Why Crazy Activism is Taking Over the West — Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 19 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Toxicity
27
sentences flagged
Hate speech
33
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, I sit down with Arthur Brooks, a public speaker and happiness expert, to talk about what it really means to be happy, why it's important to have a good life, and how to get there.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I've bought two mattresses in my entire life. Both times I walked into a shop, lay on it for
00:00:04.960
about four seconds and thought, yeah, that'll do. Genuinely world-class decision-making,
00:00:09.700
which is crazy because you spend a third of your life on the thing and most of us buy one the way
00:00:14.420
you'd buy a toaster. Today's sponsor is Avocado Green Mattress. Certified organic mattresses.
00:00:20.100
No polyurethane foam anywhere near them, just natural materials and they're handmade.
00:00:25.260
The bit that actually got me is you don't have to buy it blind. Avocado has real showroom,
00:00:33.080
So you can go in, lie down properly, not for four seconds,
00:00:36.120
and work out if it actually suits you before you pay for it.
00:00:42.480
Built to last rather than built to be replaced in three years.
00:00:47.360
my approach to buying a mattress has always been the same.
00:00:50.340
Walk in, lie down for exactly as long as it takes
00:00:52.880
to feel slightly awkward, then buy whichever one is cheapest.
00:00:58.100
which is probably why the actual sit down and try approach is worth doing properly for once.
00:01:03.900
They're not everywhere yet so check the store locator for what's actually near you.
00:01:08.080
Avocado products are made not manufactured and thoughtfully crafted with real materials
00:01:12.920
to deliver lasting comfort and support. You can experience them in person at an avocado showroom
00:01:18.180
or a premier retailer near you or shop online at avocadogreenmattress.com
00:01:23.640
slash trigger to check out their mattresses and furniture sale that's avocadogreenmattress.com
00:01:30.560
slash trigger avocadogreenmattress.com slash trigger a safer ontario means more police and
00:01:38.280
prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen it means building new jails to keep criminals
00:01:43.500
behind bars and it means there's no need to worry when i play at the park we're making every corner
00:01:49.520
of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer. That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us.
00:01:56.960
Learn how at ontario.ca slash saferontario. Paid for by the government of Ontario.
00:02:07.520
Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Try to understand
00:02:12.360
how to enjoy your life, how to achieve satisfaction in your achievements and accomplishments,
00:02:16.620
and understand deeply the why of your existence.
00:02:21.760
The biggest mistake people make about enjoyment
00:02:23.540
is thinking that it's the same thing as pleasure.
00:02:26.160
And the pursuit of pleasure does not lead to happiness.
00:02:32.100
A lot of young people today will go for every crazy activist scheme
00:02:44.860
of very very performative activism because it puts it makes them feel alive maybe for the first time
00:02:50.060
in a long time the four idols are money power pleasure and fame i teach mba students at harvard
00:02:57.420
and i have a game called what's my idol and they're usually wrong they think it's one thing
00:03:01.340
and it isn't but if you know you have unbelievable power why because you know it will beguile you
00:03:06.140
and it will distract you from what you truly want you won't play yeah yeah let's play
00:03:10.460
it. Arthur Brooks, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. I love the show. I'm a regular,
00:03:17.440
long-time listener, first-time guest. Yes. And you being a happiness expert,
00:03:23.600
we talk about a lot of depressing shit on the show. It's a bit shocking to me that you watch
0.99
00:03:28.640
the show. You listen to the show. You're a fan. Yeah, I'm a listener to the show. I do watch
00:03:31.380
your beautiful mugs sometimes, but I mostly listen to it on Apple Podcasts. And there's
00:03:36.180
a couple of different reasons that I do that. Number one is because I'm looking as a happiness
00:03:42.240
entrepreneur, I'm looking for problems to solve. And so, and you dig in very, very effectively in
00:03:49.080
what's actually on the hearts and minds of a lot of people. You know, the things that are irritating
00:03:52.420
people, the things that are holding them back, but in a very incisive way. I mean, you guys are
00:03:56.780
serious about taking on these things and not sweeping them under the rug. And I want to know
00:04:00.140
about that. As a happiness expert, I don't want to go where people are already happy. If I were a
00:04:04.480
missionary. I wouldn't go into neighborhoods where everybody already has the faith. So I want to see
00:04:09.080
what's actually keeping people up. That's the first reason. But here's the second reason.
00:04:12.780
You're comedians and you have rhythm. I'm a public speaker. I learn from people who have natural
00:04:18.620
rhythm. I've learned when I started doing a lot of public speaking, 100 times a year, I'm not going
00:04:23.880
to learn from the great orators in history and certainly not from politicians. I learned from
00:04:29.140
stand-up comedians, how to keep people's attention, how long a module should actually be. And so I
00:04:34.360
can tell when people are doing media, if they actually have the right rhythm and actually
00:04:39.000
have learned a great deal from you. That's really interesting. I've always thought,
00:04:43.740
particularly when public speaking, that humor is like you're buying another 10 seconds of
00:04:48.240
people's attention and then they wait for the next joke or the next bit of interesting information.
00:04:52.780
But anyway, enough about that. It's fascinating to have you on. Happiness is obviously, I think
00:04:58.460
most people, if you ask them, what do you actually want to be in life? What do you want? That's
00:05:02.960
actually somewhere very high up on the pecking order there. What is happiness? Yeah. So that's
00:05:08.960
where the problem begins. Everybody wants to be happy, but they can't figure out how to become
00:05:13.400
happy. And there's a lot of metaphysics to that too. I mean, the fact that we can't be happy,
00:05:17.960
but we believe that we can and we strive all of our lives suggests that it does exist,
00:05:23.640
that true unremitting happiness actually exists, just not in this life. In much the same way that
00:05:30.060
thirst, it presupposes the existence of water. But metaphysics aside, people want it. And one
00:05:37.300
of the reasons they can't find it in this life is because they don't know what it is.
00:05:40.300
They think it's a feeling and they want this feeling of happiness. And that's where we
00:05:44.380
actually all go astray. I want to feel happy all the time. The limbic system of your brain is not
00:05:48.860
made for you to feel happiness all the time. It's made for you to feel misery a lot, as a matter of
00:05:54.400
fact, negative emotions, of which there's only four, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, they exist
00:06:00.660
to keep you alive and out of the jaws of a tiger. Sadness is so you won't say those things inside
00:06:05.500
your head and have your wife leave you summarily. You know, this is what is behind your survival,
00:06:12.540
is actually negative experiences and negative emotions. And yet people don't want them. And
00:06:18.140
that conflict, I want something I can't get, I want that particular feeling, that's the problem.
00:06:25.960
And the right definition of happiness is much like you would say,
00:06:33.960
Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
00:06:44.880
how to achieve satisfaction in your achievements and accomplishments,
00:06:47.860
and understand deeply the why of your existence.
00:06:52.120
Can you break down those three a little bit more as well?
00:07:09.720
Many of them don't know how to enjoy their lives.
00:07:11.980
Now, the biggest mistake people make about enjoyment
00:07:14.020
is thinking that it's the same thing as pleasure.
00:07:16.820
And the pursuit of pleasure does not lead to happiness.
00:07:22.120
And so, and so, and there's a reason for that, which is because it's a, it's a primal urge.
00:07:28.600
You tap the ventral tegmental area and the ventral stratum part of the limbic system of
00:07:33.320
the brain. You say, and you can get that in a lot of ways. You can get that when your wife says,
00:07:38.620
Constantine, I love you. Or you can get that from a bump of cocaine. We have very thrifty brains.
00:07:43.820
The pursuit of pleasure is not the right pursuit, but you add people and memory to that. And then
00:07:50.620
you deliver that experience to the conscious executive centers of the brain called the
00:07:54.680
prefrontal cortex. And then it becomes enjoyment, which truly is part of happiness. Many people
00:07:59.500
don't know how to pursue that. Either they have the old hippie dictum, if it feels good, do it,
00:08:04.840
which is problematic and actually disastrous in a lot of people's lives, or they feel bad about
00:08:10.860
enjoying their lives because they feel like they're going backwards and they're not putting
00:08:13.980
points on the board. So I have to give a lot of very successful people enjoyment lessons. That's
00:08:18.300
part one. And, and for, can I dive in there a little bit? So enjoyment is not a bag of cocaine,
00:08:26.640
but it is having a drink with your buddies. Is that, is that what you're kind of saying?
00:08:29.880
Yeah. So if you're doing something that gives you pleasure and could be addictive and you're
00:08:34.180
doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. That's what it comes down to. That's a pretty
00:08:38.380
good rule. If I find you at four o'clock in the morning in Vegas, pulling the one, the lever on
00:08:44.560
the one-armed bandit, we'll have a conversation. This has become pleasure and not enjoyment.
00:08:49.920
But if you're at the blackjack table prudently wagering money that you can afford with your
00:08:55.660
best friends, that's enjoyment. Good for you. You should be careful with addictive things in general.
00:09:02.060
But this is why the internet is so dangerously addictive, for example. This is why pornography
00:09:07.780
is so bad. I know nobody who looks socially at pornography. It's like, hey, let's get our
00:09:14.020
our friends and you don't know. I mean, it's a solitary, shameful thing to do because it's
00:09:19.720
pleasure, never enjoyment. So the same thing is true, by the way, even with highly glycemic
00:09:24.420
carbohydrates, which are highly addictive, people tend to snack and eat them alone.
00:09:30.580
And they, you're stressed out, you go home and you eat by yourself. And so there should be,
00:09:36.660
it's a good rule of thumb not to even eat alone, as a matter of fact, such that you're eating,
00:09:41.600
which should be an inherently social and enjoyable thing to do,
00:09:52.180
Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle.
00:10:04.920
If you don't have to give something up for what you're doing,
00:10:09.000
If my students, if they cheat on my exams, they will get no satisfaction from the A.
00:10:15.640
And you look back on your life and you think about the hard things that you've done
00:10:19.100
and you ponder the hardness and that gives you the sweetness.
00:10:35.080
so how old are your children uh four and a few weeks okay i knew you just had a baby right your
00:10:43.300
wife's had a baby so um four is just old enough that you can tell them to wait until dinner
00:10:48.780
yeah right that's right when you start doing three if they're hungry you take the opportunity
00:10:53.640
to give them some food by four you're starting to space out their meals a little bit for proper
00:10:57.620
nutrition yeah and and you tell and but the big lesson from that is that you want them to come
00:11:02.780
and they're hungry because they're learning about life. If you're teaching them that good
00:11:07.260
things come to those who wait, you don't enjoy your food if you snack all day. This is actually
00:11:11.860
one of the big reasons how we sacrifice happiness is through snacking. Snacking destroys the
00:11:18.160
satisfaction that we actually get from meals and putting food in our mouth is one of the great
00:11:23.080
sources of happiness for people. It has the enjoyment part, which is the social part, but
00:11:27.760
there's the anticipation part, which is the satisfaction part of eating. And so that's why
00:11:31.840
you say, no, you can't have an ice cream at 4.30 in the afternoon. And what you're really saying
00:11:36.440
to Junior is, I want you to suffer. It just doesn't sound good. And so that's important.
00:11:42.240
And then, because then their little synaptically plastic brains learn this lesson that they should
00:11:46.640
put on, they should defer their gratifications. That's part of being a mature person who actually
00:11:50.540
knows how to produce satisfaction and this happiness. Now, it gets weirder when you get
00:11:55.560
the thing that you're deferring your gratification for, because your primeval brain says that then
00:12:00.760
you'll be super happy, but you're not. And that's called the arrival fallacy in behavioral science.
00:12:07.700
The arrival fallacy is that if it was really fun to make progress, it's going to be bliss when I
00:12:12.100
hit my goal. And it never is, which is why people, when they win an Olympic gold medal, they tend to
00:12:16.040
fall into a clinical depression because it doesn't work that way. Your emotions don't work to give
00:12:21.920
you a permanently good day because that would put you in danger of the tiger sneaking up behind you.
00:12:26.300
It has to be transitory as a signal that something is either good or bad for you.
00:12:31.320
So when something feels really good, it should be very momentary.
00:12:36.020
And the reason we don't figure that out is because Mother Nature wants us to be fooled
00:12:39.680
again and again and again, so we stay in the hunt.
1.00
00:12:42.220
That's why the Kissins passed on their genes, is because they made that mistake over and
0.99
00:12:48.900
And so I have to work with a lot of people about how to maintain a higher sense of satisfaction,
00:12:53.340
not by having everything that they want, but by wanting what they have.
00:12:59.760
So, in other words, your satisfaction is sort of all your haves divided by your wants.
00:13:04.180
You need to work the denominator more than the numerator.
00:13:11.040
That's what every religion teaches, which is why, ultimately, people of faith and of
00:13:15.460
serious philosophy, they can maintain satisfaction better than people who just go from fun to
00:13:21.700
that's fascinating i really want to dig into that later but just to lay out the groundwork fully
00:13:27.280
and complete it the third portion is meaning meaning that's the biggie that's the big one
00:13:32.480
and part of the reason that's the big one is because that's the one that's missing from most
00:13:35.880
young people's lives today that's what we have vacated largely to the way that we've used and
00:13:41.580
misused technology now that's what i have this new book out the meaning of your life and the
00:13:45.940
reason I wrote that book is because that's, as a behavioral scientist, what I saw was the most
00:13:51.580
urgent problem facing young people today. The way that technology has affected our brains is this
00:13:57.300
largely vacated important activity in the right hemisphere, which you've had Ian McGilchrist on the
00:14:02.740
show, right? We haven't. Well, we will at some point. He's really a genius on this. He talks
00:14:07.640
about hemispheric lateralization, where the right side of the brain is all the complex problems of
00:14:12.120
mystery and meaning and love. And the left side of the brain is the complicated problems of
00:14:17.300
information and things and technology. We check our phones on average 205 times a day, which just
00:14:23.560
shoves us into the left side of our brain, where not only do we not know the meaning of our lives,
00:14:28.500
we don't even ask the questions. That's why young people are depressed and anxious today.
00:14:32.960
It has to do with how we're using our brains. That's why a lot of young people today will go
00:14:58.140
No, religious people who practice their religion.
00:15:12.040
We can get this deal done right now on the show.
00:15:22.000
There are a lot of Catholics who don't practice.
1.00
00:15:25.860
And one of the things that you find is they have no better sense of meaning than people who have no religion at all.
0.74
00:15:29.960
But people who believe that they have a concept of the divine, a transcendence, who have not just physical but metaphysical fitness, which requires that you practice something, these people have a much, much deeper sense of the why of their lives.
00:15:43.680
Now, the why part is important. Meaning is really the answer to the questions of why things happen the way they do, which is coherence, why I'm doing what I'm doing, which is purpose, and why my life matters, which is significance.
00:15:56.960
the three big whys of life. And religion's really good for answering that. Why do things
00:16:01.380
happen the way they do? Mind of God. Why am I doing what I'm doing? Because I'm trying to live
00:16:05.380
up to God's will. Why does my life matter? Because I'm a child of God. I mean, this perfectly answers
00:16:11.040
the three why questions of meaning, if you take it seriously. Is that the reason, do you think,
00:16:15.660
why we're seeing a resurgence, particularly of Catholicism amongst young people? It's actually
00:16:20.260
happening in the UK, but very much so in the United States. Yeah. So I'm super interested
00:16:26.140
in these data, as you can imagine. And there's a problem with these data, which is it tends to be
00:16:31.360
quite anecdotal. So you go out to a lot of dioceses and parishes and say, oh, bigger class at the,
00:16:37.180
you know, the returning order of Catholics coming in ever that we've seen in 15 years, 20 years,
00:16:42.380
30 years. And I want that to be true. I mean, I deeply want that to be true. But I also looked
1.00
00:16:47.420
at the Pew data that say that 840 Catholics leave the church each year for every 100 who come in.
00:16:55.620
Now, an explanation might be that the 100 who come in are on fire and the 840 who leave
00:17:02.520
are boomers like me who were signing up in parishes and they chose not to attend in the
00:17:07.980
They're just disaffiliating, but they were lukewarm to begin with at best.
00:17:12.760
That's a possible explanation, but we need to know more.
00:17:16.000
Now, young men, particularly under 30, for the first time in the past two years, have
00:17:21.180
uptick in their designation as none n-o-n-e so this idea that you would be what's your religion
00:17:27.820
whole bunch of categories or none nobody ever said none when i was born in the mid-60s one
00:17:34.180
percent of americans said none and now it's about 32 percent of young adults say none and for the
00:17:40.760
first time young males have started to say none less they started to come back just for the past
00:17:46.960
There's a little fish hook on the bottom of that line.
00:17:49.820
And, you know, I'm hoping for the best in fostering it as well as I can.
00:17:55.760
Because to me, when I see this uptick in religion, it makes perfect sense.
00:18:01.120
If you look at what society values, if you look at what our society says will make you happy,
0.81
00:18:14.500
But the idea that this is going to give you ultimate fulfillment is a lie, surely.
00:18:19.280
Now, that's as old as Aristotle, who talked about, you know, the things that we think
00:18:24.940
And really through the lens of Aquinas, who in the 13th century was an unbelievably astute
00:18:31.040
social scientist, Aquinas talked about in his Summa Theology in 1265, he wrote about
00:18:41.880
And each one of us has a particular idol that if we know what it is, we have power.
00:18:47.380
But if we don't know what it is, we'll always, in retrospect, be the cause of our regret.
00:18:52.220
The four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame.
00:19:01.720
I teach MBA students at Harvard, and I have a game called What's My Idol?
00:19:07.600
But if you know you have unbelievable power, why?
00:19:39.160
The people who watch this show have generally done more thinking about how governments operate
00:19:45.600
the most. But there's a difference between understanding the problem and having actually
00:19:50.620
built insulation against it. That's the world Mikhail Thorup operates in. He's been living as
00:19:55.660
an expat for over 25 years, visiting more than 110 countries and calling nine of them home.
00:20:01.100
He founded expat money nearly a decade ago to help others do the same. When he helped someone
00:20:06.000
build an international Plan B, the knowledge he brings is entirely first-hand. Every recommendation
00:20:11.260
comes from something he has already done himself. Expat Money works specifically with freedom-minded
00:20:17.480
families and investors who want to reduce their exposure on any one government or any one system.
00:20:23.700
Second residencies, second citizenships, offshore banking, international real estate,
00:20:28.360
legal structures that spread your life across borders. Mikkel has put together a free report
00:20:33.120
called Plan B Residencies and Instant Citizenships.
00:20:39.180
including one that almost never gets discussed.
00:20:41.740
How a foreign residency functions as genuine political insurance,
00:20:53.960
or click the link in the description of this episode
00:21:12.620
In social science, I never give you a survey and say, pick one.
00:21:18.920
It's a much, much more accurate way of getting at the whole idea.
00:21:21.940
I've just realized this is going out on the internet.
00:21:29.540
I'll tell you what my idol is at the end of the day.
00:21:30.900
But so of the four, and I'll repeat them, tell me, I want you to tell me the one that
00:21:36.880
you're least beguiled by, that you're least attracted to, but that doesn't mean you don't
00:21:42.160
So for example, if you say, I don't care about money, that doesn't mean you have no money.
00:21:46.460
What that means is that you go to the population average.
00:21:56.720
Money, wealth, resources, power, which is influence over the people.
00:22:04.900
It's something that can be very, very good, but people are beguiled by it.
00:22:08.860
Pleasure, which either means feeling good or comfort or security, right?
00:22:13.580
So if you check your stock portfolio every day, you've got a pleasure, you've got a pleasure idol, right?
00:22:18.360
Or if you have a hard time getting out of bed, not just if you get high a lot, okay?
00:22:24.920
And fame doesn't necessarily mean internet fame.
00:22:51.180
on the seven-dimensional disappearing manifold.
00:23:04.340
Now you're thinking about these things, Francis, you got to get rid of one.
00:23:16.760
Or honor, you know, honor, which is, that's the old word.
00:23:37.260
Look, I kind of see it like through kind of an addict's lens.
00:23:42.220
It's because whenever I've been gambling with friends, I'm like, this does nothing for me.
00:23:49.100
That little in my brain where I'm like, yeah, more, more, more.
00:23:54.220
So power, I'm like, I don't, what's important to me is that I am satisfied with what I'm doing.
00:24:06.940
Have I produced work that I'm genuinely proud of?
00:24:09.220
At the end of the day, do I look back and go, that was a good day?
00:24:12.460
It matters to me what my friends and family think.
00:24:15.240
But everybody else, I don't really care that much.
00:24:32.220
Do you hate it when people tell you what to do?
0.99
00:24:43.160
When you see somebody who has a particular idol,
00:24:48.860
So, if you see a politician who admires dictators,
00:25:06.980
I mean, you're from Venezuela, for Pete's sake.
00:25:09.680
I mean, you've actually seen the fruits of that.
00:25:47.960
You know where you're driving with this, right?
00:25:50.880
Now, the reason I say this is because, I mean, it might perfectly well be the case that it doesn't matter to you at all when people recognize you in the airport, which I'm sure they do.
00:26:01.500
Because you've got millions and millions and millions of viewers.
00:26:04.280
And they go into, oh, I love trigonometry and it feels kind of good.
00:26:10.600
I'm glad that it provides them with value and I'm glad that I'm doing something that makes people feel good and it teaches them and educates them and all the rest of it.
00:26:22.020
I wouldn't pretend it doesn't matter because it does.
00:26:26.020
What you're saying is that the other two are more important to you.
00:26:28.340
And I know what you're going to get rid of next, which is money.
00:26:36.640
I could have told you this from the moment we started.
1.00
00:26:47.840
Yeah. I just, I have, there is a family history in, obviously, my family with alcoholism.
00:26:56.900
I know that I have those tendencies, which is why I don't drink.
00:27:02.520
It's why I have to be very regimented with my life.
00:27:08.460
I plan and I structure my day because I know that if I don't have those guardrails, I can easily veer off.
00:28:12.920
and so you know any stupid dad joke does this and the reason that little kids laugh your four-year-old
0.99
00:28:18.940
laughs or when you're when your four-year-old was two and you did this it's a flick the
0.99
00:28:23.900
parahippocampal gyrus of your baby and so they laugh like crazy and now you know even now i'll
0.98
00:28:29.060
tell you a stupid joke my i want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather not screaming in
1.00
00:28:36.600
terror like his passengers yeah that's an emophilip that's dumb oh yeah for sure i mean that's
1.00
00:28:42.500
my father's favorite joke so that's but but here's the interesting thing most people are either good
0.85
00:28:48.940
at flicking that thing to change the mood because they're depressed which is most comedians or
00:28:54.480
they're really good at having it flicked by somebody else which means they actually enjoy
00:28:57.840
humor those are the two aspects of humor you're unusual because you laugh a lot most comedians
00:29:03.200
don't laugh that much because they're only good at one part of that they're really good at changing
00:29:07.740
the tenor. It's called emotional substitution. And so you find out when you're a depressed kid
00:29:11.960
that you're funny and you say a funny thing and everybody laughs and it makes things better inside
00:29:16.720
your brain. Right. So it's a strange thing. Right. But you actually you enjoy jokes, too.
00:29:21.080
I love jokes. Yeah. I mean, good jokes. Not the one I just I like him on Phillips.
00:29:25.260
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's anyway. So that's that's sorry. I didn't mean to take us off that
00:29:30.240
path. What were we talking? Pleasure is his idol. Pleasure is pleasure is your idol and pleasure
00:29:35.640
is your idol. And I actually believe that. And so you have to be very, very careful about the fact
00:29:39.680
that you'll self-administer pleasure for mood management because it's an ineffective mood
00:29:45.000
management technique. Yeah. It's why I, one of the things that I spend my money on is like
00:29:50.600
personal training because I know that I'm physically lazy. And if I go to the gym,
00:29:55.940
I'm just going to mess about, which is why I need a very angry South African man
1.00
00:30:00.640
to basically shout at me and get me to list heavy things three to four times a week.
1.00
00:31:07.520
I'm very libertarian. I fucking hate people
1.00
00:31:13.100
Because it must be done. Because it must be done.
00:31:17.120
calling you boss, it's going to make you uncomfortable
00:31:18.960
and feel constantly aggressive. Yeah, I told everyone to stop it.
00:31:29.080
like it when people call you by your last name.
00:31:33.160
Okay. And fame, it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't draw you in at all. So if I don't like fame,
00:31:37.800
if literally nobody recognized you on the street, I'd prefer that you would prefer that. So to me,
00:31:42.400
fame is a, is an unpleasant by-product of what we do. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Uh, like when people
00:31:48.400
come up to me in the street and they want to chat, um, I, I sort of, I want to chat to them
00:31:55.420
to give them what they want. But for me, it's awkward and a bit of a distraction.
00:32:03.000
Having said that, I don't want people to walk away from this thinking like I'm being superior in somewhere, whatever.
00:32:13.660
But if I could just walk around and people didn't recognize me, that would definitely be my purpose.
00:32:18.800
You are an introvert, which means that when you do something big like ARC, that you're drained of energy.
00:32:29.660
That's really how you find out, because introverts can be very public, but they don't get energy
00:32:34.860
I get tired from being with lots of other people.
00:32:40.920
You like being alone or being alone just with your family?
00:32:50.680
And so there were just two left, which is money and pleasure.
00:32:59.660
And the thing with money is, it's like, I'm not someone who wants to make lots of money
00:33:04.620
for the sake of making money, but I do need a lot of money to, to do the things in my life that I
00:33:11.740
want. I don't, I, maybe that doesn't make any sense. It makes a lot of sense because you just
00:33:14.900
said it's pleasure, not money. You need the money to give you the, to give you the comfort that you
00:33:18.660
want. Yeah. That's really what it comes down to. And for me, comfort is peace is what I mean. Like
00:33:23.180
I want to be left alone in a comfortable space. Yeah. That, that's kind of what. Yeah. You want
00:33:27.180
eliminate sources of discomfort yes that's what it comes down to yeah yeah and that's actually one
00:33:31.940
of the things that we find a lot of people they don't you know they want they don't want noisy
00:33:36.680
neighbors for example they don't want to wait in a queue to go to the doctor i don't want to wait
00:33:42.720
they don't want to be in traffic i do not want to be in traffic those things cost money right
00:33:47.240
and so that's a pleasure right that's a pleasure idol and what that means is that it's very very
00:33:51.180
easy to kind of fall into patterns and again there's nothing wrong with these things these
00:33:55.120
things are not evil. There's nothing wrong with pleasure. It's just the misuse of pleasure. It's
00:33:59.540
just the elevation of pleasure. When you're doing this at the expense of your family, it's like,
00:34:03.400
I want peace, get the kids out of here. Then you'll actually sacrifice your relationships.
00:34:07.440
You'll do things that you ultimately regret as a result of that. And so knowing that is super
00:34:12.100
important. For most of my students, they think they have a money idol. I mean, they're MBA
00:34:16.560
students at the Harvard business. Well, they're American. But it's not that. They actually have
00:34:22.520
an honor idol. They have a, they're not even a fame idol. It's a, it's to be beloved. They want
00:34:28.680
to be adored. And the reason is because my students, and by the way, me too, it's my problem
00:34:33.680
too. They're really, really, really good at something when they're kids, like really good
00:34:38.580
at something when they're kids. And they learn that they only get love and attention from their
00:34:43.520
parents when they do that thing. And their little synaptically plastic brains is really important
00:34:48.480
as a dad. I'm a dad. I'm a grandfather. My kids, my grandkids are the same age as your kids.
00:34:53.840
That they only get attention when they do that thing, which makes them conclude in their synaptic
00:35:00.100
plasticity that love is earned. And then go through life trying to get that feeling. I want
00:35:05.000
that feeling by doing the thing. And they become sort of human doings as opposed to human beings.
00:35:10.360
And what they want is they want adoration and they want to earn it. They want to earn,
00:35:14.060
they'll earn their spouse's love. They'll earn their friend's love. They'll try to earn God's
00:35:17.620
love, they'll go through their lives trying to earn love. And that's really, that's an honor
00:35:22.480
idol. That's an idol of the adoration that you're trying to earn. And love can't be earned.
00:35:29.040
Love is a free gift, freely given. It's a grace. And so this is one of the most important things
00:35:33.700
we have to get strivers, super successful accomplishment people off of that idol,
00:35:40.780
because they'll never be happy. They'll never have a happy marriage. They'll never have true
00:35:44.660
friendships they'll never have an ordered relationship with the divine as long as they're
00:35:48.400
trying to earn love it's a lot of comedians have that yeah i can see that the moment you started
00:35:53.720
talking about that i was like yeah that's a bit of you mate i know a lot of comedians i work with
00:35:58.060
a lot of comedians and part of it because i learned from them you know i think i'm the only
00:36:02.240
social scientist that's ever done mike burbiglia's show oh really yeah yeah working it out that's a
00:36:06.700
great show yeah i listen to that show sometimes because i'm trying to because i'm working things
00:36:10.920
out all the time because i'm always on tour it's just doing public speaking and so and i went on
00:36:16.340
to talk about how i work out my material on a on a on a comedian podcast but it's true it's true
00:36:21.400
they want to be loved like laugh at my joke i just want you to laugh at my joke it's just that's
00:36:26.020
points on the board it makes me feel like i'm worth something for pete's sake and deep in my
00:36:31.000
heart i don't feel like i'm worth anything and i feel worthless until somebody's loving me yeah
00:36:41.800
It's why I never really enjoyed being a comedian.
00:36:44.760
I like making jokes as part of my speeches or doing this,
00:36:47.720
but the life of a comedian, like, it's very hard.
00:36:57.540
when COVID came along and, you know, everything shifted.
00:37:06.480
because I was a professional classical musician
00:37:12.540
I toured for a couple of years with Charlie Bird,
00:37:43.200
Because we're really trying to get to the bottom of it.
00:37:50.020
who've maybe got their life together a little bit
00:37:57.540
throwing soup on paintings to save the planet or whatever.
0.96
00:38:03.000
But I think I've always seen that within that is the drive to have meaning.
00:38:12.460
And it's the drive to live in a significant time.
00:38:14.720
I think there's a huge appeal to the idea that we are living in some kind of time that is immediately before an imminent catastrophe.
00:38:23.500
And if I just go out and I have the right placard at the right protest, then we'll save the planet.
00:38:33.000
and what I wanted to ask you is why is it that people pursue forms of activism that are not
00:38:42.440
actually effective because if you wanted meaning like I get a lot of meaning from doing trigonometry
00:38:48.600
because I feel like we're contributing to the cultural discussions and shaping them
00:38:52.640
in a way that we think is true and matters a lot and from the feedback we get from people
00:38:58.580
I hear that it makes a meaningful impact on their lives and that that to me is meaning
00:39:02.740
That's real meaning. But if I was engaged in something that was not producing any outcome and was in fact not geared to producing any outcome, was simply attending protests for the sake of feeling like I am with other people who are achieving effectively nothing, I wouldn't find that meaningful.
00:39:21.380
Why do people pursue forms of activism that don't actually achieve anything at all?
00:39:25.580
We get asked this all the time. Which VPN do you use at Trigonometry? The answer is simply
00:39:33.260
CyberGhost VPN. CyberGhost isn't some fringe tool. It has 38 million users and over 20,000
00:39:42.100
five-star reviews on Trustpilot, which frankly is rare for any tech product, let alone a VPN.
00:39:48.860
CyberGhost encrypts your internet traffic, which means your provider, your employer, your school,
00:39:53.680
or anyone else on public Wi-Fi cannot see what you're doing online.
00:39:58.540
It routes your connection through secure servers in 100 countries,
00:40:02.040
hides your IP address, and keeps no logs at all,
00:40:05.040
so your activity isn't being tracked or stored.
00:40:07.820
On top of that, it unlocks regional content from 40 streaming platforms
00:40:23.680
We rely on it when we're traveling for the show because it's simple, fast, and it just works.
00:40:28.940
Right now, you can get CyberGhost for about two bucks a month with four months free,
00:40:33.640
a 45-day money-back guarantee, and 24-7 support.
00:40:38.780
That's protection for your browsing data and access to blocked content online for two bucks a month.
00:40:47.020
To grab the offer, go to cyberghostvpn.com slash trigonometry
00:40:50.860
or click the link in the description of this episode.
00:40:53.680
it's completely risk-free. So check it out today. Well, one answer, which is an incomplete answer,
00:41:00.960
is that it's performative. Okay. And, but it's not performative to others. It's performative
00:41:05.160
to yourself. That the meaning comes from, from, from showing that you care about something enough
00:41:10.880
to be angry about it, to have, to put yourself into a hot hedonic state, to feel intense levels
00:41:18.320
of negative emotionality. It just shows that you can actually feel something for Pete's sake.
00:41:23.220
you're looking, you're doing the show. Really, really good. Really good. But you're not in a
00:41:27.800
hot, hedonic state. On the contrary, it'd be terrible if you're just yelling the whole time.
00:41:32.180
I mean, there are people who try to do that in media, but there would be a less effective
00:41:35.220
medium if you were doing that. But there are a lot of people who just can't feel anything.
00:41:39.920
They're not feeling anything. They're completely numb. And so what they get involved in forms of
00:41:45.540
very, very performative activism because it puts, it makes them feel alive, maybe for the first time
00:42:18.400
that their identity is in a form of grievance. And this is very common. This is the best way
00:42:23.700
to manipulate people, is to help them give, is to create a victim identity. That's identity
00:42:31.260
politics. But the most single toxic kind of identity that you can have is that I'm a victim.
00:42:37.100
This is what... Why is it toxic? It's toxic because you're looking in the mirror and saying,
00:42:41.320
I'm aggrieved. I don't know who I am if I'm not feeling bad. You know, and this is the exact
00:42:47.820
antithesis of Christianity or any good, serious, nutritious religion, which is to look in the
00:42:53.640
mirror and say, I'm a beloved child of God. What's my identity? Child of God. It's profoundly
00:42:58.320
positive. But if you look in the mirror and you say, I'm the victim of discrimination,
00:43:01.820
I'm somebody who's actually suffered marginalization. I'm somebody who's on the
00:43:06.180
short end of the stick. That's terrible as an identity. That's the recipe for anxiety and
00:43:12.520
depression, which of course it has produced. And what if, what would, what do you, what would you
00:43:17.480
say to people who will say to you, well, well, I have been a victim of this or my, my people have
00:43:22.240
been a victim of this for a long time. Or now, you know, you get the same on other parts of the
00:43:26.800
political spectrum. We have been a victim of DEI or whatever. And these are all things that are
00:43:31.120
historically accurate. I mean, the woke right is doing exactly the same thing today. I don't know.
00:43:34.960
Do we use, is on trigonometry, do we talk about that? Do we use this term of art? I was one of
00:43:39.140
the people that pioneered it. You did. You coined this, didn't you? Yeah, yeah. He's got me lots of
00:43:43.680
love and gratitude on the internet. Yeah, he's coming for a drink now with tucker.
00:43:48.140
Means you're onto something, Constantine. You're onto something. But the truth is that you will
00:43:53.000
find, again, this is not the exclusive ecosystem of the left. The left got really, really good at
00:43:58.860
this, of conscripting people into the culture war with victim identity. But the right has picked
00:44:04.260
this up like crazy because it's incredibly powerful. And why should, I mean, you should
00:44:09.340
acknowledge the fact that there are injustices in the world. That's the right thing to do.
00:44:12.600
But you don't identify yourself with injustice per se. That's the perfect recipe for misery
00:44:19.820
to do something like that. On the contrary, you should be joyful. There's something that
00:44:24.060
you can actually do. I mean, the message of most religions is notwithstanding all the hard things
00:44:31.060
in your life, you're beloved. Notwithstanding that you can have a good life. That's the whole
00:44:37.380
idea, that the good life is open to absolutely everybody, as opposed to, I know you grew up in
00:44:43.020
some, you grew up in a first world country with all kinds of prosperity, but you're still in it.
00:44:50.700
I mean, that's a hell of a way to live. But of course, that makes you really a putty in the hands
00:45:15.820
That's 7% of the population is dark triad.
0.77
00:45:27.660
by making them think that the world is actually against them,
00:45:30.360
as opposed to helping them understand how they can take control,
00:45:32.860
how they can have agency, how life can be joyful, how life can be good,
00:45:37.240
which is the responsible thing for all of us to do with young people today.
00:45:40.420
Do you think part of the problem as well, Arthur,
00:45:44.880
and with social media we live in a perpetual state of comparison?
00:45:49.460
That quote is frequently attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt, of all people.
00:45:55.160
and whether he said he said it on the internet so it may or may not be his but it's certainly
00:46:03.900
manifestly true and i've got data and all kinds of experiments from the literature that show
00:46:07.840
that's exactly the case as much as if you if you take photographs on your vacation you will enjoy
00:46:13.600
the vacation 16 less wow and about 25 less if you post them to the internet so for example that's
00:46:20.300
just and all that is a sort of empirical verification of the fact that when you're
00:46:23.880
doing something and you're living for other people, when you're trying to hold yourself up
00:46:28.340
to the standards of others, when you're not fully present in the joy that is your life,
00:46:32.520
you're not going to enjoy your life is what it comes down to. But sure, I mean, you're going to,
00:46:36.600
but fundamentally the problem isn't social comparison. Fundamentally the problem is that
00:46:40.360
our brains are broken. Our brains are broken. We're being shoved 205 times a day on average,
00:46:46.920
which is the number of times that the average American looks at her or his phone
00:46:54.500
and significance and purpose and love and hope.
00:46:59.680
But no, no, you're over there in the world of information
00:47:03.700
for things that actually promise you everything
00:47:11.520
as opposed to the complex issues of meaning and mystery.
00:47:15.800
And if you're just never there, well, guess what?
00:47:19.980
And that sadness and anger, particularly when you've got young men who are more prone to extremes of emotion, that tends to lead towards extremism, doesn't it?
00:47:30.740
Although I would contest that it's mostly men, on the contrary.
00:47:34.140
What we find is that, and this comes from the work of John Haidt, who's just the best on this, and Gene Twenge and a lot of other people.
00:47:41.160
Brad Wilcox down at the University of Virginia, who show that there's incredible problems of
00:47:47.260
depression and anxiety, of mood disorders, of diagnosed mental illness, particularly for
00:47:51.760
progressive women under 30. Progressive women under 30 have a 56% chance of having been
00:47:58.800
formally diagnosed with at least one mental illness. Why? Well, because of this. Because
00:48:04.080
this is how it's manifest. You know, when depression is largely shown among women with
00:48:10.400
sadness and men with anger. That's how you see it. A lot of women don't understand that about
00:48:14.280
their husbands. Like, my husband's so grumpy all of a sudden. He's depressed. He's depressed.
00:48:19.320
Well, he's not crying. Of course not. That's not how men do it. Men do it in a different way. So
00:48:23.800
you're going to see this manifest in different ways. And in classic mood disorders with sadness,
00:48:28.900
especially sadness, you know, depression, rumination with women and with unhealthy,
00:48:34.080
disordered forms of anger for men. And the worrying thing is, is the way we're going in
00:48:41.200
society where if you look at it, men are less and less likely to get married, less and less
00:48:46.700
likely to be in relationships, less and less likely to have deep friendships, which are
00:48:51.440
incredibly important for men. You do worry where this is going to go because we're less and less
00:48:58.240
happy. And as a result, young men and young women, they're veering away from each other as well.
00:49:04.560
Right. No, that's right. And, you know, effectively what the great awokening has done,
00:49:09.580
but what that really is, is it is the manifestation of modern technology has done,
00:49:15.340
is it's driven us away from the thing that's best for us in the right hemispheres of our brain,
00:49:19.500
which is romantic love. This is the ultimate mystery of life. It's a problem that can't be
00:49:24.720
solved. So are you married, Francis? No. You're not married. So, so I'll talk to you as a married
00:49:31.020
man. I've been married 35 years. There's lots of complicated left hemisphere problems in my life,
00:49:35.780
like my car. My car is the classic left hemisphere problem, complicated problem. I can solve it,
00:49:41.380
but I don't, I haven't. I don't have the slightest idea how it works. I'm incompetent,
00:49:45.680
but I could solve it. Right. My marriage is a complex problem in the right hemisphere of my
00:49:49.820
brain. I will never solve my marriage. It's so complex. Right. I mean, that's because it's
00:49:55.440
dynamic. You know, you want a cat because you have right hemispheric needs. You don't want a
00:49:59.800
mechanical cat, which would be a left hemispheric simulation for it. We're living in the world of
00:50:04.860
simulations, which don't, which don't satisfy us is what it comes about. Furthermore, when we're
00:50:10.000
living over there, we're going to drive people apart from even being able to comprehend that
00:50:13.820
mystery. I talk to men in their twenties all the time who've never been on a date. I mean,
00:50:19.400
in my twenties, that was the point. And that was the point. I mean, I wanted a career and I wanted
00:50:25.320
to make money. I wanted to be successful. I wanted love. I wanted to find the love of my life. When
00:50:30.120
I was 23 years old, it's like, yep, I'm looking for my wife. That's what I'm going to get. I was
00:50:35.160
like that as well. And that's, that's you're 20 years younger than me. So I've been married 23
00:50:39.880
years. Yeah. Got married at 20. Met at 18, married at 20. Nice. Yeah. I admire that a lot. I met my
00:50:45.720
wife when I was 24 and I couldn't close the deal for two years because she didn't believe in
00:50:50.840
marriage. She, I mean, she, she's in Barcelona. Okay. Like Denmark on the Mediterranean.
00:50:58.240
And you know, they're all very modern. You know, hard read, you know, atheists, et cetera, et cetera.
00:51:03.020
But, um, I had to set about, this was a big, big, big project. Now, of course, she leads me in paths
00:51:08.420
of righteousness. I mean, she's a true believer in all these things, but she leads me. But the
00:51:14.040
whole point is that, you know, this is the mystery of life. And if we've eradicated that,
00:51:19.180
we've broken the brains of young people because of how technology has changed our lives, how
00:51:23.680
culture, the culture that everything has a complicated solution, the culture of technology
00:51:30.260
and engineering, there's an app for that. All that does is it ruins mystery. And the ultimate
00:51:36.660
mystery, of course, is love. And so if you're freaking people out in activism, turning the
00:51:42.620
genders against each other systematically, if you're making it harder for people to meet,
00:51:47.700
if you're taking out all the joy from the way that they meet because they're meeting on apps,
00:51:52.080
for example, if you're making it such that they don't even know how to date in real life,
00:51:57.160
guess what you're going to get? A baby bust. You're going to get a love depression,
0.50
00:52:02.360
which is exactly what we have. Well, technology seems like such a huge part of it. And I
00:52:06.640
think because people feel that we, people feel may not be true that they can't control that part.
00:52:11.520
We focus so much on culture and politics and all this other stuff where it seems to me quite obvious
00:52:16.540
that for example, the pill and other elements of the sexual revolution drive so much of the stuff
00:52:21.800
that people think is cultural. And likewise, uh, I think Francis was saying before we started
00:52:26.500
happiness peaked in 1992. Yeah. Well, yeah, the internet comes along, right? Is that, is that
00:52:31.300
fair. That's fair. But really, the biggest, it's true that there's been a kind of a climatic change
00:52:37.100
in happiness since about 1990. But then you have the storms, the hurricanes, the weather of
00:52:43.700
happiness has been a lot more severe. And that's been since 2008, largely. Right. Social media.
00:52:48.340
Yeah. And at the beginning of that, when I saw the biggest downdraft in happiness in my data,
00:52:52.100
I thought it was the financial crisis. Nuh-uh. That was the introduction of the smartphone.
00:52:58.120
That's what that was. And then the introduction of apps on the smartphone. Then the
00:53:01.220
introduction of dating apps. I'm not against dating apps. That's the way that the world is
00:53:04.300
going to work. I do scientific advice to dating apps, as a matter of fact, and I want them to
00:53:08.380
be better because they're not going to go away. And the way that you do that is by adding the
00:53:12.600
human element into the algorithm, adding the right hemisphere into the left hemisphere,
00:53:17.200
and then you can actually make them productive. We learn how to use the machines. By the way,
00:53:20.820
we're going to figure this out. People are really ingenious, and we're going to figure this out. I
00:53:25.280
know the end of the story. We're fine. The problem is we lose a lot of people in the meantime,
00:53:29.480
and that's what I want to avoid. And the other thing I have noticed in the time that we've been
00:53:33.980
doing the show, I think we started Trigonometry in 2018. By this point, you know, Joe Rogan and
00:53:39.600
other people were already really big. But there was, it felt like a bit of a renaissance because
00:53:44.960
for the first time you were hearing long form conversations, often about difficult issues.
00:53:50.580
They were conducted with mutual respect and all the rest of it. And I very naively thought,
00:53:55.800
you know, this is it now. We found the magic formula for discussion. And now I see that that
00:54:03.440
very thing is becoming what we saw in the mainstream media, which is typically for a podcast,
00:54:10.720
the thing that will be most consumed is a short clip that totally misrepresents the conversation
00:54:15.240
that goes viral because somebody said something out of context that can be made to look offensive
00:54:32.700
I mean, because something that actually gets you
00:54:48.520
It feels good to be right and to hear somebody that you don't like
00:54:55.180
That's why you kind of know it's out of context.
00:55:03.920
That's why it's more satisfying that putting something into context
00:55:07.240
and getting the nuance is the least satisfying thing ever.
00:55:14.880
Well, I mean, what we do about that is adhering to truth.
00:55:17.660
It's being serious about truth, and it, and, and, and, you know, that's, there's always been this problem.
00:55:26.280
I mean, people have misrepresented each other and lied about each other, that, you know, calumny is nothing new.
00:55:31.980
I mean, if you go back to the, to the pamphlets of Thomas Paine, and, you know, there were pamphlets that were coming out from, from John Adams that were, you know, defaming Thomas Jefferson.
00:55:55.800
I mean, if you look at the second term of George Washington,
00:56:17.020
And what we're dedicated to is the long game of truth and love and beauty and all of these good things.
00:56:26.040
You'll always lose the short game to the quick hit and to the negative emotion.
00:56:33.360
But the long game has got to belong to us, ultimately.
00:56:39.800
This is a question I really wanted to ask, which is, does taking risk make us happier?
00:56:50.360
Well, no, it doesn't actually depend on the outcome so much as with the nature of the risk.
00:56:55.100
So entrepreneurs take a lot of risk, but so do compulsive dabblers, right?
00:57:00.640
And so risk per se isn't good, but risk in search of an explosive reward and done prudently
00:57:09.320
and managed in the right way can be the most rewarding thing possible.
00:57:12.780
Now, we could go and talk about Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, who took incredible
00:57:21.440
risks in search of these entrepreneurial results that were outsized and the wonderful things
00:57:30.640
The best example of the biggest entrepreneurial risk
00:57:33.580
that leads to the biggest rewards, falling in love.
00:57:39.300
A family, a marriage, babies, that's an enterprise.
00:57:47.660
And it's a little explosion, boom, boom, boom, boom,
00:57:50.500
happening all over the place, less than it was,
00:57:57.100
And I talk to my students about this all the time.
00:57:59.940
go yeah good go raise 25 million dollars in venture and throw it behind your crazy scheme
00:58:06.440
on the internet i don't care you want to be a real entrepreneur give your heart away
00:58:09.680
go give your heart away tell that girl that you're secretly in love with her and let her
00:58:13.980
stomp all over it maybe or maybe say i like you too that's risk that really really matters and
00:58:20.140
when you take risk with a sense of prudential judgment which is to say that you're doing and
00:58:26.480
by the way, prudence in the classical sense is not not taking risk. It's taking the right amount
00:58:32.040
of risk. Sometimes risking your life is the prudent thing to do, right? Joseph Pieper talks
00:58:37.640
about that in The Four Cardinal Virtues. He writes about prudence in the best way. So taking prudent
00:58:42.200
risk in search of explosive returns or things that really matter, then risk is the best thing ever.
00:58:48.380
Because the enemy, I think, of happiness, and correct me if I'm wrong, is a desire to seek
00:58:53.200
comfort yeah well i mean the the an enemy of happiness is actually never living in an
00:58:58.860
entrepreneurial way absolutely i mean this is one of the things and this is one of the biggest
00:59:02.960
problems you could live in this kind of cocoon of and and really what the cocoon is is is the
00:59:11.860
matrix that movie that came out 27 years ago and that's shocking but what that is is that nobody
00:59:18.520
people lived in a pleasant simulation because they were being controlled by an artificial
00:59:22.400
intelligence that fed off human energy. Francis, we're literally in the matrix.
00:59:28.180
This is actually happening to us right now. And the way that you keep people pacified is by the
00:59:33.420
pleasant simulation, the kind of the curve fit of a right hemispheric life that's actually a left
00:59:37.920
hemispheric experience. And in so doing, that comfort, it's a comfortable thing that's actually
00:59:44.640
awful. That's a dystopian nightmare is the way that that works out. And the way that you break
00:59:49.800
out is by taking all kinds of IRL risks, especially with your heart. If you own gold,
00:59:57.180
you probably bought it for the same reason I did, because you looked at what central banks
01:00:01.320
are doing to currencies and decided you wanted something they can't print. Good reasoning. But
01:00:06.520
here's the thing nobody talks about after you make that decision. Your gold is just sitting there.
01:00:11.160
It's not doing anything. You're paying to store it. You're paying to insure it. And in the meantime,
01:00:15.640
it earns precisely nothing. Until now. What you're about to hear is not a normal gold advert. Today's
01:00:22.520
sponsor is Monetary Metals. They've figured out something that once you hear it seems obvious,
01:00:28.000
but almost nobody in the gold world is doing it. Monetary Metals connects gold owners with
01:00:33.520
productive businesses, refiners, jewelers, companies that actually need physical gold to operate.
01:00:39.780
Those businesses lease your gold and pay you a yield.
01:00:46.280
So instead of your gold sitting in a vault costing you money,
01:00:49.640
it's out in the real economy doing something useful.
01:00:58.360
If you already own gold, this is the logical next step.
01:01:17.620
I think that The Matrix was a very formative film in my life
01:01:22.740
as I was probably 18, 19 at the time, something like that.
01:01:28.300
because when Neo leaves The Matrix, life is shitty.
01:01:35.520
And I think there's so much to that because it's only when you abandon these superficial comforts and actually take the risk, like it's not that pleasant all the time.
01:01:54.160
You know, the glory of God is a man fully alive.
01:01:56.080
That's St. Irenaeus in the third century, second century.
01:02:04.440
you know that you sell it you sell it well you tell you can tell he's a catholic yeah no but
01:02:11.360
you go into a catholic church you're literally worshiping a guy represented in the front of the
01:02:16.660
church who's being tortured to death yeah that's i don't want that but i need that i need that i
01:02:23.860
need that suffering i need that full experience i want the i want to bite out of life i want to be
01:02:28.460
fully alive and this is one of the reasons that suffering which is a largely right hemispheric
01:02:33.480
experience, makes people understand the meaning of their lives. If I go back through your life,
01:02:39.220
if we went back, if I were your therapist, and I don't do clinical work, if we went back, you know,
01:02:44.760
year after year after year, and I would say, tell me the formative moments, you wouldn't say,
01:02:49.260
oh, yeah, that beach vacation in Ibiza. No, you'd tell me about when that person passed away,
01:02:55.360
when that woman that you loved wasn't there, when something that you wanted didn't happen,
01:03:22.980
for the things that are going to happen this day.
01:03:29.240
But I will also rejoice and be glad in the suffering I'm going to face this day,
01:03:39.240
It's what I love what the French call heartbreak.
01:03:42.420
They call it le delir exquisite, which means the exquisite pain.
01:03:50.920
People are not afraid of breaking up because of the pain it's going to bring,
01:04:08.920
it actually implicates a little part of the limbic system
01:04:14.260
about the size of the end of your index finger.
01:04:16.120
And we have it so that we're averse to losing something
01:04:24.340
250,000 years ago in the middle place to scene,
01:04:26.480
you'd wind up walking the savannah and dying alone because you'd be rejected from your tribe
01:04:31.120
because you wouldn't be afraid of rejection. You wouldn't be afraid of loss. It's maladapted today
01:04:36.580
to a certain extent, but also when you learn to live with the hyperactivation of the dorsal
01:04:42.080
anterior cingulate cortex, then you get that meaning. You say, okay, this is why I'm still
01:04:47.100
alive. This is how I'm actually surviving. That's, by the way, why you listen to sad music when you're
01:04:51.860
heartbroken. Because it puts into perspective that aliveness that's in you right now, it helps
01:04:57.740
you understand the emotions that you're actually feeling. You're saying, I want to understand this
01:05:02.300
emotion. I want meaning. That's the reason you're listening to Taylor Swift over and over and over
01:05:07.560
again. Right? Right. Only when I work out. It's interesting you say that, particularly about
01:05:16.460
suffering, because I think as Buddhists, you say life is suffering. Yeah. That's the first noble
01:05:20.300
through the Buddhism. And also in The Matrix, interestingly, I don't know if you remember the
0.85
01:05:25.000
scene where Agent Smith is talking about the history of The Matrix to Morpheus when he's got
01:05:29.600
him captured and in handcuffs. And he says, we made a bunch of versions of The Matrix and they
01:05:33.940
all failed because there was not enough suffering. Right. And what you just did is you explained how
01:05:40.380
suffering is part of what makes life meaningful. Right. And that's a very powerful framing of it
01:05:47.800
Because I think it's fair to say suffering is inevitable.
01:05:54.500
So suffering equals pain times resistance to pain.
01:06:00.300
So suffering is, you know, mental suffering, et cetera, et cetera, equals pain, which has both sensory and affective components.
01:06:08.000
The sensory pain has to do with inflammation and nerve endings.
01:06:14.420
Affective pain is part of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
01:06:17.800
that I just talked about a minute ago, that's the I hate it part. You get affective pain after you
01:06:22.840
touch a hot stove, and you feel the sensory part, and then you feel the affective part. I don't want
01:06:28.320
to do that anymore. I hate that. When you have mental pain, it's only the affective portion,
01:06:33.260
which is, by the way, the reason that acetaminophen, you call it paracetamol over here,
01:06:38.500
Tylenol, it affects affective pain. It doesn't make you feel less pain. It makes you care less.
01:06:46.980
That's why a blend, when you have physical pain of both Advil and Tylenol, works so well
01:06:50.960
together because you're working on the both sides of the pain mechanism.
01:07:02.760
It's how you learn not to do things, et cetera.
01:07:07.340
But when you multiply it by resistance, then you understand that suffering is not inevitable.
01:07:14.620
If you have high, high, high pain, but low, low, low resistance, you can actually have very
01:07:21.220
manageable suffering. And that's how, in non-resistance, how the Buddhists understand
0.95
01:07:28.240
suffering versus pain itself. That's so interesting. I had an experience where
01:07:32.640
the place I was living, there was a lot of noise coming in. And I was really angry about it the
01:07:39.360
whole time. Your resistance was sky high. My resistance was sky high. And the moment I just
01:07:43.940
accepted that it's happening and started just managing around it, you know, going, you know,
01:07:48.080
just doing what I could and I couldn't eliminate the problem. But what I could do is just accept
01:07:53.740
it. My level of suffering went way down, not to zero, but close almost to zero. Yeah. That is
01:08:02.200
Catholicism. It is. It's, it's, it's like, I will get, it's like not my will be done, but thine
01:08:09.720
said the master in the garden of Gethsemane. Yeah. That's what he said. Right. And that was
01:08:13.660
to say, this is going to hurt. Our Lord did not say this is going to suck, but He was thinking
0.95
01:08:19.320
that. And He said, but thy will be done, not mine, is the act of non-resistance, which is the lesson
01:08:25.240
for us. I mean, so the first noble truth of Buddhism, and I've worked a lot with the Dalai
01:08:29.380
Lama over the past 13 years. I go to Dharamsala every year to do conferences and projects with
01:08:34.180
His Holiness. It's been very helpful to me. The first noble truth of Buddhism is dukkha,
01:08:38.500
which technically means the sticky craving from inadequate things. It's sort of dissatisfaction,
01:09:12.900
Well, the Eightfold Path is the way that the Buddhists teach you to live such that you can
01:09:16.780
live in non-resistance, that you can live to non-resistance to ego, to non-resistance to
01:09:22.300
suffering, to, sorry, to pain, non-resistance to the things in life such that you can be integrated
01:09:27.480
into a life that has inevitable pain, but not inevitable suffering.
01:09:32.760
This is what I've, what seemed to me like a contradiction with me that I've always wanted
01:09:37.520
to ask someone who's as smart and knowledgeable as you about it. It's like, um,
01:09:41.620
I just gave you the example where my suffering went to zero because I let go, but then also
01:09:48.180
like, isn't having ambition to do things and create things and to build things and have
01:09:53.640
conversations that isn't that, isn't that ego in that? Yes. Yes. And so here's the thing. This is
01:09:59.300
the balance. If I were a Buddhist, which I'm not, I might say you should always, you should always
0.59
01:10:04.680
have complete non-resistance and disregard pain. I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a capitalist,
01:10:09.560
not American, right? I think there are lots of cases when you should actually try to lower the
01:10:14.360
pain. Yeah. I mean, I take, I take a Tylenol. If I have a, I wake up, my back hurts a lot. I got
01:10:19.720
like back issues and I take Advil because I want an anti-inflammatory. By the way, I also am very
01:10:26.520
familiar with the, with the clinical research on back pain, which shows that you should alleviate
01:10:32.100
the pain, manage it a little bit, but you shouldn't take a narcotic analgesic because
01:10:36.280
that's eliminating the pain. I should manage the pain and then have non-resistance to the
01:10:41.600
fundamental presence of it in my life, which will actually co-occur with my life every day for the
01:10:46.600
rest of my life. It's okay. It's okay to say, I'm a guy with back pain. I can manage it a little bit
01:10:52.640
because Advil is pretty good, but I can also live a really, really good life and I can focus on the
01:10:57.620
things that I like. And so what I'm doing is I'm combining the lowering of pain with non-resistance
01:11:02.980
in a way where the suffering is where I needed to be in my life.
01:11:06.500
If I'm running a company and I see some problem that I can avoid,
01:11:12.480
who's lighting me up on the Slack channel,
0.96
01:11:18.800
because it's not right for me to practice non-resistance
01:11:24.160
There's all kinds of cases where judgment requires
01:11:27.260
that you understand which lever you're going to try to work.
01:11:31.260
which we are telling young people that there's only one lever, that pain, that depression,
01:11:36.740
that sadness, that melancholy, that anxiety, that loneliness is evidence that you're broken.
01:11:42.260
No, it's evidence you're alive. It's evidence that you're, I tell my students, look,
01:11:46.960
you're studying at Harvard University. If you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy.
01:11:52.160
The truth is that's a really good and normal thing. And so don't go to somebody who says,
01:11:56.960
oh, you're sad and anxious. We've got to fix that. No. You've got to manage that. You've got
01:12:01.940
to live with that. You have to understand the balance between pain and non-resistance to pain
01:12:06.060
such that the suffering is what it's supposed to be. And how much does gratitude play into this?
01:12:11.340
I saw this amazing interview with a football manager called Luis Enrique, and he was talking
01:12:15.560
about his 12-year-old daughter who died. And they were saying to him, how do you cope? And he said,
01:12:21.160
the only way I learned how to cope was to be grateful that I had 12 years with this person.
01:12:25.180
And just saying it, and I've never had kids and all that, I'm welling up and I'm thinking
01:12:30.060
that is the ultimate way to cope with probably the most tragic loss a human being can suffer.
01:12:38.580
Yeah, for sure. That is the hardest thing, by the way. That is the hardest thing. And people do
01:12:43.260
deal with it with gratitude. The ultimate long-term way to deal with that grief,
01:12:47.460
grief is the unremitting sadness, unremitting sadness. It's remitting, ultimately. The way
01:12:52.640
people will accelerate their healing is by helping people who are fresher in their grief
01:12:57.600
and so the best way if you lose a child for you to heal faster and better is for you to find
01:13:03.600
somebody else who's more recently lost a child and help that person which is one of the laws of
01:13:10.240
love that you will actually heal more when you give more that that your injury is actually it
01:13:19.040
It actually has a purpose because you can share what has happened in your life with somebody else and help that person heal in their fresher wounds.
01:13:26.980
It sounds like a karmic truth, but I think it's a fundamental truth, a beautiful truth about humanity is the way that this works.
01:13:36.840
Now, as a way to deal with the fact that we have this horrible tragedy, gratitude is great, and there's a reason for that.
01:13:53.260
on how grateful you are to find those berries on that bush
01:13:55.660
250,000 years ago while there's a saber-tooth tiger
01:14:00.500
You need to be focused on the saber-tooth tiger,
01:14:11.020
But if somebody's frowning angrily at you, take note.
01:14:20.680
and that's amplified in the environment of grief.
01:14:29.100
which is positive affect about naturally good things.
01:14:34.180
Religious people sort of do this naturally.
1.00
01:14:35.960
We almost lost one of our children many years ago.
1.00
01:14:45.620
he was going to die. And, and so we're at the hospital, my wife and I, and we start praying,
01:14:50.280
we're praying, we're praying, we're praying. What do we pray? Keep him alive, obviously. But then
01:14:54.920
we were praying, thank you for giving us our son. That's what we pray. Naturally, not on purpose.
01:15:00.800
Why? Because that's what we've been trained as Christian people is to thank God for the good
01:15:05.720
things and not just curse God. See, this is funny. So this is the book of Job, Job 1, 27.
01:15:15.620
128, 127 or 128, see how illiterate I am in this,
01:15:19.040
that Job's all, you know, God and Satan are throwing dice.
01:15:42.860
the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but then the real part comes that nobody remembers.
01:15:50.960
Blessed be the name of the Lord. That's the end of that scripture. See, that's what a supernatural
01:15:58.380
view of life can bring you. That's why it's so critically important. Now, it goes on to three
01:16:03.860
of Job's buddies show up and the entire book of Job, which is tiresome, or they're trying to tell
01:16:09.080
him, but like, here's all that happened. You must've done a bad thing. You probably sinned a lot,
01:16:12.260
You know, and there, it's just this sort of rabbinical exegesis on, on why it's sort of
01:16:17.360
like Kushner's, why bad things happen to good people, but you know, boring. Then in the 38th
01:16:23.540
chapter of Job, Job gets to talk to God about suffering because God comes in a whirlwind.
01:16:29.640
It's one of the times in the old Testament where somebody actually talks to God, comes in the
01:16:32.700
whirlwind and Job puts God in the dock. He's like, I'm your boy. You said I was, I was a righteous
01:16:38.600
man. And you did all this stuff to me. Explain yourself, sir. And God said, here's the funniest
01:16:47.020
part of the Old Testament of the Bible. It's actually, it's genius comedy. God says, oh yeah,
01:16:52.480
I'll tell you. I mean, you're so smart. You deserve an explanation, of course. But since
01:16:58.460
you're so smart, first you tell me, why did I create the heaven and the earth? You're so smart,
01:17:02.620
tell me. And then I'll tell you why you suffered. You're so smart, tell me why I put the stars in
01:17:07.760
the sky and the fishes in the ocean. You're so smart. I'm sure you know, but tell me why,
01:17:12.980
and then I'll tell you why you suffer. Here's the point. It's a mystery. It's part of the mystery
01:17:19.560
of life itself. And life itself is a miracle. And if we want, do you want part of the miracle
01:17:26.500
or do you want the whole miracle? That requires that we embrace the mystery, that we love the
01:17:32.700
mystery itself. And they're the bad parts. And that's the struggle. You get about 90 years to
01:17:38.480
figure that one out. Arthur, what a pleasure. I feel like we've only just scratched the surface.
01:17:43.360
So perhaps we'll, we'll carry on the conversation another time. We're going to end it after Job.
01:17:49.040
Yeah. Well, we depress people. That's what we do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, not this one,
01:17:53.460
actually. I thought it was a very unusual and special episode of our show. So thank you.
01:17:57.260
Thank you for making it. Thank you for what you're doing. And you've, you've really enriched my life
01:18:00.280
a lot with the show. Well, uh, this was amazing for us. Thank you. Uh, the last question, as you
01:18:05.240
know, it's always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
01:18:08.560
We touched on it. Um, we touched on it here, but I think that the story of our civilization today
01:18:17.000
is the lack of romantic love. I think that the lack of relationships, this is not a sentimental
01:18:22.460
issue. This is an existential issue that we're actually getting in here. And I think that we
01:18:27.720
need to have a better scientific understanding of what exactly is happening and what's going to
01:18:32.340
happen. This is not just demography. This is the question of whether life is actually worth living
01:18:38.260
going forward, not whether life is going to be worth, not whether life is going to continue
01:18:43.560
going forward. So that's what I think we should talk about more, which is the deep physics of
01:18:48.820
romantic love. Arthur Brooks, thank you for being here. Thank you, guys.
01:18:53.400
Don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode
01:19:00.560
It's completely risk-free, so check it out today.