The Peter Attia Drive - #280 ‒ Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more

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

00:00:16.580 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:21.580 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:26.780 wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely

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00:00:53.260 of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.080 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. My returning guest this week is

00:01:05.980 Arthur Brooks, who was originally on the podcast in October of 2022. I wanted to have Arthur back

00:01:12.560 again on the podcast to talk about his new book on happiness called build the life you want. As some

00:01:18.440 of you may recall, Arthur is a Harvard professor, a PhD social scientist, and a columnist at the

00:01:24.440 Atlantic, and also the bestselling author of From Strength to Strength, one of the handful of books

00:01:30.360 I keep in multiple copies at my house to share with anyone who comes over who doesn't have a copy.

00:01:35.580 Arthur's work specializes in using the highest levels of science and philosophy to provide people

00:01:41.280 with actionable strategies to live their best lives. In this conversation with Arthur, we focus on the

00:01:46.900 idea of happiness. And again, that sounds like a very vague concept. And if you're anything like I

00:01:53.260 was a couple of years ago, you would sort of reject the idea that this was something that could

00:01:58.000 be studied. But here we speak about the difference between happiness, happy feelings, unhappiness,

00:02:04.220 the evolution and heritability of happiness, and the different types of emotions we have. And I think

00:02:09.580 that Arthur has a really helpful way to think about this. In fact, one of the most important things

00:02:15.380 that I have noticed myself observing since reading this book and also talking with Arthur is that in

00:02:23.540 the moment, my emotions may not necessarily reflect my overall state of happiness. And I shouldn't

00:02:30.060 confuse in the moment feelings of uneasiness or even negatively valenced emotions with an overall

00:02:37.380 picture of the what Arthur calls macronutrients of happiness. We speak a lot about the positive and

00:02:43.160 negative affect schedule and a test that you can take to help understand your predisposition to types

00:02:49.220 of happiness and to your compatibility with others. And as I said, we then focus on what Arthur calls the

00:02:55.920 macronutrients of happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. And while all of these words are familiar,

00:03:02.800 they in this context have a very specific set of parameters. And I think it's worth understanding

00:03:10.100 them because it's what I keep coming back to as I examine my own life. And I suspect you'll find value in doing

00:03:16.340 that as well. We also talk about the importance of metacognition and transcendence in our happiness and the

00:03:22.200 idea of me self versus I self. Finally, we end the conversation looking at what potential biomarkers or a

00:03:30.180 dashboard of happiness might look like. And by biomarkers, I don't mean blood based biomarkers. But I use that term

00:03:36.220 kind of loosely to refer to other questions that one might ask of themselves to get a sense of their

00:03:43.440 overall health in terms of happiness, just as we might look at our own blood based biomarkers to look

00:03:49.680 at a sense of our overall health. The deeper I get into this world of longevity, the more and more convinced

00:03:57.040 I am of the importance of a topic like happiness. As I wrote about in Outlive, there really is no

00:04:05.400 clear reason to want to live longer if you are unhappy. And I think for that reason, I find myself

00:04:12.420 especially drawn to this kind of work. I consider myself to be constantly on a journey to understand

00:04:20.000 this better in myself. And of course, to understand how I can help my patients with this. So without

00:04:26.000 further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Arthur Brooks.

00:04:34.700 Arthur, thanks for making the trip to Austin. Although maybe it's only partially to see me.

00:04:38.820 It's mostly to see you, Peter. I love seeing you.

00:04:40.860 There you go.

00:04:41.180 It's the best. Doing this in person is great. Last time we did it by Zoom. This is better.

00:04:45.100 Congrats on the book.

00:04:46.180 Thanks.

00:04:46.640 This is not your first, second or third rodeo, but I'm sure each time it's a little bit of a,

00:04:51.660 what's the world going to think?

00:04:52.620 Oh, yeah. No, no. It's like having a child. I mean, well, a child you live with for a super

00:04:57.680 long time and they torture you decade after decade. But a book is something where as you

00:05:01.780 bring it into the world, you go through, you remember Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist

00:05:06.360 wrote that famous book about death and dying.

00:05:08.180 On death and dying.

00:05:08.920 And you have to go through five stages. I mean, most of that research has been questioned since

00:05:12.740 then, but it's pretty interesting. You go through bargaining and denial and rage. That's like,

00:05:17.340 as you know, when a book is coming out, writing a book, denial and bargaining and rage,

00:05:21.460 finally there's acceptance, but you're still nervous for sure.

00:05:25.300 Yeah. There's a lot of stuff I want to talk about with you on this topic, but let's begin

00:05:30.040 with a question, which is what's the difference between happiness, which is what you write

00:05:34.880 about and happy feelings. Are they the same thing?

00:05:38.520 They're not. And this is a really important misconception. All of my students and most of

00:05:42.680 us actually have, we live in the era of feelings. If you'd talk to my parents or God knows my

00:05:47.340 grandparents about feelings, they would scratch their head. What are you talking about? I mean,

00:05:52.440 talking about your emotions all the time, ephemera feelings seem so counterproductive. And in point

00:05:57.260 of fact, our grandparents were right. Feelings are not happiness any more than the smell of the

00:06:02.380 turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And that's incredibly good

00:06:07.780 news. I mean, a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling. It's quite incorrect. There are many

00:06:12.080 better technical definitions of happiness, but they produce a lot of feelings. They're associated

00:06:16.580 with a lot of emotions, which is limbic system activity, a part of the brain, a 40 million year

00:06:21.360 evolutionary process that developed the limbic system to create emotions. That's signals.

00:06:26.960 Information is what it comes from. If you mistake these feelings for the underlying phenomenon of

00:06:32.900 happiness, you're going to be chasing it all over the place. You'll be chasing ghosts.

00:06:36.340 How I slept last night, what I ate for breakfast, if my spouse yelled at me this morning, that's what's

00:06:40.480 going to determine my happiness. You wind up being managed as opposed to having any prayer of

00:06:44.940 managing your own happiness. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not feelings.

00:06:49.280 It's hard to differentiate though. Having read this stuff several times, you have to remind yourself

00:06:55.560 when you're in the throes of what I just refer to as negatively valenced feelings, that this is not

00:07:00.460 a statement of my overall state of happiness. Yeah, for sure. And then what's the relationship

00:07:05.200 between unhappiness and happiness? Are they polar images? How do they coexist?

00:07:09.440 Well, for the longest time, if you even go back to the ancient philosophers, there was the idea

00:07:13.160 that happiness and unhappiness exist on the spectrum. So unhappiness would be the lack of

00:07:17.480 happiness. We know a lot better now, given the explosion of neuroscience and the way that emotions

00:07:22.820 are produced, that in fact, you can be happy and unhappy or have happy and unhappy feelings in

00:07:28.240 parallel. So for example, the average person spends about 40% of their time with predominantly

00:07:33.740 positive feelings. It sits in a neutral idol of positivity. Most people do, not everybody.

00:07:39.600 About 16 or 17% of the time, the average person has predominantly negative feelings. Something is

00:07:44.200 going on. That's more intense. And part of the reason is because negative emotions get your attention

00:07:48.580 and they're supposed to. Evolution favors negative emotions. Positive emotions, nice to have. Negative

00:07:53.880 emotions pay attention because that could cost you your life. What are some of those, if you think

00:07:58.860 about this evolutionarily and not even going back to millions of years ago, but just going back

00:08:04.220 hundreds of thousands of years ago to the origin of our species as homo sapiens, what do we think

00:08:08.960 are some of the most powerful negative emotions that would drive action?

00:08:11.860 There's basically six fundamental emotions or basic emotions. These are the building blocks of all

00:08:16.820 emotional life that are produced by the limbic system of the brain, four negative and two positive.

00:08:20.700 The four negative emotions are sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. All four of those have a very

00:08:26.420 strong evolutionary basis. Fear and anger, of course, have to do with threat. They involve

00:08:31.300 the amygdala of the brain. You know, when a car is about to run you over and you're a pedestrian

00:08:36.180 in a crosswalk, that crosses your visual cortex and is recorded in the occipital lobe of your brain

00:08:41.280 as an enormous predator. That signals to your amygdala to send the signal through the hypothalamus

00:08:47.620 of your brain to your pituitary glands, which signals your adrenal glands above your kidneys

00:08:51.560 to spit out stress hormones. That happens in 74 milliseconds. By that time, you're sweating,

00:08:57.240 your heart is pumping, you've jumped out of the way, and you've flipped off the driver,

00:09:00.880 a combination of fear and anger in response to the enormous predator. Three seconds later,

00:09:06.440 your prefrontal cortex catches up and you say, I shouldn't have flipped him off. That's not my

00:09:10.840 values or whatever it happens to be. So that's your limbic system keeping you alive. That's fear and

00:09:15.040 anger. Then, of course, there's disgust, which involves the insular cortex of the brain,

00:09:19.340 and also part of the limbic system. That's when you pull something out of the back of your fridge

00:09:22.860 you forgot about a few weeks ago, and you hold it and you're like, ugh. That signals, don't eat it.

00:09:28.980 And so anything that might carry a pathogen signals that basic negative emotion of disgust to you.

00:09:34.480 Now, it can be misattributed to people. That's what demagogic politicians always do. That's what

00:09:39.500 the media does to us. It tries to reprogram the insular cortex, the insula of the limbic system of the

00:09:46.060 brain so that when somebody disagrees with you politically, you look at them like a cockroach.

00:09:50.940 That's what demagogic leaders and dictators have done for time immemorial so that people will

00:09:55.480 undertake barbaric acts against people in their own countries, at least a civil war, etc.

00:10:00.300 And then last but not least is sadness. Sadness has also evolved. Sadness is what you feel largely

00:10:06.180 in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, another part of the limbic system. That's mental

00:10:10.820 pain, usually when you're either socially excluded or you're separated from a loved one. Now, that's

00:10:17.900 something that's evolved because you don't want to be separated from your tribe. You don't want to walk

00:10:23.040 the frozen tundra and die alone. But what happens, for example, in grief, grief is unremediated

00:10:29.500 sadness. And the reason is because your brain is saying, make this separation go away. And you can't

00:10:35.900 because the other person is permanently gone, aka dead or divorced or whatever it happens to be.

00:10:41.620 And so the grief is just this pulsating activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain

00:10:48.540 saying, I must be reunited with that person, but I can't be. And it takes a lot of time in many cases

00:10:55.220 for the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex to stop registering that sadness, that pain.

00:11:00.520 The sadness we feel when a person dies, which would be the ultimate form of separation,

00:11:04.600 is a more extreme version of, say, a social isolation that you might feel, like what a kid

00:11:09.660 feels if they go to sit at the cafeteria table and all the other kids get up and walk away.

00:11:13.980 Yeah. And there's interesting studies that actually look at how that registers in the brain. So

00:11:18.180 the brain is so thrifty, as we all know. The neuroscience of this is super interesting. So

00:11:22.900 when you stub your toe, there's actually two processes going. There's sensory pain and affective

00:11:27.880 pain. Sensory pain means you can feel it in the nerve endings and it's very unpleasant.

00:11:32.620 Affective pain is, I hate this. And you feel both in physical pain. The affective component

00:11:38.160 involves the same part of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, when you have something

00:11:43.360 that emotionally bothers you, when you're being excluded. And we know that because there's these

00:11:47.700 interesting studies in an fMRI machine. They're looking at the part of the brain that's illuminated.

00:11:51.900 They're being subjected to being rejected by somebody else. And they can see the part of the

00:11:56.160 brain that's actually illuminated. I guess there is a way to do it, but is there a benefit to the

00:11:59.480 reverse? I love going into cold plunges. So I do it almost every day. And it's insanely

00:12:05.380 uncomfortable. There's not a day that I step into that 42 degree ice bath with jets shooting water

00:12:12.700 around me that I'm like, this doesn't hurt. But it doesn't come with the, I hate this because I'm

00:12:19.680 choosing to do it. And I think there's value in it. Does the brain treat that differently? How would we

00:12:24.180 think of that as an emotion? What it is, is a controlled aversive emotion under your own

00:12:28.780 power. And so for example, if you go to a haunted house on Halloween and get scared and get scared,

00:12:34.080 you're controlling the fear. If you're on a really radical amusement park ride, it's the same sort of

00:12:38.800 thing. It's what you're doing is you're subjecting yourself to a little bit of the stress hormones

00:12:42.120 and the experience of the aversive emotion. But since it's under your own control, you actually use it

00:12:47.780 in a way that you enjoy. And so people who do extreme sports, this is the same kind of thing that

00:12:52.400 they do. They like to feel a little bit in danger. One of my kids is somebody who likes this. He really

00:12:57.340 likes this a lot. He likes to expose himself to things that actually hurt as long as he's under

00:13:00.920 control. Any evidence that other species do this? No. This is a uniquely human phenomenon. Yeah. For

00:13:06.000 example, there's also no evidence that you can train any other species to appreciate spicy food,

00:13:12.460 to ingest capsaicin. No other species can be trained to like the feeling of spicy food that hurts

00:13:18.740 your mouth. Only humans can do that. And so this is a really higher order phenomenon where we have

00:13:23.700 aversive emotions. Other animals have aversive emotions, but we actually can dominate them

00:13:29.200 through a process called metacognition, where we experience the emotions, not just in the limbic

00:13:34.280 system of the brain, but in the prefrontal cortex. This is where it really gets interesting. This is

00:13:38.760 the human difference is where this comes around. So the dog wants the cookie, eats the cookie. Dogs are

00:13:45.440 limbic creatures. Little kids are limbic. When your kids were little, when my kids were little,

00:13:49.540 they'd be screaming over something, there's a piece of rice on their chair, whatever thing that bums

00:13:53.060 them out. You're like, use your words. What you're telling them to do is to experience the emotion

00:13:57.960 in the prefrontal cortex of the brain where they can decide how to react. They can think about what

00:14:03.720 their own emotions are. And when you're doing that, then you can get in the cold plunge and say,

00:14:07.340 it hurts so good. And that's what metacognition brings to you. And also you can say something like,

00:14:12.020 I'm really sad about this. What am I learning? That's how you can be a far more evolved human

00:14:18.740 being by becoming more and more metacognitive using the techniques for doing so, which is a

00:14:23.380 lot about what I'm writing about these days. Okay. So what about the two positive?

00:14:27.220 The two positive, and this is actually pretty much all the neuroscientists agree on the four

00:14:31.180 negative, not all the neuroscientists agree on the two positive. Some people believe that surprise

00:14:35.960 is a positive basic emotion. And so there's a lot of different schools of this, but two that pretty

00:14:41.280 much everybody agrees on are joy and interest. Now this is useful for us to think about. Joy is

00:14:46.840 obvious. It's ordinarily when you're reunited with somebody that you love or something good happens

00:14:52.020 pursuant to struggle. The joy you get after you work really hard for something and you get it,

00:14:57.700 that's a basic positive emotion. And that's a reward, evolved reward, so that you'll work hard

00:15:01.980 to find some berries on a bush and you get your caloric needs met for the day. You want to make sure that

00:15:06.000 you get an emotional reward for that. And that's actually stimulating a part of the brain called a

00:15:09.440 ventral striatum, which is your reward system. And boom, that feels good. Want to do it again,

00:15:14.780 do it again, do it again. Interest is different. Interest is you get intense pleasure. People are

00:15:20.380 listening to The Drive, which I do. Why? Because I learned something from it. Why do I care? I mean,

00:15:26.620 it's not like it's going to dramatically change my salary trajectory or my professional success if I

00:15:31.880 listen or don't listen to your show. I want to learn because learning is intensely pleasurable.

00:15:36.480 That's really a fascinating phenomenon because that's how people evolve and make progress. And

00:15:42.240 it makes sense that that would be an evolutionary phenomenon. We would favor learning so that people

00:15:47.120 can get ahead and feed themselves and find new sources of food and find new mates and all the

00:15:52.560 things that they do. And the way that that's adapted to the current environment is they listen to your

00:15:55.700 show. So it seems to me that both of those could be found in creatures other than us. Certainly,

00:16:02.720 joy. I guess learning would be a testable hypothesis, presumably with a maze or something

00:16:07.640 like that. Whether the learning is positively valenced. You can teach a worm to learn. A

00:16:13.480 worm will learn. You can teach a worm things. We just don't know whether it's a positively

00:16:17.460 valenced experience because they don't have the kind of brain that will give you emotions as we

00:16:21.520 understand them. I wonder if optogenetics would provide insight into that one day when you could get

00:16:25.880 sort of cellular level resolution of different parts of the brain. I don't know if you're familiar

00:16:29.900 with Carl Deseroth's work. Yeah, for sure. You've had him on, right? I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:34.200 Yeah, a psychiatrist. Yeah. That would be an interesting line of inquiry, I suppose.

00:16:38.240 Yeah, for sure. And we know that dogs, for example, have rudimentary emotions. They can mimic

00:16:42.640 human emotions really, really well. But it's almost certainly limbic phenomena that look

00:16:48.120 metacognitive more than anything else. And one of the things that we do is we selectively breed dogs so

00:16:53.640 that their emotional state more clearly mimics our own. We like that. They make better companions.

00:16:58.900 They do something you're not supposed to do and they look guilty. They don't feel guilty. That's

00:17:02.600 certainly an illusion. We have a new puppy. I can really relate to this.

00:17:07.460 Yeah, yeah. And there are certain ways that they are quite similar to us. For example,

00:17:11.680 there's a lot of research that suggests that they have serotonin balance issues. And if you give a

00:17:18.560 dog a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it will actually have some of the same effects it can

00:17:23.260 have on people. You can give your dog Prozac and your dog will be less depressed or at least have

00:17:27.740 fewer depressive symptoms in some cases. So there are ways that they are similar to us,

00:17:31.380 for sure. When you think about the arc of evolution, a purely Darwinian approach to our existence would

00:17:37.400 be evolutionary fitness. Where does happiness fit into that?

00:17:43.720 Now, that's a question that I've dealt with or thought about for a long, long time. And

00:17:47.460 a lot of people sort of assume that evolution would favor happiness. And the reason is basically this.

00:17:54.000 Evolution gives me a bunch of desires. It gives me desires for calories and interesting things and

00:18:01.300 sexual partners and all those things that evolution wires into me. And there are certain things that I

00:18:05.800 want. And one of the things that I want is those things, but also I want to be a happy person.

00:18:10.060 So therefore, evolution must favor happiness. That's wrong. There's no indication that Mother Nature

00:18:15.220 cares about your happiness. She cares really about two things, survival and gene propagation.

00:18:19.440 That's what Mother Nature, Mother Nature wants you to survive and pass on your genes.

00:18:24.620 You being happy, does that help that? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it doesn't. I mean,

00:18:29.200 we find that dark triad personalities, malignant narcissists, they tend to be way unhappier than

00:18:34.200 normal and they're extremely sexually attractive to the opposite sex. What's up with that? People are

00:18:39.780 finding terrible mates that make them miserable and they have extremely high levels of success in mating

00:18:45.160 markets. And that militates against the idea that happiness would be evolved. And so I've become

00:18:50.640 persuaded that happiness is sort of the divine path versus the animal path. And it's many times you

00:18:56.060 need to stand up to Mother Nature's imperatives so that you can be happy. I give a lot of examples in

00:19:01.880 my own research of actually how that's the case.

00:19:05.020 Let's talk about a bit of them because in part where I want to be able to go with this is the

00:19:08.740 heritability of happiness.

00:19:10.280 Which we know about.

00:19:11.040 Let's talk about both of those things. What can we learn about the genetics of happiness

00:19:15.100 and talk maybe a little bit about your research as well?

00:19:18.640 The baseline levels of mood balance, which is not the same thing as happiness. It's the extent to

00:19:24.180 which you feel positive and negative emotions over the course of the day varies a lot between

00:19:29.780 individuals. There's sort of four personality patterns with respect to positive and negative

00:19:34.460 emotions over the course of your day. And they have to do with the intensity and the frequency of

00:19:38.760 negative and positive emotions. There are four equal sized groups.

00:19:42.620 Yeah, let's talk about them. And I haven't taken the test yet, but I'm positive I know which one I am.

00:19:46.680 I know you are too. So there are people who have extremely intense positive emotions and extremely

00:19:52.820 intense negative emotions. Now, it doesn't have to be extreme. In my case, it is. It has to be above

00:19:58.820 average to be in a quadrant called the mad scientist quadrant. That's a quarter of the population.

00:20:03.240 They're above average positive intensity and mood and above average negative.

00:20:07.640 There are some, and this is the one that everybody wants to be, is above average positive and below

00:20:12.980 average negative in intensity. These are the cheerleaders. There's a quarter of the population

00:20:17.240 that's above average negative and below average positive. Those are the poets. And that's a really

00:20:23.280 interesting, from a neuroscientific perspective, these people. That's a quarter of the population

00:20:27.240 as well. And then there's the low low. People who are low affect people. People who have low intensity

00:20:32.260 positive, low intensity negative. It doesn't mean they're not unhappy or happy. It means the intensity of

00:20:37.140 their feelings puts them in that bottom quadrant. And those are the judges. Those are the unflappable

00:20:42.100 people with enormously good judgment who don't get freaked out about anything.

00:20:45.980 And this is roughly a quarter.

00:20:47.480 It's actually by construction a quarter because it's above and below average across the population.

00:20:51.380 So it has to be in those quarters. I have a thing on my website where people can take the test.

00:20:55.420 You can just go take the test. We don't keep the data. It's just so that people can know who they are

00:20:58.720 because you need to know who you are to manage yourself. And a large part of who you are is

00:21:03.680 genetic based on what we know about the basis of happiness.

00:21:08.060 So when we talk about the heritability of happiness, is it with respect to exactly that

00:21:12.580 phenomenon as opposed to the definition of happiness that we'll get to that you write about?

00:21:17.300 Not exactly because we haven't looked at identical twin studies with respect to those four quadrants.

00:21:21.900 The four quadrant testing is the positive affect, negative affect series, the PANIS series,

00:21:26.760 which is very well scientifically validated. But we haven't actually compared the identical twin

00:21:31.980 data on nature versus nurture and personality with those data. What the identical twin studies do

00:21:37.760 is they look at the extent to which your mood balance, your self-evaluated general happiness

00:21:44.100 scores are related to your parents and grandparents and the heritability. And so what happened in those

00:21:49.320 studies is that they will take identical twins that were separated at birth, adopted to separate

00:21:53.760 families. This was not a social science experiment cooked up like guys like me at Harvard. It happened

00:21:58.980 naturally. And then they were reunited as adults and given personality tests. And they find that

00:22:04.160 between 44 and 52 percent of your baseline self-evaluated well-being is evolved. Your mother literally

00:22:11.620 made you unhappy. Yeah. So for context, for folks listening, obesity is probably 60 percent

00:22:19.640 heritable. You know, height. Much higher. Much higher. One of the highest, probably 80, 90 percent

00:22:25.280 heritable. Alcoholism, 50 percent. Yeah. Autism, probably 80 percent. Depression, probably 60, 70 percent.

00:22:34.160 I guess my takeaway from that is your genes are not your destiny when it comes to happiness.

00:22:39.040 They play a role. And furthermore, you need to know your genetic proclivity because then you can manage

00:22:43.420 it. I talk to a lot of people who both parents drink too much and all four grandparents. They're not

00:22:48.900 doomed to alcoholism because once you know your tendency, you manage your habits. That's where

00:22:53.520 life really gets interesting. This is the reason we need to manage our health so that we know where

00:22:58.340 we are, what our tendencies are. There's some people who they have such incredibly good health,

00:23:02.260 they need to go to the gym half as much as I do, quarter as much as I do. They can eat all kinds

00:23:06.500 more junk than I can. But once I know what my tendencies are, then I know where to compensate on the

00:23:11.560 basis of my habits. And that's where knowledge about what you've inherited is true power.

00:23:15.520 So I'm going to guess I'm a mad scientist. I think you are as well, correct?

00:23:19.180 I'm the maddest of the mad. I'm at the 95th percentile in positive and the 90th percentile

00:23:23.040 in negative. I can't wait to take the test to see where I am on percentile. I wouldn't be surprised

00:23:26.680 if I exceed you, by the way. I feel like I'm insane. And it's hard to be married to you, right?

00:23:30.740 Yeah. My wife would say it's impossible. Yeah. My wife reminds me as recently as yesterday

00:23:34.300 that it's not a walk in the park being married to me.

00:23:37.480 What do we know about compatibility of those types in friendships and partnerships?

00:23:42.020 Yeah. So this is the interesting thing. One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of young

00:23:45.540 people make, the average age of my students is 28. I teach graduate students. And they've

00:23:50.820 been told that to find a good romantic partnership, you have to find maximum compatibility. And that's

00:23:56.360 wrong. You need a minimum baseline of compatibility on top of which you need complementarity. So back

00:24:02.840 in the day, the matchmaker in your village would find somebody, same religion, they live in the

00:24:07.620 same place. They're both sort of a match on physical attractiveness. Now let's find one

00:24:13.480 completing the other. This is one of the reasons that introverts and extroverts make very good marriage

00:24:18.100 partners. Typically, two extroverts can be a real problem as daggers drawn. They're competing with each

00:24:23.220 other all the time. Two introverts, typically there's not enough conversation. There's not enough

00:24:28.000 human connection. They'll be isolated too much. They'll drift apart is what we find. And when it comes to

00:24:32.900 these personality profiles with respect to affect, you need to find somebody who completes you. But

00:24:38.240 you have to appreciate differences. So mad scientists do really well with judges, because judges mellow

00:24:43.980 them out. Two mad scientists, it's like it's craziness. It's a hurricane all the time. Because

00:24:49.500 what will happen is you'll get into a vortex of getting more and more spun up and then going all

00:24:53.620 the way back down again. You can be an accelerant to each other. And that can be really a big problem.

00:24:57.860 So look for somebody different than you. Now, the problem with dating is that the platforms that

00:25:03.800 people use, I mean, you don't meet somebody in a restaurant anymore. Young people aren't going to

00:25:08.200 church very much. So where do you meet? Online. You're like a stalker or a serial killer if you're

00:25:12.820 not meeting people online. And they curate their profiles to find somebody who's like a sibling,

00:25:19.140 which is, as my adult kids remind me, not hot.

00:25:22.280 What's hot is complementarity, is the adventure of somebody different than you. Somebody that you're

00:25:29.960 discovering something. You love somebody because of their differences, not despite their differences.

00:25:35.080 And you can find a lot of that, and it's especially productive when we come to these personality

00:25:38.500 profiles. So what do you do with your knowledge base? So as a mad scientist, what are the tools you

00:25:44.780 use from that to manage yourself, which is kind of a recurring theme here. We keep coming back to it,

00:25:50.460 and I want to come back to it more formally to talk about metacognition. But just briefly, maybe,

00:25:56.260 what are the most important things that you think about as a mad scientist to regulate your own

00:26:02.900 emotions and to presumably keep the balance more on the positive versus negative valence?

00:26:09.600 For the longest time, I mean, the reason I've done this research, Peter, is because I need it.

00:26:14.680 This is me search. That's really what it is. And I know you do too. I mean, you do this work because

00:26:19.260 you want to live a long time and have a high quality of life. In our community of health and

00:26:23.440 wellness and fitness and longevity, and we're all doing the best we can for our own lives and then

00:26:28.060 sharing with other people. And this is absolutely the case with me. If you're a mad scientist and

00:26:31.540 you don't self-manage, you're going to be all over the place. You're going to be a big mess.

00:26:35.180 You're going to have difficult relationships. A lot of the time, you're going to be miserable.

00:26:38.540 And it's avoidable. It's actually unconstructive not to self-manage. But self-management is not

00:26:44.740 one weird trick, as they like to say on the internet. There's no hacks. It's really all about

00:26:50.740 mental habits. It starts with the knowledge of the science. It goes into specific practices. And

00:26:56.080 then a lot of it has to do with teaching other people. As you know, the best way for you to live

00:26:59.660 better is to teach other people how to live better. If you want to be healthy, start a health podcast or

00:27:05.160 something and make sure you've got good science on your side. So when it comes to mad science,

00:27:10.880 the mad scientist profile that's hard to manage otherwise, the mistake that people get into is

00:27:16.020 they try to stay on the positive side. That's a logical thing to do.

00:27:18.900 With bipolar disorder, we find that the biggest problem that they have is staying on their meds

00:27:22.920 because they like the manic and they don't like the depression, but they can't time it. And so you

00:27:28.860 actually have to stabilize your mood so that you're not seeking the highs and trying to avoid

00:27:35.260 the lows. And by the way, I'm not saying that every mad scientist has bipolar disorder. I'm just

00:27:39.720 saying that they tend to have mania. They tend to have this kind of a hypermanic, as John Gardner

00:27:45.640 talks about, the hypermanic edge. And that's what most mad scientists have a little bit of. That's why

00:27:49.720 they tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs like you, but they fall prey to a lot of mood issues that

00:27:55.780 are pretty avoidable. At the pro level of self-management in the mad scientist category

00:28:01.360 is to not seek the highs because the highs don't help you that much. What you actually need to be

00:28:06.620 is a full person, not riding the wave of your emotions. You need to manage your emotions and

00:28:11.720 never let them manage you. And that gets into the whole topic you're talking about, which is

00:28:15.760 metacognition. That is to experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex, as opposed to living

00:28:21.800 according to your limbic system. Never be managed by your limbic system. Your limbic system is nothing

00:28:27.340 more than the factory for your emotions. That's really what it's doing. And if you're basically

00:28:31.840 taking raw factory materials and trying to live according to them, as opposed to assembling them,

00:28:38.280 making them into a set of experiences, learning from them, growing from them, you're not fully alive.

00:28:44.460 You're subject to something. You're subject to a crazy machine all the time. And so that's a lot of

00:28:49.920 what I write about is actually how do you experience emotions more fully in the prefrontal cortex of

00:28:54.040 your brain? What are the techniques for doing so? And when you're doing that, what is the repertoire

00:28:57.920 of reactions and responses that you can bring to a highly volatile emotional state?

00:29:04.180 Are there any folks where, for example, the poet, where you actually push them to be more in that

00:29:12.080 limbic system? Or is it the same for everyone? Because the poet, of course, is the one who's

00:29:16.840 disproportionately down, right? These are the great artists.

00:29:20.260 So poets, there's interesting research that parallel to this, that doesn't use the same

00:29:24.240 panaceous test, but it's pretty provocative nonetheless. The people who have a tendency

00:29:27.960 toward depression, not bipolar, but depression, they tend to be more creative. They're ruminators.

00:29:35.880 And they also tend to be romantics. And, you know, this follows a pattern. You've met people like

00:29:40.620 this that have this pattern of romantic, creative, depressive, poetic people. Really interesting

00:29:48.280 neuroscience research suggests that there's a part of the brain that's especially active for

00:29:53.700 these people. It's called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. And this is the part of the

00:29:57.760 brain that you use a lot when you're ruminating on something, which depressive people do. They think

00:30:02.260 about the thing and think about the thing. This is also what's going on when you're in love with

00:30:05.920 somebody. You can't stop thinking it. You're ruminating on another person. This is the same thing

00:30:09.880 that's going on when you're working on a business plan or writing a symphony or actually writing a

00:30:13.860 poem. So that's what they're really good at, but also what they're really bad at. They can't stop

00:30:19.380 thinking about things, which is good for them and really bad for them. Their strength is their

00:30:22.600 weakness. And Peter, this is the same thing across all the profiles. Your strength is your weakness.

00:30:27.400 Your weakness is your strength. Learn to manage it, wire to the strengths, remediate the weaknesses,

00:30:33.460 and complete yourself. So I encourage everybody to be more metacognitive. Everybody. So that you're a

00:30:39.280 poet, you can be really, really poetic, but it won't ruin your life.

00:30:43.560 Do we think that, and this is tangential and maybe not relevant, but do we think that

00:30:47.660 the most extreme form of greatness that we've seen, the most genius type of phenomenon that we've seen

00:30:55.960 as a species always come from extremes in these categories?

00:31:00.300 It's almost certainly not true.

00:31:02.260 It's sort of a caricature of what we think to be true.

00:31:04.560 Yeah, for sure. And part of the reason is because those are the spectacular cases. You see somebody who's

00:31:08.360 unbelievably good at something and who's weird, you focus on their weirdness. There are tons of people

00:31:12.700 who are extremely accomplished and not that weird. You don't have to be weird. I mean, it's the kind of

00:31:18.100 thing where it's like, yeah, I guess to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be the kind of person

00:31:21.760 that Walter Isaacson wants to write a biography about. If Walter Isaacson is writing your biography,

00:31:26.480 get help. There are tons of people, very successful entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, just people who

00:31:34.780 excel, who have decent relationships and who are able to self-moderate and who don't abuse drugs and

00:31:41.640 alcohol. Now, a lot of them do. And part of the reason is because they have certain personality

00:31:45.960 characteristics that go relatively unremediated. And we have people who are highly limbic.

00:31:50.200 They tend to be successful in spite of their messy mental hygiene, not because of their messy

00:31:55.900 mental hygiene. It's even better if you've got some of these characteristics and you're really

00:32:00.700 creative and really hardworking and really driven and you manage it. That's even better.

00:32:05.900 Yeah. Okay. So let's now talk about these three components of happiness. You wrote about this in

00:32:12.040 Strength to Strength, but let's go over them again and talk about what each one means.

00:32:15.880 Happiness is not a feeling. We've established that. Feelings are evidence of happiness.

00:32:20.380 When we look at the happiest people and the way that we do that typically, there's some

00:32:24.260 indirect ways to figure that out. You know, I could ask your wife, how happy is Peter and you're not

00:32:29.520 there? And I would get some really probably very accurate information. There are some tests that are

00:32:34.040 not very good, but I could ask you a series of targeted questions when you're under fMRI.

00:32:39.420 But they're really the best way to do it. The most cost-effective and efficient way to do that is for

00:32:44.020 you to anonymously answer a bunch of questions that are sort of like this.

00:32:47.440 Imagine all the people you know were the happiest person you've ever met. I mean,

00:32:52.900 really happy is 10. And the most miserable SOB you've ever met is a one. All things considered

00:32:59.700 at this period of your life, not this moment, this period of your life, all things considered,

00:33:03.980 thinking of those people, what's your number? And that turns out to be incredibly accurate.

00:33:08.780 You got to have a large sample because some people answer it in a wonky way.

00:33:11.960 And it has to be anonymous because if you answer this in front of Jill, you'll probably lie.

00:33:16.820 They don't tell the truth in front of their spouses necessarily in front of their friends

00:33:20.540 because they give answers that people want to hear. But if it's really honest and you're by

00:33:24.140 yourself, I'll get extremely effective data from that. Based on these data, you find that the

00:33:31.140 happiest people, they have three macronutrients in balance and abundance.

00:33:35.520 By the way, before we get to those, are those responses normally distributed?

00:33:41.640 Yeah, they are normally distributed, but the mean is not five. Yeah, the mean is more like

00:33:47.120 seven and a half. So there's a bias toward the top part of the scale. The reason for the skew

00:33:52.640 is because you feel like it would be better if it were a five. If it were a five, it would be saying

00:33:57.980 that a three is within one standard deviation. There's nothing wrong with being a three. Nobody wants

00:34:01.440 to be a three. Numbers have cultural valence, right? They really do. And so people will kind of,

00:34:06.620 yeah, it's like, you know, being normal happy, that's like seven, eight. And what you find is

00:34:11.720 that most people over the course of their adult lives, early 20s to early 50s, they're between

00:34:16.120 seven and nine. Most people are from seven and nine. Most of the people that I talk to that I work

00:34:21.040 with, especially the executives that I work with one-on-one who are threes, they're depressed.

00:34:25.400 They're actually suffering from clinical issues. They're behind the line of scrimmage. There's nobody

00:34:30.420 who's like, yeah, I'm pretty normal. I'm like, you know, probably the 40th percentile.

00:34:34.780 That probably makes me a three and a half. 40th percentile is probably a five

00:34:37.760 is the way that that works. They would like to be better and they feel like they're not as good

00:34:42.760 as they should be, despite the fact that in the scale, that looks like the middle of the scale.

00:34:47.100 It's not the middle of the scale. So what do you find? The people who are in the upper end,

00:34:51.720 the eights and nines, and like my wife, nine and a half, I don't get it, but there you go.

00:34:56.560 They tend to be really healthy and healthy means they have balance and abundance across

00:35:01.840 what I often refer to as the happiness is macronutrients. It's very easy in your audience

00:35:06.760 because everybody knows it's protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And the best diets are those that have

00:35:11.420 all of them in balance and abundance. And you have to get your macros and you're not going to have

00:35:16.800 a hundred percent protein. That sounds good for somebody for a week until they become miserable.

00:35:21.580 So the three macronutrients are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the

00:35:26.180 three macronutrients of happiness. And none of those, by the way, is straightforward. Any more

00:35:30.040 than protein, carbohydrates, and fat is straightforward. It's like, I'll be fine. I'm

00:35:33.720 going to eat a chicken and a stick of butter and a ho-ho. And then I'm going to eat that exclusively

00:35:37.860 for the rest of my life. And it meets my macros. So I should be fine. No, no, no, it doesn't work

00:35:41.260 that way. You actually have to understand that, understand what each one of those things are,

00:35:46.300 enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And you have to have strategies to understand why they're so

00:35:52.280 hard to attain and what you need to do exercises to make sure that you can be better and more

00:35:58.420 skillful at attaining each one. So let's start with enjoyment.

00:36:02.040 Enjoyment seems sort of straightforward. I want to enjoy my life. Get a lot of pleasure. That's wrong.

00:36:06.600 Pleasure is limbic. Enjoyment involves the prefrontal cortex. Enjoyment is a much more complex

00:36:12.580 phenomenon than pleasure. Pleasure is a signal from the limbic system that says this thing that you're

00:36:21.040 doing will help you survive, usually through caloric needs or pass on your genes through something like

00:36:27.340 sex. So that's what pleasure is really all about. It's nothing more. It's just like any positive

00:36:32.180 emotion. It sends a signal saying, do more of this. That's not the secret of happiness. That's

00:36:37.160 incredibly evanescent. It's extremely temporary. And if you pursue pleasure, what you'll be doing

00:36:43.500 is you'll be engaging systems in your brain, the dopamine system, for example, which is the

00:36:48.200 anticipation of reward, the reward being pleasure. You'll hit the lever, get the cookie, hit the lever,

00:36:53.240 get the cookie. It will never last and you'll become an addict. Pleasure seeking, I mean, the hippie

00:36:57.740 phenomenon, the hippie motto of it feels good, do it, is life ruining advice. It's just the dumbest

00:37:04.300 thing ever. If it feels good, do it. You'd never go into the ice bath. I mean, you wouldn't stay

00:37:08.420 married if it feels good, do it all the time. It's just terrible advice. So what do you need for

00:37:14.460 enjoyment? The answer is the source of pleasure, adding two things, people and memory. That's where

00:37:20.860 you're engaging your prefrontal cortex. So Anheuser-Busch never runs ads for beer of a dude

00:37:28.300 alone in his apartment pounding a 12 pack. They never do that, right? A lot of people use the product

00:37:34.000 that way. Why don't they show that? Because that's the pursuit of pleasure and that's dangerous.

00:37:38.900 That's bad for you. Use of methamphetamine is bad for you. What we're incredibly good at using science

00:37:45.060 today is to take things that give a little bit of pleasure evolutionarily and supercharge them.

00:37:50.560 Natural endorphins that you get that will block pain under normal circumstances, we can supercharge

00:37:55.140 them in a lab and make fentanyl and 100,000 people died last year. That pursuit of that pleasure is

00:37:59.780 utterly ruinous. We look at a random series of events and when it's random, we get payoffs

00:38:05.180 a little bit. We'll seek those events and that gives us a little bit of pleasure. We turn that

00:38:08.740 into slot machines in Vegas and then you're sitting there at 4am by yourself, really, really bad for

00:38:14.860 you. That's the problem. Seeking pleasure alone, not making memory will make you miserable. Usually if

00:38:22.960 something gives you pleasure and you're doing it alone, you're usually doing it wrong.

00:38:25.360 So pornography is a problem. It uses the sexual function in a way that leads to addiction

00:38:29.940 and huge problems in people's lives. It's contraindicated. It's not good for especially

00:38:35.020 young people to use that, but that's the same thing as fentanyl in this way. Okay. So what

00:38:39.940 do you do? You make sure you're with people, especially the people you love and you're making

00:38:44.600 memories. That's why Anheuser-Busch's ads have two dudes or 10 dudes or a family cracking open

00:38:51.500 a bud and drinking it and laughing because in the ad, they want you to associate the

00:38:56.920 beer with happiness, which is enjoyment is the central factor, not the pleasure that the

00:39:03.380 little bit of alcohol will bring you. And that's what we need to do. That's the strategy.

00:39:07.420 We're working on a, and maybe by the time this podcast come out, it'll be out, but we're working

00:39:11.640 on a very, very in-depth newsletter on basically the conflicting data on alcohol, specifically around

00:39:18.200 wine. Why is it that at a biochemical level, and certainly looking at the Mendelian randomizations,

00:39:24.420 alcohol is toxic at any dose and it's a monotonically increasing function. So there's no

00:39:28.320 amount of alcohol that is healthy. Yet the epidemiology is pretty significantly in favor

00:39:34.560 of modest drinking over abstinence. And once you even strip out all of the obvious confounders

00:39:40.680 that would lead to that, you're left with the phenomenon you describe, which is if you dig

00:39:46.680 into the data really deeply, it's the Mediterranean drinking pattern that seems to be associated with

00:39:53.680 some benefits at low doses. People in memory, not the alcohol per se. The food and the wine and the

00:39:59.860 people combo that seems to be beneficial, not the vodka and Red Bull in the dorm issue. Even though

00:40:07.580 it's the same molecule, it's a very different experience. Processed sugar is the same thing. You find

00:40:12.540 that people who eat candy one to three times a month on average live a year longer than people

00:40:16.880 who abstain completely from candy. Candy is terrible for you. It rots your teeth. It leads to metabolic

00:40:22.140 syndrome. Eating candy one to three times a day is very different than eating it one to three times

00:40:28.060 a month. And so the whole point is you do something that you enjoy. It's something that gives you a

00:40:32.980 little bit of pleasure, which something really sweet does because of our evolution. Something that gives

00:40:38.480 you a little bit of euphoria like alcohol, makes you feel good, but you do it with people and you

00:40:43.520 make a memory, unless all your friends are drunks, which is bad. You can get into an unhealthy community

00:40:49.280 that you're doing it in a pretty moderate way. And then it's life enhancing despite the fact that

00:40:53.700 it's a poison and you can use a little bit of poison in a productive way, but it has to be about

00:40:58.560 enjoyment, never about pleasure per se. Such an interesting distinction.

00:41:02.380 Man, I'm 59. It took me this long. This is information that I wish I had been able to use

00:41:08.780 when I was in my twenties. It would have saved me a lot of grief. It really would have because all

00:41:12.940 the time that I wasted with drinking, with just unproductive activity and the way that I've missed

00:41:20.320 opportunities to love and be loved and to have a happier life. This is really, really news that

00:41:26.100 people can use. And this is probably one of the stronger arguments against evolution being in

00:41:34.220 favor of happiness. It's clear that evolution is in favor of pleasure. Pleasure might be one of the

00:41:39.920 most potent fuels that drives the engine of evolution, at least when it comes to reproduction,

00:41:46.340 but certainly other aspects of evolution as well. You're exactly right.

00:41:49.240 But enjoyment is a higher order process and I guess would not necessarily have the same

00:41:56.360 evolutionary drive. Although I suppose being with people obviously also has a strong evolutionary

00:42:03.420 bent, if for no other reason than we couldn't have survived alone, even through the industrialization

00:42:09.400 of agriculture. No, absolutely right. The problem is the maladaptation that comes with technological

00:42:13.720 progress is that you can strip off the component of enjoyment that is pleasure and then supercharge

00:42:19.220 it in the lab. That's the problem. The internet makes it possible to do that. Chemistry makes

00:42:24.420 it easy to do that. There are all kinds of ways that we strip out that component of enjoyment. So it's

00:42:29.580 no longer part of the evolved societies that would have been more traditional.

00:42:34.100 So do you think that that's a decent litmus test, Arthur, where the person who's listening to this,

00:42:37.880 who loves to smoke, says, guys, I enjoy smoking. Like I really enjoy it. And you would push back on

00:42:46.020 that and say, no, you find pleasure in smoking and you find just as much pleasure if you're sitting

00:42:51.140 by yourself doing it, puffing away, getting the physiologic high of the tobacco, but you're not

00:42:59.040 forming new memories. You're not sharing in this with someone else. That's right. My wife smokes two

00:43:03.900 times a year when she's with her sister in Barcelona. She loves her sister. Her sister smokes only after

00:43:10.680 meals only with people, maybe once or twice a day, which is by the way, too much. It's conflicting

00:43:16.480 evidence on that, but it's suffice it to say that any amount of tobacco and any amount of smoke in

00:43:20.980 your lungs is not good for you. My wife smokes twice a year because she's with her sister. My wife's

00:43:25.220 not a smoker. I used to be a smoker. I don't touch it. I don't dare touch it. Not even twice a year is

00:43:30.160 the way that that works out. Because for me, I got the monkey on my back immediately. And I don't want

00:43:36.160 that thing to come back because I so thoroughly stripped the pleasure from tobacco off from the

00:43:42.580 enjoyment of communally smoking that I can't handle it anymore. Part of that is my mad scientist.

00:43:49.580 Part of that is get back to what we talked about earlier in the conversation.

00:43:52.920 Okay. So what is satisfaction then?

00:43:56.120 Again, I mean, people are like, enjoyment's complicated and it's all complicated. That's

00:43:59.800 why the knowledge is so critically important. I mean, that's why happiness is a serious business.

00:44:04.020 Satisfaction is the joy after struggle. That's what satisfaction really is. You struggled for it.

00:44:10.140 You worked for it. You got it. It feels awesome. If my students cheat to get an A on my exam,

00:44:15.960 there's no satisfaction. But if they worked really hard, you might say, chump, stupid.

00:44:21.680 Brooks probably gave the same exam last year. Go find last year's exam. But if they actually struggle

00:44:25.920 for it and they study for it, they get a ton of satisfaction when they get an A because that's

00:44:30.900 how we're wired. We're wired after you struggle for something a lot. Again, this comes back to

00:44:35.460 the evolutionary psychology, even biology, is that you go looking hard for something and you get it.

00:44:40.740 You want that to be reinforced as a good thing to do. That's why Mother Nature really wants that to

00:44:46.020 happen. And that's why we have that evolutionary imperative. Okay. So that's great. But here's this

00:44:51.460 little twist that Mother Nature throws into it. If you knew that that satisfaction, that joy wasn't

00:44:57.300 going to last, you'd think twice before going through the struggle. You'd think twice about

00:45:02.160 the cost-benefit analysis. Like if you said to yourself, I mean, I like that watch. It's a nice

00:45:06.400 watch. I don't know what kind of watch that is. That's a Seamaster or something, right? It's a GMT.

00:45:12.460 It's a nice watch. But if you'd thought to yourself, it's a pretty expensive watch. I'm going to really,

00:45:18.860 really like it for a week. You'd think twice about it. Trivial example. But there's all kinds of

00:45:24.680 things that we do. That relationship, that conquest, that business plan, that fill in the

00:45:30.740 blanks, I'm not going to enjoy it for very long. So Mother Nature shields you from that truth.

00:45:36.920 You have to have it wear off quickly because you wouldn't be ready for the next thing.

00:45:40.120 If you're a caveman and you're looking for calories and you find berries on a bush after a long hike,

00:45:45.340 that's incredibly satisfying. That gives you a bunch of joy. But if you sat there enjoying them for

00:45:50.400 the next week, you'd be a saber-toothed tiger's dinner. You have to be ready for the next set of

00:45:53.940 emotions. That's homeostasis. You go back to the baseline, physical baseline, emotional baseline.

00:45:59.060 You always go back. But if you realize that, you won't make the effort in the first place.

00:46:03.180 So Mother Nature tantalizes you with a joy that's going to come after the struggle and then veils the

00:46:09.460 knowledge that you're not going to enjoy it forever. So people actually think, if I move to

00:46:13.780 California, I'm going to be happy for the rest of my life because of the sunshine. I got the data.

00:46:18.380 It's a few months. The taxes are forever. I mean, I see this constantly with people.

00:46:24.640 My students, the reason they think they're going to be happier at 38 than 28, which is generally not

00:46:28.780 true. Generally, your happiness is lower at 38 than it is at 28 and lower at 48 than it was at 38.

00:46:34.680 The reason they don't know that, they get it exactly upside down, is because they think that

00:46:39.120 they're going to get things they want and they're going to be satisfied forever with them.

00:46:42.900 When they get married, they'll be permanently happier.

00:46:46.880 Have you been able to quantify the length of satisfaction, the duration of satisfaction

00:46:53.400 when they get admitted to Harvard Business School?

00:46:56.480 There are some studies on that and it shows that the satisfaction they get is usually a few weeks.

00:47:00.980 So before they even matriculate.

00:47:02.420 Oh yeah, for sure. So there's interesting studies that ask this question.

00:47:05.160 When you get a bonus at your job, when do you enjoy it the most? When it hits your check

00:47:10.800 or the day you find out? It's a question that answers itself. You go home because your boss says,

00:47:15.680 you're the linchpin in this company. What a great job you're doing. 40% bonus. Boom. Dollars.

00:47:22.400 You don't have the dollars, but you go home and open a bottle of champagne with your spouse.

00:47:26.140 Ah, I earned it. It's great. Three weeks later, it shows up in your check and you're like, huh?

00:47:29.940 Yeah. Yeah, good. Good. I can do something with that. But that's not where the real satisfaction

00:47:34.120 happens because of the homeostasis. Now, the fact that that surprises you leads to deeply

00:47:40.240 suboptimal behavior. If you keep getting surprised again and again and again and again,

00:47:44.100 the satisfaction doesn't last. Natural conclusion is that you just needed more. It just wasn't enough.

00:47:49.900 So go get more and more and more. And this leads to this chase, what we call it in my business,

00:47:55.800 the hedonic treadmill that a lot of people know that expression at this point. Hedonic means

00:48:00.300 feelings. The treadmill is you're running, running, running, running to keep, maintain and to get more

00:48:05.720 of certain feelings. And you never figure out that you're on a treadmill and not making progress.

00:48:10.700 The homeostasis is that you catch up immediately. You get ahead by two inches and immediately starts

00:48:15.720 running you backwards. Unless you keep running, running, running, running, then you're going to

00:48:18.920 be going the wrong direction. And that's terrifying and terrible. So people not figuring out Mother

00:48:24.880 Nature's cruel little hoax, they wind up on the hedonic treadmill of more, more, more, more,

00:48:31.140 more, have more.

00:48:31.940 But why are we fooled by this?

00:48:33.500 Because Mother Nature wants us to be fooled. I mean, we're born to be fools when it comes

00:48:40.340 to this satisfaction problem.

00:48:42.740 So this is actually one of the macronutrients where it seems that evolution is fully engaged.

00:48:49.360 Clearly, evolution favors pleasure over enjoyment. But evolution is all for satisfaction.

00:48:57.420 All for satisfaction.

00:48:59.040 And all for fooling you into believing this is the one that's going to be the eternal

00:49:03.060 satisfaction.

00:49:03.620 That is the animal path. Absolutely. But there is a glitch in that matrix that we can exploit

00:49:08.300 if we're willing to stand up to our natural impulses. This is where every philosophical

00:49:12.700 and religious tradition comes in. Because most, I mean, life is suffering, according to the first

00:49:17.400 noble truth of Buddhism. That doesn't mean life has to be suffering. It means life is naturally

00:49:22.060 suffering. What the Buddhists are saying is that left to your devices, you're going to

00:49:26.820 suffer. And the word for suffering in that first noble truth of Buddhism is mistranslated.

00:49:31.540 The word in Sanskrit is dukkha. And dukkha actually means dissatisfaction. The first noble truth

00:49:37.580 of Buddhism is that life is unsatisfying because of the hedonic treadmill, because of homeostasis.

00:49:43.660 And how do you get beyond that? Well, you recognize that the reason for your dissatisfaction,

00:49:48.040 the second truth is attachment. And the third noble truth is that you need to detach. And the

00:49:54.060 fourth noble truth is the eightfold path, which is entirely contrary to nature. The eightfold path

00:49:59.300 is not natural. That's why it's hard. So here's the way to think about it, just in sort of

00:50:04.760 drive listener terms. Mother nature says, satisfaction will come and stay if you have more,

00:50:13.000 more, more. What's your life strategy? More, more money, more power, more pleasure,

00:50:17.440 more admiration, more Instagram followers, more, more. Actually the right model, a model that better

00:50:25.780 satisfies, that gives you more satisfaction that lasts is halves divided by wants. All the things

00:50:32.060 you have divided by all the things that you want. And this is basically kind of what the eightfold path

00:50:37.560 of Buddhism comes into. This is a baby version. So I apologize to the Buddhists who are listening to us

00:50:42.640 is that you don't need to have more strategy. You need to want less strategy. The eightfold path is a

00:50:47.960 want less strategy. We need to want less. We need to manage our wants in this life. And in so doing,

00:50:55.940 then, holy mackerel, then satisfaction hangs around, man. That's what the Dalai Lama always says.

00:51:02.440 You shouldn't have what you want. You should want what you have. Really, which is another way of

00:51:06.820 talking about this. And there's all kinds of techniques. There's visualizations. One of the

00:51:11.260 things that I like for doing this is that because I have an arts background, my mother was a painter

00:51:15.860 and I was a musician for many years professionally. And we have a tendency to think of our lives that

00:51:20.440 we're building, especially the hustlers, the go-getters, the strivers who listen to you,

00:51:24.880 that your life is like a beautiful painting and you're the artist with a brush. And that canvas is

00:51:30.340 your life and you're putting the brushstrokes on the canvas. The problem is by the time you're 45 and

00:51:35.040 you're a striver, that canvas is full. Man, it's dense. I defy people to add another brushstroke.

00:51:40.400 You need to use the metaphor that your life is actually a sculpture, that you're chipping away,

00:51:44.680 that you are in there, but there's too much stuff stuck to you. You need less, less, less, want less.

00:51:51.000 Strip away the detritus. Get out the chisel. The exercise I give my students, because this has to be

00:51:56.720 practical. Here's the exercise I give my students. They will hear that the way for them to be successful

00:52:02.600 is through the visualization and manifestation that comes from having a bucket list, right? The

00:52:07.720 bucket list. On your birthday, you list all your ambitions and all your desires and your cravings,

00:52:11.520 and you imagine yourself getting all these things. You visualize yourself getting these things.

00:52:15.280 That's a good way to blow up the denominator of your satisfaction equation and feel like a complete

00:52:19.760 loser. You need a reverse bucket list where you make a list of all of your worldly attachments and

00:52:25.140 you cross them out. Not that you won't get them, but that now they're not limbic. Now they're in

00:52:30.680 your prefrontal cortex. Now that you can actually manage those cravings in an entirely different way,

00:52:36.640 and this absolutely works. I do this on my birthday every year now.

00:52:40.000 So give me an example.

00:52:40.920 This last year on my birthday, I thought, what are my attachments that are holding me down?

00:52:45.260 And I realized it was a lot of my political opinions. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist

00:52:49.460 monk who started the Plum Village community of Western Buddhists, he said that the greatest source

00:52:55.480 of misery and attachment for most people is their opinions. We're so attached to our opinions.

00:53:00.300 It's like we're hoarding our gold. And if you get between me and my opinions, you're stupid and

00:53:04.600 evil. I'm going to cancel you or whatever dumb thing that we're doing today. And I thought to

00:53:08.260 myself, my political opinions are too strong. I'm too attached to them. So I wrote down about half of

00:53:13.640 my political opinions. I still have them, but I crossed them out, which negated their importance,

00:53:19.780 their moral importance in my life. I mean, I need fewer opinions because I need more friends.

00:53:24.520 It's really what it comes down to. And I'm way lighter. I'm way freer.

00:53:28.320 But tell me, is the act of acknowledging the opinions, the exercise, crossing them out,

00:53:34.980 the exercise, and how does that translate? I mean, we sit here today on the heels of a tragedy that

00:53:40.980 took place very recently, a terrorist attack, and it's a very dividing event politically.

00:53:48.040 It's hard for me to say, even though I'm not a political person, I don't talk about my political

00:53:53.360 views publicly. I have very strong views. And as a result of that, I'm prone to be very

00:54:00.960 judgmental of those who hold opposing views, especially the stronger my view. So there's

00:54:06.700 certain views where I'm like all about nuance. And then there's some views where I'm like,

00:54:10.740 nope, this is black and white. How would that exercise help in this situation?

00:54:15.240 This gets back to metacognition. Metacognition, once again, is not being limbic, but rather

00:54:21.080 experiencing emotions and emotional phenomena in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where you can

00:54:28.000 make conscious executive decisions. It's letting your CEO do it as opposed to the kids do it. And so

00:54:33.580 what you do is when you have an opinion, a strong, volatile political opinion, which is not just

00:54:39.220 terrorism is bad. It's that anybody who disagrees with me about this particular situation is a moron.

00:54:44.700 That's what goes on the list. And what you do is you cross that out, not because you don't think

00:54:49.800 that, but because you're willing to consider that. You're willing to let your CEO think about that as

00:54:55.180 opposed to sort of axiomatically assuming that, that it's no longer a limbic opinion where you see

00:55:01.380 something on TV and you get a sense of revulsion, where your insular cortex engages because you have

00:55:07.060 a sense of disgust. On the contrary. Do you think that that's a better strategy than my strategy,

00:55:12.080 which is to tune all of that out is to basically say, I'm going to do something that feels cowardly,

00:55:20.860 which is I'm not going to engage in any of this by reading any of it, by watching any of it,

00:55:26.860 by participating. I'm going to focus on what I do best. I'm going to do my job and not become a

00:55:33.040 spectator. There's a lot to that because you should specialize in what you can do. Well,

00:55:37.200 you should focus on the things you can control as opposed to the things that you can't. So these are

00:55:40.560 two different phenomena. You could argue my strategy is a dangerous strategy from a societal

00:55:46.460 perspective, because then if everybody took that approach, nobody would do anything.

00:55:50.660 Absolutely. You wouldn't have any collective action. Everybody would be ignorant for sure.

00:55:54.200 But what you're trying to do is protect yourself from your limbic system. When you block out

00:55:58.260 information, this is basically, I don't like the news, so I'm going to cancel the newspaper.

00:56:02.340 I'm no longer going to get the news from the newspaper. You shouldn't be afraid of information.

00:56:06.800 And that's all your limbic system is delivering to you is information. You should learn how to use

00:56:11.860 information. So ideally, you don't have to do that. But ideally, what you do is you metacognitively,

00:56:17.700 you process the information, make decisions on how to use the information. Sometimes that's not

00:56:21.900 efficient. Sometimes that's suboptimal because you don't have time to do it. I have found that I use a

00:56:26.520 combination of the two techniques. I was the president of a think tank in Washington, D.C. for

00:56:31.740 almost 11 years. And so I was, man, I was sadly in the know. I was so aware all the time of everything

00:56:39.240 everybody was saying and doing. And I knew what was going on. And I knew if there was going to be

00:56:42.940 a budget resolution, I could tell you what was going on with a farm bill, the whole deal.

00:56:47.500 Now I know a lot less. And the reason is I ration my access to news. I read a total of 15 to 30 minutes

00:56:54.180 of news per day all at once. I need more bandwidth for my work. And I don't want it to intrude on my

00:57:01.060 work. But I'm not afraid of my limbic system. I'm not afraid of what this information will actually

00:57:05.280 do to me because I'm working metacognitively to make sure that when I do have this information,

00:57:09.720 I can process it in executive ways as opposed to childlike ways. It's no longer ghosts in the

00:57:17.200 machine. I have a repertoire of ways I can deal with it. I can choose my reactions to my emotions.

00:57:21.840 I can use substitute emotions. I can act as if I had different emotions and I can disregard my

00:57:26.760 emotions. But all of that is on purpose. And those are the fruits of metacognition.

00:57:30.880 All right. So the third macronutrient is sense of purpose.

00:57:34.400 Meaning.

00:57:35.020 Yeah.

00:57:35.700 Meaning.

00:57:36.320 And obviously it extends far beyond quote unquote work.

00:57:40.120 Yeah, for sure. So meaning is the most important because it's the protein. You'll die.

00:57:46.040 Right. You can vary carbs and fat a lot.

00:57:48.260 A lot.

00:57:48.440 You can't mess with protein too much.

00:57:49.720 You can't mess with protein. It's a basic building block.

00:57:51.840 And you're in big, big trouble when you become protein deprived, because there's no other way

00:57:56.120 to get it. It's not like your carbs are going to transform into proteins. And everybody knows

00:58:00.700 when they don't have a sense of meaning because their life is empty. They're the most miserable

00:58:04.900 when they don't have a sense of meaning, but nobody knows exactly what it is. It's like,

00:58:08.440 I need this thing, but I don't know what it is. So philosophers and psychologists, by the way,

00:58:13.520 define meaning is actually a combination of three things. Coherence, purpose, and significance.

00:58:18.440 Coherence is things happen for a reason. That's the first part of meaning. I believe that things

00:58:25.760 happen for a particular reason. That doesn't mean my way is the right way. And it might be

00:58:30.660 randomness. My father was a PhD biostatistician, also very religious. And he used to say that the

00:58:37.340 greatest miracle in the world was randomness. That God built the universe with randomness and

00:58:43.180 regular distributions of events. He thought that miracles were extreme tale events in random

00:58:49.000 distributions. And God loved randomness. In other words, there's lots and lots of different ways to

00:58:53.340 understand the coherence part, why things are coherent. The second is purpose, which is direction.

00:59:00.160 Your life has direction. There's a word called the rum line, R-H-U-M line. It's actually a much more

00:59:06.400 common word in Spanish, a rumbo. And it's actually part of common parlance. Rumbo means the end point

00:59:12.700 toward which your voyage is tending. You're not going to get there and you're going to vary from

00:59:17.700 it, but you have to have- A north star. You have to have something you're navigating to.

00:59:20.840 You have to have something navigationally. And the last is significance. It would matter if I weren't

00:59:26.360 alive. It would matter if I'm not here. So these are the component parts. Now, these are worth

00:59:33.020 thinking about in detail in our lives. But here's the way I have a kind of a diagnostic test to see

00:59:38.260 if somebody has a meaning crisis. And the reason this is useful, it's a two-question exam. And if

00:59:45.720 somebody doesn't have real answers, everybody's got PC answers, answers you'd give your mom or

00:59:50.740 whatever. But if you don't have real answers to this, the good news is these are the two questions

00:59:55.140 to go looking for answers to in your life. This is your vision quest is to find the answers to these

01:00:01.440 by reading, by experiencing, by meditating, by spending time by yourself, by praying,

01:00:08.340 by asking people's advice, by therapy. I don't know. Do your thing. Question number one is,

01:00:13.000 why are you alive? Why are you alive? You got to have an answer. It's not my answer, your answer,

01:00:18.720 a real answer. Question number two is, for what are you willing to die today? Now, you flunk this quiz

01:00:25.580 by saying, oh no, that's how you flunk the quiz. But then the adventure actually begins after you

01:00:31.400 flunk the quiz, because like, I'm going to figure that out. I'm going to go find those answers. I'm

01:00:35.280 going to read. I'm going to consider. I'm going to do all the things that you do metacognitively to

01:00:39.140 find the answer to these questions. Let's think about that for a second. There are probably a lot

01:00:43.720 of people who cannot answer one who can answer two. Or who can answer one but can't answer two.

01:00:51.000 I'm alive because of some biological process, et cetera, et cetera. But number two is,

01:00:55.460 I don't know what I'm willing to die for. Let's clarify that. Are you asking one

01:00:59.580 through the lens of biology? It depends on how you answer it and what actually gives you meaning.

01:01:05.060 The way to answer the first question, why are you alive? A spiritual person or a religious person

01:01:09.160 would have a divine response to the first question. An atheist would respond to the first

01:01:14.400 question in terms of biology. And they would really understand. That biological answer could give you a

01:01:19.320 tremendous sense of meaning and a sense of place in the universe.

01:01:23.180 Although it's interesting because as someone who leans far more towards the agnostic atheist side,

01:01:30.280 I spend most of my time coming to grips with mortality, which is a very difficult thing to

01:01:38.560 come to grips with. Which is the second question.

01:01:40.460 But I come to grips with that by addressing your third point around sense of purpose,

01:01:46.260 which is my insignificance. So in other words, it's only through accepting my complete and utter

01:01:52.960 insignificance that I can have some semblance of peace with my finitude and my eventual and relatively

01:02:02.540 quick demise.

01:02:03.440 Yeah. This is one of the reasons that transcendence is one of the happiness practices,

01:02:08.300 a practice of transcendence, whether it's secular or religious transcendence,

01:02:12.960 it's really important because it makes you small. It makes you small. You stand in awe

01:02:17.000 of a sunset. You stand in awe of seeing somebody committing an unbelievably selfless act.

01:02:23.620 It makes you actually feel smaller, which gives you peace through a sense of perspective. That's a very

01:02:29.120 common phenomenon. And one of the people who works in my area, Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley,

01:02:34.360 he has a book called awe, A-W-E, that talks about the neurocognitive processes involved when you're

01:02:42.440 experiencing awe and why it gives you such deep peace. And it's really all about what you're

01:02:46.860 talking about. You got to get small, like Steve Martin used to say in the seventies, get small.

01:02:51.060 If you can find ways to get small, you're going to be a lot better off for sure.

01:02:54.960 But how do we reconcile that with the need to have significance through your sense of purpose?

01:02:59.500 Well, the key is at the same time, you realize that you matter, but at the same time, it's okay

01:03:06.100 that the universe will be just fine if you die. They seem like conflicting phenomena, but they're

01:03:11.820 actually weirdly compatible. I think that they're weirdly compatible. These ideas, this balance between

01:03:17.500 the two, it matters that I exist here and things will be just fine. If I know you think about this,

01:03:22.600 when you get married for the first time, you say, you love me. And if I'm gone, you'll be okay.

01:03:29.840 It's this sense of peace. That balance between those two things turns out to be the trick.

01:03:35.440 I've never been able to find that.

01:03:36.720 I guess practice makes perfect. I haven't found it either for sure. But the way to think about this

01:03:41.620 and the way to find the answers to the questions is really interesting. And I've worked on this with

01:03:44.660 my kids. I have adult kids. My kids are a little older than yours. My 23-year-old, he's a piece of

01:03:50.020 work, man. His name is Carlos. He likes you. He's human performance machine. He's a scout sniper in the

01:03:56.700 US Marine Corps. 204, 4% body fat, 6'5". He's all about it. He needs the information that you're

01:04:05.660 providing, obviously. So, you know, he didn't have the answers to that because many adolescents

01:04:09.580 don't and young adults don't. But he found the answers to that as he did something that was

01:04:15.200 truly difficult going through Marine basic training and then infantry training battalion and then doing

01:04:19.860 the in-doc as he's an operator in the Marines now and the scout sniper platoon. Stuff's no joke. It's

01:04:24.760 hard. And you ask him the question now, why are you alive? He would simply say, because God made me to

01:04:31.500 serve. That is both the how and the why of the first question. And the second question, for what

01:04:38.080 are you willing to die? Very simple. For my faith, for my family, for my fellow Marines, and for the

01:04:44.060 United States of America, and for our allies. These are very solid answers. These are not the right

01:04:49.320 answers for somebody listening, or you, or me, necessarily. But they are answers that he actually

01:04:55.740 believes, and that's what gives him his sense of meaning, is the content of those two answers.

01:05:01.440 And finding what we really do think about those things, what really is persuasive to us,

01:05:07.120 is a philosophical and, for some, a theological journey really worth taking.

01:05:11.780 It's definitely something I've spent much more time thinking about in the past year than certainly

01:05:16.640 any time before. People typically do around age 50. In ancient Vedic physics, the theory of the

01:05:24.540 four quarters of life. We think about, you know, your kid and adult and all that. Last time we

01:05:29.660 talked, we were talking about From Strength to Strength, which was my last book. And according

01:05:32.400 to this ancient Hindu thinking, you've got brahmacharya, which is your student phase, the first quarter

01:05:38.120 of your life. The second quarter of your life is called grihastha, which is the householder phase,

01:05:41.940 where you're hustling and you're starting your family and your work. The third quarter, going in from

01:05:46.920 the second to the third, is the second adolescence, and there's something called

01:05:50.140 vanaprastha, which means these two Sanskrit words, to retire into the forest. And it's supposed to

01:05:56.280 happen around age 50. And what happens is that certain things fade and other things become more

01:06:02.100 salient to you. More transcendental things start to become more important to you. And part of this

01:06:08.620 has to do with the change in your brain, change in your strengths, the change in your crystallized

01:06:14.420 intelligence. These are real phenomena that neuroscientists have identified as social

01:06:18.620 psychologists. But as a spiritual matter, it means, what is my retirement into the forest? What does

01:06:24.720 that actually mean? Certain things are more important to me than they used to be. These are

01:06:29.660 important questions, not because I'm going to die, but because I just want to know. What does this

01:06:34.680 actually mean about... And a lot of people wind up coming back to the faith of their youth when this

01:06:39.860 happens. A lot of people will develop a meditation practice. Some people will find that they will get

01:06:44.800 deeply, deeply into fitness in ways they hadn't before and doing things that are super hard for

01:06:50.660 them, that challenge them as human beings. Some people will change careers, do something they've

01:06:56.720 always wanted to do, but something that has more artistic significance, more creative significance than

01:07:01.280 it had before. But all of that is this vanaprastha. And the whole point of that is to get to the fourth

01:07:05.460 quarter, which is called sannyasa. And that's enlightenment, to sit at the feet of the guru and

01:07:11.180 to bask in the glow of the master is kind of how the Hindus will talk about it. But you got to do the

01:07:16.640 work to get there. You got to ask the questions and be on the quest. And that's your third quarter

01:07:21.740 around age 50.

01:07:24.200 And do you think that each of these quarters, which I recall from our first discussion,

01:07:28.800 don't necessarily reflect equal chunks of time on the calendar, but do you think that they require

01:07:35.480 an emphasis on different elements of those three macronutrients of happiness?

01:07:41.660 I do. This is mixing neuroscience plus social psychology plus Vedic wisdom. And this is like

01:07:47.060 where no man has gone before. But I do. And I've actually asked this to some teachers that I haven't.

01:07:52.300 I go to India every year and I study with various gurus and spiritual teachers, which is outside my

01:07:57.160 tradition. I'm a Catholic. But it makes me a better Catholic. And it makes me a better social

01:08:00.800 scientist too, quite frankly. And I have a teacher in Palakkad, which is in southern India,

01:08:06.800 a guy named Nochur Venkataraman, a Tamil guy. And I was asking him about precisely these sets of

01:08:12.080 questions. And he said that people pass through these phases, depending on how adroit they are

01:08:16.520 spiritually at different times and different periods of time. But you have to do all the learning

01:08:21.560 from each one. You need to be a student. You need to develop your life. Then you need to

01:08:26.180 retire into the forest and contemplate these questions such that you can get to the ultimate

01:08:30.400 destination, which is this period of enlightenment in your life. And in so doing, you need to develop

01:08:35.640 these different parts of your life. You can't do this without the love that you share with other

01:08:40.400 people, which is inherently enjoyable. You can't do this without achieving certain things and

01:08:44.480 understanding that your life requires a certain amount of satisfaction. And that has achievement,

01:08:48.780 that has earned success involved in it. And of course, you can't do that without

01:08:53.520 understanding what meaning is to you and what the meaning of your life really is.

01:08:58.840 So we've talked about metacognition. Let's talk about it a bit more. You've already very quickly

01:09:03.240 rattled off the components of it.

01:09:05.200 Or the techniques.

01:09:06.020 Yeah. But let's go into it in a bit more detail. There are basically four techniques associated.

01:09:11.120 Yeah, more or less. I mean, you can break them up into sub techniques, et cetera, et cetera.

01:09:14.820 This is an artificial distinction between them. But again, what you're trying to do is get space.

01:09:19.480 When your grandmother said, Peter, when you're angry, count to 10. Everybody's grandmother did

01:09:24.520 that. The research suggests, by the way, count to 30 when you're angry. And while you're counting to

01:09:30.600 30, envision the consequences of what you're thinking of doing. And then you will be fully

01:09:36.100 metacognitive. Then you will be processing the information in the prefrontal cortex of your brain.

01:09:40.960 So that was really good advice from grandma. And we can put a finer point on it.

01:09:45.360 Other ways to do that. What you want is space between your limbic system and your prefrontal

01:09:50.000 cortex. You want space so that your executive brain can experience emotions and deal with them

01:09:55.120 appropriately. If you don't give it space, you'll be reactive and your limbic system will manage you.

01:10:00.580 That's the problem that a lot of people have in life. It's like, so I had to cry. I'm angry. I yell.

01:10:05.840 I'm happy. I laugh. Whatever it happens to be, but that's no way to live. Then the kids are in charge

01:10:12.020 of the family budget. Big problem. Big problem. Depends on the kids, obviously, but that can be

01:10:16.820 a big problem. That kind of spontaneity comes at an enormous cost. How do you put space in it?

01:10:23.260 Therapy is a good way for some people. It's not my thing. Some people do. They learn about their

01:10:27.560 emotions this way. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, is super useful for a lot of people.

01:10:32.100 So meditation can do that because most meditation techniques that will require that you analyze

01:10:38.020 yourself at a certain remove. Peter's feeling sad right now. How interesting that Peter is feeling

01:10:43.220 sad. It's just information. It's just information. It's analyzing information. Being a scientist about

01:10:47.880 yourself. Prayer is really good for this. Why? Because you're bringing in a higher power to help

01:10:53.360 you manage these things. And in so doing, you're experiencing them very consciously in the

01:10:59.240 executive, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead. That's where you want it to reside.

01:11:04.040 Some people do this through intensive exposure to nature, walking before dawn for an hour without

01:11:09.760 devices. Some people will do this indirectly by, I don't know, studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian

01:11:15.400 Bach and learning how to analyze them, whatever it happens to be. One way or the other, you don't

01:11:20.480 want the limbic system in charge. And then when you get this distance...

01:11:24.240 So just to be clear, you feel that this can be done without a mindfulness-based meditation practice,

01:11:31.480 which is clearly the potent exercise that one uses to distance self from thought.

01:11:37.480 Exactly right. For example, one of the most effective ways to do this that has nothing to do

01:11:41.840 with meditation at all is journaling. A lot of people suffer from anxiety. A lot of people listening

01:11:45.980 to us suffer from anxiety. Anxiety is basically unfocused fear. That's what it is. It's a bombardment of

01:11:52.600 stress hormones having to do with the fact that there's a pervasive sense of doom that's undefined.

01:11:58.660 Undefined fear. Unfocused fear. That's what anxiety, generalized anxiety, is really all about.

01:12:03.940 And so you can do a lot of things. You can take pharmaceuticals, benzodiazepines that will mute the

01:12:09.640 stress response, etc., etc. But the whole point of metacognition and journaling when it comes to anxiety

01:12:15.280 is that you force your prefrontal cortex to take over by writing down the five things you're most

01:12:22.160 afraid of right now. It's like, God, I'm freaking out, man. I'm freaking out. My heart is fluttering.

01:12:28.080 I've got the butterflies in my stomach. I can't sleep or I wake up too early. I don't know what's

01:12:32.700 going on. It's like, I'm feeling like I'm under threat. Okay, get out the pad and paper.

01:12:38.040 Number one, what am I actually afraid of? Number two, what am I actually afraid of?

01:12:42.220 And what you've done is you've taken the sense of anxiety. It's not perfect.

01:12:45.460 But this, as a strategic technique, will work miracles in your life. If you consistently

01:12:51.900 journal about your emotions, and then, by the way, throw it away afterward because you don't

01:12:56.200 want everybody in your family to find it. Because who knows, maybe you're thinking forbidden thoughts

01:13:00.300 or have forbidden fears. Anxiety is a maladapted kind of fear. I'm doomed. It's not the way cavemen

01:13:07.580 were supposed to feel fear. Fear is so that you can run away from a tiger. Fear is supposed to be

01:13:11.960 extremely episodic. Our forebearers in the Pleistocene, they were mostly hanging out all

01:13:17.480 day. And then occasionally something bad would happen and they'd have to run really fast and

01:13:21.280 climb a tree. That's what fear is for. Yeah, it seems like it was 99% boredom,

01:13:25.060 1% extreme panic. Yeah. Or it's 99% fellowship, 99% hanging out, 99% with your friends, 99% with your

01:13:33.400 tribe, making jokes and popping a grub in your mouth from time to time. That's really what it was.

01:13:39.180 Because some anthropologists think that the quality of life has dramatically fallen in the modern era

01:13:43.720 and what we have today. But it's also one of the components of modern life is generalized anxiety

01:13:48.200 where we're processing outside stimuli as minor threats. We get a little drip of cortisol into

01:13:52.740 our system constantly, constantly, constantly. And it's really unfocused. So focus it, focus it,

01:13:58.180 write down the five things and they suddenly will feel a lot less threatening and they'll be more

01:14:02.400 bounded and they'll be determined in a way where you can actually deal with them and start getting

01:14:07.980 some solutions as opposed to just feeling afraid. So that's an example of non-mindful meditation,

01:14:15.360 metacognition, as simple as a pad and paper. What about this idea of journaling positive experiences

01:14:21.340 as kind of a database? I like doing that. But what I like doing better is I like journaling negative

01:14:27.600 experiences and learning from them. Does that mean learning from them or finding meaning in them?

01:14:31.460 Are those the same thing? Here's the way to do it. That can really,

01:14:34.780 really change life a lot. I ask my students to keep a failure and disappointment journal.

01:14:40.140 When you're 28, there's one thing after another. It's like she broke up with me or she didn't return

01:14:46.540 my text or that professor gave me a C on an exam or the job market isn't turning out the way I wanted

01:14:51.720 to. There's something bugging you in a big way. Every time, write it down, write it down, just write it

01:14:57.580 out. Even if it's stupid, write it down. Then leave two blank spaces, two blank lines under it,

01:15:03.020 under each entry. The first one you come back to after 30 days, set an alarm on your phone.

01:15:08.080 Come back to it and you have to write, what did I learn about this thing in the last 30 days

01:15:11.860 about that thing? After six months, you get another alarm that says, go back to it and say,

01:15:16.560 tell me something good that happened as a result of that. Now, if we don't do that,

01:15:22.620 we won't remember and we won't grow on the basis of this. I'll give you an example. You're at work

01:15:28.360 and your boss says, time for your performance evaluation. You've been killing it. You've been

01:15:32.420 killing it. I'm working hard, doing a good job. And your boss is like, you're a B around here and

01:15:38.220 you're crushed. I'm B talent? Dude, really? And so you write it down in your journal. I thought it was

01:15:45.380 an A plus. Turns out my boss thinks I'm a B minus. Your natural tendency is to say, I'm going to go out and

01:15:51.700 drink with my friends and complain about my boss with my partner and then make the discomfort go

01:15:56.740 away. I want it to go away, make it go away. That's wrong. Write it down. 30 days, you come

01:16:01.320 back and you say to yourself, what did I learn? I learned I wasn't as good a fit as I thought for

01:16:07.180 this job. That's number one. I also learned, by the way, that I thought I was going to be bummed out

01:16:11.360 about this for the rest of my life. And actually, I was bummed out about it for like three days.

01:16:15.500 Interesting. Hmm. You learn from it because you write down the thing that you learned and that was

01:16:20.580 permanent because you committed it to your executive center. Six months later, you come

01:16:25.140 back and say, given the fact that I wasn't as good a fit as I thought, I went on the job market and I

01:16:30.480 found a job for which I am a better fit and I'm a lot happier. And then when you start doing this

01:16:36.440 consistently, you'll start looking forward to writing down things in your failure journal.

01:16:41.260 This is alchemy, practically. You've converted the negative into the positive. There's no good or bad

01:16:46.400 emotions. There's only information. You've treated the emotional information the way you're

01:16:50.060 supposed to. You're learning from the data. And that's how you do it. That's what I like even a

01:16:55.760 lot better than, I saw fluffy clouds today and I'm really grateful for that. Gratitude lists are great.

01:17:00.840 I got nothing against gratitude lists, but failure lists, that's powerful. That's actually even better

01:17:05.960 for life. Let's talk about the difference between optimism and hope. You comment on this.

01:17:11.460 People use them interchangeably. There's so much empathy and compassion. They're not the same. These

01:17:16.020 things are never the same. One of the things I do in my class is I always have a distinction

01:17:19.220 between two things that seem the same and then see what the distinction will actually do for

01:17:24.080 our lives if we understand them. And optimism and hope are, it's a classic case. Optimism is nothing

01:17:30.260 more than a prediction. Things will be okay. It'll be okay. Everything's going to be all right.

01:17:35.300 Maybe yes, maybe not. Hope is no matter what happens, something can be done and I can do something

01:17:42.380 about it. Hope is empowering. You can be a very pessimistic, but very hopeful person.

01:17:48.240 You can be an optimist who's hopeless. I think things are going to be okay. Thank God, because

01:17:53.220 there's nothing I can do. Hope actually is tied to happiness. Optimism generally is not. Optimism is

01:17:59.660 something, it's just kind of a sunny predictor. You might be an optimist because you're a happy person,

01:18:03.880 but the optimism itself doesn't make you happier.

01:18:06.380 What is the opposite of hope? Despair is hopelessness. There's nothing I can do.

01:18:12.200 Nothing can be done and there's nothing I can do. That's almost never true.

01:18:16.980 And what is the root of that feeling or belief system?

01:18:21.060 Despair usually is an extreme form of disempowerment. People get it from childhood trauma. I mean,

01:18:27.180 there's some research that suggests that the way that people are brought up can make them inherently

01:18:31.140 hopeless, but people actually can get into kind of a hopeless stance. And part of it is self-definance.

01:18:37.380 For example, we have a real tendency in our culture to want people to live on the basis of victimhood

01:18:42.160 and grievance. People will actually, their identity will be victim. I'm a victim. And their identity

01:18:47.140 will be grievance against the people who have power over me. And I get it. I mean, there are people who

01:18:51.820 have power over us and there's legitimate grievance and people are victims, but to identify it as a

01:18:57.080 victim is the recipe for hopelessness and despair.

01:19:00.600 Why is that becoming more prevalent or does it just seem that way?

01:19:03.980 It goes in waves. What happens is in, we have an identity culture at this point. One of the

01:19:10.480 things that you typically find is that especially manipulative leaders will tell people that they

01:19:16.340 can be virtuous on the basis of victimhood. That victimhood is inherently virtuous. Literally in

01:19:22.580 the social science literature, it's called virtuous victimhood. And it's incredibly disempowering for

01:19:26.860 the followers. It's incredibly manipulative and malignant on the part of leaders who are actually

01:19:31.960 doing this. And we're in a period in our culture of polarization and hatred and contempt where there's

01:19:36.720 just a lot of that going around.

01:19:38.460 It seems that both sides have agency in this, just different flavors of it.

01:19:42.500 Oh, totally. You look at the most manipulative leaders and these manipulative leaders,

01:19:46.100 they have the characteristic almost always of what we call the dark triad of personality,

01:19:50.400 which is a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. That happens in 7% of the

01:19:56.240 population, according to Scott Barry Kaufman, who's done the best work on the dark triad.

01:20:01.160 That means trait psychopathy. It doesn't mean you're an ax murderer. It means you're

01:20:04.460 way less remorseful about your negative actions and people in the population. If you're narcissistic,

01:20:10.560 Machiavellianism, and have trait psychopathy, or dark triad, you're most likely going to want

01:20:14.680 to disempower people, create a movement of people who are relatively disempowered because you want

01:20:19.120 to manipulate people. And do we see that more concentrated in politics?

01:20:23.220 Yes, right now in particular. So what politics does this where we reward dark triads. And what we're

01:20:27.600 doing is we're rewarding dark triads on both sides of the political spectrum right now. So it's a war of

01:20:32.340 dark triads. And their followers are being systematically disempowered into a climate

01:20:36.420 of virtuous victimhood. That's what we actually see. What's the source of my virtue? The fact

01:20:41.280 that I'm getting screwed is the source of my virtue. Agree or disagree that that's a hell of a way to

01:20:46.340 run a country. But for sure, this is why happiness is in decline.

01:20:52.040 Where do we think we are on the long arc of happiness? So I would probably be less optimistic that

01:20:58.960 our ancestors were that happy. I think it'd be hard for us to relate to what they went through,

01:21:02.980 depending on how far back we want to go. But I have the feeling that most people would much prefer

01:21:08.700 to be alive today than to have been alive 100 years ago, let alone 1000 years ago, 10,000 years ago,

01:21:14.420 or 100,000 years ago. Of course, you'd choose it.

01:21:17.520 So on the one hand, we all have this amazing good luck, which is, as you said, there's 8 billion people

01:21:24.340 on the planet. 100 billion have already died. In the last 250,000 years, 100 billion people have

01:21:29.720 died. So how lucky are we that we were born right now? Or you could say, we should be a lot better

01:21:35.100 if I were born 200 years from now, perhaps. Who knows? Maybe. We have a sense of dread. I don't

01:21:40.580 know. I've thought about this a little bit. But regardless, it is what it is. And yet, there are

01:21:45.700 probably objective data that would say, what's our happiness today relative to 10 years ago, 20 years ago,

01:21:51.720 30 years ago. If you go back to immediately following World War II, what has been the

01:21:57.100 trajectory of happiness? We have imperfect data on that. We have really good data going back to the

01:22:01.740 1970s. That's really when the National Opinion Research Center started through the General Social

01:22:06.160 Survey, which is University of Chicago data. It's the best data available. We can really trust it.

01:22:10.400 That started to ask people about their self-evaluation of their life. And you don't want to look at it

01:22:14.800 between countries. The comparisons between countries are nonsense. Denmark is happier than Mexico.

01:22:19.700 It's meaningless. Oh, how come? Well, because they define happiness differently and they have

01:22:23.180 different cultural languages. Different languages. Yeah, different languages. Literally,

01:22:25.900 the Germanic languages comes from the word for luck. In German, happiness is gluck. Gluck is luck,

01:22:32.460 and glucklich is happy. And so, that means lucky. And in Middle English, the word for luck was hop,

01:22:38.180 from which we actually get happiness. Whereas felicity, the idea of felicitousness in the

01:22:43.160 Romance languages, has a completely different sense to it of what that means. Plus,

01:22:47.140 for example, in Denmark, happiness is a lot about contentedness. There's a word in Danish,

01:22:52.320 hygge, H-Y-G-G-E, which means the cozy conviviality in the presence of friends on a comfy couch. It's

01:22:59.940 like a paragraph. But it gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don't want that. I want adventure, which is why my

01:23:05.800 grandparents left Denmark and came to the United States to start a farm.

01:23:10.300 So, we're not going to do the across country.

01:23:11.840 You can look at the same group of people over time. That's pretty legit. And what you find is

01:23:17.020 that it was from the 1970s through the 1980s, it was pretty constant and pretty decent in the United

01:23:23.480 States. And then it started to fall. So, by the way, that's interesting. The 70s,

01:23:27.760 you could argue, were a pretty depressing time in the United States. And the 80s, maybe less so.

01:23:33.280 But you're saying it was relatively constant? Relatively constant. It was like here and there,

01:23:37.300 you know, things, ups and downs, et cetera. You know, you go into a recession, it dips a little

01:23:40.600 bit. You come out of the recession, it goes up. Morning in America, all good. But then around

01:23:45.360 1989, 1990, it starts to fall. And it starts to decline just a little bit. And there's two

01:23:49.740 phenomena going on. There's weather and climate for happiness. The climate is these little declines,

01:23:55.640 one percentage point here and the percentage of people who say they're very happy, a little

01:23:59.300 increase in the percentage of people saying they're not happy about their lives. Usually,

01:24:03.060 these are the three groups, not happy, not too happy, somewhat happy, very happy. They're just

01:24:09.100 kind of closing in on each other a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Then there's storms,

01:24:13.040 then there's weather. And the weather would be the big ones were around 2008.

01:24:18.140 What happened in the 90s? What led to the climate drift of the 90s?

01:24:21.500 The climate drift of the 90s was the four habits of the happiest people all went into decline.

01:24:26.080 Faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people, the attitudes we have toward our work,

01:24:30.160 all changed, really in the 1990s and the 2000s. And this was a secular decline in the number of

01:24:36.020 people that were practicing faith, secular decline in the formation of families, having children,

01:24:41.040 getting married, having families, secular decline in the number of people who know you well,

01:24:45.840 there was more and more loneliness and fewer intimate friendships that people had.

01:24:49.500 It's a really good question. Vivek Murthy, our Surgeon General, has written a whole book on

01:24:53.120 loneliness. And there's a lot of speculation, the UCLA data on loneliness, you know, people using those

01:24:57.340 data are always asking what it is. Probably it has to do with the fact that people are more and

01:25:01.620 more likely to move away from their families. And technological changes have made it so that we

01:25:06.220 don't have to be in person as much as we have been in the past.

01:25:09.860 Was that even true in the early 90s?

01:25:12.080 Yeah, I mean, more and more. I mean, it was certainly true by the mid-1990s.

01:25:16.840 Didn't have to pick up the phone anymore. I was writing a lot of emails in the middle of the 1990s,

01:25:20.980 for sure. But every way that we get more efficient in the way that we communicate,

01:25:25.040 there's less of the oxytocin interchange, which of course, the neuropeptide of human bonding,

01:25:30.840 it only comes from eye contact and touch. That's how we get it. We're evolved to link to each other

01:25:36.760 and experience intense pleasure when oxytocin is produced endogenously in the brain from eye

01:25:41.920 contact and touch. And so if we're actually communicating with each other, not getting

01:25:45.040 eye contact and touch, we're going to get less of it. And so that's what happened where people say,

01:25:49.280 I have fewer people who know me well. There's more isolation in our communities that's been

01:25:53.560 happening. It's been just drift, just drift. And last but not least, people have fewer and fewer

01:25:58.260 healthy ideas about their work. My work really serves other people. And we see this over the

01:26:02.820 decades. And why has that changed? Is that basically the change from a largely manufacturing

01:26:08.100 sector to finance information technology? Like where has that changed?

01:26:12.460 I don't know the answer to that. I'm a real enthusiast for the free enterprise system. And my friends who

01:26:17.080 are not would blame the free enterprise system for making us into just these incredible efficiency

01:26:21.460 machines and the way that we do our work. Work is just less humane and less human.

01:26:26.760 Are we less tethered to a product?

01:26:28.480 That's for sure. And we're less tethered to a workplace too. And this is one of the things

01:26:32.040 that work. I mean, my dad worked for the same university for his whole career, 40 years teaching

01:26:37.040 at the same university day in and day out. Didn't like it a lot of times, complained about the dean,

01:26:41.580 all the things that college professors do, but he knew his colleagues and he had students to the

01:26:45.580 house. You know, we had his students, you know, his math students to the house all the time and

01:26:49.600 they'd be playing guitars and singing. And my mom would be making a big pot of spaghetti and doing

01:26:54.780 the whole thing. I don't do that. And I've changed universities a bunch of times. And

01:26:59.160 why don't we do that?

01:27:00.800 Our culture is actually telling us that we need to move when it's time to get a better deal.

01:27:04.960 I see. So we're not into laying down roots.

01:27:07.100 We don't lay down roots professionally. And that's why we have less of a sense of bondedness in the

01:27:11.680 workplace, a less of a sense that we're, we have relationships that we're serving in the

01:27:15.960 workplace. And it's not just efficiently producing a product. That's the best explanation that we can

01:27:21.620 find that people have worse attitudes toward their work. They're less likely to have close friends.

01:27:27.200 They are less likely to form and cultivate families. And they're less likely to practice faith.

01:27:32.400 The climate changes. Then we get these bad storms.

01:27:36.020 How big an impact was 9-11 on the American psyche?

01:27:38.280 Not that bad. On the contrary, it was momentarily a blip. And then the

01:27:42.960 esprit de corps that came about actually lifted happiness. And that's what often happens. No doubt

01:27:47.180 that would have been World War II if we had data then. Big national threats that bring us together

01:27:50.840 raise our happiness. It's not reliable data. The data notwithstanding that we have suggests that

01:27:57.280 during wartime, clinical depression falls by 75%.

01:28:00.680 I'd seen these data in the UK during World War II.

01:28:04.180 Exactly.

01:28:04.580 Yeah.

01:28:04.780 Again, you can't rely on that because this is not treatment and control experiments.

01:28:07.960 Half the population got a war and the other half of the population didn't get a war and all that.

01:28:11.640 So this is longitudinal data and we're doing the best that we can. But it is almost certainly the

01:28:15.720 case that a collective threat brings us together. And that does not hurt our happiness. What hurt

01:28:20.040 our happiness was around 2008. And originally, we all thought it was because of the financial crisis.

01:28:24.940 That certainly didn't help. It was the advent of social media. That was when everybody adopted

01:28:29.080 social media. It was 2008. Social media has been catastrophic for American happiness,

01:28:33.720 especially among young people, especially among young women. Jonathan Haidt at NYU, who I've worked

01:28:39.400 with for a long time. And Jean Twenge, who teaches at San Diego State University. The case is closed.

01:28:45.480 The data they've got on this, the studies they've collected on this show that this was just inflecting

01:28:50.440 when different platforms, which lowered happiness in different ways. I mean, Twitter creates more hatred

01:28:55.720 and contempt in our culture. Instagram, it creates social comparison, which is the thief of joy.

01:29:01.400 TikTok, when you see ordinary people doing fun things, it makes you feel lonely.

01:29:05.080 They're unhappiness machines. Obviously, you can use them in a way that doesn't denigrate your

01:29:09.000 happiness, but most people don't. That was 2008. Then political contempt and polarization in the 2016

01:29:15.520 era. One in six Americans stops talking to a family member because of politics after the 2016 election.

01:29:21.420 That's the second storm. The third storm was the coronavirus when everybody went home and nobody

01:29:26.860 came back. Remote work, death for happiness. It's very convenient. Seven percent of the population

01:29:33.260 actually gets happier because they're introverts. Those are the cats. The rest of us are dogs.

01:29:40.460 And it's terrible that something pulled us apart like that. And then we didn't get back together.

01:29:45.660 I go to my university and it's like tumbleweeds going down the hall.

01:29:49.100 Still. Oh, yeah. I go in at three o'clock in the afternoon to the place for my offices and

01:29:54.140 the lights are off because of the motion sensor. People didn't go back to work.

01:29:58.780 And the result of that is we don't congregate. There's still fear in some places. It's not as

01:30:04.380 bad as it was, but there are permanent changes. And that was the third storm. And today, ordinarily,

01:30:10.780 you'll see twice as many people say they're very happy as not happy. That's flipped. Twice as many

01:30:15.260 people today say they're not happy is very happy. The signal is clear. A very clear

01:30:20.300 reduction in happiness over 50 years. Yes. Yes. There's a secular decline with

01:30:24.780 periodic storms, periodic downdrafts and happiness. So as individuals now thinking about some of those

01:30:31.740 things, I just based on my own personal experience would agree that social media usually does not

01:30:39.980 produce a feeling that is a positive one. It's usually a negative one. If we're going to put

01:30:45.180 on our metacognitive hats and self-manage, if we think of ourselves as capable to self-manage

01:30:52.620 through difficulty as opposed to saying, look, we're all going to move to India. We're going to,

01:30:58.460 you know, take up a monk's tradition. Take sitar lessons or something, right?

01:31:01.820 Again, most of us don't have that luxury and we still want to coexist in this world.

01:31:05.980 What are the steps we want to take to minimize the damage of these things? And at the same time,

01:31:11.900 sort of try to find this semblance of happiness. So that's the reason I do my work is precisely

01:31:17.900 because greater happiness, not perfect happiness. That's not the goal. It's not even desirable.

01:31:24.300 People say, I want to be happy. No, you don't. Pure happiness, that would mean the eradication of your

01:31:28.620 negative feelings and you'd be dead. That'd be the eradication of negative experiences. You

01:31:32.460 wouldn't learn and grow. Well, also I would argue we would get back to the same

01:31:37.260 problem with satisfaction, wouldn't we? For sure. I mean, it's impossible to begin with.

01:31:41.580 The point is that happiness is not a destination. It's a direction and we want to get happier.

01:31:46.060 Oprah Winfrey calls it happier-ness. That's the goal. It's a good neologism to actually get the point

01:31:50.460 across. To do that, you need information. That's why I teach about the science of happiness,

01:31:55.100 because it's a super interesting body of knowledge. I write about it every week because it's

01:31:59.100 fascinating. People like to learn about it, do the work to change your habits, and then you need to

01:32:03.660 share with other people. So it becomes permanent in your consciousness. That's really what it's all

01:32:07.660 about. Everybody can do that. I'm dedicated to making an entire generation of happiness

01:32:11.820 aficionados and teachers. That's what I want. I want a movement of people who say, my hobby is

01:32:16.220 learning about happiness. And in my job, I'm a happiness teacher. Whatever your job is, whether you're

01:32:21.820 managing a family or managing a company or just trying to manage yourself, is what I talk about.

01:32:26.540 And to do that, you have to know the facts on this. There's certain things you need to protect

01:32:31.740 yourself from and there's certain things you need to do. You need aversion and you need approach.

01:32:37.340 There's certain things you need to approach. You need to take seriously your spiritual life.

01:32:40.620 You need to take it seriously. Let's talk about that for the non-religious person. Most people

01:32:46.060 listening to us are not religious. And by the way, I think most people would look at someone like you

01:32:50.620 and be a bit confused. Because on the one hand, you're a scientist, you're a serious intellectual

01:32:56.460 guy. And yet you describe yourself as having a very strong religious faith. And yet you don't

01:33:01.980 have a hard time talking about things that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago and millions of

01:33:05.660 years ago. In other words, you don't have a difficult time reconciling science and faith.

01:33:09.340 No, not at all. And part of the reason for that is because faith and reason have to coexist in the

01:33:14.860 same way that understanding a Picasso painting and understanding Picasso the man

01:33:19.180 are utterly reconcilable, but not the same thing. The painter and the painting are not in conflict

01:33:24.940 with each other. They're both important things to understand.

01:33:28.700 But there are many religious people who take a very literal view of, say, the Bible and would say,

01:33:34.940 well, the earth is 6,000 years old or whatever.

01:33:37.420 They need to study more science.

01:33:38.700 They're taking things too literally.

01:33:40.060 They're taking things not just too literally. They're not understanding that there's an intellectual

01:33:44.540 bifurcation between the concept of the creation, the myth of how that actually creation takes place,

01:33:51.020 which is the literalness that you're talking about, and then the evidence, the awe-inspiring

01:33:54.940 evidence of the creation itself. One of the reasons I'm religious is because of science.

01:34:00.220 Every time I learn something new, I'm like, oh, thank you. What a wonderful gift. It doesn't

01:34:05.340 also freak me out that I might be wrong. It doesn't freak me out that I might be wrong about the

01:34:09.180 science. It doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong about the religion. I don't think so, but you know,

01:34:14.540 maybe. That's okay. That's absolutely okay.

01:34:17.260 So if a person listening to this says, my view has always been those who have a religious view

01:34:22.220 are more fortunate. And I especially think that in terms of dealing with death. I think it's much

01:34:29.900 easier to process death if you believe that there is a life after death.

01:34:34.780 There's meaning in a different dimension.

01:34:36.540 Right. Whereas if you really only think about this through the lens of biochemistry,

01:34:40.620 it's a blank screen.

01:34:41.580 What question? Well, that's because if you only think of it in terms of biochemistry,

01:34:44.860 death is a what question, which is in a spiritual dimension, death becomes a why question.

01:34:50.060 And those are different interrogatives that have different philosophical and emotional content.

01:34:55.180 Now there's this area in between of spirituality, which is not religion. If I were going to lump

01:35:00.780 myself into a category, it would probably be around the idea that I find enormous pleasure in nature.

01:35:07.820 That is the closest I suppose I get to religion.

01:35:13.580 That's a transcendent experience. And that's really what we're talking about.

01:35:16.300 It's why I live here. You see where I live. I live in the middle of nowhere.

01:35:19.340 It's so beautiful.

01:35:19.900 And it's why I have to be outside every single day.

01:35:23.180 Yep. Yep. I get it. And that's very common, by the way. A lot of people get transcendence from nature.

01:35:28.780 So what does a person do who lives in a very busy urban center where they are surrounded by a wall

01:35:35.260 of concrete all day, every day?

01:35:36.940 Well, if that turns out to be destructive to your transcendence.

01:35:40.380 Is that a reason to move?

01:35:41.740 Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. For some people, not everybody. I know some people don't want to leave

01:35:45.980 Manhattan. And part of the reason is because they get their transcendent from other dimensions of life.

01:35:50.620 Maybe they are religious. Maybe they're traditionally religious. Maybe they are serious meditators.

01:35:55.420 Maybe they become completely awestruck from music or human genius. Again, it really gets back to

01:36:02.780 transcending your littleness, transcending that, and that transcendent experience. What it does is

01:36:07.740 it gives you the same benefit as a religious journey. So basically what you're saying is-

01:36:11.980 Big same happiness benefit.

01:36:13.340 Yeah. We need to talk about something much broader than religion in a formal sense. And awe can be the

01:36:20.540 religious belief. It could be an obsession or an appreciation of great music or art.

01:36:25.980 Yes.

01:36:26.300 Or meditation can be the place where you tap transcendence.

01:36:29.180 Uh-huh. Yeah, absolutely. Now, it's also very convenient to not invent your own physics

01:36:34.300 on this. And so the Catholic Church is really, really good for me. And one of the things also is not

01:36:39.340 what I feel. It's what I've decided to do. This is an important thing to understand about transcendence.

01:36:44.940 You don't feel transcendence all the time. You decide to experience transcendence and put yourself

01:36:49.900 in the circumstances to experience awe. I'm sure you go outside and there's a lot on your mind.

01:36:55.340 You've got a very busy and hectic and stressful life and you don't feel it. You don't feel it every

01:37:00.780 single day. Look, I got a mass every day. I don't feel it every day. I wake up an atheist alive.

01:37:05.980 And why do you do that?

01:37:06.940 I do that because it was part of the protocol for living the life that I want to live. I mean,

01:37:11.420 I get up at 445, like you. I work out for an hour, body. I go to mass, soul. Then I work.

01:37:19.260 That's when my creativity is highest. Now, of course, I'm also, you notice, I'm optimizing my

01:37:23.660 dopamine. I'm sucking as much dopamine into my prefrontal cortex, which gives me creativity and

01:37:28.300 focus for the three hours that I need to write. And that's a good motivation to do so. But I also

01:37:33.500 want to optimize both body and soul at the very beginning of the day. So I'm centered on the things

01:37:37.340 that really matter to me, notwithstanding how I feel. I wake up at 445 in the morning. I'm like,

01:37:41.900 back day. I don't want to do back day. I don't want to do leg day. I don't want to do that,

01:37:45.900 but I do it. I do it. It's the discipline of the will that in and of itself is so important.

01:37:51.180 Then I go to mass. I don't want to do it a lot of days. I don't want to do it, but that's not the

01:37:55.580 point. Do you think that there is a deficit of that as well, of that idea? So for example,

01:38:01.980 you alluded to marriage earlier and anybody who's listening to this who's married, especially who's

01:38:07.420 been married for many, many years, they'll acknowledge that so much of the almost perverse

01:38:13.180 joy of marriage is that you make a lot of sacrifices for another person and you find yourself putting

01:38:20.860 someone else ahead of yourself. For me, that's a very hard thing to do. I'm just so hardwired to

01:38:25.420 be such a selfish guy that it's really a wonderful practice to do something where I know I'm going to

01:38:33.020 make my wife's coffee today because she would do the same for me.

01:38:37.740 Well, part of that is that you have discovered and not enough people have that love is not a

01:38:44.540 feeling either. Happiness is not a feeling, but love isn't either. Love is a commitment. Martin Luther

01:38:48.700 King, one time he gave this very beautiful sermon on the most transgressive passage in the Christian

01:38:53.420 Bible, which is Matthew 5, 44, love your enemies. And he says, Jesus says, today I give you a new

01:39:00.060 teaching. You have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends. I tell you,

01:39:04.460 love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He says, Jesus doesn't say to like your enemies

01:39:09.740 because that's a sentimental thing. To like is to feel, to love is to decide. This is what's going

01:39:15.620 on between you and your wife. The satisfaction, the disciplining of your own will comes from the

01:39:20.680 decision to love her. That's the magic. That's the magic in marriage. That's the magic in friendship.

01:39:27.260 That's the magic that you can have in a relationship with your kids. Look, if it were all about your

01:39:30.300 feelings, hell, I'd be divorced. God knows my wife would bail on me. It's a pain being around me.

01:39:37.420 She decides every day to love me. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle. Aristotle talked really

01:39:42.800 compellingly about love and friendship. Aquinas, in 1265, writes the Summa Theologic guy's

01:39:48.620 magisterial contribution to philosophy. I mean, he introduced, he reintroduced Aristotle to the West.

01:39:55.540 Everybody was a Platonist till Aquinas. And he defined love as to will the good of the other as

01:40:01.760 other. When you're making your wife that cup of coffee, notwithstanding your feelings, you're willing

01:40:06.960 her good for her, not you. That discipline of the will to love another person like that, that decision

01:40:13.460 to do so is completely transformative. That's transcendent to the day-to-day experience. The animal

01:40:19.200 path is, well, I'm not going to make coffee. I don't feel like it. The divine path is to love

01:40:25.060 her, is to will her good as her. That's the human distinction. That's organized life.

01:40:32.000 So it really seems that that's almost a theme here of happiness, that happiness is much more about

01:40:38.280 deliberate decision-making, deliberate choices, as opposed to reactive feelings, which that's

01:40:44.800 obviously the extent to which we've discussed it. I think I like this thing that Oprah said,

01:40:49.140 not happiness, but-

01:40:50.520 Happier-ness.

01:40:51.160 Happier-ness.

01:40:51.820 Yeah. The thing I liked the most that she said was, let's write a book. But totally, she said,

01:40:55.800 let's spread this idea to a bunch of other people. And like, I've been listening to your show for a

01:40:59.460 long time. This is the salient theme. Take charge, man. Take charge. Don't leave your health up to what

01:41:07.780 feels good right now. Take charge of it. I mean, you're the boss. The startup is you. You're the

01:41:14.240 entrepreneur. The guy in charge of the enterprise. You're the CEO. Treat it as such. The CEO doesn't

01:41:19.760 do what feels good all the time. The CEO does what's right, notwithstanding her or his feelings.

01:41:25.340 And that's the secret of happiness, is treating your life like a startup. It's your philosophy of

01:41:29.660 health and longevity is my philosophy of happiness, because it's all one thing. You know, when you talk

01:41:35.880 about better, happier years or health span, I'm talking about happy span. That's what it comes down

01:41:41.880 to. And you're just not going to do it by doing what feels good in the moment. You're not going

01:41:45.940 to discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this divine

01:41:50.040 path that can give you this thing that you actually seek. Is it perfect? No. Can you learn and grow and

01:41:54.960 have progress all throughout the journey? Absolutely. Absolutely.

01:41:58.220 So finally, how would you think about the biomarkers of happiness? If we think about my world,

01:42:04.260 we have so many biomarkers. It's one of the things that makes our job relatively straightforward.

01:42:09.500 We have blood-based biomarkers. We have

01:42:11.880 biomarkers of performance, your VO2 max strength. We can look at body composition,

01:42:17.720 all of these things. If someone comes to you and you were the doctor in this sense,

01:42:23.520 they want to obviously first have some sort of assessment of happiness,

01:42:26.540 and then they want to be able to track their progress. Is that a silly idea here because it's

01:42:31.580 so self-evident? No, it's not a silly idea at all. I thought about it so much and I've had dozens

01:42:36.180 of entrepreneurs want to engineer the idea and applies it. The class, Harvard, you got to be

01:42:42.820 able to turn it into some sort of a product. And the way that you would do that is by having

01:42:46.080 relatively complicated but measurable phenomenon that you could look at and get better at. And

01:42:52.620 that's a proxy marker for the underlying construct, which is happiness. Here's the problem with that.

01:42:56.660 Here's the fundamental problem. It's a different species of challenge. We talked about this one time

01:43:01.920 before. There's two types of problems in human life. There's complicated problems and complex

01:43:06.740 problems. And for those who didn't actually listen the last time that we did our show,

01:43:10.600 your show together, the complicated problems are really, really tricky and take a lot of

01:43:15.060 computational horsepower and learning. But once you solve them, you can replicate the solution with

01:43:20.260 effortless ease forever. You can do the biomarkers. Complex problems are incredibly easy to

01:43:27.020 understand, but impossible to solve. Impossible to solve. There are too many permutations of what

01:43:32.100 can actually happen. So you're like Formula One racing. And so I'm going to set up this unbelievable,

01:43:37.300 I'm going to take a bunch of Unix machines and I'm going to wire them together and I'm going to,

01:43:41.380 you know, 250,000 lines of code and I'm going to simulate every F1 race for the rest of the year.

01:43:46.500 You're like, you're an idiot. Why? Because F1 is complex. That's why it's interesting and you want

01:43:52.440 to watch it. That's why it's so exciting to watch a Formula One race because it's complex. I know

01:43:57.200 what winning looks like. You cross the finish line before the other guys. It's the simplest thing in

01:44:00.400 the world, but a million different things can happen. A quadrillion things can actually happen.

01:44:05.440 That's the fun of it. All of life's joys are complex problems. Most of the solutions that we get

01:44:13.200 from technology and science are complicated solutions. The biggest problems that we have right

01:44:18.500 now have to do with the fact that we want to solve our complex problems like love and we're trying to

01:44:24.200 do it with complicated solutions like Instagram. A complicated solution to a complex problem will

01:44:30.040 always leave you cold and make you worse off. Basically, I'm going to get rid of all the Formula

01:44:35.000 One races because it's dangerous and I'm going to have nothing more than computer simulations of it.

01:44:38.800 It's like, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. That's the dumbest thing I've actually ever heard.

01:44:43.000 So that's the key thing for us to understand. And that's the reason I can't appize this.

01:44:46.420 Happiness is a complex and adaptive human phenomenon and you can only get it by living it

01:44:51.780 and working on it and making progress and failing. Just like your marriage. I just described your

01:44:57.700 marriage. In that sense, at least I get feedback in my marriage because when I screw up and I

01:45:04.760 apologize, I see that my wife forgives me. When I make a mistake, I feel the lenience and the love.

01:45:10.880 When I need the help, the help is there. So indirectly, I'm getting really good feedback.

01:45:17.420 And conversely, if a person was to take an honest assessment of their marriage and realize like,

01:45:22.280 we're two ships passing and we don't fight, but we don't have anything in common. If they were

01:45:27.220 thoughtful enough, they'd recognize things are not well. So they'd have a barometer there. Do you

01:45:32.040 think that using others as a mirror is the best way to get the true barometer of happiness? Or

01:45:37.560 do we rely on our own internal assessment? We wind up with our own internal assessment,

01:45:43.080 but it's not good enough to have that be one single metric. How happy am I?

01:45:50.260 We have three so far today in the conversation. Levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning. We can

01:45:56.140 know whether or not we have those things on the basis of the science that we've talked about and

01:45:59.900 the ways that we can get better at and practice it. The techniques for getting more of those things

01:46:03.840 are your family, friends and satisfying work. I break it down even further, by the way. I don't

01:46:08.740 try to make it complicated. It's still complex, but I have a spreadsheet that I keep on my own

01:46:12.960 happiness. They're the micronutrients behind the macronutrients, dozens of dimensions. And I'm

01:46:18.180 rating myself. I weight those things according to my experience of how they feed into the macronutrients.

01:46:23.800 And then I have scores on those dimensions and I want to make progress every year. I do it on my

01:46:27.740 birthday and half birthday. My half birthday is coming up in November, November 21st,

01:46:31.460 my half birthday. And I'm going to fill out my spreadsheet and say, I'm not on pace to get the

01:46:36.540 progress that I had in my strategic plan for my happiness for next May when my birthday comes

01:46:42.220 around again. What are the things I need to actually touch up? So what am I doing? I'm kind

01:46:46.640 of doing a curve fit to the complex problem I'm trying to solve with a little bit of a complicated

01:46:52.200 solution. I give all those dimensions to my students and I say, look, do the reading, do the work.

01:46:57.780 You know, I've read 10,000 articles about this so you don't have to, but I do try to break it down

01:47:02.880 a little bit so that I can have a multidimensional problem. One of the things that we know with

01:47:06.040 complex problems is the more multidimensional you make it, the more likely you are to get better

01:47:11.080 solutions. The worst thing that you can do is like, how do I feel today? You're not going to make

01:47:15.440 progress under those circumstances. What are some of the micronutrients that go into this for you?

01:47:20.420 It'll be the warmth of my marriage, the relationship with my kids, how well things are going with

01:47:26.200 respect to the value I'm trying to create with my career, the stability that I have in my

01:47:30.580 friendships, the degree to which I feel like I'm properly philanthropic, the interest I'm taking in

01:47:36.520 my professional life, the closeness that I have with certain intimates in my life, the extent to

01:47:42.720 which I'm avoiding or finding conflict in my work relationships. All these things go into my

01:47:48.880 spreadsheet because I know that they really matter across these three dimensions. The extent to which

01:47:53.000 I'm enjoying my life over the course of each day, I do these particular ratings and then I put them

01:47:58.020 together with a weighted sum across them and I've messed with the weighted sum and I've messed with

01:48:03.060 it and experimented with it until I said, yep, that seems about right. That seems about right with

01:48:07.860 respect to what I'm experiencing at this point in my life. So you make it a multidimensional problem.

01:48:11.600 That's a huge body of social science. I talked about imperfect linear models where you take big

01:48:16.360 problems and make them into a bunch of little tiny problems and that curve fits to the complex thing

01:48:22.060 you're trying to solve. You evaluate that twice a year and therefore you can't have it be dependent

01:48:27.740 on the technical noise of the day or the week. You're trying to answer these questions through

01:48:31.440 the lens of the last half of the year. Yeah. And if I'm having like a big conflict with my wife

01:48:35.740 on my birthday, I don't do it that day. Yeah. I don't do it that way too because I don't want the

01:48:39.780 noise is what it comes down to. And if something really, really great happens to me, the book is

01:48:44.980 doing great. I don't answer it that day either because I don't want my neurochemistry to be affecting

01:48:50.060 it unduly. Although at this point in my life, I've been doing it for 25 years. I'm pretty cold

01:48:54.680 and calculating. I think that would be a reasonable app to start with. Could be, could be. Yeah. And

01:48:59.540 that's very different than the biomarkers for sure, because I don't actually know what you would look

01:49:03.160 at. What are the biomarkers? I want to make sure I don't have a problem with my cortisol. I want to

01:49:07.660 make sure that my hormones are balanced. I want to make sure that my adrenal system is not...

01:49:11.580 Oh yeah, yeah. But when I went biomarkers, that's not what we're talking about.

01:49:13.860 Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah. When I went biomarkers, I didn't mean blood-based biomarkers. I mean anything

01:49:19.700 that is either subjective or objectively measurable that would serve as a proxy for

01:49:25.360 a dashboard of your happiness health. And in fact, I have that. It's imperfect. It's imperfect.

01:49:31.100 Any plans to share that, to make that something that others can use besides your students? It sounds

01:49:35.220 like they have access to this. I should do that. I actually should do that. That would be an

01:49:39.880 interesting thing. I'd be very interested in experimenting on that with maybe your clients,

01:49:44.340 to what extent that that could be a useful tool. Just to see.

01:49:48.100 Yeah. I think it would be very interesting. I'll tell you the last thing I think that's very

01:49:52.980 powerful and worth talking about, and I'm curious if you think that this is something valuable for

01:49:57.840 everyone or just a subset of people is less self. Yeah. The what?

01:50:02.920 Take away the mirrors. Oh yeah.

01:50:04.740 Yeah. I found that to be a very interesting discussion. Yeah. Because you even talked

01:50:09.780 about that literally. Some people will literally minimize the view of themselves in a mirror,

01:50:15.860 and then of course you talk about broader versions of that, such as social media and things like that.

01:50:20.240 Do you think everybody would benefit from this?

01:50:22.380 William James talked about the I self versus the me self. You must have both. When you're looking

01:50:26.860 in the mirror, you're two people. You're the looker and the lookie. And you need both because you

01:50:31.320 need to be able to look to understand what's going on around you, but you need to have a reflection

01:50:34.440 of yourself to understand who you are. I need to see, but I need to be seen by me so I can

01:50:39.280 understand my context. I can understand my place in the world. If you don't do that, you'll get run

01:50:44.300 over by a car if you don't have the I self, or you'll have somebody kill you because you've offended

01:50:48.960 them repeatedly because you don't understand the me self is the way that this works out.

01:50:52.320 The problem is in our society, it's all me self, no I self. Most people are not observing the world

01:50:56.820 very much at all. They're being observed and they're observing themselves. They're trying to be

01:51:02.140 observed and they're observing themselves. So social media is a classic case of this.

01:51:05.680 Checking your notifications is nothing more than a me self obsession. What are they saying about me?

01:51:11.300 What kind of impact am I having on other people? I get it why we do it. We're evolved to want to

01:51:16.640 understand where we are in the hierarchy. Social comparison, even envy are evolved phenomena because

01:51:22.240 it helps keep us alive and make progress. But it's misery when it takes over and when technology

01:51:27.180 supercharges our ability to be in the me self state. There are moments when you can be really

01:51:31.520 confused about the I self and the me self. One time I was really thinking deeply about something

01:51:37.140 and I was kind of obsessed. My daughter and I were in the car and I put gas in my car and I filled up

01:51:41.780 the car with gas, took off from the gas station. I'm just kind of lost in thought. And about a block

01:51:46.420 later, I hear this weird ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's like,

01:51:50.040 what's going on? Somebody's dragging a muffler. And then I'm like looking for somebody who's dragging

01:51:53.440 a muffler around me. And then I noticed that cars are honking at me and pointing at me. And I'm like,

01:51:57.720 what the hell? So I stopped the car. It turns out I hadn't pulled the hose out of the car,

01:52:02.160 out of the pump. And I was dragging, I pulled it out of the pump and I was dragging the gas pump

01:52:06.460 down the road, right? The hose. And I had to go back to the gas station. I find out how happy they

01:52:10.680 are when you do that, which is not. And how expensive it is when you have to replace part

01:52:14.740 of a gas pump. It's pretty bad. But the whole point was I was the I self and the me self all at

01:52:20.360 once. And it was this weird disequilibrating experience. One of the ways to get much happier is to be

01:52:27.260 more in the I self and less in the me self state, is to minimize the reflection, is to think a lot

01:52:33.740 less of what other people are thinking and to observe yourself a lot less. And there are different

01:52:38.740 ways to do that. So in the book, I talk about this guy I work with pretty closely who he was a fitness

01:52:45.800 influencer and a fitness model. I mean, imagine that. I mean, you're living by your abs. What a way to

01:52:51.520 live. If you're seeing lower abs and you're an adult, that means you're never eating anything

01:52:58.240 you like ever. And you're not getting enough enjoyment. Right. And he was miserable for 10

01:53:03.880 years. He didn't eat what he liked. He always had headaches. He didn't feel good. He didn't have

01:53:07.780 normal relationships. And so he decided he had to make a change in his life. He wasn't living. So he

01:53:13.500 literally got rid of every mirror in his apartment and showered in the dark for a year. So he couldn't see

01:53:19.540 his own abs and his life completely changed just on the basis of getting rid of those mirrors.

01:53:25.000 When people are miserable in my classes, I say, take off number one, take the notifications off

01:53:29.440 your social media, turn off the notifications. So you're not getting notifications. Don't look at

01:53:34.520 your mentions under any circumstances. Don't pay attention to that. And then actually literally

01:53:39.540 start getting rid of some of your mirrors, your literal mirrors. And what you'll do is you'll get

01:53:43.560 into more of a state of looking outward. And the more you look outward, the happier you'll be,

01:53:47.580 the better off your life will be when you're walking around going, man, that's amazing.

01:53:53.620 You know, what's not amazing? Me.

01:53:58.100 Indeed. Arthur, what surprised you the most when you set out to write this? You're writing a book

01:54:04.360 on a topic that you've studied for decades. You've been writing column after column after column weekly

01:54:09.420 in the Atlantic. You've written other books that touch on similar themes, but I have to believe that

01:54:14.300 there's something that you believe today that you absolutely didn't before or vice versa.

01:54:20.960 Yeah. I mean, I've changed my opinion about a lot of different things as science has gotten

01:54:24.220 clearer and my knowledge has gotten deeper. A lot of things that I would have thought,

01:54:27.880 and I could come up with a lot of little examples. Here's the biggie. My paradigm has been shifted.

01:54:31.900 I've have been studying happiness for a long time. I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008,

01:54:36.020 but it was kind of like a book on astronomy. It was observing happiness from a distance.

01:54:41.600 Who are the happy people? Who are the unhappy people? It never really occurred to me that with

01:54:45.840 the science, I could change my own life. And I'm not a fundamentally happy person.

01:54:51.260 Mad scientists struggle. They just do because negative affect, it gets your attention so much

01:54:57.320 more strongly than positive affect does. If you're high positive and high negative, you're going to feel

01:55:02.260 on balance pretty negative a lot. So I always thought to myself, happiness is a really interesting

01:55:07.300 thing, but it's not my lot. It isn't my lot. I went through years and years and years like that.

01:55:12.700 And when I came back and started the new happiness projects, writing my column in the books that I've

01:55:18.340 written in the past couple of years, I said, all right, let's see if that's true. I can't move the

01:55:23.120 stars as an astronomer, but maybe I can use the social science and the neuroscience in ways where I

01:55:28.340 can, with the knowledge, change my habits and get happier. I kind of doubted it. I sort of thought I

01:55:35.100 couldn't. And I did. I actually did. I changed my life. I'm usually eight to nine weeks out of my

01:55:40.940 column in the Atlantic because I'm trying the things that I'm suggesting. I'm a lab rat.

01:55:46.280 I know you do this too. You're not going to suggest some of your clients that you don't

01:55:49.580 feel comfortable with, even as a human being. This is what I'm doing too. And I'm taking constant

01:55:55.180 updates. I take the tests with my students on positive and negative affect and life satisfaction.

01:56:00.100 My well-being has risen by 60% in the past four years, 60%. I mean, it was a pretty low base.

01:56:07.780 It was a bad denominator, but it's been dramatic. And I didn't actually trust. I didn't actually

01:56:14.240 believe, but it's actually true. And anybody can do this. It's a great message, Arthur, because

01:56:20.840 you haven't wrapped your identity up in being the happiest guy. Because if you did, you'd feel like

01:56:26.260 a hypocrite all day long, right? You'd feel like any moment you didn't have that warm, fuzzy, happy

01:56:31.300 feeling, you'd be like, oh my God, how am I the guy that wrote the book on happiness?

01:56:34.940 Yeah. And furthermore, I'd be faking it all the time. I'd be faking it. My wife would be,

01:56:40.860 aren't you supposed to be happy all the time? And somebody sees me kind of grouchy in the airport

01:56:46.920 and be like, man, that's very disillusioning.

01:56:48.780 Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny when people see me eat a donut, they're like, what? And I go,

01:56:54.260 hey, read the book, man. I know. I didn't say don't eat a donut. I just said, don't eat 10 a day.

01:56:58.560 Yeah. Well, Arthur, thanks so much for making time. I know your time's tight here in Austin,

01:57:03.720 so I'm glad we had a chance to sit down today. Thank you, Peter. I have so much admiration for

01:57:07.780 the work that you're doing. You're making my life better through the work that you do and for a lot of

01:57:10.960 other people too. So thank you for that. Well, you're making mine better. And likewise,

01:57:14.480 all the people that are listening and reading. Right on. Thank you for listening to this week's

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The Peter Attia Drive - November 27, 2023

#280 ‒ Cultivating happiness, emotional self-management, and more ｜ Arthur Brooks Ph.D.

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