloquent in how he talks about this complex problem

00:01:43.700 in a way that we can all learn a lot from his words. I certainly have, and I've talked about

00:01:48.440 this elsewhere, that there are three books I've read this year that are not technical books that

00:01:54.200 have had a really profound way of getting me to think about the quality of life. And this is one

00:02:02.060 of them. The other two, I'll hopefully be interviewing the authors of those books as well. But for now,

00:02:07.740 we're going to focus on From Strength to Strength and the work of Arthur Brooks. So without further

00:02:11.260 delay, please enjoy my conversation with Arthur.

00:02:18.680 Well, Arthur, this is a first in that we're doing a repeat podcast. Although unfortunately,

00:02:24.840 this time we're not in person. The last time we did a wonderful podcast, we were in person and

00:02:30.140 I enjoy that even more. You want to tell everybody what happened?

00:02:32.980 Yeah, for sure. Hi, Peter. Nice to see you again. And I wish I were down in Austin where all the cool

00:02:36.440 kids live with you too. Showing up at your podcast studio last time, we had a great conversation for

00:02:42.360 a couple of hours and then learned afterward that we hadn't turned the sound on, which it turns out

00:02:46.960 you need for podcasting. You know, people can just stare at two bald guys for two hours looking like

00:02:55.100 they're talking, but that turns out to be not the most interesting programming. So we had a great time

00:02:59.280 together and now we're doing the part two. And we did have a great video from that first podcast

00:03:03.700 and we actually were able to get some people who could sign it. We even contemplated releasing it

00:03:09.700 with subtitles, but in the end we decided, ah, what the heck, let's just do it again, even though it

00:03:14.260 won't look as good because we'll be on video. The good news I think for the listener is though I have

00:03:20.140 a pretty good memory, I have an awful memory for podcasts. So when I record a podcast, if you asked me

00:03:27.620 two months later, what did we talk about? If I remember two things, that's a lot. So it's almost

00:03:32.980 like we're doing this from the beginning, at least for me, because I don't really remember what we

00:03:37.440 talked about. And I hope that that allows us to reproduce what I recall gestalt wise or valence wise

00:03:43.020 was a pretty positive discussion and a really enjoyable one. Yeah, me too. I agree. And I don't

00:03:47.120 remember exactly what we talked about, except it had to do with happiness and longevity and living a

00:03:52.000 prosperous, flourishing life. I see it by the way, also that when we were together last year,

00:03:56.060 turned me on to Ghia and you're drinking it right there. And I've been drinking it ever since too,

00:04:00.780 by the way, I've been on a constant diet of it. It's the best. It's really nice to be able to talk

00:04:04.620 about things where the company has no idea you're promoting it because I'm paying full retail for

00:04:09.800 this stuff, which is enjoyable. And yeah, I make no money off it, have no affiliation with it, but do

00:04:14.440 love it. And I always love when I can get somebody turned on to Ghia. So I think for folks who might not

00:04:20.160 be familiar with you at all, to understand the arc of what we want to talk about, which I think

00:04:27.040 there are a lot of things to talk about, but the biggest arc is sort of accepting the transitions

00:04:31.420 that are inevitable in life. I mean, if I were to put my finger on one thing that resonates the most,

00:04:36.400 and by the way, I went back and reread your book, you know, I'd read it months ago and we did the

00:04:40.040 thing and I was like, you know, the best thing for me to do to prepare is just to reread it.

00:04:43.260 That was really the part that stood out to me, especially when we get to the four stages of life that

00:04:48.840 you talk about, as I think about personally transitioning from the second to the third,

00:04:53.220 but you've lived many lives. I think for people to understand kind of that first life,

00:04:57.900 which happens to be a life that has a short half-life had you stuck with it indefinitely.

00:05:01.860 So talk a little bit about the background as a musician.

00:05:05.660 As a social scientist, you don't usually dig into the background of a guy who teaches behavioral

00:05:09.740 social science and fine classical music, but that's actually where I started. And that's where I

00:05:13.740 intended to finish. I intended to be a one act guy and to be, I wanted to be the greatest French

00:05:17.880 horn player in the world, which is a pretty weird ambition for most of the people listening,

00:05:21.640 I would imagine. But that was also my parents' ambition for me, for some reason. I started on

00:05:26.340 violin at four, piano at five, and I took up the French horn when I was eight and I was really good

00:05:30.380 at it, or I had a natural ability in it at least. And so I did it a lot. I did it to the exclusion of

00:05:36.740 nearly everything else, as a matter of fact. And when it came time to go to college, I had one

00:05:41.580 successful run at a year in college and then went pro because that's really what I wanted to do.

00:05:45.600 So at 19, I dropped out or kicked out, splitting hairs out of college. And I went on the road as a

00:05:51.120 classical musician. I played chamber music for six years all over the United States, all over the

00:05:55.300 world. Then I went to Barcelona where I was in the symphony orchestra. And then my plan was to become

00:05:59.860 a French horn soloist playing these great concerti of the greatest composers. And it just didn't work

00:06:04.920 out that way. And so by my late twenties, my mid twenties, I was in decline as a performer. My technique

00:06:10.980 was getting worse. It's not entirely clear why that was happening at this point,

00:06:14.100 but I had to make a plan to exit, to do the next thing. And so by my late twenties, I was in college

00:06:19.760 by correspondence, which I finished a month before my 30th birthday. Then did my master's degree at

00:06:24.820 night, finished up my horn career at 31, started my PhD. And that was the new phase, the next phase,

00:06:29.780 which was becoming a social scientist. So before we kind of exit that first phase,

00:06:33.460 I want to dig into that a little bit, because again, as you said, it's very foreign. I certainly

00:06:36.240 can't really appreciate what you're speaking about. And I suspect a lot of people listening can't

00:06:40.520 either. What is the arc of a French horn player and how many exceptional French horn player talents

00:06:48.540 can be consumed by the world? So for example, we were talking about baseball. You know, there are

00:06:52.640 hundreds of people who can be good enough to make a living. What is it with French horn players?

00:06:58.500 Well, classical musicians in general, there's about a 95% unemployment or underemployment rate

00:07:04.580 in the classical music industry. It's an absolute superstar industry. Now that's not like professional

00:07:08.800 sports. And so far as that people are not getting rich, the great soloists, the great opera singers,

00:07:13.640 the great conductors are pretty wealthy, but orchestra musicians are earning a middle-class,

00:07:18.520 upper middle-class income, but they're not really very money motivated. They want to do this almost

00:07:23.580 to the exclusion of anything else. And so what you find is that there are a few, let's say probably

00:07:29.420 about a hundred really great orchestras in the world, each one of which has a principal French horn

00:07:35.240 player and then four other French horn positions in those orchestras. And then a few other people,

00:07:40.460 a handful of other people are making a serious living in playing chamber music. And there are

00:07:43.920 usually about one or two French horn soloists in the world at any given time. So there are not that

00:07:49.420 many people making a living at it. And there are a lot of people who are trying. So it's weird,

00:07:52.660 you know, most people listening to us, they're like French horn player, what an exotic thing to want

00:07:56.300 to do. And yet there are plenty of people who are trying to do that, who are really motivated by the idea

00:08:01.340 of making that kind of music and are good at it and are taking every audition that they can.

00:08:05.620 And what kind of commitment was necessary to get to that level? How many hours a day were you

00:08:10.740 practicing as a teenager? For example, I was all in, I was practicing five, six hours a day,

00:08:15.660 plus playing in every ensemble I could possibly find. I was basically doing it to the exclusion of

00:08:20.920 almost everything else in my life. It was like being a gymnast. It was like being an athlete where

00:08:25.020 you practice as much as you can without doing damage to the musculature. So there's not just

00:08:30.380 diminishing returns for athletes. There's negative returns if you overtrain. And that's the same thing

00:08:35.400 that happens in classical music. You can get all kinds of repetitive stress injuries, et cetera,

00:08:39.560 et cetera, if you do that. But then the time that you're not actually actively practicing,

00:08:42.900 you're listening to music, you're learning the repertoire, you're thinking about what your craft

00:08:46.940 actually is. So the result of it is that it's almost every hour of the day is what you're doing.

00:08:51.640 You're thinking about your future. You're thinking about what you want to do. You're trying to get better

00:08:55.740 in your mind as much as in your lips and in your fingers to the craft. So it's very much like a

00:09:00.860 sports career, just that it's more fine motor skills as opposed to gross motor skills.

00:09:05.400 What distinguishes the best French horn player in the world from the hundredth best? I'm guessing I

00:09:12.840 wouldn't be able to distinguish them, but for the discerning ear, what is it that separates those two

00:09:18.200 people? It largely has to do with accuracy. So the French horn has a problem of physics insofar as

00:09:24.940 that the mouthpiece is smaller than a trumpet mouthpiece, but it has a very long, the tube is

00:09:29.300 as long as the tuba, which is the largest of the brass instruments. So by physics, it should

00:09:34.280 actually play in the low register, but by mouthpiece, it should actually play in the high

00:09:38.060 register. And the result of that is for anybody who knows the physics of these, of the harmonic

00:09:42.260 structure of these instruments, that the harmonics are very close together, meaning it's very easy to

00:09:46.600 miss notes. That's the reason for people who like classical music and they go to the orchestra,

00:09:50.440 the principal French horn, notwithstanding the fact that she or he is one of the best in the world,

00:09:54.700 is missing a lot of notes. It's just really, really hard to be accurate. The greatest,

00:09:58.580 greatest, greatest, greatest, they have some uncanny ability. It's sort of like Nolan Ryan,

00:10:03.120 who's able to hit a postage stamp at 98 miles an hour with a fastball when he's 40. That's the kind

00:10:09.480 of difference that you get, the freakish microscopic differences. Now, yeah, you probably wouldn't notice

00:10:15.100 the difference if you're not a big classical music buzz, and especially if you're not really into

00:10:19.240 the French horn. But if I went to an orchestra now and I heard the best French horn player in the

00:10:22.540 world versus the 100, I would notice the difference in a big hurry.

00:10:25.500 You mentioned in your mid-20s, if I sort of remember what you said correctly, you felt you

00:10:30.060 were in decline, or at least you'd peaked and you were now on the way down. Two thoughts on that are

00:10:34.900 two questions. The first is, is that the typical age at which a French horn player peaks? And secondly,

00:10:39.760 what is it you noticed that was changing?

00:10:42.820 The answer is I was peaking and declining early. Now, I've done this research subsequently as a social

00:10:47.260 scientist, not as a French horn player. I kind of knew casually, brass players,

00:10:51.280 the classical musicians in general, they tend to peak in terms of their physical qualities,

00:10:55.620 their ability to dominate the instrument in their late 30s. And you start to see a little bit of

00:11:00.020 drop off in their 40s and 50s. The greatest players in the world, you know, the greatest piano soloists

00:11:04.700 will still be touring and playing beautifully in the 70s, but they're not what they once were.

00:11:09.460 I mean, even in rock and roll, the great guitar players can shred at 40 very differently than they

00:11:15.020 can at, you know, now these days, you know, the great rock and rollers are all like 100 at this point.

00:11:19.200 The Rolling Stones are still on tour, but you heard Mick Jagger saying recently, he's reminding you

00:11:24.320 of what he was doing 57 years ago when I Can't Get No Satisfaction was released and was number one

00:11:30.260 on the charts. So it's usually late 30s, early 40s where the peak happens, then it's a slow decline.

00:11:35.620 I was declining much earlier than that. It's almost certainly having to do with a microscopic tear

00:11:40.400 in one of the lips, an injury. And that wasn't well known at the time, but there actually are

00:11:45.200 surgeries that brass players will get at this point to repair that. And had I been 25 years younger,

00:11:51.580 I certainly had a much longer career in music and much to my own detriment because I wound up going

00:11:57.100 on to something that's touching a lot more people, I think, in which I actually have more possibility

00:12:01.360 of doing something positive in the world. So within every, what seems like a tragedy at the time is

00:12:06.940 there's all kinds of opportunity.

00:12:08.900 Now, I've heard you say in the past that when you started going back to night school for college and

00:12:13.320 ultimately for your bachelor's and master's degree, you were a little bit ashamed. You're

00:12:16.560 kind of doing this in secret. Why is that?

00:12:19.180 Classical musicians think nothing else matters. It's a cult. It's not a profession. It's more like

00:12:23.140 a cult. My oldest son went to Princeton and my younger son is in the Marines. Those are cults too.

00:12:28.480 And so if you basically say to someone of your friends in the Marines, you know, I'm getting out,

00:12:31.580 but I'm going to re-up, but in the Navy, they'll laugh you out. You just wouldn't do that. Well,

00:12:35.600 that's what it's like in classical music. I remember one time I was hanging around with this group of

00:12:39.520 brass players and I was probably 28 years old or something. And it was, I knew the writing was on

00:12:44.640 the wall and I wasn't telling anybody. I was actually studying at night serendipitously. And

00:12:48.920 this woman who hangs out with us, she's also a French horn player. She says, I got an announcement.

00:12:53.320 We're like, Hey, what, what happened? You win an audition, man. She says, nah, I decided I'm going

00:12:57.360 to leave the business. I just got a full scholarship, the university of Miami, the medical school.

00:13:01.440 I'm going to become a surgeon. And she leaves after a little while. We're all sitting around going,

00:13:05.400 see, she didn't have it. It's like, she's going to become a surgeon. That's a big deal. But it

00:13:10.240 wasn't to us. It was just, obviously she hadn't had it. So she had to quit her crummy, low paying

00:13:14.920 French horn playing career to settle for becoming a life-saving doctor like you, Peter.

00:13:20.860 So what did you study for your bachelor's?

00:13:23.060 Economics. And I didn't intend to do that. I actually intended to get my bachelor's degree in

00:13:27.160 some area of the humanities or maybe even composition. I was a pretty avid composer and I thought that

00:13:32.360 that's what I would do. But I took an economics class and it just opened my eyes. I mean,

00:13:36.200 just the statistically based social sciences, it felt like I had a magic wand or some actually

00:13:40.980 more like a crystal ball. That's a better metaphor. I mean, I could see things about the world.

00:13:45.540 And furthermore, I could actually analyze behavior in ways that I never, I didn't even think was

00:13:49.780 possible. It felt like I was, you know, those whole world of information to be able to generate

00:13:54.340 information was being open to me. I was just, my mind was blown. I was completely hooked and I wound up

00:13:59.380 becoming an economist, you know, so talk about the sublime to the dismal.

00:14:04.240 Did you go straight from bachelor's to master's? At what point did you formally hang up your French

00:14:09.400 horn and say, I'm going to pursue the PhD? Where did that occur in the timeline?

00:14:13.720 So I finished my bachelor's degree completely by correspondence. And in those days I was faxing in

00:14:19.340 my assignments and buying course materials over the phone from the bookstores of these universities

00:14:24.400 that offered these correspondence school courses. And I was banking the credits at the state

00:14:28.620 college in New Jersey at the time that I never visited. I never saw the place until I went there.

00:14:33.020 They gave me an honorary doctorate 20 years later and I went and gave the graduation speech.

00:14:37.380 I mean, what's the graduation for correspondence school? Is it like 10 guys around a conference

00:14:41.280 table? It turns out there was 3000 people in the Trenton ice rink. It was fun. I was wild. I mean,

00:14:47.020 it was mostly first generation college graduates, a lot of active military men. I was very proud that

00:14:51.880 day to be among that group of really sort of American life entrepreneurs. It made me very proud.

00:14:57.040 I went on to the state, the local state university, and at night did my master's degree,

00:15:01.880 a one-year master's degree. And at that point, I mean, it was fish or cut bait. And so I left

00:15:07.800 music at that point after that and went away residentially, more traditionally started my PhD

00:15:12.560 and over the next four years finished my PhD. And what was the focus of your PhD?

00:15:16.980 My PhD was in quantitative policy analysis. So I was doing mathematical modeling and applied

00:15:21.340 microeconomics for public policy. I was working at the same time as a military operations research

00:15:26.020 analyst for the RAND Corporation. I was doing theater level combat modeling for the Air Force.

00:15:30.980 So I was doing large scale, early artificial intelligence algorithms to link computers up

00:15:37.640 together to simulate battle situations across a lot of scenarios. So I was learning a lot of math

00:15:43.200 modeling. And that was a real weakness for me was my mathematics and statistics. So working in that

00:15:47.780 area was critically important for me to beef that up and become a well-rounded scholar in the area where I

00:15:53.480 previously had weakness. What did you do right after that? You became a professor,

00:15:57.280 if I'm not mistaken, before you went to AEI, right?

00:15:59.320 No, no. I was 10 years as a professor. I graduated when I was 34 for my PhD and I went to

00:16:05.080 Georgia State University in Atlanta for three years. And then I went to, I was able to secure

00:16:09.980 a position at Syracuse, which for public policy is the best school in the country. That was a really

00:16:14.400 great opportunity. I'll always be grateful to that place for giving me that opportunity. And I moved to

00:16:18.400 Syracuse and we spent the next seven years at Syracuse. I did what academics do. I was writing

00:16:22.460 academic journal articles, refereed 14 readers, highly technical, writing papers that were

00:16:28.940 mathematically so complex that now at age 58, I can't read them. I actually don't know what I was

00:16:35.860 talking about at 35, which speaks to a lot of what I do now, which is the changing structure of the

00:16:41.680 prefrontal cortex and our ability to learn and perform at different phases of life. What are we

00:16:45.900 good at then? And what are we good at now? I want to come back to that because of course,

00:16:49.660 that's really the important hook here, but I just want to go to this next chapter because I want to

00:16:53.900 understand when you understood this shift in intelligence. So from Syracuse, you then went to

00:17:01.220 AEI. You were the CEO for about a decade, if I'm not mistaken, before leaving to join the faculty at

00:17:07.780 Harvard where you are today. At what point during this journey did you begin to understand what it is

00:17:15.260 that you've now written about in Strength to Strength? For those who don't know, the American

00:17:18.720 Enterprise Institute is a think tank in Washington, D.C. A think tank is like a university without

00:17:23.660 students. It's completely dedicated to high quality academic research, but in the service of better

00:17:29.220 public policy. So it's in the middle of Washington, D.C. It's one of the oldest think tanks in the world.

00:17:33.440 It started in 1938 during the Great Recession, the Great Depression, to pull the United States and the

00:17:38.940 world, they thought, out of the Great Depression using the tools of the American free enterprise

00:17:43.080 system. But they had to bring together the greatest economists and later foreign policy experts and

00:17:47.540 health and education experts. So I had 300 employees. I had to raise about $50 million a year

00:17:52.940 in philanthropy. You know, my job was like running for the Senate and never getting elected. For 10

00:17:58.460 years, it was actually kind of a slog. I mean, it was an 80 hour a week CEO job. And I noticed about

00:18:03.240 halfway through that my skills were kind of changing. I was getting worse at certain things and I was

00:18:08.460 getting better at other things. I didn't actually understand why that was. I found that I was getting

00:18:12.520 worse at thinking up brand spanking new clever ideas and I was getting much better at explaining

00:18:18.060 things. I was becoming effectively a better teacher, better instructor, but I was worse as a

00:18:23.980 classic innovator. When I had first come to AEI, I was developing new programs. I was coming up with

00:18:28.840 these new big policy and research ideas. And about halfway through, I was noticing that what I was

00:18:34.560 really good at was synthesizing everybody else's ideas and putting them together into a relatively

00:18:40.300 compelling argument about how we should do things, which was interesting to me. But it also occurred

00:18:45.220 to me that there was probably more to it than that. I got to work on where this was going to lead

00:18:49.760 in my own life such that I could exploit my own strengths optimally. And I started looking at the

00:18:54.660 research on different forms of intelligence as people get older. What it led me to conclude based on

00:19:00.640 the work of a lot of social psychologists that were doing intelligence work in the 1960s and 70s,

00:19:06.740 actually it was older work out of the UK, primarily the work of Raymond Cattell, is that early on we have

00:19:12.860 a fluid intelligence, which is largely our innovative capacity based on working memory, where we can do a

00:19:18.560 lot of things alone and come up with brand new ideas based on kind of limited background. Later on, we're less

00:19:25.180 good at that, but we're much better at synthesizing ideas. We have a vast library, much less working memory,

00:19:31.080 but a much better vocabulary pattern recognition and ability to synthesize ideas of other people,

00:19:37.160 which is called crystallized intelligence. Now, what we find is that fluid intelligence tends to peak

00:19:42.240 in the late 30s, which is, by the way, why a lot of classical musicians are peaking in their late 30s is

00:19:47.700 because fluid intelligence is not just about writing mathematical formulas. It's about doing a lot of

00:19:54.180 things that make you great with your 10,000 hours of practice and your mastery, et cetera, et cetera. And then it

00:19:59.200 declines in your 40s and 50s, but your crystallized intelligence, your teaching capacity, your

00:20:03.580 explaining capacity, your pattern recognition, your management of other people, that those things get

00:20:08.620 better through your 40s and 50s and 60s and stay high in your 70s and 80s. When I saw that, I thought,

00:20:13.400 hmm, what am I going to do? What's my plan so that I can exploit that for the rest of my career? And

00:20:19.080 that's actually what led me to quit my CEO job and to do what I do now, which is writing and speaking

00:20:23.820 and teaching, really using my creative capacities to mix ideas together about happiness, which is my

00:20:30.340 main area of focus and research. Now, these terms fluid and crystallized intelligence, the first time

00:20:35.780 I ever encountered them, I think is about four years ago in an Atlantic piece that you wrote. I think it

00:20:41.880 was in the Atlantic. Obviously, this was a precursor to the book. Does that sound about right? Was that

00:20:46.100 about four years ago? July of 2019. When I first wrote that piece, I was doing this research for myself.

00:20:52.400 It was me search, Peter, which is what we all do. I mean, it's like people think, ah, Peter Atiyah,

00:20:57.020 the great longevity doctor. Well, Peter Atiyah wants to live a long time with good lifespan and

00:21:00.820 healthspan and happiness span. And so that's why he's doing this work. And that's exactly why I was

00:21:04.940 doing that work as well. I found that it was so useful to audiences that I wrote it up for the

00:21:09.420 Atlantic, how to go from strength to strength in your life. That article was one of the 50 most read

00:21:14.520 articles of the entire year of all publications in the world. And I thought, huh, turns out I'm not the only

00:21:19.920 one who's thinking about this. And so I wrote it up in a book over the next couple of years and

00:21:24.660 published it in February of 2022. Now, what I don't recall, though, I'm sure you explained it

00:21:29.640 in the article. Are those terms fluid and crystallized terms you came up with, or are those

00:21:34.560 in the literature and you're simply bringing them to our attention? Those are in the literature. They

00:21:39.100 were coined by Raymond Cattell, the social psychologist I talked about later. And his findings

00:21:43.420 were replicated. And of course, the social psychology then expanded the neuroscience

00:21:48.120 literature. This is the way that the world is going. I mean, social psychology was kind of the

00:21:52.940 whole show through the 50s and 60s and 70s. And since about the 90s, and especially this century,

00:21:59.120 neuroscience is really getting into the game. So the neuroscientists have started to replicate

00:22:03.000 these two curves and finding the strength and some of the neurophysiological reasons for these

00:22:08.260 strengths that are occurring as well. In your book, you open, I think you open with the story

00:22:12.420 about being on an airplane, sitting in front of an older gentleman who's, well, I'll let you tell

00:22:17.760 the story. I want to hear the story. And I'm also curious where that experience occurred in your

00:22:21.920 personal evolution of this. I was thinking halfway through my time as a CEO, you know, we're kind of,

00:22:28.540 where does it go? You run a company. I mean, you know what it means to actually run a business,

00:22:32.580 but sometimes you think I'm going to do my homework and turn it in and things are going to get better.

00:22:36.800 And then it's going to stop. Well, when and under what circumstances and what does that mean?

00:22:41.780 What is the end goal? What is my intention with all of that? And it's very funny. It's, I mean,

00:22:46.700 that's a, I remember feeling a kind of an existential crisis about that. And I was thinking

00:22:50.540 about it a lot. And around that time, I was doing what I always did, which was sit on a plane with my

00:22:55.760 laptop. And I was coming back on a long cross-country flight from LA to DC. It was a flight that leaves LA

00:23:02.120 at five o'clock in the afternoon, gets in about one o'clock in the morning in Dulles. And I took it a lot.

00:23:06.580 And one night I was listening to this guy telling his wife that he might as well be dead.

00:23:13.320 And his wife was consoling. He was very disconsolate. I couldn't quite make out his words,

00:23:17.020 but her words were very penetrating. So I was just hearing the answers. Oh, don't say it would be

00:23:20.540 better if you were dead. And then it's not true. Nobody remembers you or cares about you or loves

00:23:24.840 you anymore. It was just awful. And I thought this guy is somebody who's not Peter Atiyah. I mean,

00:23:30.720 this is somebody who he hasn't lived up to his own personal standards. He hasn't had the opportunities.

00:23:34.860 He hasn't pursued the education and started the business. And now it's kind of near the end. I

00:23:38.240 could tell by their voices that they were elderly. And at the end of the flight, I was kind of curious

00:23:43.100 just to get a little look. And the lights went on and we all stood up and I turned around. It was

00:23:46.880 one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody who is not controversial. He's not some

00:23:52.720 actor or politician. This is somebody who's justifiably considered a hero by many millions of

00:23:58.860 people for his achievements, his accomplishments in the 1970s, 1980s. And before that as well,

00:24:04.740 and he evidently is living a real life of regret because those times are long past. And I got this

00:24:12.000 window onto his soul. Now, when we were leaving the plane, the pilot's like, thanks for flying

00:24:15.320 United, folks, like I was doing. And he looks through me like a pane of glass. I mean, why

00:24:19.280 wouldn't he? He sees the guy behind me and he recognizes him. And he says, sir, you've been my

00:24:23.420 hero since I was a little boy. And I turn around and he's beaming with pride and joy. And I thought to

00:24:29.000 myself, which is the real guy? And then I had a selfish thought, which is how can I be not that

00:24:35.640 first guy? How can I structure? I'm not going to be the hero of the plane, Peter, but I'm trying to do

00:24:41.600 a lot with my life. You know, I'm trying to live to the max to create a, have a contribution to achieve

00:24:47.500 a lot. And which has some pathologies attached to it as well. I write about this in my research now

00:24:51.960 about the success addiction and the workaholism that's attendant to that and the neuroscience behind

00:24:56.980 those addictions as well. But what can I do so that the rug is not pulled out from under me?

00:25:01.940 And I'm telling my long suffering wife, Esther on a plane in 30 years that I might as well be dead.

00:25:07.120 That's what really led to this research project that led to the book.

00:25:11.560 Let's define happiness. I don't think I understand what it really is. And given that it's your

00:25:18.180 business, effectively, it's what you teach. It's what you write about. It's the thing you think about

00:25:25.120 as much as I think about the longevity component of biology. I'm sure you get asked this question

00:25:30.960 all the time, and I'm sure you've got a 30-second answer, and I'm sure you've got a three-hour answer.

00:25:34.960 Take it in any direction you like. I've got a semester-long answer, which is the class I teach

00:25:38.780 at the Harvard Business School, which is what is it and how do you get it? The reason for that is that

00:25:43.360 by the time my students reach me, my graduate students at Harvard reach me, a lot of them are

00:25:47.640 realizing that the world's promises are empty. That, you know, the money, power, pleasure, and fame

00:25:53.040 that are supposed to bring you undying happiness are false promises. They're a bill of goods.

00:25:58.320 They could be instrumental to getting what you want, but they can't intrinsically give you the

00:26:03.100 satisfaction that you desire. So I start on the first day of class. I say, okay, guys, I mean,

00:26:07.260 you spent all your elective points getting into the class because they have a competitive system

00:26:11.300 to get into these electives, and the class fills in like nine seconds. It's happiness, after all.

00:26:16.080 Free candy, kids. And there's hundreds of people on the waiting list for this class. I say, okay,

00:26:20.360 you made a commitment to getting this class. You must know what happiness is. As I go around,

00:26:24.180 I cold call them. What's happiness? They'll say, it's that feeling I get on Thanksgiving and,

00:26:29.620 you know, yada, yada, yada, feelings, feelings. Wrong. Happiness is not a feeling any more than

00:26:34.400 your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. The feeling of happiness is evidence of

00:26:39.360 happiness. Now, we measure happiness in all sorts of very complicated and very simple ways.

00:26:44.240 And one of the things that we know is that all of the people who are really happy,

00:26:47.480 who have a lot of happy feelings, but also have a lot of satisfaction and contentment with their

00:26:50.920 lives, they're getting abundance and balance across three dimensions. And so, this is the

00:26:56.700 definition of happiness. Now, think about this like if I were to say, hey, Peter, what is the

00:27:00.260 Thanksgiving dinner? You'd say, well, it's carbohydrates, proteins, and fat. You know,

00:27:04.220 you'd say there's the three macronutrients of all food. And, you know, we're always trying to get

00:27:07.780 our macros in order. Forget lifespan. Let's talk about health span. And I say, let's take it even

00:27:12.840 farther to happiness span. So, let's get our literal macronutrients in order for health span.

00:27:17.140 Let's get our happiness span in order with the macronutrients of happiness. They are

00:27:20.640 enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness. If you don't

00:27:27.480 have those things in balance and abundance, you will not report being a happy person. Now,

00:27:32.120 this is different than unhappiness, which is another entire subject. Believe it or not,

00:27:35.940 happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're different phenomena. So, we're just talking

00:27:40.860 about happiness here. To be a truly happy person, you need to enjoy your life. And that requires not

00:27:46.940 pleasure. It's pleasure plus elevation. It's pleasure plus metacognition. You know, Thanksgiving

00:27:53.160 dinner fills your belly and tastes good. That's pleasure. But the experience that you have of

00:27:58.280 consuming the Thanksgiving dinner with other people and having a memory that you can last forever,

00:28:01.780 that's enjoyment. And so, it's a much more elevated experience than pleasure. Satisfaction,

00:28:06.340 which is super fleeting and troublesome. And, you know, as Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no

00:28:11.580 satisfaction. The truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. There's an entire research literature

00:28:16.680 on that that I've participated in on the problem with satisfaction, but it's the joy and reward for

00:28:22.440 a job well done and a goal met. You know, that elation from actually meeting a goal. And last but not

00:28:28.300 least is purpose, is meaning in life. I talk an awful lot about the coherence, the significance,

00:28:33.940 the direction, the meaning of meaning. And it gets back to a lot of the great philosophy,

00:28:38.460 but we can also measure it. I have a few diagnostic questions that I ask for the clients who come to me

00:28:42.900 and they'd lack purpose in their life. You know, the questions I ask are, why were you born?

00:28:47.580 And for what are you willing to die? And if you can't answer one or both of those questions,

00:28:52.100 you have a serious meaning problem. We got to dig in and actually to solve that particular problem,

00:28:55.380 but that's it. I mean, these are the three macronutrients, either the protein,

00:28:58.720 carbohydrates, and fat of happiness or enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

00:29:01.740 There's so much I want to touch on there. I'll start with the latter. I have to be honest with

00:29:05.560 you. And I've thought about this a lot in terms of purpose. I literally can only think of one thing.

00:29:10.780 And I suspect a lot of people will think of this, which is kids. I think that's probably the only

00:29:17.660 thing I'm, I would say I have a real purpose for that I would die for in a second and think nothing

00:29:22.940 of. Is it bad that I don't have a higher purpose than that? It sort of depends on what the higher

00:29:28.680 purpose means. One of the things that you find is that one of the habits of the happiest people,

00:29:33.740 think of this as the dishes in the happiness meal, as opposed to the macronutrients in the

00:29:37.500 happiness meal. The happiest people, they all have a transcendental understanding of life.

00:29:42.480 It's just to say that they have an understanding of life bigger than themselves. The most miserable

00:29:47.140 people, the people who lack happiness and have a lot of unhappiness, they're focusing on me,

00:29:51.460 me, me, me. I mean, the philosophers talk about the I self and the me self.

00:29:54.940 And the I self is outward looking. It's observational. It's sort of Zen. The me self

00:30:00.520 is reflective of the outside world. It has a lot to do with social comparison. It has a lot to do

00:30:05.440 with the micro circumstances, you know, like my job, my money, my career, my friends, my house,

00:30:11.920 my mortgage, my commute, me, me. It's just so boring. And a transcendental understanding of life

00:30:17.140 is key to a happy life because you need peace. You need perspective. You need to zoom out. When the

00:30:22.740 Dalai Lama says you are one in seven billion, what he's saying is not that you're insignificant or

00:30:27.840 you're the spec. What he's saying is that you need to stop focusing on yourself so you can actually get

00:30:32.560 some relief once in a while. So that might be the higher purpose, but it's just a transcendental

00:30:37.700 purpose and understanding of something bigger than yourself. So that's another thing. And I know you

00:30:42.360 have that. I know you think about things that are bigger than you. And part of that is your family

00:30:46.300 and part of that's your kids. But part of that is an understanding of the universe.

00:30:48.680 Coming back to the kids thing, I think one of my greatest fears of aging is less about the physical

00:30:56.440 changes of aging and more about kids being out of the house. I think a lot of parents probably feel

00:31:03.380 that way, which is it's so enjoyable to have young kids around, even though it's hard, it's like a two

00:31:07.700 edged sword. But I can't imagine how quiet a house would be without them. And I don't know, sometimes I

00:31:14.120 think I'm not really sure how enjoyable life would be when they're gone, because when they're gone,

00:31:19.320 they're gone. You know, recently I posted something on Instagram that I found really depressing,

00:31:22.520 which was a chart of the fraction of time that people spend with others in their life over the

00:31:28.940 course of their life. So it's kind of like the X axis is time and the Y axis is percent spent with

00:31:34.460 each entity and its various curves. And the one that just depressed the hell out of me was time with

00:31:39.040 your kids, which basically corresponds to once they turn 18, it just plummets. Now you've got

00:31:46.060 kids that are, you have three kids, right? Yeah. My three kids have grown up. Youngest is 19

00:31:49.540 in Spain in college. I know all about how the empty nest works. And there were times, I mean,

00:31:54.900 like I've been in your house and it's, there's a lot of Legos on the ground and it's, there's a lot

00:31:58.740 of chaos that comes from little kids. I remember that. And my wife and I, we said, you know, what's it

00:32:02.780 going to be like when actually, you know, they grow up and move out. And it is very different and it's

00:32:07.120 very disconcerting and it's kind of new to us, quite frankly. But the key is, and this is one

00:32:12.420 of the most important things for a happy life is a partnership with somebody who will be the last

00:32:17.900 person on whom you lay your eyes as you take your dying breath. That's really, really important.

00:32:22.160 A companion and love that is your wife. That turns out to be much more indicative of your happiness

00:32:28.940 than actually getting the developing and having a continuing relationship with kids because your

00:32:32.820 kids are turning into different people every single year. I mean, that's super fun and that's

00:32:36.760 super interesting, but that's actually not the key. The people who suffer the most from empty

00:32:40.900 nest syndrome is not the empty nest. It's the fact that they're only with one other bird and they

00:32:45.820 don't really like that bird very much. That's the real problem is when it comes in. And that's one of

00:32:50.840 the things that I talk about with my students. And, and by the way, I'm doing lots of executive

00:32:54.620 teaching these days. And it's what I'm talking about with people our age too, is the goal of your

00:33:00.200 marriage is not passion. It's friendship. This is the goal. You must be close friends,

00:33:06.760 ideally best friends with your spouse, such that your kids, they grow up and they move away. And

00:33:12.260 then you have your grandkids. I'm probably gonna have grandkids with them. My oldest son is married.

00:33:16.160 They're going to have kids quick. I bet. I mean, I don't know. You can tell that I'm projecting and

00:33:19.960 praying about this, but, but you know, then I'll have grandkids and it'll be a different experience,

00:33:23.780 but I'm going to be with my wife Esther and tell death to us part. So that has to be the juice of

00:33:29.320 the relationship where the love that actually makes true happiness and love truly is the great

00:33:33.560 secret of happiness. That's the one saving grace is, as I feel very fortunate that my wife and I are,

00:33:39.000 we joke that we're the best roommates in the world. I think we'll have a lot to enjoy in that

00:33:43.180 transition. Is the implication of that though, Arthur, that, because I don't think it is, but how do we

00:33:48.100 reconcile then a person who chooses not to have a partner? There are some people who do really,

00:33:52.740 really well on their own that, you know, introverts who like to live alone, for example,

00:33:55.980 and loneliness is not the same thing as solitude. Isolation and solitude are very, very different

00:34:01.180 phenomena. By the way, they're neurocognitively different phenomena. They affect the brain in

00:34:05.540 different ways. And so isolation is always bad, but solitude is not. As a matter of fact, we all

00:34:10.760 need it. We need it in different levels. That's point one. Point two. And actually this is based on

00:34:14.900 the harvest. I'm sorry, just to interrupt you for a sec, Arthur, you can be lonely in a relationship

00:34:19.600 and you can be in solitude and not be lonely. Absolutely. One of the greatest predictors of

00:34:23.880 divorce is partners who are lonely while living together. And this gets back to the big danger of

00:34:29.060 the empty nest syndrome is that the only thing you have in common is your kids. And that one point of

00:34:34.480 commonality disappears and you're sitting across the table, blinking at each other during dinner,

00:34:38.240 not talking because you literally don't have anything to talk about. That's metastatically awful

00:34:43.200 for a relationship. And so that's why it's critically important that couples have something in

00:34:47.920 common besides their kids, that they're practicing their religion together. They're

00:34:51.960 practicing interest together. They're reading the same things. They're on the same philosophical

00:34:56.140 journey together. I mean, one of the things that I talk about with couples is that they should

00:35:01.240 develop philosophical interests in common. They're talking about deep things. The gold standards

00:35:06.920 that your kids are like, ah, mom and dad are talking about Kierkegaard again or whatever. I mean,

00:35:11.820 it's got to be something that's bigger than did you change his diaper? That's not going to be

00:35:16.380 something you have in common forever. And you're going to be lonely inside your relationship.

00:35:19.900 The second big point, however, is that whereas most of the truly happy people, as they get older,

00:35:25.120 they do have a spousal partner where that's companion in terms of its love, which also has

00:35:29.700 some passion, but the companionate part is ascendant throughout your marriage. Whereas the passion part

00:35:35.060 is not as high as it used to be. And that's completely okay. That's healthy, normal, and actually

00:35:39.640 advisable because it's more sustainable over the long run. But some people are very happy and don't have

00:35:45.660 that. What do they have in common? Very, very close, personal, lifelong friends. So here's the

00:35:51.480 key. If you don't have a spouse, you need real friends. These are people who know your secrets,

00:35:56.860 who would take your 2 a.m. phone call and that you talk to a lot. Now, that doesn't mean that if

00:36:02.240 you're married, you don't need that. Because when I talk to especially men, men are horrible at real

00:36:06.860 friendships. They're the worst. You know, they got lots of deal friends, but no real friends a lot of

00:36:11.200 the time, especially if they're really successful in business. And so I'll say, okay, name two guys

00:36:16.640 or whoever who are real friends besides your spouse. And they're like, yeah, so-and-so and so-and-so.

00:36:22.000 I'll say, well, when's the last time you talked to him? He's like, I don't know, four months ago.

00:36:25.140 Not a close friend. That's just the case. And so you've got to work on these things for sure,

00:36:30.020 for a lot of reasons besides the fact that it's just healthy and good. You also might at some point be

00:36:34.600 left alone if you're widowed. And you don't want to be alone in the world under those circumstances.

00:36:39.100 That's really corrosive. That's one of the reasons that men do so poorly when they lose

00:36:43.140 their wives to death. A lot of them don't have real friendships to backfill any of this need

00:36:47.080 in their souls. Why? Well, actually, before I ask you the gender differences there, can you give me

00:36:52.140 a few other characteristics or features that differentiate deal friends from real friends?

00:36:57.240 Yeah. So this is actually an Aristotelian notion, believe it or not. And we do a lot of this stuff in

00:37:00.800 our mathematical social sciences as well. But all the things that we do in behavioral social sciences now,

00:37:06.240 all we're doing is we're just exposing the ancients to empirical scrutiny. We're just testing whether

00:37:11.880 or not Aristotle was right, which he always is. So Aristotle wrote a lot about friendships. And he

00:37:16.260 talked about these escalating levels of friendship in terms of the satisfaction that they bring and

00:37:21.380 the virtue that they bring to our lives. The lowest level is the friendships of transaction.

00:37:25.920 So these are friendships where people work together. And they're really, you're a shirt manufacturer

00:37:29.300 and you've got a guy who sells you cloth. And you're friends. You probably really are. I mean,

00:37:33.460 you like him. He likes you. You're really friendly with each other. You take care not to offend each

00:37:36.920 other. But if you stop making shirts, you're probably not going to continue that relationship.

00:37:41.080 Above that are relationships of admiration or beauty where you admire each other. And that's a

00:37:45.780 really good thing, too. But that's dependent on a particular quality. The perfect friendship or the

00:37:50.140 friendship of virtue is just inherently satisfying. You'll like being together. Frequently, it'll revolve

00:37:56.700 around a third kind of useless thing like baseball. This is what guys do. It's like, I don't know.

00:38:01.800 What do you guys do together? We build birdhouses or whatever it happens to be. And it's that third

00:38:06.580 thing that is the focus. But what you're doing in parallel is developing a very beautiful friendship,

00:38:12.740 a very positive link. And that's what these real friendships have in common. They're intrinsically

00:38:17.700 satisfying and they're frequently focused on the cosmic third thing. It doesn't have to be useless,

00:38:22.200 by the way. I mean, I have a very close friend. One of my very closest friends is in Atlanta and we have

00:38:27.720 the same religion. And we talk about that a lot. Our discussions about that are quite deep. And he

00:38:31.740 also wants to know what's going on with my marriage and my kids. And he knows my secrets is the bottom

00:38:35.660 line. You alluded to something that I think most people intuitively would appreciate, but I'm curious

00:38:40.220 as to why. What is it about men that makes it harder for us to have those really deep friendships?

00:38:47.120 Again, if I were to consider my parents, I don't think my father has one such friendship. I think my

00:38:52.440 mother has many, really many. She's rich in friendship. Maybe they're an extreme example.

00:38:57.280 Why do you think that is? Well, there's some generational differences between men and women,

00:39:00.680 and there are probably some intrinsic differences as well. The generational differences largely have

00:39:04.720 to do with the fact that in conventional family setups, I mean, I'm going to guess that your dad was

00:39:09.600 super hardworking. He probably was busting his pick all the way through your childhood. He put you

00:39:14.180 through college. He did all that stuff. And he knew that he was gone all day. And that if he went

00:39:19.120 out to goof around with his buddies after work, he was stealing from his family. And so he came home.

00:39:24.480 The truth was that his intimate relationships were in his family and his business relationships

00:39:29.180 were at work. And there was a firewall between the two such that he could afford to spend adequate

00:39:34.080 time or he had adequate time to spend with his family. And so that was a very traditional situation.

00:39:38.000 Meanwhile, your mom was making sure that you kids were properly brought up and you had friends

00:39:43.380 and she knew your friends' mothers. And the result was that she was reinforcing friendship

00:39:47.760 relationships and therefore getting better at them. Now, the distressing thing is that friendship

00:39:52.980 is a skill that requires practice. It's like a muscle and it will atrophy. You can get worse and

00:39:58.700 worse at friendships. And so I'll meet these 60-year-old guys, guys who are a little older

00:40:01.820 than me, and they'll be like, what do you want me to do? Call up some other dude and ask for a play

00:40:06.020 date? I mean, how does one do this? I don't know how to do this. I haven't had a real friend

00:40:09.740 since I was in college. And ever since then, then I got married and had my family and I worked

00:40:14.640 really, really hard and now I'm lonely. And so what do you expect me to do? And the answer is

00:40:18.080 you have to actually learn how to make and maintain friends, real friendships. And that's a skill that

00:40:24.400 a lot of men lose because of our traditional social circumstances.

00:40:28.700 So what do you say to that guy? So the 60-year-old guy comes to you and let's make this a dramatic case.

00:40:33.600 You know, he and his wife have divorced or she's died. Kids are grown up. And using the example you

00:40:38.080 said, I mean, this is a guy who hasn't had an intimate friendship with somebody in 40 years.

00:40:42.960 And let's say he's bought into what you're saying, which is a crucial part of his happiness

00:40:49.000 for the remainder of his life is going to be intimacy through friendships. And maybe some

00:40:54.640 of those are not platonic. Maybe he meets another woman, but let's focus on the platonic side of that.

00:40:58.840 The truth is, it's not an easy nut to crack, but you have to do the work like anything else. You can,

00:41:03.820 we know that there's enough plasticity in the brain and there's enough emotional plasticity as well

00:41:08.900 that we can learn all kinds of new skills. People can learn lots of skills. They can't be as good

00:41:14.040 playing the cello starting at 70 as if they started at seven. We know that to be a fact,

00:41:18.300 but you can get plenty good at stuff. And that includes social skills, but you have to be committed

00:41:24.460 to doing the work. What a lot of guys want is great. That's a good advice, professor. You know,

00:41:28.780 I'm going to go out and get some friends. Like it's going to take time. It took your wife years and

00:41:32.740 years and years and years to build up her friend group. It's going to take you some time as well,

00:41:36.960 but you actually have to start putting in the work. And that has to do with actually making

00:41:40.280 yourself available and vulnerable to other people. That means actually hanging out with other people

00:41:46.100 and saying, and taking the time. I mean, a lot of guys will be like, I don't want to go have dinner

00:41:49.600 with some guy. Well, you got to go have dinner with some guy. And furthermore, you actually have

00:41:54.400 to ask that other guy questions about his kids and be interested in that other person. And that sounds

00:41:59.500 so obvious, but these are skills that a lot of men have lost or never really cultivated over the course

00:42:04.060 of their lives. And so you can go through these basic social skills and they're sort of mystifying

00:42:09.020 to a lot of guys, but once they do it, I've seen case after case, because I've been coaching people

00:42:13.040 on this now for a couple of years since this research has started to get some prominence.

00:42:17.560 And I've seen amazing progress from people who are older than me.

00:42:21.720 Let's go back to the three components of happiness. The one that we didn't really touch on is

00:42:25.400 satisfaction. You've obviously alluded to the Rolling Stones tune, which speaks to how fleeting it is.

00:42:30.820 I wonder then why it's included, because whenever I think of satisfaction, I echo that sentiment,

00:42:38.920 which is I'll have some goal. And I can't think of a single goal I've had, including ones that took

00:42:44.900 me years to achieve, where the moment I achieved it, I don't think I'm being facetious to say within

00:42:50.380 five minutes, I'm thinking about the next one. And I mean, that's a very depressing thought.

00:42:54.800 So given the fleeting nature of satisfaction, why is it even a component of happiness?

00:43:00.820 Well, you're not a typical case, Peter. And part of the reason is because you're doing an unusual and

00:43:07.540 unusually difficult success-oriented thing. Not only are you working for your own success,

00:43:13.380 you're working for your client's success. You're an addict for your success and you're an addict

00:43:17.460 for other people's success. Now let me talk about a more typical profile. Most people are not going

00:43:22.160 through life thinking, I'm going to get this great big thing and then running for the next great big

00:43:27.900 thing. And next great big thing after that, most people are not thinking about their achievements

00:43:32.120 in exactly the same way or the same scale as you. Most people have sources of satisfaction,

00:43:36.920 which is a reward for getting to the end of the day, a reward that feels like a real reward

00:43:43.640 to get through the week and to get to Saturday and to be able to relax. And those are real sources

00:43:48.420 of satisfaction. Now you can blow that up. You can bloat that to the point where your version of

00:43:54.060 Saturday is some huge business milestone. Your podcast now has 200,000 weekly downloads. This

00:44:02.280 is just so out of proportion to the ordinary experience. Now that doesn't mean that the

00:44:07.180 ordinary person can master satisfaction and get it in a reliable way either. We all fall prey to the

00:44:12.980 problem of I can't get none. Actually, I can't keep none. And there's a reason for this. Now it is

00:44:18.980 extremely joyful to be rewarded, to achieve a goal, even a little goal. We are made. Our brains light

00:44:25.980 up like Christmas trees. We all know, I mean, you've talked on your show many times. I'm a regular

00:44:30.760 listener to your show and I've heard this many times. And I've heard you on Huberman and all the

00:44:34.160 other kind of parallel shows that people listen to in this suite of how can we improve our lives,

00:44:39.740 podcasts and shows that we all have to understand dopamine these days. And dopamine, of course,

00:44:43.880 is a neuromodulator, not of pleasure, but of anticipation of reward.

00:44:47.540 And what it does is it says you're going to get satisfaction if you get this thing and you're

00:44:51.760 going to get it forever. Dopamine is a liar. Mother nature is a liar. She's horrible. Mother

00:44:57.280 nature basically says that new car smell is going to last forever. And you always believe it,

00:45:02.740 which is why we do what we in social science call get on the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic means feeling

00:45:07.580 and the treadmill is obviously a metaphor. So we can run and run and run and run, but it moves

00:45:11.920 against us. We think we're going to get satisfaction and we're going to keep it. And we actually don't.

00:45:16.340 So we run for the next one. Now, fortunately, ordinary people get a next Friday and a next

00:45:20.620 Friday and the next Friday. But if you're doing this and your main objective is, you know, the next

00:45:26.060 big financial milestone, something out of proportion to the ordinary human experience, then it becomes

00:45:30.840 quite tyrannical. Then it becomes something that you really can't keep up with. Now, there's a reason

00:45:35.680 that mother nature does this. You know, I'm bringing coals to Newcastle by telling Peter at T about

00:45:40.080 homeostasis, but every biological and even emotional process is subject to homeostasis in

00:45:45.960 which we go always back to our baseline. You know, if you're on the treadmill this morning

00:45:50.880 for a good cardiovascular health and you want your pulse to be at 135 or 140, you don't want it to be

00:45:56.520 there a week from now because you die. Homeostasis 15 minutes or 30 minutes after you get off the

00:46:01.320 treadmill takes you back to your baseline pulse rate. That's for good and proper health. And the same

00:46:05.720 thing happens emotionally. If you get elation from a job well done, it's going to leave so that

00:46:11.580 you can be ready. It's going to go away very quickly. So you can be ready for the next set

00:46:15.040 of circumstances. That's why you can't keep no satisfaction is so that you won't be just staring

00:46:20.660 at the delicious berries on the bush with joy in the Pleistocene while the saber-toothed tiger is

00:46:25.420 sneaking up behind you and you're not aware of it. You need to be ready for the next circumstantial

00:46:29.880 whatever's going on in your life. And that's how homeostasis works. That's why it happens. And that's

00:46:33.880 why you can't keep no satisfaction. That notwithstanding a life without those moments of

00:46:39.400 satisfaction is dull and it's gray. And that's one of the key parts of major depressive disorders

00:46:47.160 called anhedonia. And anhedonia means the inability to get this feeling of satisfaction and the

00:46:53.480 anticipation of the reward. So you need it, but the paradox is you can't keep it. And so one of the

00:46:58.920 things that I talk about is for people like you who have this outsized understanding of what

00:47:03.900 satisfaction is going to be, how you can crack that code, how you can dominate the matrix in a

00:47:08.740 different way. And the answer is basically this. You need to stop managing your haves and start

00:47:15.160 managing your wants. In other words, your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. And you need

00:47:22.900 to manage the denominator of your satisfaction fraction as opposed to the numerator and serious

00:47:29.020 full on wants management can be a game changer for a guy like you, for anybody for that matter.

00:47:36.620 But it's a less serious issue for a lot of people. But for a guy like you, you need a wants management

00:47:41.040 strategy or you're going to be running from thing to thing to thing. And as your haves go up, your wants

00:47:46.380 will go up by more. And paradoxically, your satisfaction will decline, which pulls down your

00:47:50.600 overall happiness. A lot to unpack there. So let's start with how much of the want deals with

00:47:58.240 comparison versus intrinsic needs to one up yourself. I'll give you an example. A great source

00:48:06.040 of satisfaction in my life has historically come, not anymore, but certainly historically has come

00:48:11.180 through sort of athletic achievement. So when I was a cyclist, it was certain milestones I wanted to be

00:48:16.680 able to hit when it was a marathon swimmer. It was certain swims I wanted to be able to do.

00:48:22.300 Believe it or not, there's less comparison to others in some of those things, depending on how

00:48:26.640 you define your metrics. Like you might say, like, I want to be able to climb Mount Palomar, which is,

00:48:31.560 you know, a long climb, 20 miles or something. I want to be able to climb it in a certain amount of

00:48:35.660 time. I want to be able to swim across this sliver of the ocean or things like that. Those don't feel

00:48:41.160 like they're heavily dependent on comparison to others. But yet there are a number of other things

00:48:46.480 where I think it's almost exclusively about you can't ignore what's happening to others, right?

00:48:51.340 You mentioned income or some other measure of professional success. We've joked about the idea,

00:48:57.860 like you could literally be worth $100 million, but if your peer group is worth a billion, you might

00:49:04.040 actually find yourself feeling poor. It makes no sense to those of us that are miles beneath that.

00:49:09.240 But how do you untangle those two types of objects of satisfaction, one that is purely intrinsic,

00:49:16.140 one that is pure comparator, and yet both of whom could easily put you on a hedonic treadmill? Is

00:49:20.980 there a difference? There is, but they're kind of in a hierarchy of what will bring you enduring

00:49:25.280 satisfaction. And the one you're talking about where you're comparing Peter with Peter,

00:49:29.460 Peter times zero with Peter time one, that's still a tyranny. It's just not as bad a tyranny as

00:49:36.340 comparing yourself with somebody else, you know, counting your social media followers or you're

00:49:41.080 like, I don't care if I have 200,000 downloads, as long as I have more than Huberman. That's a-

00:49:46.900 That'll never happen. And to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that the former was less insidious

00:49:52.720 than the latter. I just wonder what the difference is because the problem with the former

00:49:55.840 is whether it's playing something on the French horn or swimming, those tend to rely on going back

00:50:04.680 to fluid intelligence. Well, we've just established that that's probably going to peak in your thirties.

00:50:10.240 So whether it be athletic achievements or whatever, they're probably going to start going down.

00:50:14.920 For sure. Now, the biggest problem with social comparison, however, there's nothing good about

00:50:18.600 social comparison. We do it because we have to. And part of the reason is we have to understand

00:50:23.220 what we're doing. We have to understand who we are and where we're going. And that means,

00:50:28.360 and we're part of a society. So there's a natural fabric of comparisons that are happening all the

00:50:32.900 time. But actually trying to understand your own self-worth in comparison to other people is

00:50:37.360 really the worst tyranny. That leads to envy. Joe Epstein, who's the great essayist,

00:50:41.360 says that envy is the only deadly sin that's not even fun. I mean, it's just misery. My dad used to,

00:50:47.580 my dad was a really funny guy. He used to joke, it's not enough to win, son. Your friends have to

00:50:51.300 lose too, right? It's like, it's horrible because it actually tears other people down. You can feel

00:50:56.980 awful about yourself, notwithstanding the fact that you're creating real value. In Dante, down to the

00:51:02.280 bottom of Mount Purgatory, he finds Satan. And Satan, at the worst of the deadly sins, is actually

00:51:08.000 half frozen in a block of ice and twisting in agony in this ice. And he's keeping the ice solid

00:51:14.060 because of the wind from his wings where he's fruitlessly trying to get away and is in such

00:51:18.840 agony. He doesn't even notice the narrator of the inferno going down to the bottom of Mount

00:51:23.160 Purgatory. This is analogy. It's not envy isn't fire. You're frozen. It's awful. There's two

00:51:30.320 commandments against it. It's so bad. It's the whole idea. Okay. So when you're comparing yourself

00:51:34.380 with yourself, that's just looking for progress. Mathematicians will say that all of happiness is

00:51:39.700 in the first derivative. Progress off the baseline. That's what you want is progress. And that's

00:51:44.740 really good. The problem is that's insidious too, because that's also on the treadmill.

00:51:48.800 The true master will be getting intrinsic enjoyment from the thing that she or he is doing. That's what

00:51:56.020 the true master actually gets. And that's the goal that we should all be going for. And the way to do

00:52:00.300 that is to have this idea of wants management. There are other ways to put it. There are other

00:52:05.080 ways to actually get at this as well. I like the metaphor of instead of adding brushstrokes

00:52:09.900 to your, the canvas of your life, start thinking of your life as a sculpture where you have to chip

00:52:14.780 away until you find the true Peter. Tell that story. Actually, you wrote about that in the book.

00:52:19.700 I believe you were in a museum in, was it in Taiwan? Yeah. In the National Palace Museum in Taiwan,

00:52:24.300 which is the greatest collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world from the Paleolithic

00:52:28.160 into the present. When you go to a museum, never go by yourself because you'll remember nothing

00:52:33.260 except the snack bar. You got to go with somebody who will show you 10 things. Get a guy, as they say

00:52:38.640 in the vernacular, and say, I want to understand deeply 10 things. That's the way to go to any museum.

00:52:43.640 And so I hired a guy and he was a philosopher and an expert in both Eastern and Western art. And,

00:52:49.500 you know, I was looking at this block of jade that was carved, a two ton block of jade carved

00:52:54.240 intricately into a village, a village scene. I said, even if I'd never seen any Chinese art

00:52:59.300 in person, and I were not in Taiwan, if I were in Dayton right now, I'd know this is Chinese. How?

00:53:04.760 He says, oh, it's just that the whole philosophy is different between Western and Eastern art.

00:53:09.200 And I said, what is it? He said, well, Western art uses the metaphor of starting with nothing

00:53:13.240 and then creating something. The Eastern art, the idea is starting with everything there and

00:53:19.420 chipping away until you reveal it. Now, this is true in music too. You'll find in Eastern

00:53:24.320 classical art traditions. I've studied Hindustani classical music, you know, Raga,

00:53:29.240 for example. I studied Tabla, which is the North Indian classical drumming. The ensemble will be

00:53:33.680 as small as it needs to be, such that nothing is extraneous. Whereas in a Western orchestra,

00:53:39.360 a symphony orchestra, there's 85 people cranking in 100 decibels, such that in the East, they'll say,

00:53:43.980 I can't even hear the music of a symphony orchestra because there's too much going on. It's the same

00:53:48.100 kind of metaphor. Well, your life in the first part is usually a canvas. By the time you're 45,

00:53:53.980 if you're a successful person, that canvas is full, man. It's like Jackson Pollock,

00:53:58.000 you know, add one more brushstroke and it adds nothing that you can possibly, it probably gets

00:54:02.280 worse. It's just dense and dark at that particular time. You got to move to the metaphor of the block

00:54:07.660 of Jade that you chip away until you actually find the beautiful thing that's in you. And the goal

00:54:12.820 for the second half of life, certainly after 45 years old, is each year having less, each year

00:54:19.940 getting rid of more relationships that are extraneous, more possessions, more ambitions,

00:54:25.720 more experiences. And the way that I do that, I actually have a practical way of doing it.

00:54:30.520 I was a young guy, like everybody else, I had a bucket list. I'm a very ambitious guy. I've gone

00:54:34.160 from career to career, tried to do a lot with my life. And I had a bucket list, all the things that

00:54:38.320 I wanted, all it did make me feel like a loser. You know, it's like all these things that are

00:54:42.040 unfulfilled and it kept me fired up to be sure. But now I have a reverse bucket list where I make

00:54:48.200 a list of all of my worldly cravings and ambitions and I might get them and I might not. What I'm not

00:54:53.260 is I make a conscious metacognitive commitment to not be attached to the things on that reverse

00:55:00.180 bucket list. I'm not attached to my opinions in the same way that I was my political views. I'm not

00:55:05.860 attached to the ambitions that will show me that I'm Mr. Big along the way. It might happen. It

00:55:11.780 might not happen. But when I make a commitment consciously to detach myself from those things,

00:55:16.540 it's like chipping away. And I'm telling you, Peter, it is very, very effective for helping you

00:55:21.240 with a wants management strategy such that you can have a big fulfilling life that's enviable by any

00:55:27.960 outward standard, but at the same time, not be chained to it in this insidious kind of success

00:55:32.560 addiction that brings so many successful people so much unhappiness.

00:55:36.840 Say more about this want management. I mean, I think I intellectually kind of understand,

00:55:40.880 I certainly understand the equation, why we want the want in the denominator to go down,

00:55:46.180 which therefore raises the value of the fraction. But what's the practical set of tools that one,

00:55:52.420 so let's just say I'm sitting here saying, Arthur, I just don't think I can be happy until I,

00:55:57.740 and I don't want to use myself as an example because people are sick and tired of hearing about me.

00:56:00.560 So let's just say I'm a normal guy. And until I get this promotion, I got to get to VP. Until I'm

00:56:06.540 a VP, it's just not. But once I get there, I swear it's going to be great. I just want to pay

00:56:11.600 the mortgage off. Right now, it's a bit of a chain. And once the mortgage is paid off, we are

00:56:17.180 absolutely going to be able to take a month off every summer and go anywhere. So there's a list of

00:56:23.120 all of these things that all seem pretty reasonable in terms of aspirations, in terms of career

00:56:28.400 success, et cetera, et cetera. How would you explain to that guy, well, let's skip the first part.

00:56:33.600 The first part is you're going to tell him that, by the way, when you get all those things, you're

00:56:38.060 not going to feel that much different for very long. But more importantly, how would you spare

00:56:42.160 him the agony of spending the next five years pursuing that only to find out he'll be right

00:56:47.620 where he is now? I have an exercise that I do with my students when they're in their late 20s.

00:56:52.720 My MBA students are on average 27, 28 years old. And it's the same thing that I, same exercise that

00:56:57.700 I do with people who are my age. I'm 58. And it basically starts like this. Imagine yourself,

00:57:02.160 you're 49 or 50. I can't remember. 49. Yeah. I'm not trying to give you an extra year, Peter.

00:57:06.880 Imagine yourself in five years, you're 54 years old. Okay. Totally imaginable at this point,

00:57:12.880 you're going to be in really good health. You're going to be working really hard. Okay. Now

00:57:16.540 imagine that you're happy and we've talked about what that means, but you know

00:57:20.580 what it means when you're happy. You know how it feels when you're happy.

00:57:24.860 So you don't even have to describe that. Put in order the five things in your life that explain it,

00:57:31.100 why you're most happy in order. And think about it carefully. It's not the stuff that you wish would

00:57:36.160 make you happy. The things that you might make you happy, the things that never have, but could

00:57:40.240 somewhere. The things you really know, really realistically, 54 years old that are making Peter

00:57:46.020 Atiyah happier than he is today in order. I guarantee you that one, two, and three are going

00:57:53.180 to be about your relationships. And only the bottom of the list is going to be about human

00:57:57.060 achievements. That's just the way it's going to be. And then the next thing I'm going to ask you is

00:58:01.160 what's your strategic plan for aggressively managing one, two, and three, as opposed to leaving them up

00:58:05.280 to chance? How much of your time are you spending on four and five and even things that are not on the

00:58:10.060 list as opposed to one, two, and three? What is your strategic plan for fortifying your friendships,

00:58:16.380 your marriage, your spiritual walk, the relationships with your children, your relationships

00:58:22.380 with your parents, all that stuff? Those are the biggies. And that's how you think about it. You

00:58:26.720 say, okay, you got to promotion. Congratulations. You've got extra money. You might say, that's a

00:58:31.780 good way for me to have better relationships because I'll be able to go out of town with my family.

00:58:35.920 Do you really think that that month away is going to be the game changer for you to have the perfect

00:58:41.320 marriage? Or should you be thinking, great, if you get the promotion, more power to you.

00:58:46.220 But do you think you should be thinking more aggressively and strategically about how to

00:58:50.600 improve your marriage today? How can you improve your marriage today? And probably has a lot more

00:58:56.300 to do with paying attention to your wife. It probably has a lot more to do with actually trying to

00:59:01.780 get interested in many of the things that she's interested in. It's not rocket science. We actually know how

00:59:07.040 to do this, but if it turns out to be that mystifying, maybe get some help, but manage the

00:59:11.560 things that really will be what you know will bring you the greatest happiness. Don't leave those

00:59:15.960 things up to chance. Love that exercise, Arthur. My question, I guess, is what fraction of people do

00:59:23.100 you think have enough, maybe awareness or introspection is the word that they could come up with

00:59:27.560 that list? Because I think you're absolutely correct. If you really think about this from the right

00:59:32.660 spot, one, two, and three have to do with your physical and emotional health. And if your physical

00:59:40.860 and emotional health are out of order, I don't think anything else really matters. Do you get the

00:59:45.120 sense that when you pose this question to your students, that all of them are able to arrive at

00:59:50.800 that conclusion? It sort of depends on how deeply they take or how seriously they take the question. So

00:59:56.520 if you ask it in a kind of a breezy way, a pretty informal way, half the students will have these

01:00:02.100 extrinsic motivations about money, power, pleasure, and fame. And half of them will have intrinsic

01:00:07.120 motivations about relationships and love. But if you ask them to think very, very deeply about it,

01:00:12.640 almost all of them wind up in the intrinsic category of love and relationships. Usually the

01:00:17.120 top, especially for people in their late twenties, is their romantic lives. They want to have that on

01:00:21.100 point. The second is their family and friends is the second big category. And the third is that they

01:00:27.320 want to have children. Most of them really actually want to have children. They don't know when and they

01:00:31.940 don't know how, but that's something that they want. And so we say, okay, well, we need to be

01:00:37.100 focusing strategically on treating your romantic life the way that you would a startup. You know,

01:00:42.800 we need to have the same seriousness. You need to be putting in the time. You need to be putting in

01:00:46.940 the work. And we talk about actually how to do that with the barriers typically are. There's a lot

01:00:50.340 of science and there's a lot of good practices behind that. And they tend to, when you ask them to do the

01:00:55.880 work, they will focus in on those three areas. Now, if you say, why weren't you paying attention to

01:01:01.040 those things, they'll say, I don't know how to manage those things. I came to the Harvard business

01:01:04.820 school to learn how to be successful in my career. I didn't learn how to be successful in dating.

01:01:11.120 So professor, how do I do that? And it turns out that there are ways to do that, but you have to

01:01:16.180 take it seriously and put it to work. We spoke about the four idols. What is it? Money, power,

01:01:23.380 pleasure, fame. Fame is really a funny one though, because most people listening to us are like,

01:01:28.600 I don't want to be famous. Yeah, but you want to be admired by others and you want to have some

01:01:31.600 prestige. And that's localized fame. That's to be known and admired by the right people. It's exactly

01:01:38.040 the same phenomenon philosophically and psychologically. So let's explore those a

01:01:43.520 little bit more. Is it necessarily the case that we are hardwired to have preferences along that

01:01:49.920 spectrum? Well, I suspect it's both nurture and nature. I can imagine that the circumstances by which

01:01:54.900 you grow up would heavily influence that. But how much of that do you think is sort of hardwired

01:01:59.060 versus developed as a result of circumstances? So there's a lot of research on that. And

01:02:03.780 most of the philosophy would suggest, and even the evolutionary psychologists would suggest

01:02:08.280 that we're hardwired to be looking for money, power, pleasure, and fame, because that makes us

01:02:12.880 most, that gives us fitness in the mating market. Who gets mates? Somebody who's got a bigger cave,

01:02:19.220 more flints, more animal skins, more buffalo jerky piled up in the corner. And it was actually known

01:02:25.080 by more troglodytes than troglodytes that he or she knows. This gives you mating fitness. And so the

01:02:30.780 result is this would become an imperative. It would become a hardwired imperative. And then you have all

01:02:35.760 kinds of evidence of this. You actually find that when people are kind of at their base nature,

01:02:40.260 when they're being distracted, they will go for these particular rewards over much more intrinsic,

01:02:44.680 more satisfying rewards having to do with love. They will go for these types of rewards all day

01:02:49.360 long. We see this in our consumer patterns. We even see some of the really interesting

01:02:53.760 neuroscience research talks about it, how it will illuminate our brains, how it will stimulate the

01:02:57.840 most dopamine. The most dopamine comes from these not very satisfying rewards, but nonetheless,

01:03:04.040 the ones that we're supposed to go for. Now, here's the key thing to keep in mind.

01:03:07.800 Mother Nature wants you to pass on your genes. Mother Nature wants Peter Atiyah to have like a hundred kids.

01:03:12.840 But of course, you don't want that. You want three and you want to have a lifelong partnership with

01:03:19.640 one wife. And that means that you can't live the hippie motto of if it feels good, do it.

01:03:26.080 That is the motto of useful idiots. By the way, there's other stupid mottos. Like if it feels

01:03:31.500 terrible, treat it and make it go away because suffering is really important in a full life too,

01:03:36.720 it turns out. But the key thing to keep in mind is that Mother Nature, she doesn't care if you're happy.

01:03:40.680 She doesn't care. That's not Mother Nature. We don't select on happiness. We select on biological

01:03:46.000 fitness to mate, to pass on our genes. And so the result is if you follow, if it feels good, do it,

01:03:51.540 you're going to be chasing a whole lot of very fleeting rewards for what you think is enduring

01:03:57.360 satisfaction. And you're going to have your hedonic treadmill speeding at a terrifying velocity,

01:04:02.860 and you won't even know how to get off it. You need to get in charge of your own life is the

01:04:07.360 online. You wrote something, God, I want to say it's been in the last couple of months in the

01:04:11.740 Atlantic about happiness and success and noting that the happiest people weren't necessarily the

01:04:19.020 most successful. If I'm remembering that correctly, I think you wrote this in maybe April, it might've

01:04:23.320 been June, but it looked at some data that suggested actually a little bit of sacrifice in happiness led

01:04:29.680 to greater success. Am I remembering that sort of correctly? Yeah, that's right. And part of the reason

01:04:33.860 is because people who are tremendously successful in worldly terms, when I'm talking about success,

01:04:38.380 we can define it in different ways, right? Having a lifelong marriage where you're in love with your

01:04:43.260 spouse, that's unbelievably successful. Believing like you have found spiritual transcendence,

01:04:48.800 that's unbelievably successful. Living for the good of other people, tremendously successful,

01:04:54.020 but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about worldly success, money, power, fame,

01:04:58.880 the admiration of other people. So that these particular metrics of success,

01:05:02.280 people who are remarkably successful along those worldly metrics, they're making cost benefit

01:05:08.400 calculations systematically that are not in their own happiness favor. Typically they're making

01:05:13.800 sacrifices to their own happiness for some reason. And this is one of the things that I've looked at

01:05:18.280 in my own research. Why, why, why, why? And I was talking to a woman. One of the things that I do as a

01:05:22.960 social scientist, I'm not just cranking data. I go out and talk to the humans, which I find is a really

01:05:27.680 beneficial thing to do. And I was interviewing this unbelievably successful woman on wall street. I

01:05:33.000 mean, billionaire business or epic success after success and very well known. And she was confessing

01:05:39.860 to me that she was missing decisions that people were doubting it, that at the same time that she

01:05:45.640 and her husband were just kind of roommates, that she had a cordial relationship with her adult kids,

01:05:49.900 that she was starting to get bad blood work back from her doctor. She thinks that she was probably

01:05:53.880 drinking too much. She couldn't sleep right. And the whole thing. And she said, what are you doing?

01:05:57.100 I said, you don't need a nerd from Harvard to tell you what to do. You told me you're a billionaire.

01:06:02.200 Step back from your company, take a souvenir in it, go onto the board, whatever, get to know your

01:06:07.000 husband, restable relationship with your kids, start to take care of your drinking problem, become a

01:06:11.760 client of Peter Atiyah. I don't know. You know what I'm talking about here. I say, why don't you do these

01:06:17.680 things? She thought about it. She said, I guess I'd prefer to be special than happy. And I thought she

01:06:22.740 that is the hallmark of addiction. You know, I used to be a musician. I've met a lot of addicts.

01:06:29.560 I've met a lot of alcoholics in my life. And they will confess that before they got clean and sober,

01:06:35.060 that they preferred to be high than happy. They all said that they knew that they'd be happier when

01:06:39.940 they were finally beyond this thing. But let's just get high one more time. Just the feel of that

01:06:45.100 pipe on my lips. One more time. Just the burning of the alcohol in my throat. One more time. Just the,

01:06:49.800 what do William Burroughs call the red, the blood in the hypodermic needle before you actually put

01:06:55.240 down the plunger. And it gives incredible pleasure to people. And they say, just one more time,

01:07:00.360 just one more time. And that's what that lady was saying to me. That's a success addiction.

01:07:05.380 That is absolutely implicated in the dopamine system. And that is like any other behavioral

01:07:10.440 addiction that a lot of very worldly successful people fall prey to. A lot of people listening to us.

01:07:15.880 And I'm glad they're listening to us right now because they want an edge. But you got to ask

01:07:20.400 yourself. Arthur has to ask himself. And Peter has to ask himself. And all the people listening to them

01:07:24.220 have to ask themselves, is this a pathology that I'm actually feeding by actually trying to get this

01:07:29.880 edge? And I hope it's not. And I hope it's not for me. But I know a lot of people where it is.

01:07:34.720 We talk about workaholism. There's a lot of literature on workaholism. Workaholism is an

01:07:39.020 ancillary addiction to success addiction. You know, people work really, really hard. The payoff,

01:07:44.120 the cookie that you get, the dopamine is just driving you to, is the promotion, is the raise,

01:07:50.400 is the dollar, is the compliment, is the adulation on social media. That's where the real addiction

01:07:55.700 is coming in. And those are the people that are going to be sacrificing their own happiness decisions

01:08:00.000 for these success metrics. Do we have a sense of, this is an unanswerable question, so I'll rephrase

01:08:06.000 it in kind of a more theoretical question. What would the world look like today if no one was pursuing

01:08:13.380 being special over being happy? What year would we be living in? Would it be 1842 right now? What I'm

01:08:20.800 really getting at is how much of the modern marvels of this world do we owe to the backs of people who

01:08:31.900 sacrificed their own happiness for the innovation that allows us to be doing what we're doing right

01:08:39.620 now? It's such a smart question, and I consider this myself. For me to say, you and I should break

01:08:44.300 our success addiction, therefore, the world would be better if nobody had a success addiction, is the

01:08:49.660 fallacy of composition. You know, it's to basically say, since I get home faster if I go 100 miles an

01:08:54.600 hour down the freeway, it would be better if everybody drove 100 miles an hour on the freeway.

01:08:58.440 Now, you live in Texas, so you're like, yeah, actually, that would be better. But anyway,

01:09:01.380 but that is really, really relevant because what you find is that many of the greatest innovators,

01:09:07.260 composers, creative intellects, these were people that absolutely sacrificed their happiness, that

01:09:11.240 were deeply, deeply unhappy. Look, there's a huge literature that shows the ventral lateral prefrontal

01:09:16.300 cortex is stimulated in depressives in a way that makes them highly creative. I mean, we actually have

01:09:22.340 good brain science at this point that shows that people who are suffering from mood disorders,

01:09:26.440 they tend to be disproportionately creative and they do a lot. Van Gogh was not the outlier,

01:09:32.500 it turns out. There's a lot of weird people in Silicon Valley that have a lot of pretty untreated

01:09:37.400 maladies and they're doing a lot. Now, you might say in Silicon Valley, a lot of them are doing a lot

01:09:42.140 of harm for society as well. But the point is that it is true that the world has been propelled by a lot

01:09:48.680 of unusual people with unusual goals. And so I don't know if I were the divine, how I would create the

01:09:54.380 universe. I don't know how I would designate people in society. I don't know whether I would

01:09:58.820 make people sacrifice their happiness for the greater good of the whole. I'm just not sure

01:10:02.680 whether there's a kind of a success martyrdom that's going on here.

01:10:06.700 My two cents having none of the data and none of the insights that you do is that we are probably a

01:10:11.780 lot better off for people who have made enormous sacrifices. And I'm not just talking about like

01:10:16.400 what we think about in Silicon Valley. I mean, I'm talking about Newton and Gauss and

01:10:19.380 Euler and the great physicists, the great mathematicians. I feel like these people

01:10:22.700 made untold sacrifices in terms of the pain that they endured as a result of their genius.

01:10:30.960 I think that's actually right. But there's one thing that I want to emphasize,

01:10:34.020 which is that the misery is not inevitable. You can actually, and this is the one of the reasons

01:10:38.640 I've done my work. I'm not asking people to not be successful. I'm not asking people to be not

01:10:43.240 ambitious, to not work hard. I'm asking them to dominate it such that you're not playing to your

01:10:48.620 most innate drives so that you can be successful and happy. And that's a small quadrant of the

01:10:55.180 happy, unhappy, successful, unsuccessful, the successful and happy, really, really successful

01:11:00.560 and really, really happy. It's a pretty small group of people, but it's not not populated. I mean,

01:11:04.940 I write in my book about the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, who

01:11:09.520 died surrounded by the people who loved him and who revered him. And the reason is because he got on

01:11:15.600 his second curve, he dedicated his work to other people. He didn't say, forget it. I'm not going

01:11:20.260 to write any more music. He said, I'm going to write music and I'm just going to detach myself

01:11:25.080 from the ego of having this enormous audience of people who will say that I'm the greatest composer

01:11:31.380 ever. And I'm going to do it for humanity and for to glorify God and to refresh the soul of other

01:11:36.240 people. And if it's really successful in commercial terms, it is. And if it isn't, that's okay too.

01:11:41.380 In other words, be really ambitious, but detach yourself from the worldly idols and think about

01:11:48.220 how you can use your success in service of other people. And that's the hack. That's the workaround.

01:11:54.080 That's actually the glitch and the success on happiness matrix is when you become other focused,

01:11:59.620 you can be a success machine and also happy. I agree with all of that. I was going to actually

01:12:04.680 make a slightly different point, which was just because that's what got us here today as a

01:12:11.240 civilization doesn't speak to the individual choice that we all have. I'll give you an example in my

01:12:17.140 world is my thinking on cancer screening for an individual is based solely on the individual.

01:12:24.920 If I were in charge of creating a cancer screening program for everyone in the country or in the

01:12:30.920 world, it's a totally different question because the former is really all about individual risk,

01:12:38.240 individual cost and what the reward potentially is. When you start to talk about that at a societal

01:12:44.420 trade-off level, it's a much more complicated problem. Now you have to look at quality adjusted

01:12:48.880 life years and all these other metrics, and you have to balance a budget to basically do this.

01:12:53.660 And so my takeaway from this is that just because everything we said is probably true, it doesn't

01:13:00.800 mean that any one individual doesn't have the potential to make a choice to live in less misery

01:13:06.660 or to be happier. Absolutely. And part of it is, I believe you don't even have to sacrifice the

01:13:12.080 success, but you do have to go against your worldly urges in a very big way, not against your worldly

01:13:18.300 urge for success, but against your worldly urge to pursue the success for a particularly idolatrous

01:13:24.400 reason. And that's a really big distinction as it turns out. Now, this is the point that's made by

01:13:29.980 philosophers and theologians forever, that when you do things in service of others, to lift other

01:13:35.640 people up, to bring other people together, then you can become unbelievably successful. You can

01:13:40.900 become the Dalai Lama, you can become Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, you can do Albert Schweitzer.

01:13:47.600 What are the, all of those people have in common, but they were world famous, but they were doing

01:13:52.100 this in the service of their fellow women and men. And that was the key distinction that allowed

01:13:56.220 them to wiggle their way into the both happy and successful quadrant.

01:14:00.560 You wrote about this also very recently. You're the only reason I subscribe to The Atlantic,

01:14:05.940 by the way. The Atlantic should know that. You wrote about the mortality paradox, right? We can't

01:14:12.360 conceive of not being here. I have been thinking about this so much. I'll sit there on my bike.

01:14:17.820 I was thinking about it yesterday and I was really sitting there thinking, how difficult is it for us to

01:14:22.740 imagine the world with us not in it? Because every experience we have is only through our eyes,

01:14:29.080 only through our senses. Say more about that because I just find this to be such a fascinating

01:14:33.920 topic. Mortality paradox has to do with the fact that as big-brained mammals, we're able to

01:14:40.420 understand that we're going to die intellectually. But what we can't conceive of, because our brain isn't

01:14:46.120 that big, is the idea of not existing. So I know I'm going to die, but I can't imagine not existing.

01:14:53.220 Those are two different phenomena, the two different cognitions. And one I can really understand,

01:14:58.120 and the other that I can't. And the fact that those two things are in tension creates a lot of fear.

01:15:01.800 It creates a lot of uncertainty, real discomfort, real cognitive dissonance and discomfort in people.

01:15:09.260 And so the result is they're trying to work through that their whole lives. Either they'll say,

01:15:13.180 okay, well, I'll just resolve it on the first side. I won't die. Well, good luck with that.

01:15:17.080 You're the longevity guy. And I heard you say, I was listening to you today, and you said like,

01:15:20.780 the one thing we all know is that we're going to die. So if Peter Atiyah says,

01:15:24.120 I'm going to die, I'm going to die. Okay. Or they try to resolve it on the other side,

01:15:28.240 which is to either understand, to apprehend the concept of not existing, or to say, I will always

01:15:34.560 exist, notwithstanding the fact that I'm going to die. And there's lots of philosophies and religions,

01:15:38.920 and look, I'm a traditional Catholic. And so I've resolved it in a particular way. But the result is

01:15:43.460 that of all of this is that this is a lot of what leads to people's fears. People talk to me a lot

01:15:50.880 about what they're most afraid of. I ask people about that a lot. And part of the reason is

01:15:54.540 because my main focus of my happiness work is love. And love and fear are opposites. Love and

01:16:00.100 hatred are not opposites. Hatred is downstream from fear. And this is a philosophical principle

01:16:03.860 from Lao Tzu and St. John the Apostle, but it's also a neurocognitive regularity where you find that

01:16:10.020 how the brain works, you tend to find that love neutralizes fear and fear can turn off love and

01:16:15.520 every other feeling like a switch because of the way the brain is designed. The main focus of my work

01:16:20.800 in happiness is the subject of love. And part of the reason is because love is the nuclear fuel

01:16:25.900 rods of happiness. If you want to know one thing about how to be happy, happiness is love full stop.

01:16:30.380 And there's a ton of longitudinal data that shows this. There's a ton of data that shows people who

01:16:34.700 are in their 80s and 90s who are really happy. If you look back in their 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s,

01:16:39.700 what they all have in common is strong relationships that they were cultivating and working on, real love

01:16:44.080 relationships in terms of romance and family and real friends, not just real friends.

01:16:48.300 Now, the interesting thing is when you're studying love is you also have to study its opposite. And

01:16:53.840 the opposite of love is fear. That's a philosophical truism. You know, Lao Tzu talked about the fact

01:17:00.040 that fear and love are opposites, St. John the Apostle, but also we find this in modern neuroscience

01:17:03.960 and the way that emotions are processed in the human brain. Psychology shows this abundantly that

01:17:09.340 love and hatred and opposites, hatred is downstream from fear. So if you want to understand what turns off

01:17:14.620 love in your life, when people come to me and say, I don't have enough love, I'll say, well,

01:17:17.240 tell me about what you're afraid of. And when people come to me and they say they have too much

01:17:20.400 fear in their life, we'll say, well, we need more relationships. We need more love to neutralize

01:17:24.100 the fear. So the big fears that I ask people about, one of the things that I find is that

01:17:29.200 everybody has a death fear. This is an interesting thing. You know, most people say, I'm not afraid

01:17:33.040 of dying. And I'm not afraid of dying. I mean, like Peter, you and I are like, the reaper comes

01:17:36.960 tomorrow. It's like, okay, I lived right. And I'm actually not afraid of that, but I do have a death

01:17:41.560 fear. Everybody does. And it has to do with the extinction of how you understand yourself.

01:17:48.540 And that gets back to the mortality paradox. The idea of not existing has some manifestation

01:17:55.440 almost everybody's life, whether it's, I'm really afraid of becoming irrelevant. I'm really afraid of

01:18:01.320 being forgotten. That's your mortality problem. That's your death fear. You know, for me, it's like,

01:18:07.960 I think about it. The one thing about my health I'm most worried about is dementia. My mother was

01:18:13.800 demented. I was in early stage dementia when she was my age. She was mid fifties. She was in early

01:18:18.960 stage dementia and she lived for another 15 years. Man, it was really, really bad. It was really a

01:18:24.820 bad ending. And for me, I mean, my whole living is inside my head. I work on my biceps, but it doesn't

01:18:29.880 matter how strong they are for me to be able to make a living and support my family and support my

01:18:33.620 employees, et cetera. So that really freaks me out. Well, guess what? That's my death fear.

01:18:37.980 It's the functioning of my brain is my death fear. Everybody has something like this, whether

01:18:42.040 it's really ego related or has to do with skill related. Everybody's got their mortality terror.

01:18:47.440 This is one of the things that we need to dominate if we want to be happy. And I have an exercise,

01:18:52.300 believe it or not, Peter, that I give my students on how to do that. Number one is you have to figure

01:18:55.380 out what it is. You have to do some serious reflection of what your death fear is. And for most of my

01:18:59.640 students at Harvard is fear of failure. These are super high performing. I mean, this was you. I mean,

01:19:05.080 you went to Stanford and then you did all of this fancy college stuff. And so my guess is that you

01:19:09.180 never had any academic failure and you were perhaps pretty afraid of academic failure because you'd

01:19:14.180 never experienced it. And because it would have been problematic in your family if you'd started

01:19:19.200 to fail some classes in college, I was going to guess, right? I'm a bit confused because what you

01:19:24.060 spoke about earlier makes a lot of sense as a death failure, because I see a cognitive decline

01:19:29.180 being tied to physical death because it's an end of life thing. I'm a bit confused about what the

01:19:35.560 students, these 29 year olds are equating failure in life, for example, starting a business and having

01:19:42.060 it fail with actual death. So it's basically, I am a success machine. Most of my students start off as

01:19:49.700 very objectified by their parents, where their parents say, you're the special one, you're successful,

01:19:54.780 you always get A's, you're a hard worker, you know, get it done. And they start to see themselves

01:19:59.720 as kind of homo economicus. They see themselves as high performers and they're very bright and

01:20:04.820 they're very hardworking. And the result is they don't experience any failure in school. I mean,

01:20:08.400 for me, these are absurd things. You got to be on an exam. Who cares? You know, I flunked out of

01:20:12.440 college, man, I know failure, but for them, they've never experienced these things. So it feels like a

01:20:16.860 mortal threat because it's a threat to who they think they are, which is a successful person,

01:20:22.900 somebody who never fails and is very foreign territory to them. So whether their death fears

01:20:28.520 failure or cognitive decline or being forgotten or being irrelevant or actually dying, the technique

01:20:35.040 for getting beyond this is really all the same. And it comes from that I found very successful

01:20:38.940 is to do what is called a Theravada Buddhism, the Maranasati meditation. This is the nine part

01:20:45.060 death meditation that Theravada Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka and Thailand and Vietnam, they will

01:20:50.480 undertake in which often they'll contemplate corpses, photos of corpses in various states

01:20:56.080 of decay. And they'll say, that is me. And that is me. And they have a nine part of this

01:20:59.920 Maranasati is a meditation in which they imagine themselves decaying, dying, and then a rotting

01:21:07.040 bloated corpse. And then it's so graphic. It's super graphic. It's unbelievable. And that's the

01:21:11.840 point. And super accurate. Like it really is how a human corpse decays. It's just unbelievable.

01:21:18.320 And what you're trying to do is what psychologists would call exposure therapy. You're exposing

01:21:22.680 yourself to the inevitable truth. Look, I heard you say, Peter, I'm going to die. Okay, fine,

01:21:28.540 fine, fine. No, think about it. Think about it. Why? Because it loses its terror when it becomes

01:21:34.900 familiar. So what I make my students do is a nine part meditation on their own failure,

01:21:40.340 catastrophic failure by their own terms, which is not necessarily human catastrophic failure.

01:21:44.740 I remember the first time I did this, I put the steps in because they didn't know how to do it

01:21:48.020 and the first one is I'm falling behind my colleagues at school. I graduate, but just

01:21:53.620 barely. I'm not getting the jobs that my friends are getting and that people thought I was going

01:21:58.120 to get. I'm finding I'm really, my career is not what I thought it was going to be. And then I get

01:22:02.080 to this one point. I threw this in just for a little bit of pathos. There's one point I say,

01:22:06.900 I think my parents feel sorry for me. And a student starts crying because that's the nerve, man.

01:22:13.340 That's the nerve. There's always this point in the death meditation. So figure out what death means

01:22:18.820 for you, where this mortality paradox, it really has teeth and then actually put together the

01:22:23.900 exposure therapy of walking yourself through the experience, the emotional experience of this

01:22:28.840 failure. And you will be free. This is the one thing that I guarantee that you'll be free of that.

01:22:34.160 Now you got to, you can't do it just once. You have to do it again and again and again,

01:22:37.680 because what your fear is, is deeply rooted in a lot of your experience. But once you're exposing

01:22:42.640 yourself to that again and again, it has an incredible therapeutic impact.

01:22:47.620 So the exercise is obviously first taking some time to really be thoughtful about what these fears

01:22:54.020 are. And by the way, I'm guessing some people have more than one. I mean, you have the fear of

01:22:59.060 actual death, perhaps the fear of failure along the way. So you might be doing this exercise twice.

01:23:05.600 We probably all have multiple versions and they change throughout life. You know,

01:23:09.080 when I was 20 years old, I wasn't afraid of cognitive decline. I'm 58 years old and I want

01:23:13.300 to keep the party going. Is that a lot of line? And the party's not going to keep going. I might

01:23:17.500 not be demented. I might be hit by a bus tomorrow. I might be, you know, my mother-in-law died last

01:23:21.620 month. Talking about a good death. She was 93. She had her marbles to the last minute and she died at

01:23:26.940 home. Not bad, not bad. You know, chapeau. That's really, really good, but everybody goes. And so you

01:23:32.500 can't keep these things unless you're comfortable with this inevitability. The mortality paradox is

01:23:38.640 inability to process these two competing ideas. It'll terrorize you. It'll paralyze you. It'll

01:23:44.140 be a problem. What's the optimal dose of exposure? So if I was an arachnophobic and I came to you and

01:23:50.640 said, we came to the understanding that I need to be exposed to spiders. How often would we need to do

01:23:57.580 this? That's a good question. And actually there are psychologists and psychotherapists who deal

01:24:02.560 with this with different kinds of phobias. And they find that different people have to be exposed,

01:24:07.280 have to have an exposure that's more or less frequent and you have to re-up it or you don't.

01:24:13.400 Some people are just, they solve the problem. My little girl, she's 19. When she was a baby,

01:24:18.300 we adopted her from China. You know, she had never been held and she was undernourished. And so when she

01:24:23.740 came to live with us, she was afraid of a lot of stuff. And one of the things she was really,

01:24:27.660 really afraid of was dogs. She would see a dog outside. She would scream. And so we wanted to

01:24:34.220 solve this and we did it by getting a dog, but we didn't just like throw the dog in the room with her

01:24:39.040 in the crib. You kept the dog apart. And it turns out there was about three days. And after about three

01:24:44.360 days, she was not afraid of the dog anymore. And after about six weeks, she loved all dogs. And that

01:24:49.740 was it forever. She's so crazy about all dogs. She's 19 years old. She has pictures of the dog

01:24:54.540 that was that dog, sadly passed away, but lives in blessed memory at this point because it was her

01:24:59.400 cognitive therapy, death meditation dog or something like that. But other people who have lived with

01:25:05.000 these phobias all their lives, including people who have these stresses about their own mortality,

01:25:08.800 it requires, I think, a more strenuous and thorough intervention and one that's more frequent.

01:25:14.260 How do you suggest somebody go about doing this exposure? In the case of the monastery,

01:25:18.820 they literally have pictures of nine stages of decaying corpses. I assume that the monks come

01:25:24.420 there and look at these pictures and meditate. Yeah. They stand in front of each one of the

01:25:28.960 pictures each day and they say, that is me while staring at the photograph where they wanted to

01:25:32.700 become completely trivial and familiar. That's what they want. So for all of us, again, that's a good

01:25:39.160 one to do, by the way, because we're all going to die. And, you know, nobody's like, Hey, can't wait.

01:25:43.600 But the thing that really is your bugaboo, you know, the thing that really is holding you back,

01:25:48.060 your version of the death meditation, think about it, contemplate it, write it out and expose

01:25:53.840 yourself to it as much as you need to, you know, when you're getting the benefit.

01:25:57.480 That could literally just be reading it out every day and thinking about it,

01:26:01.780 contemplate each step for two minutes and to do that each day for three weeks. Cause one of the

01:26:07.080 things that I've found is by the end of three weeks is like, yeah, I'm going to fail.

01:26:10.280 Wow. So not a big commitment. Look, it's 20 minutes a day for three weeks, basically.

01:26:16.160 And again, you know, maybe a psychotherapist would be like, you're kidding yourself.

01:26:19.320 If it's a really entrenched problem, it's going to take a lot longer than that. Plus

01:26:22.900 cognitive behavioral therapy, plus drugs. I know. But one of the things that I've found is

01:26:27.380 that my students are afraid of failure and we can get over it pretty quick.

01:26:30.740 You visited India. I think you described yourself as an India file. By the way, when you were here,

01:26:35.600 did I make you curry? I can't remember. Yeah. It was delicious, but the tofu and

01:26:39.680 unflavored Greek yogurt that you actually put in it for consistency and thickness.

01:26:43.400 Talk about the four ashrams. I know they're divided into sort of 25 year chunks. I find this

01:26:48.640 very interesting what those four stages are, especially, I guess, as you pointed out, I'm

01:26:52.500 about to be 50. So I'm really ending the second one about to enter the third. And it's really the

01:26:58.240 second one. That's the hardest one I think to leave, isn't it? Yeah. These are called ashramas.

01:27:02.480 What it means is the quarters of a perfect life in Vedic philosophy. So really ancient Indian

01:27:09.520 wisdom. These ideas are probably 5,000 years old. I have studied with a lot of these very deep Hindu

01:27:16.000 masters in Southern India. Every time I go to India, I try to sit at the feet of one of these

01:27:19.420 masters and they'll say, you're Christian, right? He says, you think all these things that we used to

01:27:22.460 think 4,000 years ago. But I went to India specifically to study the ashramas with a wonderful

01:27:27.100 guru in a place called Palakkad in Southern India on the border between Kerala and Tamil Nadu,

01:27:32.200 which is these two Southern states. And his name is Sri Noachar Benkataraman. And I asked him about

01:27:36.800 these ashramas, which are the four quarters of a well-balanced and perfect life, ideally 25 years

01:27:41.800 each. Now, the odds of getting to 100 are 1 in 6,000 in the United States. That ain't a lot lower

01:27:46.900 than that in India. So the point is not to be dogmatic about turning 50, Peter. What we're really

01:27:51.400 talking about is just these chunks of life. The first phase of life is called Brahmacharya, which is

01:27:57.420 the student life. And all that means is not necessarily literally a student. It means the

01:28:01.880 time when you're learning, when you're absorbing, when you are a sponge for human capital and ideas.

01:28:08.480 Then around age 25 is when you enter Grihastha, which is typically when a man, for example,

01:28:14.360 would get married and start a household. And that's called the householder phase. And that's career

01:28:19.900 and marriage and children and success and sexual relationships and all of these kind of worldly

01:28:26.880 rewards of money, power, pleasure, and fame. That's when you get addicted to those worldly rewards of

01:28:31.960 money, power, pleasure, and fame. And it's fun and it's good and it's hard and it's tiring, et cetera,

01:28:37.080 et cetera. Whereas in the West, we talk about that one hard transition from kid to adult, from

01:28:42.620 Brahmacharya to Grihastha. In India, they talk about the difficulty of the second adolescence, which is

01:28:47.660 passing out of Grihastha into the third phase around 50, which is called Vana Prastha. That's

01:28:53.620 50 to 75. And that's a really critical and very interesting phase. It's hard to get into because it

01:28:58.880 requires wanting less. It requires chipping away. It requires a reverse bucket list. What it requires,

01:29:05.980 it's in Vana Prastha comes from two Sanskrit words, Vana and Prastha. That means to retire into the

01:29:12.200 forest. Obviously metaphoric. I'm not going to go live in the forest and neither do you. The whole point is to

01:29:17.600 retire away from a lot of the parts of Grihastha. You're still going to work. You're still going

01:29:22.620 to do your thing, but you're going to have a different focus. You're going to be focused on

01:29:26.160 teaching. You're going to be focused on other people. This is very second curve. This is where

01:29:30.700 it all comes together. And this is what I try to do with my work is I take Eastern or Western

01:29:34.360 philosophy and wisdom. I mix it up with neuroscience, with historical regularity, and with modern

01:29:40.740 experimental social science. And it all has to be consistent. If it's not all consistent,

01:29:45.840 and there's one part of that, that's not quite right, then I'm onto the wrong comprehensive

01:29:49.720 story. So how this hangs together is you're passing into your second curve, which is also

01:29:55.620 Vana Prastha as one of the ashramas, retiring into the forest where you are the teacher.

01:30:01.080 You are becoming less involved in your own success, but more involved in the success of other people.

01:30:08.480 Now that might carry you to great glory, but that's not primarily for that. If you're going to be in the

01:30:14.320 happy, successful quadrant. And here's the twist. There's another goal ahead of you, a big goal,

01:30:20.500 which is the last order, the last ashrama, which is 75 and beyond, which is called sannyasa.

01:30:26.360 Now, a lot of people who studied Eastern philosophy or Hindu thought, they know it as sannyasi. A sannyasi

01:30:30.920 is somebody who's an enlightened one. And in a lot of religious cults, they talk about sannyasis and all

01:30:35.860 that. But basically all that means is somebody in this ashrama of sannyasa. And that is where you're

01:30:40.140 really dedicated fully to spiritual enlightenment. And in ancient times, Hindu men of some means at

01:30:47.240 age 75 would take leave of their families and go to the Himalayas and sit at the foot of their

01:30:52.200 master until death. Now, I'm not suggesting that, right? That doesn't sound so great to me because

01:30:58.540 I want to death do us part with my wife. But the whole point is once again, not that to take it

01:31:03.180 literally, but rather to say, look, the fruit of my old age requires a lot of training, the intellectual

01:31:08.460 and philosophical and spiritual transcendental root or fruit of my life requires this elite

01:31:16.560 training, which is vana prastha. You can't show up to the Olympics, 60 pounds overweight,

01:31:22.400 expect to swim the backstroke having not swum in months. It can't be done. You have to train for

01:31:28.680 it. It takes, according to this Hindu philosophers, 25 years of elite spiritual and intellectual and

01:31:34.660 transcendental train to get to that point later in life. Arthur, if you go back in time to that plane

01:31:39.820 ride from LA to DC, and let's just imagine you've somehow found yourself alone with this gentleman

01:31:46.260 once you figured out who he was and processed all he had to say, what would you say to him?

01:31:52.260 Well, I wouldn't intrude on his privacy to begin with, because I was overhearing a conversation about

01:31:57.800 the most intimate things in his life with his wife, which is one of the reasons I haven't divulged to a

01:32:02.280 single soul of the identity of that man of the plane, because it's not important. It could be

01:32:05.640 could be anybody practically under very similar circumstances. But if you were asking me for

01:32:10.680 particular advice, I would talk about the one thing that he's really missing, which he's evidently

01:32:16.620 really missing. And by the way, I've, I've Googled him since then. I've been following him since

01:32:21.740 then. He divorced that woman already, and it's not his first wife. And so the whole point is what he's

01:32:27.260 been hungering after, panting after, lusting after is what he had in Grihastha, what he had on his first

01:32:34.700 curve, what he had in his idols of money, power, pleasure, and honor. That's what he wanted. That's

01:32:41.040 what he wants back. And the fruit of his life should be his enlightenment based on love, on faith, and

01:32:48.440 family, and friendship, and service to other people. Those are the habits, not the happiest people.

01:32:53.880 Those are the people who are maximizing their happy span. I made up that word and it's awful,

01:32:58.500 but I'm just trying to, you know, I'm talking to Peter and Tia here. So I got a thing in the theme.

01:33:02.820 That's what I would talk about is like, you're going for the wrong thing. Your ambition to go

01:33:07.900 back in time is going to lead you to misery. You need to move forward into the bonds of love that should

01:33:14.680 be your rightful claim as a person later in life. And I did the research so that I could give the advice

01:33:22.320 to myself and other people on exactly how to do it. Well, Arthur, I won't even ask if this

01:33:26.780 gentleman is still alive, but if he is, I hope he's listening as I think we all are. And I think

01:33:31.520 we all benefit from this. It's a lot to think about. I think this is a harder thing to fix than

01:33:35.740 a lot of the things that I talk about. And I'm not sure why, because you would think, well, gosh,

01:33:39.800 it must be really hard to take somebody who's sleeping six hours a night in a fragmented way and

01:33:45.500 help them get to eight hours a night of great sleep, or someone who's sitting on the couch all day

01:33:50.140 and get them to exercise or someone who's living on McDonald's and get them to eat happy. All of

01:33:54.720 those things are difficult, but they're not as difficult, I think, as taking somebody who lives

01:34:00.500 on a hedonic treadmill and getting them to adjust that to decrease wants to make the type of strategic

01:34:10.680 changes that are in keeping with what ultimately will bring them happiness. I guess my final question

01:34:16.360 for you is, well, first of all, I guess, do you agree with me? But assuming that you would agree that

01:34:19.480 this is very difficult, why do you think it is? I've contemplated that an awful lot.

01:34:25.540 And I mean, I'll answer that actually in a weird way. When I was doing work for the RAND Corporation

01:34:30.740 on combat modeling using huge computer systems to look at unbelievable number of simulations and

01:34:38.780 contingencies, what I found was that all of the easiest problems to solve, which can be very hard,

01:34:44.420 but they're solvable, are what mathematicians call complicated problems. Those are problems that

01:34:49.860 they take a lot of computational horsepower. But once you solve the problem, you can replicate the

01:34:54.680 solution over and over again with great accuracy, like creating a jet engine where every single jet

01:34:59.260 flies and almost none of them ever crash or fail. That's a complicated problem. Now, it took a long

01:35:03.580 time to do that. We call that the toaster problem. It wasn't that long ago that there were no toasters.

01:35:08.820 And I recommend that you don't try to build your own. You'd probably burn your house down.

01:35:12.840 But now you can get a $20 toaster that lasts you for many, many years, and it makes really great

01:35:16.960 toast. That's a complicated problem. But the bigger problems, the problems that really bedevil us,

01:35:22.820 the problems of human life and the essence of human life are mostly complex problems. Those are the

01:35:28.740 problems where we understand the nature of what winning means very easily. But there's so many

01:35:34.000 inconceivably high number of permutations that they can't be solved. Those are not toaster problems.

01:35:39.780 Those are cat problems. Cats are complex, not complicated. You know what they want, scratches

01:35:45.320 and warmth and kibble in a box to poop in, but you don't know what they're going to do next ever.

01:35:51.420 And all of life's really interesting things that make life life, they're complex problems. Love is a

01:35:58.060 complex problem. Love is a cat, not a toaster. The problem that we have in our life today,

01:36:02.720 you know, and the problem with what we're getting from tech, for example, is that they're trying to

01:36:07.380 solve our complex problems of love using complicated engineering solutions. You're lonely? Here's

01:36:12.680 Facebook. That's like saying, you want a cat? Here's a toaster. So that's the problem, is that

01:36:17.860 these complex issues, they're insoluble, actually. And so we're looking for a simulacrum for a solution

01:36:24.840 to these particular problems. And when it comes down to saying, just love more, it's insufficient.

01:36:29.880 And that's why it's so hard. And so what I'll do when I can't get my cat is I'll just try to be

01:36:35.740 contented with a toaster. It's like, I don't know, I can't find a mate. So I guess I'll buy a boat. I

01:36:41.600 guess I'll try to be more successful. I guess I'll try to make more money. And it doesn't work. And

01:36:46.440 that's what leads to a lot of the heartbreak of ordinary life.

01:36:49.980 Arthur, I think that's literally one of the most remarkable explanations I've heard for, I mean,

01:36:54.680 certainly I'm familiar with complex and complicated problems, but this application of it is probably

01:36:59.160 one of the most helpful I've heard. So I appreciate that. And I appreciate your patience and sitting

01:37:03.120 down with me a second time. What a pleasure. Are you kidding? I was like, that's great. That's

01:37:07.860 awesome. I get to talk to Peter twice. Well, we'll do it a third time at some point. It'll be in person

01:37:13.960 and we'll come up with something great to eat as well. Thank you, Peter. Thank you for what you do.

01:37:18.120 I love your show and all of the things that you do. You make my life a lot better.

01:37:21.760 Well, I can say the same to you, Arthur. Thank you so much.

01:37:24.720 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. If you're interested in diving deeper

01:37:28.820 into any topics we discuss, we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you

01:37:33.240 more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads. It's our goal to ensure members get

01:37:38.720 back much more than the price of the subscription. Now to that end, membership benefits include a bunch

01:37:44.240 of things. One, totally kick-ass comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic, paper,

01:37:49.940 person thing we discuss on each episode. The word on the street is nobody's show notes rival these

01:37:55.360 monthly AMA episodes or ask me anything episodes, hearing these episodes completely access to our

01:38:02.020 private podcast feed that allows you to hear everything without having to listen to spiels

01:38:06.680 like this. The qualies, which are a super short podcast that we release every Tuesday through Friday,

01:38:12.400 highlighting the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on previous episodes of The Drive.

01:38:17.040 This is a great way to catch up on previous episodes without having to go back and necessarily

01:38:21.900 listen to everyone. Steep discounts on products that I believe in, but for which I'm not getting

01:38:27.460 paid to endorse, and a whole bunch of other benefits that we continue to trickle in as time goes on.

01:38:32.980 If you want to learn more and access these member-only benefits, you can head over to

01:38:36.360 peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook,

01:38:43.420 all with the ID peteratiamd. You can also leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast

01:38:49.920 player you listen on. This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute

01:38:55.480 the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the

01:39:00.400 giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is formed. The use of this information

01:39:05.940 and the materials linked to this podcast is at the user's own risk. The content on this podcast is not

01:39:12.480 intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not

01:39:18.920 disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice from any medical condition they have, and they should

01:39:25.080 seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Finally, I take conflicts

01:39:31.040 of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in or advise, please

01:39:37.100 visit peteratiamd.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date and active list of such companies.

01:39:55.080 for all of my disclosures and the companies I invest in, please visit peteratiamd.com forward slash about where I keep an up-to-date.

The Peter Attia Drive - October 10, 2022

#226 ‒ The science of happiness ｜ Arthur Brooks, Ph.D.

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript