The Peter Attia Drive - #377 ‒ Special episode： Understanding true happiness and the tools to cultivate a meaningful life—insights from past interviews with Arthur Brooks

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

00:00:16.540 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:58.020 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to the Drive. Today's episode

00:01:06.500 is a special best of with Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, social scientist, columnist at The

00:01:11.600 Atlantic, and bestselling author. I've sat down with Arthur twice in the past few years to talk

00:01:16.200 about how to build a life that's both successful and deeply happy. We pulled the best moments from

00:01:21.460 these two conversations into one focused episode built around four themes. Happiness, what hijacks

00:01:27.840 it, the tools and practices that help, and the courage to live and love well, highlighting the most

00:01:33.860 insightful and actionable takeaway steps from previous episodes. I'm really excited about this

00:01:38.580 one because I've actually recently gone back and started rereading one of Arthur's books, and I've come

00:01:43.800 to realize in rereading it that in just a span of a year and a half or two years, it's so easy to forget

00:01:50.340 some of the nuance. And while I rarely have the time to go back and listen to old podcasts, I love

00:01:56.180 having a mashup like this that actually brings some of the most important aspects from several podcasts

00:02:01.640 into one. So without further delay, please enjoy this best of Brooks episode on The Drive.

00:02:13.220 Arthur, thanks for making the trip to Austin, although maybe it's only partially to see me.

00:02:17.060 It's mostly to see you, Peter. I love seeing you. There you go.

00:02:19.780 It's the best. Doing this in person is great. Last time we did it by Zoom. This is better.

00:02:23.720 Congrats on the book.

00:02:24.800 Thanks.

00:02:25.260 This is not your first, second, or third rodeo, but I'm sure each time it's a little bit of a

00:02:29.800 what's the world going to think?

00:02:31.820 Oh, yeah. No, no. It's like having a child. I mean, well, a child you live with for a super long

00:02:36.520 time and they torture you decade after decade. But a book is something where as you bring it into the

00:02:40.940 world, you go through... You remember Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist,

00:02:44.980 wrote that famous book about death and dying.

00:02:46.820 On death and dying.

00:02:47.540 And you have to go through five stages. I mean, most of that research has been questioned since

00:02:51.360 then, but it's pretty interesting. You go through bargaining and denial and rage. That's like,

00:02:55.960 as you know, when a book is coming out, writing a book, denial and bargaining and rage, finally

00:03:00.380 there's acceptance, but you're still nervous for sure.

00:03:03.620 Yeah. There's a lot of stuff I want to talk about with you on this topic, but let's begin

00:03:08.660 with a question, which is, what's the difference between happiness, which is what you write

00:03:13.500 about? And happy feelings. Are they the same thing?

00:03:17.300 They're not. And this is a really important misconception. All of my students and most of

00:03:21.300 us actually have. We live in the era of feelings. If you'd talk to my parents or God knows my

00:03:25.960 grandparents about feelings, they would scratch their head. What are you talking about? I mean,

00:03:30.980 talking about your emotions all the time, ephemera, feelings seem so counterproductive. And in

00:03:35.740 point of fact, our grandparents were right. Feelings are not happiness any more than the smell

00:03:40.720 of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And that's incredibly

00:03:46.160 good news. I mean, a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling. It's quite incorrect.

00:03:50.020 There are many better technical definitions of happiness, but they produce a lot of feelings.

00:03:54.360 They're associated with a lot of emotions, which is limbic system activity, a part of the brain,

00:03:58.940 a 40 million year evolutionary process that developed the limbic system to create emotions. That's

00:04:04.460 signals. Information is what it comes from. If you mistake these feelings for the underlying

00:04:10.640 phenomenon of happiness, you're going to be chasing it all over the place. You'll be chasing ghosts.

00:04:14.960 How I slept last night, what I ate for breakfast. If my spouse yelled at me this morning, that's what's

00:04:19.100 going to determine my happiness. You wind up being managed as opposed to having any prayer of managing

00:04:23.840 your own happiness. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not feelings.

00:04:27.440 It's hard to differentiate though. Having read this stuff several times, you have to remind yourself

00:04:34.180 when you're in the throes of what I just refer to as negatively valenced feelings, that this is not

00:04:39.080 a statement of my overall state of happiness. Yeah, for sure. And then what's the relationship

00:04:43.820 between unhappiness and happiness? Are they polar images? How do they coexist? Well, for the longest

00:04:49.060 time, if you even go back to the ancient philosophers, there was the idea that happiness and unhappiness

00:04:52.900 exist on the spectrum. So unhappiness would be the lack of happiness. We know a lot

00:04:57.300 better now, given the explosion of neuroscience and the way that emotions are produced, that in

00:05:03.320 fact, you can be happy and unhappy or have happy and unhappy feelings in parallel. So for example,

00:05:08.740 the average person spends about 40% of their time with predominantly positive feelings. It sits in a

00:05:14.820 neutral idol of positivity. Most people do, not everybody. About 16 or 17% of the time, the average

00:05:20.220 person has predominantly negative feelings. Something is going on. That's more intense. And part of the

00:05:24.920 reason is because negative emotions get your attention and they're supposed to. Evolution favors

00:05:29.500 negative emotions. Positive emotions, nice to have. Negative emotions, pay attention, because that

00:05:34.700 could cost you your life. What are some of those, if you think about this evolutionarily, and not even

00:05:39.660 going back to millions of years ago, but just going back hundreds of thousands of years ago to the origin

00:05:44.840 of our species as homo sapiens, what do we think are some of the most powerful negative emotions that

00:05:49.640 would drive action? There's basically six fundamental emotions or basic emotions. These are the building

00:05:54.880 blocks of all emotional life that are produced by the limbic system of the brain, four negative and

00:05:58.600 two positive. The four negative emotions are sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. All four of those have a

00:06:04.960 very strong evolutionary basis. Fear and anger, of course, have to do with threat. They involve the amygdala

00:06:10.540 of the brain. You know, when a car is about to run you over and you're a pedestrian in a crosswalk,

00:06:15.640 that crosses your visual cortex and is recorded in the occipital lobe of your brain as an enormous

00:06:20.740 predator. That signals to your amygdala to send the signal through the hypothalamus of your brain

00:06:26.820 to your pituitary glands, which signals your adrenal glands above your kidneys to spit out stress

00:06:31.540 hormones. That happens in 74 milliseconds. By that time, you're sweating, your heart is pumping,

00:06:37.220 you've jumped out of the way and you've flipped off the driver, a combination of fear and anger

00:06:41.480 in response to the enormous predator. Three seconds later, your prefrontal cortex catches up and you

00:06:47.160 say, I shouldn't have flipped him off. That's not my values or whatever it happens to be. So that's

00:06:52.000 your limbic system keeping you alive. That's fear and anger. Then, of course, there's disgust, which

00:06:55.860 involves the insular cortex of the brain, also part of the limbic system. That's when you pull something

00:07:00.700 out of the back of your fridge you forgot about a few weeks ago and you hold it and you're like,

00:07:04.060 ugh, that signals don't eat it. And so anything that might carry a pathogen signals that basic

00:07:11.080 negative emotion of disgust to you. Now, it can be misattributed to people. That's what demagogic

00:07:16.520 politicians always do. That's what the media does to us. It tries to reprogram the insular cortex,

00:07:23.040 the insula of the limbic system of the brain so that when somebody disagrees with you politically,

00:07:27.620 you look at them like a cockroach. That's what demagogic leaders and dictators have done

00:07:32.380 for time immemorial so that people will undertake barbaric acts against people in their own

00:07:37.040 countries, at least a civil war, etc. And then last but not least is sadness. Sadness has also evolved.

00:07:42.760 Sadness is what you feel largely in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain,

00:07:47.640 another part of the limbic system. That's mental pain, usually when you're either socially excluded

00:07:53.080 or you're separated from a loved one. Now, that's something that's evolved because you don't want to be

00:07:58.960 separated from your tribe. You don't want to walk the frozen tundra and die alone.

00:08:04.160 But what happens, for example, in grief, grief is unremediated sadness. And the reason is because

00:08:10.260 your brain is saying, make this separation go away. And you can't because the other person is

00:08:15.560 permanently gone, aka dead or divorced or whatever it happens to be. And so the grief is just this

00:08:22.000 pulsating activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain saying, I must be reunited with

00:08:29.560 that person, but I can't be. And it takes a lot of time, in many cases, for the dorsal anterior

00:08:34.880 cingulate cortex to stop registering that sadness, that pain.

00:08:39.260 The sadness we feel when a person dies, which would be the ultimate form of separation,

00:08:43.300 is a more extreme version of, say, a social isolation that you might feel, like what a kid

00:08:48.380 feels if they go to sit at the cafeteria table and all the other kids get up and walk away.

00:08:52.700 Yeah. And there's interesting studies that actually look at how that registers in the brain. So

00:08:56.900 the brain is so thrifty, as we all know. The neuroscience of this is super interesting. So

00:09:01.600 when you stub your toe, there's actually two processes going. There's sensory pain and affective

00:09:06.600 pain. Sensory pain means you can feel it in the nerve endings, and it's very unpleasant.

00:09:11.320 Affective pain is, I hate this. And you feel both in physical pain. The affective component

00:09:16.860 involves the same part of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, when you have something

00:09:22.080 that emotionally bothers you, when you're being excluded. And we know that because there's these

00:09:26.420 interesting studies in an fMRI machine. They're looking at the part of the brain that's illuminated.

00:09:30.600 They're being subjected to being rejected by somebody else, and they can see the part of the brain

00:09:35.080 that's actually illuminated. I guess there is a way to do it, but is there a benefit to the reverse?

00:09:38.440 I love going into cold plunges, so I do it almost every day. And it's insanely uncomfortable.

00:09:45.400 There's not a day that I step into that 42-degree ice bath with jets shooting water around me that I'm

00:09:52.620 like, this doesn't hurt. But it doesn't come with the, I hate this because I'm choosing to do it,

00:09:59.080 and I think there's value in it. Does the brain treat that differently? How would we think of that

00:10:03.240 as an emotion? What it is, is a controlled, aversive emotion under your own power. And so,

00:10:08.740 for example, if you go to a haunted house on Halloween-

00:10:11.480 And get scared.

00:10:12.120 And get scared, you're controlling the fear. If you're on a really radical amusement park ride,

00:10:16.680 it's the same sort of thing. And so what you're doing is you're subjecting yourself to a little

00:10:19.840 bit of the stress hormones and the experience of the aversive emotion. But since it's under your own

00:10:24.960 control, you actually use it in a way that you enjoy. And so people who do extreme sports,

00:10:29.900 this is the same kind of thing that they do. They like to feel a little bit in danger. One of my

00:10:33.360 kids is somebody who likes this. He really likes this a lot. He likes to expose himself to things

00:10:37.980 that actually hurt as long as he's under control. Any evidence that other species do this?

00:10:42.120 No. This is a uniquely human phenomenon.

00:10:44.380 Yeah. For example, there's also no evidence that you can train any other species to appreciate

00:10:49.500 spicy food, to ingest capsaicin. No other species can be trained to like the feeling of spicy

00:10:56.600 food that hurts your mouth. Only humans can do that. And so this is a really higher order phenomenon

00:11:01.840 where we have aversive emotions. Other animals have aversive emotions, but we actually can dominate

00:11:07.560 them through a process called metacognition, where we experience the emotions, not just in the limbic

00:11:13.000 system of the brain, but in the prefrontal cortex. This is where it really gets interesting. This is the

00:11:17.660 human difference is where this comes around. So the dog wants the cookie, eats the cookie. Dogs are

00:11:24.160 limbic creatures. Little kids are limbic. When your kids were little, when my kids were little,

00:11:28.260 they'd be screaming over something, there's a piece of rice on their chair, whatever thing that bums

00:11:31.780 them out. You're like, use your words. What you're telling them to do is to experience the emotion

00:11:36.680 in the prefrontal cortex of the brain where they can decide how to react. They can think about what

00:11:42.420 their own emotions are. And when you're doing that, then you can get in the cold plunge and say,

00:11:46.040 it hurts so good. And that's what metacognition brings to you. And also you can say something like,

00:11:50.740 I'm really sad about this. What am I learning? That's how you can be a far more evolved human

00:11:57.460 being by becoming more and more metacognitive using the techniques for doing so, which is a lot about

00:12:02.460 what I'm writing about these days. Okay. So what about the two positive?

00:12:05.940 The two positive, and this is actually pretty much all the neuroscientists agree on the four

00:12:09.900 negative, not all the neuroscientists agree on the two positive. Some people believe that surprise is a

00:12:15.220 positive basic emotion. And so there's a lot of different schools of this, but two that pretty much

00:12:20.180 everybody agrees on are joy and interest. Now this is useful for us to think about. Joy is obvious.

00:12:26.260 It's ordinarily when you're reunited with somebody that you love or something good happens pursuant to

00:12:31.720 struggle. The joy you get after you work really hard for something and you get it, that's a basic

00:12:37.000 positive emotion. And that's a reward, evolved reward, so that you'll work hard to find some

00:12:41.240 berries on a bush and you get your caloric needs met for the day. You want to make sure that you get an

00:12:45.120 emotional reward for that. And that's actually stimulating a part of the brain called a ventral striatum,

00:12:49.060 which is your reward system. And boom, that feels good. Want to do it again, do it again,

00:12:54.000 do it again. Interest is different. Interest is you get intense pleasure. People are listening to

00:12:59.720 The Drive, which I do. Why? Because I learned something from it. Why do I care? I mean, it's not

00:13:05.580 like it's going to dramatically change my salary trajectory or my professional success if I listen

00:13:10.820 or don't listen to your show. I want to learn because learning is intensely pleasurable.

00:13:15.200 That's really a fascinating phenomenon because that's how people evolve and make progress. And

00:13:20.940 it makes sense that that would be an evolutionary phenomenon. We would favor learning so that people

00:13:25.820 can get ahead and feed themselves and find new sources of food and find new mates and all the

00:13:31.260 things that they do. And the way that that's adapted to the current environment is they listen

00:13:34.220 to your show. So it seems to me that both of those could be found in creatures other than us.

00:13:40.500 Certainly joy. I guess learning would be a testable hypothesis, presumably with a maze or something

00:13:46.340 like that. Whether the learning is positively valenced. You can teach a worm to learn. A worm

00:13:52.400 will learn. You can teach a worm things. We just don't know whether it's a positively valenced

00:13:56.800 experience because they don't have the kind of brain that will give you emotions as we understand

00:14:00.620 them. I wonder if optogenetics would provide insight into that one day when you could get sort of

00:14:05.020 cellular level resolution of different parts of the brain. I don't know if you're familiar with

00:14:09.120 Carl Deseroth's work. Yeah, for sure. You've had him on, right? I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:12.820 Yeah, a psychiatrist. Yeah, that would be an interesting line of inquiry, I suppose.

00:14:17.040 Yeah, for sure. And we know that dogs, for example, have rudimentary emotions.

00:14:20.520 They can mimic human emotions really, really well. But it's almost certainly limbic phenomena that look

00:14:26.840 metacognitive more than anything else. And one of the things that we do is we selectively breed

00:14:31.680 dogs so that their emotional state more clearly mimics our own. We like that. They make better

00:14:37.060 companions. They do something you're not supposed to do and they look guilty. They don't feel guilty.

00:14:41.180 That's certainly an illusion. We have a new puppy. I can really relate to this.

00:14:46.060 Yeah, yeah. And there are certain ways that they are quite similar to us. For example,

00:14:50.400 there's a lot of research that suggests that they have serotonin balance issues. And if you give a dog

00:14:57.540 a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it will actually have some of the same effects it can have

00:15:02.140 on people. You can give your dog Prozac and your dog will be less depressed or at least have fewer

00:15:06.680 depressive symptoms in some cases. So there are ways that they are similar to us for sure.

00:15:10.900 Let's define happiness. I don't think I understand what it really is. And given that it's your

00:15:17.160 business, effectively, it's what you teach. It's what you write about. It's the thing you think

00:15:23.880 about as much as I think about the longevity component of biology. I'm sure you get asked this

00:15:29.720 question all the time and I'm sure you've got a 30 second answer and I'm sure you've got a three hour

00:15:33.240 answer. Take it in any direction you like. I've got a semester long answer, which is the class I

00:15:37.600 teach at the Harvard Business School, which is what is it and how do you get it? The reason for that is

00:15:42.100 that by the time my students reach me, my graduate students at Harvard reach me, a lot of them are

00:15:46.640 realizing that the world's promises are empty, that the money, power, pleasure, and fame that are

00:15:52.480 supposed to bring you undying happiness are false promises. They're a bill of goods. They can be

00:15:58.240 instrumental to getting what you want, but they can't intrinsically give you the satisfaction that

00:16:02.760 you desire. So I start in the first day of class. I say, okay, guys, I mean, you spent all your

00:16:07.220 elective points getting into the class because they have a competitive system to get in these

00:16:10.680 electives. And the class fills in like nine seconds. It's happiness after all, free candy kids.

00:16:16.540 And there's hundreds of people on the waiting list for this class. I say, okay, you made a commitment

00:16:20.380 to getting this class. You must know what happiness is. As I go around, I cold call them.

00:16:24.020 What's happiness? They'll say, it's that feeling I get on Thanksgiving and yada, yada, yada,

00:16:29.380 feelings, feelings. I'm wrong. Happiness is not a feeling any more than your Thanksgiving dinner is

00:16:34.640 the smell of the turkey. The feeling of happiness is evidence of happiness. Now we measure happiness

00:16:40.280 in all sorts of very complicated and very simple ways. And one of the things that we know is that

00:16:44.780 all of the people who are really happy, who have a lot of happy feelings, but also have a lot of

00:16:48.720 satisfaction and contentment with their lives, they're getting abundance and balance across three

00:16:53.460 dimensions. And so this is the definition of happiness. Now think about this, like if I were

00:16:57.820 to say, Hey, Peter, what is the Thanksgiving dinner? You'd say, well, it's carbohydrates,

00:17:01.520 proteins, and fat. You know, you'd say there's the three macronutrients of all food. And, you know,

00:17:06.120 we're always trying to get our macros in order. Forget lifespan. Let's talk about health span.

00:17:10.700 And I say, let's take it even farther to happiness span. So let's get our literal macronutrients

00:17:14.980 in order for health span. Let's get our happiness span in order with the macronutrients of happiness.

00:17:18.900 They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three macronutrients of happiness.

00:17:25.960 If you don't have those things in balance and abundance, you will not report being a happy

00:17:30.400 person. Now, this is different than unhappiness, which is another entire subject. Believe it or not,

00:17:34.940 happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're different phenomena. So we're just talking

00:17:39.860 about happiness here. To be a truly happy person, you need to enjoy your life. And that requires not

00:17:45.940 pleasure. It's pleasure plus elevation. It's pleasure plus metacognition. You know,

00:17:51.900 Thanksgiving dinner fills your belly and tastes good. That's pleasure. But the experience that

00:17:56.220 you have of consuming the Thanksgiving dinner with other people and having a memory that you can

00:18:00.100 last forever, that's enjoyment. And so it's a much more elevated experience than pleasure.

00:18:04.940 Satisfaction, which is super fleeting and troublesome. And, you know, as Mick Jagger saying,

00:18:09.740 I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. There's an entire research

00:18:15.100 literature on that that I participated in on the problem with satisfaction, but it's the joy

00:18:19.860 and reward for a job well done and a goal met. You know, that elation from actually meeting a goal.

00:18:26.640 And last but not least is purpose, is meaning in life. I talk an awful lot about the coherence,

00:18:32.020 the significance, the direction, the meaning of meaning. And it gets back to a lot of the great

00:18:36.960 philosophy, but we can also measure it. I have a few diagnostic questions that I ask for the clients

00:18:41.300 who come to me and they'd lack purpose in their life. The questions I ask are, why were you born?

00:18:46.580 And for what are you willing to die? And if you can't answer one or both of those questions,

00:18:51.020 you have a serious meaning problem. We got to dig in and actually just solve that particular

00:18:54.000 problem. But that's it. I mean, these are the three macronutrients, either the protein,

00:18:57.720 carbohydrates, and fat of happiness or enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

00:19:01.380 Okay. So let's now talk about these three components of happiness. You wrote about this in

00:19:06.920 strength to strength, but let's go over them again and talk about what each one means.

00:19:10.740 Happiness is not a feeling. We've established that. Feelings are evidence of happiness.

00:19:15.280 When we look at the happiest people and the way that we do that typically, there's some

00:19:19.120 indirect ways to figure that out. You know, I could ask your wife, how happy is Peter? And you're not

00:19:24.400 there. And I would get some really probably very accurate information. There's some tests that are not

00:19:29.060 very good, but I could ask you a series of targeted questions when you're under fMRI.

00:19:33.520 Okay. But they're really the best way to do it. The most cost-effective and efficient way to do

00:19:38.240 that is for you to anonymously answer a bunch of questions that are sort of like this.

00:19:43.000 Imagine all the people you know were the happiest person you've ever met. I mean, really happy

00:19:48.400 is 10. And the most miserable SOB you've ever met is a one. All things considered at this period of

00:19:55.560 your life, not this moment, this period of your life, all things considered, thinking of those people,

00:19:59.940 what's your number? And that turns out to be incredibly accurate. You got to have a large

00:20:04.220 sample because some people answer it in a wonky way. And it has to be anonymous because if you

00:20:09.440 answer this in front of Jill, you'll probably lie. They don't tell the truth in front of their spouses

00:20:13.420 necessarily, in front of their friends, because they give answers that people want to hear.

00:20:17.600 But if it's really honest and you're by yourself, I'll get extremely effective data from that.

00:20:23.760 Based on these data, you find that the happiest people, they have three macronutrients in balance

00:20:29.820 and abundance. By the way, before we get to those, are those responses normally distributed?

00:20:36.480 Yeah, they are normally distributed, but the mean is not five. Yeah, the mean is more like

00:20:42.000 seven and a half. So there's a bias toward the top part of the scale. The reason for the skew is

00:20:47.840 because you feel like it would be better if it were a five. If it were a five, it would be saying

00:20:52.840 that a three is within one standard deviation. There's nothing wrong with being a three. Nobody

00:20:56.120 wants to be a three. Numbers have cultural valence, right? They really do. And so people

00:21:00.660 will kind of, yeah, it's like being normal happy. That's like seven, eight. And what you find is that

00:21:06.720 most people over the course of their adult lives, early 20s to early 50s, they're between seven and

00:21:11.420 nine. Most people are from seven and nine. Most of the people that I talk to that I work with,

00:21:16.280 especially the executives that I work with one-on-one who are threes, they're depressed.

00:21:20.280 They're actually suffering from clinical issues. They're behind the line of scrimmage. There's

00:21:25.080 nobody who's like, yeah, I'm pretty normal. I'm like, you know, probably the 40th percentile.

00:21:29.640 That probably makes me a three and a half. 40th percentile is probably a five

00:21:32.620 is the way that that works. They would like to be better and they feel like they're not as good

00:21:37.640 as they should be, despite the fact that in the scale, that looks like the middle of the scale.

00:21:41.980 It's not the middle of the scale. So what do you find? The people who are in the upper end,

00:21:46.580 the eights and nines and like my wife, nine and a half. I don't get it, but there you go.

00:21:52.260 They tend to be really healthy and healthy means they have balance and abundance across

00:21:56.740 what I often refer to as the happiness is macronutrients. It's very easy in your audience

00:22:01.640 because everybody knows there's protein, carbohydrates and fat. And the best diets are

00:22:05.580 those that have all of them in balance and abundance. And you have to get your macros and

00:22:10.980 you're not going to have a hundred percent protein. That sounds good for somebody for a week until they

00:22:15.880 become miserable. So the three macronutrients are enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the

00:22:21.060 three macronutrients of happiness. And none of those, by the way, is straightforward. Any more than

00:22:25.060 protein, carbohydrates and fat is straightforward. It's like, I'll be fine. I'm going to eat a chicken

00:22:29.160 and a stick of butter and a ho-ho. And then I'm going to eat that exclusively for the rest of my life.

00:22:33.660 And it meets my macros. So I should be fine. No, no, no, it doesn't work that way.

00:22:36.620 You actually have to understand that. Understand what each one of those things are. Enjoyment,

00:22:42.340 satisfaction and meaning. And you have to have strategies to understand why they're so hard to

00:22:47.740 attain and what you need to do exercises to make sure that you can be better and more skillful at

00:22:54.120 attaining each one. So let's start with enjoyment. Enjoyment seems sort of straightforward. I want to

00:22:58.520 enjoy my life. Get a lot of pleasure. That's wrong. Pleasure is limbic. Enjoyment involves the

00:23:04.000 prefrontal cortex. Enjoyment is a much more complex phenomenon than pleasure. Pleasure is a signal from

00:23:12.200 the limbic system that says this thing that you're doing will help you survive, usually through

00:23:19.020 caloric needs or pass on your genes through something like sex. So that's what pleasure is

00:23:24.680 really all about. It's nothing more. It's just like any positive emotion. It sends a signal saying,

00:23:28.600 do more of this. That's not the secret of happiness. That's incredibly evanescent. It's

00:23:34.080 extremely temporary. And if you pursue pleasure, what you'll be doing is you'll be engaging systems

00:23:40.040 in your brain, the dopamine system, for example, which is the anticipation of reward, the reward

00:23:45.220 being pleasure. You'll hit the lever, get the cookie, hit the lever, get the cookie. It will never

00:23:49.260 last and you'll become an addict. Pleasure seeking, I mean, the hippie phenomenon, the hippie

00:23:53.600 motto of it feels good, do it, is life ruining advice. It's just the dumbest thing ever. If it

00:24:00.100 feels good, do it, you'd never go into the ice bath. I mean, you wouldn't stay married if it feels

00:24:04.740 good, do it all the time. It's just terrible advice. So what do you need for enjoyment? The

00:24:09.980 answer is the source of pleasure, adding two things, people and memory. That's where you're engaging your

00:24:16.940 prefrontal cortex. So Anheuser-Busch never runs ads for beer of a dude alone in his apartment

00:24:24.300 pounding a 12-pack. They never do that, right? A lot of people use the product that way.

00:24:30.020 Why don't they show that? Because that's the pursuit of pleasure and that's dangerous. That's

00:24:33.960 bad for you. Use of methamphetamine is bad for you. What we're incredibly good at using science

00:24:39.920 today is to take things that give a little bit of pleasure evolutionarily and supercharge them.

00:24:45.040 natural endorphins that you get that will block pain under normal circumstances. We can supercharge

00:24:50.020 them in a lab and make fentanyl and 100,000 people died last year. That pursuit of that pleasure is

00:24:54.640 utterly ruinous. We look at a random series of events and when it's random, we get payoffs a

00:25:00.340 little bit. We'll seek those events and that gives us a little bit of pleasure. We turn that into slot

00:25:04.060 machines in Vegas and then you're sitting there at 4 a.m. by yourself. Really, really bad for you.

00:25:09.900 That's the problem. Seeking pleasure alone, not making memory will make you miserable.

00:25:17.360 Usually, if something gives you pleasure and you're doing it alone, you're usually doing it wrong.

00:25:20.720 Pornography is a problem. It uses the sexual function in a way that leads to addiction

00:25:24.820 and huge problems in people's lives. It's contraindicated. It's not good for especially

00:25:29.900 young people to use that, but that's the same thing as fentanyl in this way. Okay, so what do you do?

00:25:35.160 You make sure you're with people, especially the people you love, and you're making memories.

00:25:40.180 That's why Anheuser-Busch's ads have two dudes or 10 dudes or a family cracking open a bud and

00:25:47.440 drinking it and laughing because in the ad, they want you to associate the beer with happiness,

00:25:52.820 which is enjoyment is the central factor, not the pleasure that the little bit of alcohol will

00:25:59.300 bring you. That's what we need to do. That's the strategy. We're working on a, and maybe by the time

00:26:03.980 this podcast come out, it'll be out, but we're working on a very, very in-depth newsletter on

00:26:09.240 basically the conflicting data on alcohol, specifically around wine. Why is it that at

00:26:15.000 a biochemical level, and certainly looking at the Mendelian randomizations, alcohol is toxic at any

00:26:20.520 dose, and it's a monotonically increasing function, so there's no amount of alcohol that is healthy.

00:26:25.400 Yet the epidemiology is pretty significantly in favor of modest drinking over abstinence.

00:26:31.620 And once you even strip out all of the obvious confounders that would lead to that,

00:26:36.780 you're left with the phenomenon you describe, which is if you dig into the data really deeply,

00:26:43.120 it's the Mediterranean drinking pattern that seems to be associated with some benefits at low doses.

00:26:50.780 People in memory, not the alcohol per se.

00:26:53.040 The food and the wine and the people combo that seems to be beneficial,

00:26:57.560 not the vodka and Red Bull in the dorm issue. Even though it's the same molecule,

00:27:04.160 it's a very different experience.

00:27:05.900 Processed sugar is the same thing. You find that people who eat candy one to three times a month,

00:27:09.980 on average, live a year longer than people who abstain completely from candy. Candy's terrible for

00:27:14.300 you. It rots your teeth. It leads to metabolic syndrome. Eating candy one to three times a day

00:27:20.460 is very different than eating it one to three times a month. And so the whole point is you do

00:27:25.720 something that you enjoy. It's something that gives you a little bit of pleasure, which something

00:27:29.940 really sweet does because of our evolution. Something that gives you a little bit of euphoria,

00:27:34.380 like alcohol, makes you feel good. But you do it with people and you make a memory,

00:27:39.600 unless all your friends are drunks, which is bad. You can get into an unhealthy community that

00:27:44.600 you're doing it in a pretty moderate way. And then it's life enhancing despite the fact that it's a

00:27:48.820 poison. And you can use a little bit of poison in a productive way, but it has to be about

00:27:53.440 enjoyment, never about pleasure per se. Such an interesting distinction.

00:27:57.700 Man, I'm 59. It took me this long. This is information that I wish I had been able to use

00:28:03.660 when I was in my 20s. It would have saved me a lot of grief. It really would have because all the

00:28:07.940 time that I wasted with drinking, with just unproductive activity and the way that I've missed

00:28:15.200 opportunities to love and be loved and to have a happier life. This is really, really news that

00:28:20.980 people can use. And this is probably one of the stronger arguments against evolution being in

00:28:29.080 favor of happiness. It's clear that evolution is in favor of pleasure. Pleasure might be one of the

00:28:34.780 most potent fuels that drives the engine of evolution, at least when it comes to reproduction,

00:28:40.580 but certainly other aspects of evolution as well. You're exactly right.

00:28:44.460 But enjoyment is a higher order process and I guess would not necessarily have the same

00:28:51.240 evolutionary drive. Although I suppose being with people obviously also has a strong evolutionary

00:28:58.300 bent. If for no other reason, then we couldn't have survived alone, even through the industrialization

00:29:04.280 of agriculture. No, absolutely right. The problem is the maladaptation that comes with technological

00:29:08.580 progress is that you can strip off the component of enjoyment that is pleasure and then supercharge

00:29:14.180 it in the lab. That's the problem. The internet makes it possible to do that. Chemistry makes it

00:29:19.420 easy to do that. There are all kinds of ways that we strip out that component of enjoyment. So it's no

00:29:24.720 longer part of the evolved societies that would have been more traditional.

00:29:28.960 So do you think that that's a decent litmus test, Arthur, where the person who's listening to this,

00:29:32.660 who loves to smoke, says, guys, I enjoy smoking. Like I really enjoy it. And you would push back on

00:29:40.880 that and say, no, you find pleasure in smoking and you find just as much pleasure if you're sitting

00:29:46.000 by yourself doing it, puffing away, getting the physiologic high of the tobacco, but you're not

00:29:53.900 forming new memories. You're not sharing in this with someone else.

00:29:56.980 That's right. My wife smokes two times a year when she's with her sister in Barcelona. She loves her

00:30:03.160 sister. Her sister smokes only after meals, only with people, maybe once or twice a day, which is,

00:30:09.840 by the way, too much. It's a conflicting evidence on that, but it's suffice it to say that any amount

00:30:14.120 of tobacco and any amount of smoke in your lungs is not good for you. My wife smokes twice a year

00:30:18.460 because she's with her sister. My wife's not a smoker. I used to be a smoker. I don't touch it. I don't

00:30:22.860 dare touch it, not even twice a year is the way that that works out. Because for me, I got the

00:30:27.980 monkey on my back immediately. And I don't want that thing to come back because I so thoroughly

00:30:33.640 stripped the pleasure from tobacco off from the enjoyment of communally smoking that I can't

00:30:41.460 handle it anymore. Part of that is my mad scientist. Part of that is get back to what we talked about

00:30:46.080 earlier in the conversation. Okay. So what is satisfaction then?

00:30:50.200 Again, I mean, people are like, enjoyment's complicated and it's all complicated. That's

00:30:54.580 why the knowledge is so critically important. I mean, that's why happiness is a serious business.

00:30:59.900 Satisfaction is the joy after struggle. That's what satisfaction really is. You struggled for it.

00:31:04.920 You worked for it. You got it. It feels awesome. If my students cheat to get an A on my exam,

00:31:10.940 there's no satisfaction. But if they worked really hard, you might say, chump, stupid. Brooks probably

00:31:16.920 gave the same exam last year. Go find last year's exam. But if they actually struggle for it and they

00:31:21.720 study for it, they get a ton of satisfaction when they get an A. Because that's how we're wired.

00:31:26.620 We're wired after you struggle for something a lot. Again, this comes back to the evolutionary

00:31:30.940 psychology, even biology, is that you go looking hard for something and you get it. You want that to

00:31:36.440 be reinforced as a good thing to do. That's why Mother Nature really wants that to happen. And that's

00:31:41.440 why we have that evolutionary imperative. Okay. So that's great. But here's this little twist that

00:31:47.100 Mother Nature throws into it. If you knew that that satisfaction, that joy wasn't going to last,

00:31:53.120 you'd think twice before going through the struggle. You'd think twice about the cost-benefit

00:31:57.620 analysis. Like if you said to yourself, you know, like that watch. It's a nice watch. I don't know

00:32:02.260 what kind of watch that is. That's a Seamaster or something, right? That's a GMT. It's a nice watch.

00:32:08.280 But if you'd thought to yourself, it's a pretty expensive watch. I'm going to really,

00:32:13.420 really like it for a week. You'd think twice about it. Trivial example. But there's all kinds

00:32:19.380 of things that we do. That relationship, that conquest, that business plan, that fill in the

00:32:25.540 blanks. I'm not going to enjoy it for very long. So Mother Nature shields you from that truth.

00:32:31.700 You have to have it wear off quickly because you wouldn't be ready for the next thing.

00:32:34.700 If you're a caveman and you're looking for calories and you find berries on a bush after

00:32:39.160 a long hike, that's incredibly satisfying. That gives you a bunch of joy. But if you sat there

00:32:44.140 enjoying them for the next week, you'd be a saber-toothed tiger's dinner. You have to be ready

00:32:48.080 for the next set of emotions. That's homeostasis. You go back to the baseline, physical baseline,

00:32:53.000 emotional baseline. You always go back. But if you realize that, you won't make the effort in the

00:32:57.460 first place. So Mother Nature tantalizes you with a joy that's going to come after the struggle

00:33:02.360 and then veils the knowledge that you're not going to enjoy it forever. So people actually

00:33:07.360 think, if I move to California, I'm going to be happy for the rest of my life because of the

00:33:11.520 sunshine. I got the data. It's a few months. The taxes are forever. I mean, I see this constantly

00:33:18.520 with people. My students, the reason they think they're going to be happier at 38 than 28, which

00:33:22.800 is generally not true. Generally, your happiness is lower at 38 than it is at 28 and lower at 48

00:33:28.520 than it was at 38. The reason they don't know that they get it exactly upside down is because they

00:33:33.080 think that they're going to get things they want and they're going to be satisfied forever with

00:33:37.480 them. When they get married, they'll be permanently happier. Have you been able to quantify the length

00:33:45.080 of satisfaction, the duration of satisfaction when they get admitted to Harvard Business School?

00:33:51.280 There are some studies on that and it shows that the satisfaction that they get is usually a few

00:33:54.960 weeks. So before they even matriculate. Oh yeah, for sure. So there's interesting studies that ask

00:33:59.020 this question. When you get a bonus at your job, when do you enjoy it the most? When it hits your

00:34:05.260 check or the day you find out? It's a question that answers itself. You go home because your boss says,

00:34:10.460 you're the linchpin in this company. What a great job you're doing. 40% bonus. Boom. Dollars.

00:34:17.180 You don't have the dollars, but you go home and open a bottle of champagne with your spouse.

00:34:21.040 I earned it. It's great. Three weeks later, it shows up in your check and you're like, huh?

00:34:24.360 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Good. I can do something with that. But that's not where the real satisfaction

00:34:28.980 happens because of the homeostasis. Now, the fact that that surprises you leads to deeply

00:34:35.020 suboptimal behavior. If you keep getting surprised again and again and again and again, the satisfaction

00:34:39.420 doesn't last. Natural conclusion is that you just needed more. It just wasn't enough. So go get more

00:34:45.680 and more and more. And this leads to this chase, what we call it in my business, the hedonic treadmill

00:34:51.900 that a lot of people know that expression at this point. Hedonic means feelings. The treadmill is

00:34:56.460 you're running, running, running, and running to keep, maintain, and to get more of certain feelings.

00:35:01.680 And you never figure out that you're on a treadmill and not making progress. The homeostasis is that

00:35:06.800 you catch up immediately. You get ahead by two inches and immediately starts running you backwards.

00:35:11.620 Unless you keep running, running, running, running, then you're going to be going the wrong direction.

00:35:14.700 And that's terrifying and terrible. So people not figuring out Mother Nature's cruel little hoax,

00:35:21.660 they wind up on the hedonic treadmill of more, more, more, more, more, more, have more.

00:35:26.820 But why are we fooled by this?

00:35:28.620 Because Mother Nature wants us to be fooled. I mean, we're born to be fools when it comes to this

00:35:35.540 satisfaction problem.

00:35:37.120 So this is actually one of the macronutrients where it seems that evolution is fully engaged.

00:35:43.500 Clearly, evolution favors pleasure over enjoyment, but evolution is all for satisfaction.

00:35:52.660 All for satisfaction.

00:35:53.660 And all for fooling you into believing this is the one that's going to be the eternal satisfaction.

00:35:58.400 That is the animal path. Absolutely. But there is a glitch in that matrix

00:36:01.860 that we can exploit if we're willing to stand up to our natural impulses.

00:36:05.900 This is where every philosophical and religious tradition comes in. Because most,

00:36:10.500 I mean, life is suffering according to the first noble truth of Buddhism.

00:36:13.500 That doesn't mean life has to be suffering. It means life is naturally suffering.

00:36:17.780 What the Buddhists are saying is that left to your devices, you're going to suffer.

00:36:22.740 And the word for suffering in that first noble truth of Buddhism is mistranslated.

00:36:26.440 The word in Sanskrit is dukkha. And dukkha actually means dissatisfaction.

00:36:31.780 The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is unsatisfying because of the hedonic treadmill,

00:36:36.560 because of homeostasis. And how do you get beyond that? Well, you recognize that the reason for

00:36:41.960 your dissatisfaction is the second truth is attachment. And the third noble truth is that

00:36:47.160 you need to detach. And the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path, which is entirely contrary to

00:36:52.340 nature. The eightfold path is not natural. That's why it's hard. So here's the way to think about it

00:36:58.740 just in sort of drive listener terms. Mother nature says, satisfaction will come and stay

00:37:05.960 if you have more, more, more. What's your life strategy? More, more money, more power,

00:37:11.680 more pleasure, more admiration, more Instagram followers, more, more.

00:37:16.060 Actually, the right model, a model that better satisfies, that gives you more satisfaction that

00:37:23.240 lasts is halves divided by wants. All the things you have divided by all the things that you want.

00:37:29.980 And this is basically kind of what the eightfold path of Buddhism comes into. This is a baby version.

00:37:35.100 So I apologize to the Buddhists who are listening to us, is that you don't need to have more strategy.

00:37:39.740 You need to want less strategy. The eightfold path is a want less strategy. We need to want less. We

00:37:46.740 need to manage our wants in this life. And in so doing, then, holy mackerel, then satisfaction hangs

00:37:54.640 around, man. That's why the Dalai Lama always says, you shouldn't have what you want. You should

00:37:58.640 want what you have. Really, which is another way of talking about this. And there's all kinds of

00:38:03.060 techniques. There's visualizations. One of the things that I like for doing this is that because I have an

00:38:08.320 arts background, my mother was a painter and I was a musician for many years professionally. And we have a

00:38:14.060 tendency to think of our lives that we're building, especially the hustlers, the go-getters, the strivers

00:38:18.580 who listen to you, that your life is like a beautiful painting and you're the artist with a brush. And that

00:38:24.380 canvas is your life and you're putting the brush strokes on the canvas. The problem is, by the time you're 45 and

00:38:29.820 you're a striver, that canvas is full. Man, it's dense. I defy people to add another brush stroke. You need to

00:38:35.780 use the metaphor that your life is actually a sculpture, that you're chipping away, that you

00:38:39.840 are in there, but there's too much stuff stuck to you. You need less, less, less, want less.

00:38:45.980 All right. So the third macronutrient is sense of purpose.

00:38:49.540 Meaning.

00:38:50.200 Yeah.

00:38:50.900 Meaning.

00:38:51.520 And obviously it extends far beyond quote unquote work.

00:38:55.280 Yeah, for sure. So meaning is the most important because it's the protein. You'll die.

00:39:00.820 Right. You can vary carbs and fat a lot. You can't mess with protein too much.

00:39:04.900 You can't mess with protein. It's a basic building block and you're in big, big trouble when you become

00:39:09.280 protein deprived because there's no other way to get it. It's not like your carbs are going to

00:39:13.200 transform into proteins. And everybody knows when they don't have a sense of meaning because their

00:39:17.200 life is empty. They're the most miserable when they don't have a sense of meaning, but nobody knows

00:39:21.820 exactly what it is. It's like, I need this thing, but I don't know what it is. So philosophers

00:39:26.300 and psychologists, by the way, define meaning is actually a combination of three things,

00:39:31.900 coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. That's the first

00:39:38.460 part of meaning. I believe that things happen for a particular reason. That doesn't mean

00:39:42.720 my way is the right way. And it might be randomness. My father was a PhD biostatistician,

00:39:48.960 also very religious. And he used to say that the greatest miracle in the world was randomness,

00:39:55.120 that God built the universe with randomness and regular distributions of events. He thought that

00:40:00.560 miracles were extreme tale events in random distributions and God loved randomness. In other

00:40:06.960 words, there's lots and lots of different ways to understand the coherence part, why things are

00:40:10.980 coherent. The second is purpose, which is direction. Your life has direction. There's a word called the

00:40:18.180 rum line, R-H-U-M line. It's actually a much more common word in Spanish, el rumbo. And it's actually

00:40:23.740 part of common parlance. Rumbo means the end point toward which your voyage is tending.

00:40:30.740 You're not going to get there and you're going to vary from it, but you have to have-

00:40:34.300 A north star. You have to have something you're navigating to.

00:40:36.020 You have to have something navigationally. And the last is significance. It would matter

00:40:40.960 if I weren't alive. It would matter if I'm not here. So these are the component parts. Now,

00:40:46.220 these are worth thinking about in detail in our lives. But here's the way I have a kind of a

00:40:52.260 diagnostic test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis. And the reason this is useful, it's a

00:40:58.100 two-question exam. And if somebody doesn't have real answers, everybody's got PC answers,

00:41:04.540 answers you'd give your mom or whatever. But if you don't have real answers to this, the good news is

00:41:09.060 these are the two questions to go looking for answers to in your life. This is your vision

00:41:14.520 quest is to find the answers to these by reading, by experiencing, by meditating, by spending time

00:41:21.500 by yourself, by praying, by asking people's advice, by therapy. I don't know. Do your thing.

00:41:27.320 Question number one is why are you alive? Why are you alive? You got to have an answer. Not my answer,

00:41:33.440 your answer, a real answer. Question number two is for what are you willing to die today?

00:41:37.920 Now, you flunk this quiz by saying, I don't know. That's how you flunk the quiz. But then the

00:41:45.000 adventure actually begins after you flunk the quiz, because like, I'm going to figure that out.

00:41:48.860 I'm going to go find those answers. I'm going to read. I'm going to consider. I'm going to do all

00:41:52.580 the things that you do metacognitively to find the answer to these questions.

00:41:55.880 Let's think about that for a second. There are probably a lot of people who cannot answer one,

00:42:02.160 who can answer two.

00:42:03.920 Or who can answer one, but can't answer two. I'm alive because

00:42:07.680 some biological process, et cetera, et cetera. But number two is I don't know what I'm willing

00:42:11.180 to die for. Let's clarify that. Are you asking one through the lens of biology?

00:42:17.680 It depends on how you answer it and what actually gives you meaning.

00:42:20.260 The way to answer the first question, why are you alive?

00:42:22.460 A spiritual person or a religious person would have a divine response to the first question.

00:42:28.000 An atheist would respond to the first question in terms of biology.

00:42:31.500 And they would really understand. That biological answer could give you a tremendous sense of meaning

00:42:35.300 and a sense of place in the universe.

00:42:37.800 Although it's interesting because as someone who leans far more towards the agnostic atheist side,

00:42:45.240 I spend most of my time coming to grips with mortality, which is a very difficult thing to

00:42:53.760 come to grips with.

00:42:54.640 Which is the second question.

00:42:55.640 But I come to grips with that by addressing your third point around sense of purpose,

00:43:01.440 which is my insignificance. So in other words, it's only through accepting my complete and utter

00:43:08.140 insignificance that I can have some semblance of peace with my finitude and my eventual and relatively

00:43:17.720 quick demise.

00:43:18.860 Yeah. This is one of the reasons that transcendence is one of the happiness practices,

00:43:23.320 the practice of transcendence, whether it's secular or religious transcendence,

00:43:28.140 it's really important because it makes you small. It makes you small. You stand in awe

00:43:32.180 of a sunset. You stand in awe of seeing somebody committing an unbelievably selfless act.

00:43:38.800 It makes you actually feel smaller, which gives you peace through a sense of perspective. That's a very

00:43:44.300 common phenomenon. And one of the people who works in my area, Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley,

00:43:49.540 he has a book called awe, A-W-E, that talks about the neurocognitive processes involved when you're

00:43:57.620 experiencing awe and why it gives you such deep peace. And it's really all about what you're

00:44:02.040 talking about. You got to get small, like Steve Martin used to say in the seventies, get small.

00:44:06.240 If you can find ways to get small, you're going to be a lot better off for sure.

00:44:10.140 But how do we reconcile that with the need to have significance through your sense of purpose?

00:44:14.680 Well, the key is at the same time, you realize that you matter, but at the same time, it's okay

00:44:21.280 that the universe will be just fine if you die. They seem like conflicting phenomena, but they're

00:44:27.000 actually weirdly compatible. I think that they're weirdly compatible. These ideas, this balance between

00:44:32.680 the two, it matters that I exist here and things will be just fine. If I know you think about this,

00:44:37.780 when you get married for the first time, you say, you love me. And if I'm gone, you'll be okay.

00:44:45.020 It's this sense of peace. That balance between those two things turns out to be the trick.

00:44:50.620 I've never been able to find that.

00:44:51.900 I guess practice makes perfect. I haven't found it either for sure. But the way to think about this

00:44:56.800 and the way to find the answers to the questions is really interesting. And I've worked on this with

00:44:59.840 my kids. I have adult kids. My kids are a little older than yours. My 23-year-old, he's a piece of

00:45:05.200 work, man. His name is Carlos. He likes you. He's human performance machine. He's a scout sniper in the

00:45:11.880 US Marine Corps. 204, 4% body fat, 6'5". He's all about it. He needs the information that you're

00:45:20.840 providing, obviously. So, you know, he didn't have the answers to that because many adolescents don't

00:45:25.260 and young adults don't. But he found the answers to that as he did something that was truly difficult

00:45:31.280 going through Marine basic training and then infantry training battalion and then doing the

00:45:35.180 in-doc as he's an operator in the Marines now in the scout sniper platoon. Stuff's no joke. It's hard.

00:45:40.280 And you ask him the question now, why are you alive? You would simply say, because God made me

00:45:46.520 to serve. That is both the how and the why of the first question. And the second question,

00:45:52.940 for what are you willing to die? Very simple. For my faith, for my family, for my fellow Marines,

00:45:59.020 and for the United States of America, and for our allies. These are very solid answers. These are not

00:46:04.020 the right answers for somebody listening or you or me necessarily, but they are answers that he

00:46:10.600 actually believes. And that's what gives him his sense of meaning is the content of those two answers

00:46:16.220 and finding what we really do think about those things. What really is persuasive to us is a

00:46:22.880 philosophical and for some, a theological journey really worth taking.

00:46:25.980 In this next section, Arthur explains the traps that hijack our happiness.

00:46:36.500 We spoke about the four idols. What is it? Money, power, pleasure, fame.

00:46:44.200 Fame is really a funny one though, because most people listening to us are like, I don't want to be famous.

00:46:47.980 Yeah, but you want to be admired by others and you want to have some prestige. And that's localized fame.

00:46:52.720 That's to be known and admired by the right people. It's exactly the same phenomenon philosophically and

00:46:59.380 psychologically. So let's explore those a little bit more. Is it necessarily the case that we are

00:47:05.000 hardwired to have preferences along that spectrum? Well, I suspect it's both nurture and nature. I can

00:47:11.520 imagine that the circumstances by which you grow up would heavily influence that. But how much of that

00:47:16.040 do you think is sort of hardwired versus developed as a result of circumstances?

00:47:20.240 So there's a lot of research on that. And most of the philosophy would suggest,

00:47:24.160 and even the evolutionary psychologists would suggest that we're hardwired to be looking for

00:47:29.180 money, power, pleasure, and fame, because that makes us most, that gives us fitness in the mating

00:47:34.040 market. Who gets mates? Somebody who's got a bigger cave, more flints, more animal skins,

00:47:40.060 more buffalo jerky piled up in the corner. And it was actually known by more troglodytes than

00:47:45.380 troglodytes that he or she knows. This gives you mating fitness. And so the results is this would

00:47:50.080 become an imperative. It would become a hardwired imperative. And then you have all kinds of

00:47:54.560 evidence of this. You actually find that when people are kind of at their base nature,

00:47:58.800 when they're being distracted, they will go for these particular rewards over much more intrinsic,

00:48:03.440 more satisfying rewards having to do with love. They will go for these types of rewards all day long.

00:48:08.420 We see this in our consumer patterns. We even see some of the really interesting neuroscience

00:48:12.700 research talks about how it will illuminate our brains, how it will stimulate the most dopamine.

00:48:17.080 The most dopamine comes from these not very satisfying rewards, but nonetheless, the ones that

00:48:22.920 we're supposed to go for. Now, here's the key thing to keep in mind. Mother nature wants you to pass on

00:48:27.760 your genes. Mother nature wants Peter Atti to have like a hundred kids. But of course, you don't want

00:48:33.300 that. You want three and you want to have a lifelong partnership with one wife. And that means that you

00:48:40.880 can't live the hippie motto of if it feels good, do it. That is the motto of useful idiots. By the way,

00:48:47.920 there's other stupid mottos like if it feels terrible, treat it and make it go away because suffering is

00:48:53.120 really important in a full life, too. It turns out. But the key thing to keep in mind is that mother nature,

00:48:58.320 she doesn't care if you're happy. She doesn't care. That's not mother. We don't select on happiness. We select on

00:49:04.060 biological fitness to mate, to pass on our genes. And so the result is if you follow if it feels good,

00:49:09.600 do it. You're going to be chasing a whole lot of very fleeting rewards for what you think is

00:49:15.620 enduring satisfaction. And you're going to have your hedonic treadmill speeding at a terrifying

00:49:20.760 velocity and you won't even know how to get off it. You need to get in charge of your own life is the

00:49:25.880 bottom line. You wrote something that I want to say it's been in the last couple of months in the

00:49:30.220 Atlantic about happiness and success and noting that the happiest people weren't necessarily the

00:49:37.480 most successful. If I'm remembering that correctly, I think you wrote this in maybe April, it might've

00:49:41.800 been June, but then it looked at some data that suggested actually a little bit of sacrifice in

00:49:47.120 happiness led to greater success. Am I remembering that sort of correctly? Yeah, that's right. And part

00:49:52.020 of the reason is because people who are tremendously successful in worldly terms, when I'm talking about

00:49:56.520 success, we can define it in different ways, right? Having a lifelong marriage where you're in love

00:50:01.520 with your spouse, that's unbelievably successful. Believing like you have found spiritual transcendence,

00:50:07.280 that's unbelievably successful. Living for the good of other people, tremendously successful,

00:50:12.480 but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about worldly success, money, power, fame,

00:50:17.360 the admiration of other people. So that these particular metrics of success, people who are remarkably

00:50:22.640 successful along those worldly metrics, they're making cost benefit calculations systematically

00:50:28.500 that are not in their own happiness favor. Typically, they're making sacrifices to their

00:50:33.200 own happiness for some reason. And this is one of the things that I've looked at in my own research.

00:50:37.480 Why? Why? Why? Why? And I was talking to a woman. One of the things that I do as a social scientist,

00:50:42.120 I'm not just cranking data. I go out and talk to the humans, which I find is a really beneficial

00:50:46.480 thing to do. And I was interviewing this unbelievably successful woman on Wall Street. I mean, billionaire

00:50:52.500 business started epic success after success and very well known. And she was confessing to me that

00:50:58.640 she was missing decisions, that people were doubting it, that at the same time that she and her husband

00:51:04.560 were just kind of roommates, that she had a cordial relationship with her adult kids, that she was

00:51:09.360 starting to get bad blood work back from her doctor. She thinks that she was probably drinking too much.

00:51:13.260 She couldn't sleep right and the whole thing. And she said, what are you doing? I said, you don't need a

00:51:16.220 nerd from Harvard to tell you what to do. You told me you're a billionaire. Step back from your company,

00:51:21.720 take a souvenir in it, go onto the board, whatever. Get to know your husband, reestablish a relationship

00:51:26.860 with your kids, start to take care of your drinking problem, become a client of Peter Atiyah. I don't

00:51:32.260 know. You know what I'm talking about here. I said, why don't you do these things? She thought about it.

00:51:37.280 She said, I guess I'd prefer to be special than happy. And I thought she, that is the hallmark of

00:51:44.720 addiction. You know, I used to be a musician. I've met a lot of addicts. I've met a lot of

00:51:48.780 alcoholics in my life. And they will confess that before they got clean and sober, that they preferred

00:51:54.280 to be high than happy. They all said that. They knew that they'd be happier when they were finally

00:51:59.200 beyond this thing, but let's just get high one more time. Just the feel of that pipe on my lips.

00:52:04.380 One more time. Just the burning of the alcohol in my throat. One more time. Just the,

00:52:08.740 what do William Burroughs call the, the red, the blood in the hypodermic needle before you actually put

00:52:13.700 down the plunger and it gives incredible pleasure to people. And they say, just one more time,

00:52:18.820 just one more time. And that's what that lady was saying to me. That's a success addiction.

00:52:23.840 That is absolutely implicated in the dopamine system. And that is like any other behavioral

00:52:28.900 addiction that a lot of very worldly successful people fall prey to a lot of people listening to

00:52:34.000 us. And I'm glad they're listening to us right now because they want an edge, but you got to ask

00:52:38.860 yourself. Arthur has to ask himself and Peter has to ask himself and all the people listening to them

00:52:42.700 have to ask themselves, is this a pathology that I'm actually feeding by actually trying to get this

00:52:48.340 edge? And I hope it's not. And I hope it's not for me, but I know a lot of people where it is.

00:52:53.040 We talk about workaholism. There's a lot of literature on workaholism. Workaholism is an

00:52:57.480 ancillary addiction to success addiction. You know, people work really, really hard. The payoff,

00:53:02.720 the cookie that you get, the dopamine is just driving you to is the promotion, is the raise,

00:53:08.760 is the dollar, is the compliment, is the adulation on social media. That's where the real addiction

00:53:14.160 is coming in. And those are the people that are going to be sacrificing their own happiness decisions

00:53:18.460 for these success metrics. Do we have a sense of, this is an unanswerable question, so I'll rephrase

00:53:24.480 it in kind of a more thoroughness. What would the world look like today if no one was pursuing

00:53:31.820 being special over being happy? What year would we be living in? Would it be 1842 right now? What I'm

00:53:39.280 really getting at is how much of the modern marvels of this world do we owe to the backs of people who

00:53:50.360 sacrificed their own happiness for the innovation that allows us to be doing what we're doing right

00:53:58.100 now? It's such a smart question, and I consider this myself. For me to say, you and I should break

00:54:02.780 our success addiction. Therefore, the world would be better if nobody had a success addiction is the

00:54:08.140 fallacy of composition. You know, it's to basically say, since I get home faster, if I go 100 miles an

00:54:13.060 hour on the freeway, it would be better if everybody drove 100 miles an hour on the freeway. Now, you live

00:54:17.540 in Texas, so you're like, yeah, actually, that would be better. But anyway, but that is really,

00:54:22.640 really relevant because what you find is that many of the greatest innovators, composers,

00:54:26.100 creative intellects, these were people that absolutely sacrificed their happiness, that were

00:54:29.840 deeply, deeply unhappy. Look, there's a huge literature that shows the ventrolateral prefrontal

00:54:34.760 cortex is stimulated in depressives in a way that makes them highly creative. I mean, we actually have

00:54:40.800 good brain science at this point that shows that people who are suffering from mood disorders, they tend to

00:54:45.380 be disproportionately creative, and they do a lot. Van Gogh was not the outlier, it turns out. There's a lot of

00:54:52.080 weird people in Silicon Valley that have a lot of pretty untreated maladies, and they're doing a lot.

00:54:58.300 Now, you might say in Silicon Valley, a lot of them are doing a lot of harm for society as well. But the

00:55:02.060 point is that it is true that the world has been propelled by a lot of unusual people with unusual

00:55:08.840 goals. And so I don't know if I were the divine, how I would create the universe. I don't know how I

00:55:14.580 would designate people in society. I don't know whether I would make people sacrifice their happiness for

00:55:19.060 the greater good of the whole. I'm just not sure whether there's a kind of a success martyrdom

00:55:23.680 that's going on here. My two cents, having none of the data and none of the insights that you do,

00:55:28.840 is that we are probably a lot better off for people who have made enormous sacrifices. And I'm not just

00:55:34.120 talking about what we think about in Silicon Valley. I mean, I'm talking about Newton and Gauss and

00:55:37.860 Euler and the great physicists, the great mathematicians. I feel like these people

00:55:41.180 made untold sacrifices in terms of the pain that they endured as a result of their genius.

00:55:49.060 I think that's actually right. But there's one thing that I want to emphasize,

00:55:52.540 which is that the misery is not inevitable. You can actually, and this is the one of the

00:55:56.900 reasons I've done my work. I'm not asking people to not be successful. I'm not asking people to be

00:56:01.520 not ambitious, to not work hard. I'm asking them to dominate it such that you're not playing to your

00:56:07.100 most innate drives so that you can be successful and happy. And that's a small quadrant of the happy,

00:56:13.980 unhappy, successful, unsuccessful, the successful and happy, really, really successful and really,

00:56:19.580 really happy. It's a pretty small group of people, but it's not not populated. I mean,

00:56:23.400 I write in my book about the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived,

00:56:27.840 who died surrounded by the people who loved him and who revered him. And the reason is because he got

00:56:33.940 on his second curve. He dedicated his work to other people. He didn't say, forget it. I'm not going to

00:56:38.800 write me more music. He said, I'm going to write music and I'm just going to detach myself from the

00:56:44.100 ego of having this enormous audience of people who will say that I'm the greatest composer ever.

00:56:50.540 And I'm going to do it for humanity and for the glorify God and to refresh the soul of other people.

00:56:55.280 And if it's really successful in commercial terms, it is. And if it isn't, that's okay too.

00:57:00.220 In other words, be really ambitious, but detach yourself from the worldly idols and think about how you

00:57:07.060 can use your success in service of other people. And that's the hack. That's the workaround.

00:57:12.560 That's actually the glitch and the success unhappiness matrix is when you become other

00:57:17.640 focused, you can be a success machine and also happy. I agree with all of that. I was going to

00:57:22.940 actually make a slightly different point, which was just because that's what got us here today

00:57:29.200 as a civilization doesn't speak to the individual choice that we all have. I'll give you an example in

00:57:35.400 my world is my thinking on cancer screening for an individual is based solely on the individual.

00:57:43.400 If I were in charge of creating a cancer screening program for everyone in the country or in the

00:57:49.380 world, it's a totally different question because the former is really all about individual risk,

00:57:56.820 individual cost, and what the reward potentially is. When you start to talk about that at a societal

00:58:02.900 trade-off level, it's a much more complicated problem. Now you have to look at quality adjusted

00:58:07.340 life years and all these other metrics, and you have to balance a budget to basically do this.

00:58:12.080 And so my takeaway from this is that just because everything we said is probably true,

00:58:18.640 it doesn't mean that any one individual doesn't have the potential to make a choice to live in less

00:58:24.760 misery or to be happier. Absolutely. And part of it is, I believe you don't even have to sacrifice

00:58:30.260 the success, but you do have to go against your worldly urges in a very big way, not against your

00:58:36.460 worldly urge for success, but against your worldly urge to pursue the success for a particularly

00:58:41.740 idolatrous reason. And that's a really big distinction as it turns out. Now, this is the

00:58:47.240 point that's made by philosophers and theologians forever, that when you do things in service of

00:58:53.360 others to lift other people up, to bring other people together, then you can become unbelievably

00:58:57.780 successful. You can become the Dalai Lama, you can become Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, you can do

00:59:04.140 Albert Schweitzer. What do all those people have in common? They were world famous, but they were

00:59:10.320 doing this in the service of their fellow women and men. And that was the key distinction that allowed

00:59:14.680 them to wiggle their way into the both happy and successful quadrant.

00:59:24.380 Here are Arthur's tools and practices he recommends for moving past the traps.

00:59:29.840 Here's the exercise I give my students. They will hear that the way for them to be successful

00:59:34.740 is through the visualization and manifestation that comes from having a bucket list,

00:59:39.600 right? The bucket list. On your birthday, you list all your ambitions and all your desires and your

00:59:42.920 cravings. And you imagine yourself getting all these things. You visualize yourself getting these

00:59:46.980 things. That's a good way to blow up the denominator of your satisfaction equation and feel like a

00:59:51.640 complete loser. You need a reverse bucket list where you make a list of all of your worldly attachments

00:59:56.920 and you cross them out. Not that you won't get them, but that now they're not limbic. Now they're in

01:00:02.820 your prefrontal cortex. Now that you can actually manage those cravings in an entirely different way.

01:00:08.820 And this absolutely works. I do this on my birthday every year now.

01:00:11.600 So give me an example.

01:00:13.240 This last year on my birthday, I thought, what are my attachments that are holding me down?

01:00:17.420 And I realized it was a lot of my political opinions. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist

01:00:21.600 monk who started the Plum Village community of Western Buddhists. He said that the greatest source

01:00:27.620 of misery and attachment for most people is their opinions. We're so attached to our opinions. It's

01:00:32.680 like we're hoarding our gold. And if you get between me and my opinions, you're stupid and evil. I'm

01:00:37.020 going to cancel you or whatever dumb thing that we're doing today. And I thought to myself,

01:00:40.700 my political opinions are too strong. I'm too attached to them. So I wrote down about half

01:00:45.700 of my political opinions. I still have them, but I crossed them out, which negated their

01:00:51.120 importance, their moral importance in my life. I mean, I need fewer opinions because I need more

01:00:55.860 friends. It's really what it comes down to. And I'm way lighter. I'm way freer.

01:01:00.460 But tell me, is the act of acknowledging the opinions the exercise, crossing them out the

01:01:07.240 exercise? And how does that translate? I mean, we sit here today on the heels of a tragedy that

01:01:13.120 took place very recently, a terrorist attack, and it's a very dividing event politically.

01:01:20.200 It's hard for me to say, even though I'm not a political person, I don't talk about my political

01:01:25.500 views publicly. I have very strong views. And as a result of that, I'm prone to be very

01:01:33.100 judgmental of those who hold opposing views, especially the stronger my view. So there's

01:01:38.840 certain views where I'm like all about nuance. And then there's some views where I'm like,

01:01:42.880 nope, this is black and white. How would that exercise help in this situation?

01:01:47.500 This gets back to metacognition. Metacognition, once again, is not being limbic,

01:01:52.300 but rather experiencing emotions and emotional phenomena in the prefrontal cortex of the brain,

01:01:59.620 where you can make conscious executive decisions. It's letting your CEO do it as opposed to the kids

01:02:04.720 do it. And so what you do is when you have an opinion, a strong, volatile political opinion,

01:02:10.540 which is not just terrorism is bad. It's that anybody who disagrees with me about this particular

01:02:15.260 situation is a moron. That's what goes on the list. And what you do is you cross that out,

01:02:20.700 not because you don't think that, but because you're willing to consider that. You're willing

01:02:25.460 to let your CEO think about that as opposed to sort of axiomatically assuming that, that it's no

01:02:30.880 longer a limbic opinion where you see something on TV and you get a sense of revulsion, where your

01:02:36.980 insular cortex engages because you have a sense of disgust. On the contrary, do you think that that's

01:02:42.160 a better strategy than my strategy, which is to tune all of that out, is to basically say,

01:02:50.160 I'm going to do something that feels cowardly, which is I'm not going to engage in any of this

01:02:56.400 by reading any of it, by watching any of it, by participating. I'm going to focus on what I do

01:03:02.300 best. I'm going to do my job and not become a spectator. There's a lot to that because you should

01:03:07.880 specialize in what you can do well. You should focus on the things you can control as opposed to the

01:03:11.780 things you can't. So these are two different phenomena. You could argue my strategy is a

01:03:16.360 dangerous strategy from a societal perspective because then if everybody took that approach,

01:03:21.580 nobody would do anything. Absolutely. You wouldn't have any collective action. Everybody would be

01:03:25.260 ignorant for sure. But what you're trying to do is protect yourself from your limbic system.

01:03:29.520 When you block out information, this is basically, I don't like the news, so I'm going to cancel the

01:03:33.800 newspaper. I'm no longer going to get the news from the newspaper. You shouldn't be afraid of

01:03:38.240 information. And that's all your limbic system is delivering to you is information. You should learn

01:03:43.280 how to use information. So ideally, you don't have to do that. But ideally, what you do is you

01:03:48.840 metacognitively, you process the information, make decisions on how to use the information.

01:03:53.120 Sometimes that's not efficient. Sometimes that's suboptimal because you don't have time to do it.

01:03:56.940 I have found that I use a combination of the two techniques. I was the president of a think tank in

01:04:02.860 Washington, D.C. for almost 11 years. And so I was, man, I was sadly in the know. I was so aware

01:04:10.100 all the time of everything everybody was saying and doing. And I knew what was going on. And I knew

01:04:14.460 if there was going to be a budget resolution, I could tell you what was going on with a farm bill,

01:04:18.320 the whole deal. Now I know a lot less. And the reason is I ration my access to news. I read a total

01:04:24.620 of 15 to 30 minutes of news per day all at once. I need more bandwidth for my work. And I don't want

01:04:32.240 to intrude on my work. But I'm not afraid of my limbic system. I'm not afraid of what this

01:04:36.580 information will actually do to me because I'm working metacognitively to make sure that when

01:04:40.780 I do have this information, I can process it in executive ways as opposed to childlike ways.

01:04:47.220 It's no longer ghosts in the machine. I have a repertoire of ways I can deal with it. I can

01:04:52.400 choose my reactions to my emotions. I can use substitute emotions. I can act as if I had different

01:04:57.340 emotions and I can disregard my emotions. But all of that is on purpose. And those are the fruits

01:05:01.600 of metacognition. What do you do with your knowledge base? So as a mad scientist, what

01:05:06.420 are the tools you use from that to manage yourself, which is kind of a recurring theme

01:05:11.460 here? We keep coming back to it and I want to come back to it more formally to talk about

01:05:15.560 metacognition. But just briefly, maybe what are the most important things that you think

01:05:21.160 about as a mad scientist to regulate your own emotions and to presumably keep the balance

01:05:28.400 more on the positive versus negative valence?

01:05:32.100 For the longest time, I mean, the reason I've done this research, Peter, is because

01:05:35.780 I need it. This is me search. That's really what it is. And I know you do too. I mean,

01:05:40.980 you do this work because you want to live a long time and have a high quality of life

01:05:43.860 in our community of health and wellness and fitness and longevity. And we're all doing the

01:05:49.260 best we can for our own lives and then sharing it with other people. And this is absolutely the

01:05:52.280 case with me. If you're a mad scientist and you don't self-manage, you're going to be

01:05:55.540 all over the place. You're going to be a big mess. You're going to have difficult relationships.

01:05:59.540 A lot of the time, you're going to be miserable. And it's avoidable. It's actually unconstructive

01:06:04.420 not to self-manage. But self-management is not one weird trick, as they like to say on the

01:06:10.000 internet. There's no hacks. It's really all about mental habits. It starts with the knowledge

01:06:15.620 of the science. It goes into specific practices. And then a lot of it has to do with teaching other

01:06:20.240 people. As you know, the best way for you to live better is to teach other people how to

01:06:23.360 live better. If you want to be healthy, start a health podcast or something and make sure you've

01:06:28.940 got good science on your side. So when it comes to mad science, the mad scientist profile that's

01:06:35.080 hard to manage otherwise, the mistake that people get into is they try to stay on the positive side.

01:06:40.560 That's a logical thing to do.

01:06:41.400 Bipolar disorder, we find that the biggest problem that they have is staying on their meds because they

01:06:45.780 like the manic and they don't like the depression, but they can't time it. And so you actually have to

01:06:52.560 stabilize your mood so that you're not seeking the highs and trying to avoid the lows. And by the

01:06:58.880 way, I'm not saying that every mad scientist has bipolar disorder. I'm just saying that they tend to

01:07:02.920 have mania. They tend to have this kind of a hypermanic, as John Gardner talks about, the hypermanic

01:07:09.820 edge. And that's what most mad scientists have a little bit of. That's why they tend to make pretty

01:07:12.900 good entrepreneurs like you, but they fall prey to a lot of mood issues that are pretty avoidable.

01:07:18.860 At the pro level of self-management in the mad scientist category is to not seek the highs

01:07:25.760 because the highs don't help you that much. What you actually need to be as a full person,

01:07:30.400 not riding the wave of your emotions. You need to manage your emotions and never let them manage

01:07:35.480 you. And that gets into the whole topic you're talking about, which is metacognition. That is to

01:07:40.060 experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex, as opposed to living according to your limbic

01:07:45.880 system. Never be managed by your limbic system. Your limbic system is nothing more than the factory

01:07:51.060 for your emotions. That's really what it's doing. And if you're basically taking raw factory materials

01:07:57.140 and trying to live according to them, as opposed to assembling them, making them into a set of

01:08:01.780 experiences, learning from them, growing from them, you're not fully alive. You're subject to

01:08:08.160 something. You're subject to a crazy machine all the time. And so that's a lot of what I write about

01:08:13.020 is actually how do you experience emotions more fully in the prefrontal cortex of your brain?

01:08:16.860 What are the techniques for doing so? And when you're doing that, what is the repertoire

01:08:20.440 of reactions and responses that you can bring to a highly volatile emotional state?

01:08:26.680 Are there any folks where, for example, the poet, where you actually push them to be more in that

01:08:34.560 limbic system? Or is it the same for everyone? Because the poet, of course, is the one who's

01:08:39.340 disproportionately down, right? These are the great artists.

01:08:42.760 So poets, there's interesting research that parallel to this, that doesn't use the same

01:08:46.720 pan as test, but it's pretty provocative nonetheless. The people who have a tendency toward

01:08:51.100 depression, not bipolar, but depression, they tend to be more creative. They're ruminators.

01:08:58.380 And they also tend to be romantics. And you know, this follows a pattern. You've met people like this

01:09:03.400 that have this pattern of romantic, creative, depressive, poetic people.

01:09:09.900 Really interesting neuroscience research suggests that there's a part of the brain that's especially

01:09:14.480 active for these people. It's called a ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. And this is the part of the

01:09:20.260 brain that you use a lot when you're ruminating on something, which depressive people do. They think

01:09:24.760 about the thing and think about the thing. This is also what's going on when you're in love with

01:09:28.400 somebody. You can't stop thinking it. You're ruminating on another person. This is the same thing that's

01:09:32.540 going on when you're working on a business plan or writing a symphony or actually writing a poem.

01:09:37.300 So that's what they're really good at, but also what they're really bad at.

01:09:41.120 They can't stop thinking about things, which is good for them and really bad for them. Their

01:09:44.480 strength is their weakness. And Peter, this is the same thing across all the profiles.

01:09:48.240 Your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength. Learn to manage it,

01:09:53.180 wire to the strengths, remediate the weaknesses, and complete yourself. So I encourage everybody to be

01:09:59.420 more metacognitive. Everybody. So that you're a poet, you can be really, really poetic,

01:10:04.160 but it won't ruin your life.

01:10:06.040 Do we think that, and this is tangential and maybe not relevant, but do we think that

01:10:10.140 the most extreme form of greatness that we've seen, the most genius type of phenomenon that we've seen

01:10:18.440 as a species always come from extremes in these categories?

01:10:22.780 It's almost certainly not true.

01:10:24.780 It's sort of a caricature of what we think to be true.

01:10:26.980 Yeah, for sure. And part of the reason is because those are the spectacular cases. You

01:10:30.200 see somebody who's unbelievably good at something and who's weird, you focus on their weirdness.

01:10:33.860 There are tons of people who are extremely accomplished and not that weird. You don't

01:10:39.240 have to be weird. I mean, it's the kind of thing where it's like, yeah, I guess to be a great

01:10:42.580 entrepreneur, you have to be the kind of person that Walter Isaacson wants to write a biography about.

01:10:47.120 If Walter Isaacson is writing your biography, get help. There are tons of people,

01:10:51.740 very successful entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, just people who excel, who have decent relationships

01:11:00.280 and who are able to self-moderate and who don't abuse drugs and alcohol. Now, a lot of them do.

01:11:06.720 And part of the reason is because they have certain personality characteristics that go

01:11:09.440 relatively unremediated. And we have people who are highly limbic. They tend to be successful in spite

01:11:14.900 of their messy mental hygiene, not because of their messy mental hygiene. It's even better if

01:11:21.040 you've got some of these characteristics and you're really creative and really hardworking and really

01:11:25.140 driven and you manage it. That's even better. So as individuals now thinking about some of those

01:11:31.640 things, I just based on my own personal experience would agree that social media usually does not

01:11:39.980 produce a feeling that is a positive one. It's usually a negative one. If we're going to put

01:11:45.240 on our metacognitive hats and self-manage, if we think of ourselves as capable to self-manage

01:11:52.440 through difficulty, as opposed to saying, look, we're all going to move to India. We're going to,

01:11:58.480 you know, take up a monk's tradition.

01:12:00.580 Take sitar lessons or something, right?

01:12:01.820 Again, most of us don't have that luxury and we still want to coexist in this world.

01:12:05.500 What are the steps we want to take to minimize the damage of these things? And at the same time,

01:12:11.340 sort of try to find this semblance of happiness.

01:12:15.160 So that's the reason I do my work is precisely because greater happiness,

01:12:20.100 not perfect happiness. That's not the goal. It's not even desirable. People say, I want to be happy.

01:12:25.340 No, you don't. Pure happiness, that would mean the eradication of your negative feelings and you'd be

01:12:29.600 dead. That'd be the eradication of negative experiences. You wouldn't learn and grow.

01:12:33.200 Well, also I would argue we would get back to the same problem with satisfaction, wouldn't we?

01:12:39.600 For sure. I mean, it's impossible to begin with. The point is that happiness is not a destination,

01:12:43.780 it's a direction and we want to get happier. Oprah Winfrey calls it happier-ness. That's the goal.

01:12:48.660 It's a good neologism to actually get the point across. To do that, you need information. That's

01:12:53.660 why I teach about the science of happiness because it's a super interesting body of knowledge.

01:12:57.680 I write about it every week because it's fascinating. People like to learn about it,

01:13:00.840 do the work to change your habits and then you need to share with other people so it becomes

01:13:04.840 permanent in your consciousness. That's really what it's all about. Everybody can do that.

01:13:09.200 I'm dedicated to making an entire generation of happiness aficionados and teachers. That's what

01:13:13.760 I want. I want a movement of people who say, my hobby is learning about happiness and in my job,

01:13:18.600 I'm a happiness teacher. Whatever your job is, whether you're managing a family or managing a company or

01:13:23.800 just trying to manage yourself is what I talk about. And to do that, you have to know

01:13:28.640 the facts on this. There are certain things you need to protect yourself from and there are certain

01:13:32.800 things you need to do. You need aversion and you need approach. There are certain things you need

01:13:38.280 to approach. You need to take seriously your spiritual life. You need to take it seriously.

01:13:42.580 Let's talk about that for the non-religious person. Most people listening to us are not religious.

01:13:48.020 And by the way, I think most people would look at someone like you and be a bit confused because on the

01:13:52.460 one hand, you're a scientist, you're a serious intellectual guy, and yet you describe yourself

01:13:58.780 as having a very strong religious faith. And yet you don't have a hard time talking about things

01:14:03.320 that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago and millions of years ago. In other words,

01:14:06.680 you don't have a difficult time reconciling science and faith.

01:14:09.700 No, not at all. And part of the reason for that is because faith and reason have to coexist in the

01:14:14.920 same way that understanding a Picasso painting and understanding Picasso the man are utterly

01:14:20.180 reconcilable, but not the same thing. The painter and the painting are not in conflict with each

01:14:25.360 other. They're both important things to understand. But there are many religious people

01:14:30.580 who take a very literal view of, say, the Bible and would say, well, the earth is 6,000 years old

01:14:37.000 or whatever. They need to study more science. They're taking things too literally. They're taking

01:14:40.840 things not just too literally. They're not understanding that there's an intellectual

01:14:44.540 bifurcation between the concept of the creation, the myth of how that actually creation takes place,

01:14:51.060 which is the literalness that you're talking about, and then the evidence, the awe-inspiring

01:14:54.860 evidence of the creation itself. One of the reasons I'm religious is because of science.

01:15:00.240 Every time I learn something new, I'm like, oh, thank you. What a wonderful gift. It doesn't also

01:15:05.620 freak me out that I might be wrong. It doesn't freak me out that I might be wrong about the science.

01:15:09.460 It doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong about the religion. I don't think so, but you know,

01:15:14.540 maybe. That's okay. That's absolutely okay.

01:15:17.360 So if a person listening to this says, my view has always been those who have a religious view

01:15:22.200 are more fortunate. And I especially think that in terms of dealing with death. I think it's much

01:15:29.940 easier to process death if you believe that there is a life after death.

01:15:34.840 There's meaning in a different dimension.

01:15:36.380 Right. Whereas if you really only think about this through the lens of biochemistry,

01:15:40.320 it's a blank screen.

01:15:41.540 Well, that's because if you only think of it in terms of biochemistry, death is a what

01:15:45.680 question, which is in a spiritual dimension, death becomes a why question. And those are

01:15:50.640 different interrogatives that have different philosophical and emotional content.

01:15:55.380 Now there's this area in between of spirituality, which is not religion. If I were going to lump

01:16:00.740 myself into a category, it would probably be around the idea that I find enormous pleasure in nature.

01:16:07.760 That is the closest I suppose I get to religion.

01:16:13.960 That's a transcendent experience. And that's really what we're talking about.

01:16:16.560 It's why I live here. You see where I live. I live in the middle of nowhere.

01:16:19.480 It's so beautiful.

01:16:20.140 And it's why I have to be outside every single day.

01:16:23.180 Yep. Yep. I get it. And that's very common, by the way. A lot of people get transcendence from

01:16:28.360 nature.

01:16:28.700 So what does a person do who lives in a very busy urban center where they are surrounded by

01:16:34.960 a wall of concrete all day, every day?

01:16:37.080 Well, if that turns out to be destructive to your transcendence.

01:16:40.620 Is that a reason to move?

01:16:42.160 Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. For some people, not everybody. I know some people don't want to leave

01:16:45.960 Manhattan. And part of the reason is because they get their transcendent from other dimensions of life.

01:16:50.580 Maybe they are religious. Maybe they're traditionally religious. Maybe they are serious meditators.

01:16:55.360 Maybe they become completely awestruck from music or human genius. Again, it really gets back to

01:17:02.720 transcending your littleness, transcending that, and that transcendent experience. What it does is it

01:17:07.900 gives you the same benefit as a religious journey. So basically what you're saying is-

01:17:11.900 Big same happiness benefit.

01:17:13.380 Yeah. We need to talk about something much broader than religion in a formal sense. And awe can be the

01:17:20.540 religious belief. It could be an obsession or an appreciation of great music or art.

01:17:26.020 Yes.

01:17:26.380 Or meditation can be the place where you tap transcendence.

01:17:29.180 Yeah, absolutely. Now, it's also very convenient to not invent your own physics on this. And so the

01:17:35.940 Catholic Church is really, really good for me. And one of the things also is not what I feel. It's what

01:17:40.680 I've decided to do. This is an important thing to understand about transcendence. You don't feel

01:17:45.640 transcendence all the time. You decide to experience transcendence and put yourself in the circumstances

01:17:51.120 to experience awe. I'm sure you go outside and there's a lot on your mind. You've got a very busy

01:17:56.280 and hectic and stressful life and you don't feel it. You don't feel it every single day. Look,

01:18:01.540 I got a mass every day. I don't feel it every day. I wake up an atheist alive.

01:18:05.980 And why do you do that?

01:18:07.160 I do that because it was part of the protocol for living the life that I want to live. I mean,

01:18:11.420 I get up at 445, like you. I work out for an hour, body. I go to mass, soul. Then I work.

01:18:19.220 That's when my creativity is highest. Now, of course, I'm also, you notice, I'm optimizing my

01:18:23.720 dopamine. I'm sucking as much dopamine into my prefrontal cortex, which gives me creativity and

01:18:28.320 focus for the three hours that I need to write. And that's a good motivation to do so. But I also

01:18:33.460 want to optimize both body and soul at the very beginning of the day. So I'm centered on the things

01:18:37.380 that really matter to me, notwithstanding how I feel. I wake up at 445 in the morning. I'm like,

01:18:41.420 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,

01:18:45.980 but I do it. I do it. It's the discipline of the will that in and of itself is so important.

01:18:51.220 And then I go to mass. I don't want to do it a lot of days. I don't want to do it,

01:18:54.980 but that's not the point.

01:18:56.600 Do you think that there is a deficit of that as well, of that idea? So for example,

01:19:01.940 you alluded to marriage earlier and anybody who's listening to this, who's married, especially

01:19:06.760 who's been married for many, many years, they'll acknowledge that so much of the almost perverse

01:19:13.100 joy of marriage is that you make a lot of sacrifices for another person and you find

01:19:20.180 yourself putting someone else ahead of yourself. For me, that's a very hard thing to do. I'm just

01:19:24.540 so hardwired to be such a selfish guy that it's really a wonderful practice to do something where

01:19:31.920 I know, like, I'm going to make my wife's coffee today because, you know, she would do the same

01:19:37.260 for me.

01:19:38.280 Well, part of that is that you have discovered, and not enough people have, that love is not a

01:19:44.560 feeling either. Happiness is not a feeling, but love isn't either. Love is a commitment.

01:19:48.380 Martin Luther King, one time he gave this very beautiful sermon on the most transgressive

01:19:52.480 passage in the Christian Bible, which is Matthew 5, 44, love your enemies. And he says, Jesus says,

01:19:58.760 today I give you a new teaching. You have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your

01:20:03.480 friends. I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He says, Jesus doesn't

01:20:08.560 say to like your enemies, because that's a sentimental thing. To like is to feel, to love is to decide.

01:20:14.640 This is what's going on between you and your wife. The satisfaction, the disciplining of your own

01:20:19.520 will comes from the decision to love her. That's the magic. That's the magic in marriage. That's the magic

01:20:26.500 and friendship. That's the magic that you can have in a relationship with your kids. Look, if it were all

01:20:29.940 about your feelings, hell, I'd be divorced. God knows my wife would bail on me. It's a pain being around

01:20:36.640 me. She decides every day to love me. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle. Aristotle talked really

01:20:42.720 compellingly about love and friendship. Aquinas, in 1265, writes the Summa Theologica, his magisterial

01:20:49.800 contribution to philosophy. He reintroduced Aristotle to the West. Everybody was a Platonist

01:20:56.660 till Aquinas. He defined love as to will the good of the other as other. When you're making your wife

01:21:04.300 that cup of coffee, notwithstanding your feelings, you're willing her good for her, not you. That

01:21:09.580 discipline of the will to love another person like that, that decision to do so, is completely

01:21:14.700 transformative. That's transcendent to the day-to-day experience. The animal path is,

01:21:20.180 oh, I'm not going to make coffee. I don't feel like it. The divine path is to love her, is to will

01:21:26.060 her good as her. That's the human distinction. That's organized life. So it really seems that

01:21:32.780 that's almost a theme here of happiness, that happiness is much more about deliberate decision

01:21:39.440 making, deliberate choices, as opposed to reactive feelings, which that's obviously the extent to

01:21:45.740 which we've discussed it. I think I like this thing that Oprah said, not happiness, but-

01:21:50.460 Happierness.

01:21:51.100 Happierness.

01:21:51.740 Yeah. The thing I liked the most that she said was, let's write a book. But totally, she said,

01:21:55.720 let's spread this idea to a bunch of other people. And like, I've been listening to your show for a

01:21:59.380 long time. This is the salient theme. Take charge, man. Take charge. Don't leave your health up to what

01:22:07.700 feels good right now. Take charge of it. I mean, you're the boss. The startup is you. You're the

01:22:14.180 entrepreneur. The guy in charge of the enterprise, you're the CEO. Treat it as such. The CEO doesn't

01:22:19.700 do what feels good all the time. The CEO does what's right, notwithstanding her or his feelings.

01:22:25.340 And that's the secret of happiness, is treating your life like a startup. It's your philosophy of

01:22:29.580 health and longevity is my philosophy of happiness, because it's all one thing. You know, when you talk

01:22:35.800 about better, happier years or health span, I'm talking about happy span. That's what it comes

01:22:41.580 down to. And you're just not going to do it by doing what feels good in the moment. You're not

01:22:45.740 going to discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this

01:22:49.700 divine path that can give you this thing that you actually seek. Is it perfect? No. Can you learn and

01:22:54.440 grow and have progress all throughout the journey? Absolutely. Absolutely.

01:22:58.380 So finally, how would you think about the biomarkers of happiness? If we think about

01:23:02.340 my world, we have so many biomarkers. It's one of the things that makes our job relatively

01:23:08.360 straightforward. We have blood-based biomarkers. We have biomarkers of performance, your VO2 max

01:23:14.720 strength. We can look at body composition, all of these things. If someone comes to you and you were

01:23:21.360 the doctor in this sense, they want to obviously first have some sort of assessment of happiness,

01:23:26.280 and then they want to be able to track their progress. Is that a silly idea here because it's so

01:23:31.500 self-evident? No. It's not a silly idea at all. I thought about it so much, and I've had dozens

01:23:35.920 of entrepreneurs want to engineer the idea and appize it. The class, Harvard, you got to be able

01:23:42.660 to turn it into some sort of a product. And the way that you would do that is by having relatively

01:23:46.480 complicated but measurable phenomenon that you could look at and get better at. And that's a proxy

01:23:53.020 marker for the underlying construct, which is happiness. Here's the problem with that. Here's the

01:23:56.660 fundamental problem. It's a different species of challenge. We talked about this one time before.

01:24:02.720 There's two types of problems in human life. There's complicated problems and complex problems.

01:24:07.680 And for those who didn't actually listen the last time that we did our show, your show together,

01:24:11.280 the complicated problems are really, really tricky and take a lot of computational horsepower

01:24:15.760 and learning. But once you solve them, you can replicate the solution with effortless ease forever.

01:24:21.100 You can do the biomarkers. Complex problems are incredibly easy to understand, but impossible

01:24:27.900 to solve. Impossible to solve. There are too many permutations of what can actually happen. So

01:24:32.940 you're like Formula One racing. And so I'm going to set up this unbelievable. I'm going to take a bunch

01:24:37.720 of Unix machines and I'm going to wire them together. And I'm going to be 250,000 lines of code.

01:24:42.980 And I'm going to simulate every F1 race for the rest of the year. You're like, you're an idiot.

01:24:46.900 Why? Because F1 is complex. That's why it's interesting and you want to watch it. That's

01:24:52.780 why it's so exciting to watch a Formula One race because it's complex. I know what winning looks

01:24:57.640 like. You cross the finish line before the other guys. It's the simplest thing in the world,

01:25:00.480 but a million different things can happen. A quadrillion things can actually happen.

01:25:05.220 That's the fun of it. All of life's joys are complex problems. Most of the solutions that we get

01:25:12.940 from technology and science are complicated solutions. The biggest problems that we have

01:25:17.980 right now have to do with the fact that we want to solve our complex problems like love. And we're

01:25:23.540 trying to do it with complicated solutions like Instagram. A complicated solution to a complex

01:25:29.160 problem will always leave you cold and make you worse off. Basically, I'm going to get rid of all

01:25:34.340 the Formula One races because it's dangerous. And I'm going to have nothing more than computer

01:25:37.440 simulations of it. It's like, that's the worst thing I've ever heard. That's the dumbest thing I've

01:25:41.240 actually ever heard. So that's the key thing for us to understand. And that's the reason I can't

01:25:45.520 appize this. Happiness is a complex and adaptive human phenomenon. And you can only get it by living

01:25:51.220 it and working on it and making progress and failing, just like your marriage. I just described

01:25:57.300 your marriage. In that sense, at least I get feedback in my marriage because when I screw up and

01:26:04.380 I apologize, I see that my wife forgives me. When I make a mistake, I feel the lenience and the love.

01:26:10.620 When I need the help, the help is there. So indirectly, I'm getting really good feedback.

01:26:17.160 And conversely, if a person was to take an honest assessment of their marriage and realize like,

01:26:22.020 we're two ships passing and we don't fight, but we don't have anything in common. If they were

01:26:26.960 thoughtful enough, they'd recognize things are not well. So they'd have a barometer there. Do you

01:26:31.780 think that using others as a mirror is the best way to get the true barometer of happiness? Or do we

01:26:37.820 rely on our own internal assessment? We wind up with our own internal assessment,

01:26:42.820 but it's not good enough to have that be one single metric. How happy am I?

01:26:49.980 We have three so far today in the conversation, levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning. We can

01:26:55.880 know whether or not we have those things on the basis of the science that we've talked about and

01:26:59.640 the ways that we can get better at and practice it. The techniques for getting more of those things

01:27:03.580 are faith, family, friends, and satisfying work. I break it down even further, by the way. I don't

01:27:08.480 try to make it complicated. It's still complex, but I have a spreadsheet that I keep on my own

01:27:12.700 happiness. They're the micronutrients behind the macronutrients, dozens of dimensions. And I'm

01:27:17.920 rating myself. I weight those things according to my experience of how they feed into the macronutrients.

01:27:23.540 And then I have scores on those dimensions and I want to make progress every year. I do it on my

01:27:27.480 birthday and half birthday. My half birthday is coming up in November, November 21st,

01:27:31.200 my half birthday. And I'm going to fill out my spreadsheet and say, I'm not on pace to get the

01:27:36.300 progress that I had in my strategic plan for my happiness for next May when my birthday comes

01:27:41.960 around again. What are the things I need to actually touch up? So what am I doing? I'm kind

01:27:46.380 of doing a curve fit to the complex problem I'm trying to solve with a little bit of a complicated

01:27:51.940 solution. I give all those dimensions to my students and I say, look, do the reading, do the work.

01:27:57.520 You know, I've read 10,000 articles about this so you don't have to, but I do try to break it down

01:28:02.620 a little bit so that I can have a multidimensional problem. One of the things that we know with complex

01:28:06.160 problems is the more multidimensionally you make it, the more likely you are to get better solutions.

01:28:11.780 The worst thing that you can do is like, how do I feel today? You're not going to make progress

01:28:15.520 under those circumstances. What are some of the micronutrients that go into this for you?

01:28:20.160 It'll be the warmth of my marriage, the relationship with my kids, how well things are going with respect to

01:28:26.480 the value I'm trying to create with my career, the stability that I have in my friendships,

01:28:31.440 the degree to which I feel like I'm properly philanthropic, the interest I'm taking in my

01:28:36.420 professional life, the closeness that I have with certain intimates in my life, the extent to which

01:28:42.640 I'm avoiding or finding conflict in my work relationships. All these things go into my

01:28:48.620 spreadsheet because I know that they really matter across these three dimensions. The extent to which

01:28:52.740 I'm enjoying my life over the course of each day, I do these particular ratings and then I put them

01:28:57.760 together with a weighted sum across them and I've messed with the weighted sum and I've messed with

01:29:02.800 it and experimented with it until I said, yep, that seems about right. That seems about right with

01:29:07.600 respect to what I'm experiencing at this point in my life. So, you make it a multidimensional

01:29:10.980 problem. That's a huge body of social science. I talked about imperfect linear models where you take

01:29:15.740 big problems and make them into a bunch of little tiny problems and that curve fits to the complex thing

01:29:21.800 you're trying to solve. You evaluate that twice a year. Yeah. And therefore, you can't have it be

01:29:27.140 dependent on the technical noise of the day or the week. You're trying to answer these questions

01:29:30.940 through the lens of the last half of the year. Yeah. And if I'm having like a big conflict with my wife

01:29:35.480 on my birthday, I don't do it that day. Yeah. I don't do it that way because I don't want the noise

01:29:39.840 is what it comes down to. And if something really, really great happens to me, the book is doing

01:29:44.940 great. I don't answer it that day either because I don't want my neurochemistry to be affecting

01:29:49.800 it unduly. Although at this point in my life, I've been doing it for 25 years. I'm pretty cold

01:29:54.420 and calculating. I think that would be a reasonable app to start with. Could be. Could be. Yeah. And

01:29:59.300 that's very different than the biomarkers for sure because I don't actually know what you would look

01:30:02.920 at. What are the biomarkers? I want to make sure I don't have a problem with my cortisol. I want to

01:30:07.400 make sure that my hormones are balanced. I want to make sure that my adrenal system is not

01:30:11.100 Oh yeah. Yeah. But when I went biomarkers, that's not what we're talking about. Yeah. No, no, no,

01:30:14.140 yeah. When I went biomarkers, I didn't mean blood-based biomarkers. I mean anything that

01:30:19.860 is either subjective or objectively measurable that would serve as a proxy for a dashboard of

01:30:26.420 your happiness health. And in fact, I have that. It's imperfect. It's imperfect. Any plans to share

01:30:32.000 that, to make that something that others can use besides your students? It sounds like they have

01:30:35.380 access to this. I should do that. I actually should do that. That would be an interesting thing.

01:30:40.240 I'll tell you the last thing I think that's very powerful and worth talking about. And I'm curious

01:30:44.680 if you think that this is something valuable for everyone or just a subset of people is less self.

01:30:51.440 Yeah. The what?

01:30:52.380 Take away the mirrors.

01:30:53.440 Oh yeah.

01:30:54.000 Yeah. I found that to be a very interesting discussion because you even talked about that

01:30:59.400 literally. Some people will literally minimize the view of themselves in a mirror. And then of

01:31:05.440 course you talk about broader versions of that, such as social media and things like that.

01:31:09.160 Do you think everybody would benefit from this?

01:31:11.640 William James talked about the I self versus the me self. You must have both. When you're

01:31:15.920 looking in the mirror, you're two people. You're the looker and the lookie. And you need both because

01:31:20.380 you need to be able to look to understand what's going on around you, but you need to have a

01:31:23.420 reflection of yourself to understand who you are. I need to see, but I need to be seen by me so I

01:31:28.440 can understand my context. I can understand my place in the world. If you don't do that, you'll get run

01:31:33.560 over by a car if you don't have the I self or you'll have somebody kill you because you've offended

01:31:38.220 them repeatedly because you don't understand the me self is the way that this works out.

01:31:41.600 The problem is in our society, it's all me self, no I self. Most people are not observing the world

01:31:46.080 very much at all. They're being observed and they're observing themselves. They're trying to

01:31:51.220 be observed and they're observing themselves. So social media is a classic case of this.

01:31:54.960 Checking your notifications is nothing more than a me self obsession. What are they saying about me?

01:32:00.240 What kind of impact am I having on other people? I get it why we do it. We're evolved to want to

01:32:05.920 understand where we are in the hierarchy. Social comparison, even envy are evolved phenomena because

01:32:11.520 it helps keep us alive and make progress. But it's misery when it takes over and when technology

01:32:16.440 supercharges our ability to be in the me self state. There are moments when you can be really

01:32:20.780 confused about the I self and the me self. One time I was really thinking deeply about something and I

01:32:26.580 was kind of obsessed. My daughter and I were in the car and I put gas in my car and I filled up

01:32:31.060 the car with gas. Took off from the gas station. I'm just kind of lost in thought. And about a block

01:32:35.700 later, I hear this weird ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's like, what's

01:32:39.420 going on? Somebody's dragging a muffler. And then I'm like looking for somebody who's dragging a muffler

01:32:43.120 around me. And then I noticed that cars are honking at me and pointing at me. And I'm like, what the

01:32:47.380 hell? So I stopped the car. It turns out I hadn't pulled the hose out of the car, out of the pump.

01:32:52.080 And I was dragging. I pulled it out of the pump and I was dragging the gas pump down the road,

01:32:56.440 right? And I had to go back to the gas station. I find out how happy they are when you do that,

01:33:00.640 which is not. And how expensive it is when you have to replace part of a gas pump.

01:33:05.300 It's pretty bad. But the whole point was I was the I self and the me self all at once. And it was this

01:33:10.340 weird disequilibrating experience. One of the ways to get much happier is to be more in the I self and

01:33:17.660 less than the me self state, is to minimize the reflection, is to think a lot less of what other

01:33:24.000 people are thinking and to observe yourself a lot less. And there are different ways to do that.

01:33:28.960 So in the book, I talk about this guy I work with pretty closely who he was a fitness influencer and a

01:33:36.160 fitness model. I mean, imagine that. I mean, you're living by your abs. What a way to live.

01:33:41.260 If you're seeing lower abs and you're an adult, that means you're never eating anything you like

01:33:47.940 ever and you're not getting enough enjoyment from your life, right? And he was miserable for 10

01:33:53.140 years. He didn't eat what he liked. He always had headaches. He didn't feel good. He didn't have

01:33:57.040 normal relationships. And so he decided he had to make a change in his life. He wasn't living. So he

01:34:02.760 literally got rid of every mirror in his apartment and showered in the dark for a year. So he couldn't see

01:34:08.800 his own abs. And his life completely changed. Just on the basis of getting rid of those mirrors.

01:34:14.500 When people are miserable in my classes, I say, take off, number one, take the notifications off

01:34:18.700 your social media. Turn off the notifications. So you're not getting notifications. Don't look at your

01:34:23.900 mentions. Under any circumstances, don't pay attention to that. And then actually literally start getting

01:34:29.380 rid of some of your mirrors, your literal mirrors. And what you'll do is you'll get into more of a state of

01:34:33.640 looking outward. And the more you look outward, the happier you'll be. The better off your life

01:34:38.760 will be when you're walking around going, man, that's amazing. You know what's not amazing? Me.

01:34:47.360 Indeed. Arthur, what surprised you the most when you set out to write this? You're writing a book

01:34:53.440 on a topic that you've studied for decades. You've been writing column after column after column

01:34:58.160 weekly in the Atlantic. You've written other books that touch on similar themes. But I have to believe

01:35:03.180 that there's something that you believe today that you absolutely didn't before or vice versa.

01:35:09.720 Yeah. I mean, I've changed my opinion about a lot of different things as science has gotten clearer

01:35:13.680 and my knowledge has gotten deeper. A lot of things that I would have thought, and I could come up with

01:35:17.440 a lot of little examples. Here's the biggie. My paradigm has been shifted. I've have been studying

01:35:21.780 happiness for a long time. I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008, but it was kind of like a book

01:35:26.300 on astronomy. It was observing happiness from a distance. Who are the happy people? Who are the

01:35:32.260 unhappy people? It never really occurred to me that with the science, I could change my own life.

01:35:36.980 And I'm not a fundamentally happy person. Mad scientists struggle. They just do because negative

01:35:44.460 affect, it gets your attention so much more strongly than positive affect does. If you're high positive

01:35:49.820 and high negative, you're going to feel on balance pretty negative a lot. So I always thought to

01:35:54.680 myself, happiness is a really interesting thing, but it's not my lot. It isn't my lot. I went through

01:35:59.920 years and years and years like that. And when I came back and started the new happiness projects,

01:36:06.020 writing my column in the books that I've written in the past couple of years, I said, all right,

01:36:10.320 let's see if that's true. I can't move the stars as an astronomer, but maybe I can use the social

01:36:15.240 science and the neuroscience in ways where I can, with the knowledge, change my habits and get happier.

01:36:20.980 I kind of doubted it. I sort of thought I couldn't and I did. I actually did. I changed my life.

01:36:27.980 I'm usually eight to nine weeks out of my column in the Atlantic because I'm trying the things that

01:36:33.120 I'm suggesting. I'm a lab rat. I know you do this too. You're not going to suggest some of your

01:36:37.740 clients that you don't feel comfortable with, even as a human being. This is what I'm doing too.

01:36:43.120 And I'm taking constant updates. I take the tests with my students on positive and negative affect and

01:36:48.280 life satisfaction. My wellbeing has risen by 60% in the past four years. 60%. I mean, it was a pretty

01:36:55.300 low base. It was a bad denominator, but it's been dramatic and I didn't actually trust. I didn't

01:37:02.880 actually believe, but it's actually true. And anybody can do this. It's a great message, Arthur,

01:37:09.280 because you haven't wrapped your identity up in being the happiest guy. Because if you did,

01:37:14.860 you'd feel like a hypocrite all day long, right? You'd feel like any moment you didn't have that

01:37:19.500 warm, fuzzy, happy feeling, you'd be like, Oh my God, how am I the guy that wrote the book on

01:37:23.080 happiness? Yeah. And furthermore, I'd be faking it all the time. Be faking it. My wife would be,

01:37:29.940 aren't you supposed to be happy all the time? And somebody sees me kind of grouchy in the airport

01:37:36.000 and be like, man, that's very disillusioning. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's funny when people see me eat a

01:37:41.460 donut. They're like, what? And I go, Hey, read the book, man. I know. I didn't say don't eat a

01:37:45.900 donut. I just said, don't eat 10 a day. Yeah. Well, Arthur, thanks so much for making time. I

01:37:51.460 know your time's tight here in Austin. So I'm glad we had a chance to sit down today. Thank you, Peter.

01:38:01.180 Thanks for listening to the best of Brooks on the drive. To listen back to the full conversations

01:38:06.280 with Arthur head to episode 226 and 280. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to this

01:38:14.000 week's episode of the drive. Head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash show notes. If you

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01:39:22.220 up-to-date and active list of all disclosures.

01:39:29.100 Thank you.

The Peter Attia Drive - December 22, 2025

#377 ‒ Special episode： Understanding true happiness and the tools to cultivate a meaningful life—insights from past interviews with Arthur Brooks

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