TRIGGERnometry - Why Crazy Activism is Taking Over the West — Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

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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.

00:02:19.740 And then happiness will find you.

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.

00:02:28.740 The pursuit of pleasure leads to rehab.

00:02:32.100 A lot of young people today will go for every crazy activist scheme

00:02:36.740 because they're screaming out for meaning

00:02:38.380 because they don't naturally experience it.

00:02:40.340 They're completely numb.

00:02:42.540 And so what they get involved in forms

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.

00:06:24.400 So you have to define it in the right way.

00:06:25.960 And the right definition of happiness is much like you would say,

00:06:29.100 what's the right definition of food?

00:06:31.160 And that's protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

00:06:33.960 Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

00:06:37.500 Those are the macronutrients of happiness.

00:06:39.840 Don't try to pursue happiness.

00:06:42.180 Try to understand how to enjoy your life,

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.

00:06:50.800 And then happiness will find you.

00:06:52.120 Can you break down those three a little bit more as well?

00:06:55.460 So say them again.

00:06:57.120 Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

00:06:58.940 Okay.

00:07:00.260 What do they mean?

00:07:01.460 So enjoyment is, believe it or not,

00:07:04.100 most, many, many people, especially strivers,

00:07:06.880 very successful people listen to this program.

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.

00:07:19.600 The pursuit of pleasure leads to rehab.

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.

00:09:29.940 Wow.

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,

00:09:45.320 leads to happiness.

00:09:46.740 Okay, so that's enjoyment.

00:09:49.380 Satisfaction?

00:09:50.260 Satisfaction is a really paradoxical one.

00:09:52.180 Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment with struggle.

00:09:56.140 Only Homo sapiens want pain.

00:09:58.600 Only Homo sapiens want suffering

00:10:00.280 because that's how you understand

00:10:01.780 what's proportional to your accomplishment.

00:10:04.920 If you don't have to give something up for what you're doing,

00:10:07.300 you will get no sweetness from it.

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.

00:10:23.420 That's how satisfaction works.

00:10:24.700 That's why your kids are little, right?

00:10:26.780 Yeah.

00:10:27.040 And your kids are a little older?

00:10:28.220 I don't have kids.

00:10:29.260 You don't have kids.

00:10:30.020 Okay, so they're really little.

00:10:32.920 They're very small and there's a lot of them.

00:10:34.800 Yeah.

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.

00:12:34.460 But we don't figure that out.

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

00:12:46.940 over again. 1.00

00:12:47.420 But that's maladapted.

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.

00:13:07.240 And that goes against your animal impulses.

00:13:09.020 It speaks to your moral aspirations.

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

00:13:20.820 fun to fun thing.

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

00:14:36.860 for every crazy activist scheme

00:14:40.000 because they're screaming out for meaning

00:14:41.660 because they don't naturally experience it.

00:14:44.000 This really is at the doorstep

00:14:46.080 of small screens in our pockets.

00:14:48.720 And this meaning crisis,

00:14:50.300 people frequently tie to religion,

00:14:52.160 particularly on the show.

00:14:53.920 Are religious people, therefore,

00:14:55.260 happier than non-religious people? 1.00

00:14:56.800 Yes, yes. 1.00

00:14:58.140 No, religious people who practice their religion.

00:15:01.580 I mean, we all know a lot of people,

00:15:03.160 of course, you know, look,

00:15:04.500 you're not Catholics, right?

00:15:05.680 Actually, you're not, are you?

00:15:06.640 I was raised Catholic.

00:15:08.260 It's struggling Catholic. 0.54

00:15:09.620 I can help you back. 0.99

00:15:12.040 We can get this deal done right now on the show.

00:15:14.820 I'm going to take half an hour.

00:15:16.440 You guys crack on.

00:15:18.080 There's a brochure under your seat. 1.00

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.

00:16:53.880 That's not good.

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

00:17:07.140 first place.

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.

00:17:53.900 Pardon the pun.

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

00:18:07.120 invariably, these things won't make you happy.

00:18:11.140 Look, career is important. Money is important.

00:18:13.360 No one's disputing that.

00:18:14.500 But the idea that this is going to give you ultimate fulfillment is a lie, surely.

00:18:18.880 For sure.

00:18:19.280 Now, that's as old as Aristotle, who talked about, you know, the things that we think

00:18:23.600 will make us happy that don't.

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

00:18:35.980 the idols that beguile us.

00:18:38.160 And it was ever thus.

00:18:40.040 The four idols that beguile us, he said.

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.

00:18:56.020 And each one of us.

00:18:57.180 I mean, like, they're all nice.

00:18:58.580 They're all great.

00:19:00.100 And I play a song.

00:19:01.720 I teach MBA students at Harvard, and I have a game called What's My Idol?

00:19:05.880 They don't know.

00:19:06.560 Right.

00:19:07.000 They don't know.

00:19:07.600 But if you know you have unbelievable power, why?

00:19:09.740 because you know it will beguile you

00:19:11.460 and it will distract you

00:19:12.960 from what you truly want.

00:19:14.580 Faith, family, friendship,

00:19:17.680 satisfying, meaningful work,

00:19:19.560 which are the kind of the four virtuous

00:19:22.060 parts of the happiness 401k plan,

00:19:26.200 if you want.

00:19:27.060 But if you know, it's really important.

00:19:29.320 So I play this game, you know,

00:19:30.340 so that we can uncover their own idol.

00:19:31.980 And they're usually wrong.

00:19:33.100 They think it's one thing and it isn't.

00:19:34.440 And I have a series of questions

00:19:35.380 that I go through to figure out which it is.

00:19:37.280 Hey, do you want to play?

00:19:38.260 Yeah, let's play.

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00:21:03.620 Which one of you wants to play first?

00:21:05.020 Francis.

00:21:05.300 Me.

00:21:05.740 Okay.

00:21:07.060 Let's hear it for our first contestant.

00:21:09.600 So here's how What's My Idol works.

00:21:12.620 In social science, I never give you a survey and say, pick one.

00:21:16.920 I eliminate the things that it's not.

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.

00:21:24.140 This is going out on the internet.

00:21:25.860 Be loud.

00:21:26.940 Be proud.

00:21:28.000 Don't worry.

00:21:28.560 I'll do it too if you want.

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

00:21:41.620 have it at all.

00:21:42.160 So for example, if you say, I don't care about money, that doesn't mean you have no money.

00:21:44.760 You're not in poverty.

00:21:46.460 What that means is that you go to the population average.

00:21:49.660 And if it's your idol, that's torture.

00:21:52.020 Being normal is the worst if it's your idol.

00:21:55.160 Okay, so here are the four.

00:21:56.720 Money, wealth, resources, power, which is influence over the people.

00:22:01.340 It's not evil.

00:22:02.760 It's not Hugo Chavez.

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?

00:22:22.840 And last is, and last is fame.

00:22:24.920 And fame doesn't necessarily mean internet fame.

00:22:27.940 It might be prestige.

00:22:30.940 It might be...

00:22:31.920 It's like status.

00:22:33.000 Well-regarded and for the right people.

00:22:35.980 You know what I mean?

00:22:36.980 It's like for professors,

00:22:38.260 it's like most professors,

00:22:39.700 they don't want to be Taylor Swift.

00:22:44.240 What most professors want

00:22:45.320 is to walk into the room of that conference

00:22:46.960 and everybody says,

00:22:47.760 that's Professor Kissing.

00:22:49.860 It's like he wrote that paper

00:22:51.180 on the seven-dimensional disappearing manifold.

00:22:54.580 Yeah, I definitely don't want that.

00:22:57.060 But you do want prestige in your field, right?

00:23:02.100 So fame can mean all sorts of things.

00:23:04.340 Now you're thinking about these things, Francis, you got to get rid of one.

00:23:08.500 Which one do you get rid of first?

00:23:09.820 Okay.

00:23:10.820 So we've got fame.

00:23:11.820 Money, power, pleasure, and fame.

00:23:13.460 Money, power, pleasure, fame.

00:23:16.760 Or honor, you know, honor, which is, that's the old word.

00:23:19.940 That's the word that Aquinas uses is honor.

00:23:22.460 Instead of?

00:23:23.460 Instead of fame.

00:23:24.460 But that has kind of a connotation.

00:23:26.340 You know, I have two of my kids are Marines.

00:23:27.920 They serve with honor.

00:23:28.680 That's not what I mean.

00:23:29.560 Right, right, right.

00:23:30.780 I'd say power.

00:23:31.980 Power.

00:23:32.340 Tell me why.

00:23:33.560 And by the way, I believe you.

00:23:34.960 But tell me why.

00:23:35.920 Tell me.

00:23:37.260 Look, I kind of see it like through kind of an addict's lens.

00:23:41.200 And I'll tell you why.

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.

00:23:52.860 I get nothing from it.

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.

00:24:03.780 That's what matters to me.

00:24:05.160 Like, have I done my best?

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.

00:24:18.320 You don't want to order people around?

00:24:19.600 No.

00:24:20.000 Snap your fingers and people do what you want?

00:24:21.920 No.

00:24:22.200 You don't want to be a CEO?

00:24:23.900 No.

00:24:24.220 So, let me make a supposition about you.

00:24:28.300 Do you have libertarian political tendencies?

00:24:30.980 Yeah, I kind of want to be left alone.

00:24:32.220 Do you hate it when people tell you what to do? 0.99

00:24:34.440 I fucking hate it. 0.99

00:24:35.300 Yep, there you go. 1.00

00:24:36.600 And when people who hate actually seeing,

00:24:39.180 having other people have power over them,

00:24:40.680 don't like power.

00:24:42.140 Here's the thing.

00:24:43.160 When you see somebody who has a particular idol,

00:24:45.700 they admire somebody who has the same idol,

00:24:47.760 but more of it.

00:24:48.860 So, if you see a politician who admires dictators,

00:24:52.400 look out.

00:24:53.720 That person wants to be a dictator.

00:24:55.500 Look at who you admire.

00:24:57.220 If you admire rich people,

00:24:59.200 if you admire famous people,

00:25:00.800 that's your idol, almost certainly.

00:25:02.140 You despise powerful people

00:25:04.400 who wield it arbitrarily, right?

00:25:06.660 Yeah. 0.94

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.

00:25:11.740 So I totally believe you.

00:25:13.180 Now, you've just gotten rid of an idol

00:25:14.980 that's not an idol, so there's no virtue.

00:25:17.420 Okay, you've got three left.

00:25:18.780 Money, pleasure, and fame.

00:25:21.100 You've got to get rid of one more,

00:25:22.060 and this is going to get harder now

00:25:23.280 because these are all kind of nice, right?

00:25:31.100 Fame.

00:25:32.980 Sorry, I don't believe you.

00:25:34.440 You have a famous podcast.

00:25:37.140 No, but you know,

00:25:39.940 I, no, I'll tell you why.

00:25:42.380 I know enough about myself

00:25:45.280 that I know pleasure.

00:25:47.180 I know pleasure.

00:25:47.960 You know where you're driving with this, right?

00:25:49.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:25:50.360 Okay, now,

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.

00:26:01.120 Yeah.

00:26:01.500 Because you've got millions and millions and millions of viewers.

00:26:04.040 Yeah.

00:26:04.280 And they go into, oh, I love trigonometry and it feels kind of good.

00:26:07.320 Yeah.

00:26:07.680 But you don't care.

00:26:09.620 It's not that I don't care.

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.

00:26:18.460 But it's third in that list.

00:26:22.020 I wouldn't pretend it doesn't matter because it does.

00:26:24.300 But if I'm being honest, it's third.

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.

00:26:30.600 And that's because what's left is pleasure.

00:26:32.680 Yes.

00:26:33.060 Tell me about the pleasure idol.

00:26:36.640 I could have told you this from the moment we started. 1.00

00:26:39.500 Francis, are you a porn addict? 1.00

00:26:40.720 I'm kidding. 1.00

00:26:44.080 That's right.

00:26:45.000 The last episode of Trigonometry.

00:26:47.840 Yeah. I just, I have, there is a family history in, obviously, my family with alcoholism.

00:26:55.480 Alcoholism, yeah.

00:26:56.900 I know that I have those tendencies, which is why I don't drink.

00:27:02.080 Yep.

00:27:02.520 It's why I have to be very regimented with my life.

00:27:06.680 I meditate every morning.

00:27:07.900 Right.

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.

00:27:15.960 I have depressive tendencies

00:27:18.320 and when I do

00:27:19.760 and when I indulge

00:27:20.720 those depressive tendencies

00:27:21.860 it either goes

00:27:23.100 it can go

00:27:23.960 it goes very quickly

00:27:25.340 down a dark path

00:27:26.360 and you try to alleviate

00:27:27.520 those tendencies

00:27:28.480 with immediate pleasures

00:27:29.720 which ultimately

00:27:30.500 make the problem worse

00:27:31.280 yeah

00:27:31.580 like every comedian

00:27:32.700 I got diagnosed with ADHD

00:27:34.160 and I know that I have those

00:27:36.480 trying to ameliorate

00:27:38.320 those

00:27:38.860 those best set of behaviors

00:27:41.080 whatever you want to call them

00:27:42.180 yeah

00:27:42.420 and ameliorate it with

00:27:43.980 substances

00:27:44.900 and various different behaviors

00:27:47.040 that I know are deeply destructive.

00:27:49.060 Yeah, I completely believe you.

00:27:50.740 And I completely believe that.

00:27:52.180 And it's interesting because

00:27:53.220 I've actually studied how humor works.

00:27:56.040 And humor is all based on surprise.

00:27:58.400 And so you're usually really good

00:27:59.980 at being surprised

00:28:00.840 or you're good at surprising people.

00:28:03.080 So humor works on a part of the limbic system

00:28:05.440 called the parahippocampal gyrus.

00:28:07.080 And you flick it and it creates surprise

00:28:10.380 which you resolve by laughing. 1.00

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

00:30:05.640 Lift, lift, lift, lift.

00:30:07.920 Yeah, I like it.

00:30:09.340 But I just know that if I do that,

00:30:12.440 that again, I see my life essentially

00:30:14.900 and my behavior and the way I plan my life

00:30:19.020 as a series of guardrails.

00:30:20.440 If I don't have the guardrails in place,

00:30:22.700 we go somewhere very dark, very quickly.

00:30:24.680 Right, right, right.

00:30:25.820 You ready?

00:30:26.520 Yeah.

00:30:27.500 All right.

00:30:28.040 This can be difficult.

00:30:28.940 I can't eliminate any of them.

00:30:30.360 You can, I can.

00:30:31.520 Well, having a balanced portfolio of idols

00:30:34.920 is actually pretty healthy insofar

00:30:36.500 is that you're probably not managed

00:30:39.340 by any of them really vigorously.

00:30:41.080 But give them to me again.

00:30:42.460 Money, power, pleasure, and fame.

00:30:44.960 You got to get rid of one of them first.

00:30:46.380 And that means going to the population mean.

00:30:49.100 Which one do you get rid of first? 0.93

00:30:50.120 Going to the population means

00:30:51.560 if I eliminate money,

00:30:52.900 I make what an average person makes.

00:30:54.020 You're the most average Brit ever.

00:30:56.180 Which, by the way, is getting worse and worse.

00:30:57.680 Yeah, tell me about it.

00:31:00.440 I can't believe I'm saying this,

00:31:02.140 but power and fame, I'd definitely eliminate.

00:31:04.080 You would.

00:31:04.400 you would. You're pretty libertarian, too.

00:31:07.520 I'm very libertarian. I fucking hate people 1.00

00:31:09.220 telling me what to do, but I am CEO of 0.99

00:31:11.080 trigonometry, and I do run it, right?

00:31:13.100 Because it must be done. Because it must be done.

00:31:15.080 I'd rather not do it. But if people start

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.

00:31:20.920 Yeah, it's king. Yeah, yeah. So, you're

00:31:23.160 a hierarchical organization that has the

00:31:25.160 that's flatter

00:31:27.300 than it could be, because you don't

00:31:29.080 like it when people call you by your last name.

00:31:31.240 No. That stuff really bums you out.

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.

00:32:00.520 It's not oxygen for you?

00:32:01.900 No, not at all.

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.

00:32:09.180 Like I enjoy having that conversation.

00:32:13.660 But if I could just walk around and people didn't recognize me, that would definitely be my purpose.

00:32:17.100 Are you an extrovert or an introvert?

00:32:18.360 Introvert.

00:32:18.800 You are an introvert, which means that when you do something big like ARC, that you're drained of energy.

00:32:24.080 Absolutely.

00:32:24.680 I need to rest for a week.

00:32:25.780 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:26.380 So an extrovert would be wired after that.

00:32:29.660 That's really how you find out, because introverts can be very public, but they don't get energy

00:32:34.340 from being public.

00:32:34.860 I get tired from being with lots of other people.

00:32:37.320 Okay.

00:32:37.660 So you like solitude?

00:32:39.720 I love solitude.

00:32:40.920 You like being alone or being alone just with your family?

00:32:43.180 Yeah.

00:32:43.820 Massively.

00:32:44.620 Interesting.

00:32:45.140 Alone.

00:32:45.620 Okay.

00:32:47.640 I've got two young kids, you can tell.

00:32:49.360 Yeah.

00:32:49.760 Yeah.

00:32:50.120 Yeah.

00:32:50.680 And so there were just two left, which is money and pleasure.

00:32:55.740 Well, I really value comfort.

00:32:58.920 Right.

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

00:36:36.780 That's really interesting.

00:36:37.720 You call it joke coke, don't you?

00:36:38.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:36:39.360 It's a joke coke.

00:36:40.280 Yeah, totally.

00:36:41.380 It's interesting.

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.

00:36:50.740 It's a hard life.

00:36:51.440 Yeah.

00:36:51.880 The travel, all of it.

00:36:53.900 And I was very happy to not do it anymore

00:36:57.540 when COVID came along and, you know, everything shifted.

00:37:00.080 Really?

00:37:00.560 Yeah.

00:37:00.820 Oh, super.

00:37:01.180 I hated being taken off the road.

00:37:02.900 I hated it.

00:37:03.660 Really?

00:37:04.080 I love being on tour.

00:37:04.900 I started going on tour when I was 19.

00:37:06.480 because I was a professional classical musician

00:37:08.540 all the way through my 20s.

00:37:09.920 And I started going on chamber music tours.

00:37:12.540 I toured for a couple of years with Charlie Bird,

00:37:14.340 who is a bossa nova guitar player.

00:37:16.200 And I love tour.

00:37:17.480 I love the touring life.

00:37:19.060 It's just the best.

00:37:20.440 And it's not a well-balanced, healthy life,

00:37:23.220 which means that married life and family life

00:37:25.660 actually saved me.

00:37:27.040 But left to my devices,

00:37:28.320 I would be outside of Israel. 0.82

00:37:29.420 Right, right, right.

00:37:30.900 I want to come back to something you said.

00:37:33.420 And obviously the meaning issue

00:37:35.220 is something we've talked about a lot.

00:37:36.840 And the activism issue

00:37:38.120 is something we've talked about a lot.

00:37:40.160 I know on this show really well, too.

00:37:42.140 Well, thank you.

00:37:43.200 Because we're really trying to get to the bottom of it.

00:37:45.260 I think it's very easy and tempting

00:37:47.260 for people who, you know,

00:37:50.020 who've maybe got their life together a little bit

00:37:52.060 and they're successful in some ways

00:37:54.240 to just look at people who are, you know,

00:37:57.540 throwing soup on paintings to save the planet or whatever. 0.96

00:38:00.440 And, you know, it's kind of silly 0.76

00:38:01.840 and you make fun of it.

00:38:03.000 But I think I've always seen that within that is the drive to have meaning.

00:38:09.800 And it's the drive to be significant as well.

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.

00:38:30.040 Otherwise, everything is going to go haywire.

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?

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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

00:41:50.640 in a long time.

00:41:52.100 And it's really an extraordinary thing.

00:41:53.440 I mean, they're spending their time scrolling

00:41:54.760 and dating online.

00:41:57.160 It's just incredibly numbing behaviors.

00:41:59.880 They kind of wiped out all sense of boredom,

00:42:02.060 but their lives are grindingly boring.

00:42:04.700 And so the result of it is

00:42:05.840 they want to feel something,

00:42:06.960 maybe for the first time in a long time.

00:42:08.940 That's what it comes down to.

00:42:09.840 The second problem is that 0.75

00:42:11.020 a lot of young people today

00:42:11.980 have been effectively conscripted 0.99

00:42:13.900 into a culture war by baby boomers 1.00

00:42:15.740 and they've been made to understand 0.76

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

00:44:57.660 of the dark triad activist boomer. 0.94

00:45:01.940 You know, the person who's a narcissist,

00:45:04.280 the person who's Machiavellian,

00:45:05.480 the person who has psychopathic tendencies,

00:45:07.200 which, by the way, the research is very clear,

00:45:09.560 describes most real activist leaders today

00:45:12.580 in the political environment.

00:45:14.680 They have these tendencies. 0.99

00:45:15.820 That's 7% of the population is dark triad. 0.77

00:45:18.700 But they're disproportionately represented

00:45:20.980 in the activist community,

00:45:22.120 and they want soldiers.

00:45:25.140 How do you get that?

00:45:26.000 By freaking them out.

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,

00:45:42.300 is they say comparison is a thief of joy,

00:45:44.880 and with social media we live in a perpetual state of comparison?

00:45:48.100 Yeah, no, that's absolutely the case.

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

00:46:49.980 into the left hemisphere of the brain.

00:46:52.460 The right hemisphere is mystery and meaning

00:46:54.500 and significance and purpose and love and hope.

00:46:58.260 It's the right side of the brain.

00:46:59.680 But no, no, you're over there in the world of information

00:47:02.100 you didn't ask for,

00:47:03.700 for things that actually promise you everything

00:47:06.320 and deliver nothing.

00:47:08.080 And it was the complicated problems

00:47:09.940 of engineering and analysis

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?

00:47:18.220 You're going to be sad and angry.

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?

00:47:29.820 It can, absolutely.

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

00:54:20.260 and triggering and whatever.

00:54:22.800 So we keep reverting to this very bad mean.

00:54:26.740 Why is that?

00:54:28.040 Well, because people want,

00:54:29.380 they want the immediate emotional hit.

00:54:32.700 I mean, because something that actually gets you

00:54:35.260 into this hedonic state,

00:54:36.680 it gives you a lot of dopamine.

00:54:38.620 I mean, the idea that somebody said something

00:54:40.320 that triggers you,

00:54:41.400 something that offends you,

00:54:43.040 that actually gives you the sense

00:54:44.480 that you're right and they're wrong.

00:54:46.240 And that's really, really satisfying.

00:54:48.520 It feels good to be right and to hear somebody that you don't like

00:54:52.040 saying something you think is wrong.

00:54:53.920 That's why you'll pass it on.

00:54:55.180 That's why you kind of know it's out of context.

00:54:58.420 But that's no fun.

00:55:01.120 You'll actually pass that on.

00:55:02.820 It's satisfying.

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.

00:55:11.020 That's a drag, man.

00:55:13.240 What do we do about that?

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.

00:55:24.280 I mean, there's nothing new under the sun.

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.

00:55:44.960 and Thomas Jefferson was sniping at John Adams

00:55:48.280 and they were telling lies about each other.

00:55:50.200 And there were people that were lying about,

00:55:51.560 we look back in the glory days,

00:55:53.360 everybody loved George Washington.

00:55:54.660 No.

00:55:55.800 I mean, if you look at the second term of George Washington,

00:55:57.760 he literally wouldn't read the newspapers

00:55:59.760 because they were so calumnious about him.

00:56:02.440 They were lying about him

00:56:03.480 and saying terrible things about him.

00:56:05.160 The newspapers in those days

00:56:06.440 were all completely aligned

00:56:07.760 with one particular political party.

00:56:10.240 And so, and the ones that were against him

00:56:12.720 in New York or whatever.

00:56:14.360 And so there's nothing new under the sun.

00:56:15.900 This is the way that this works.

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.

00:56:24.540 But that's always the long game.

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.

00:56:37.080 Because if it doesn't, then there is no hope.

00:56:39.800 This is a question I really wanted to ask, which is, does taking risk make us happier?

00:56:46.460 So the answer is maybe.

00:56:48.420 Well, it depends on what happens, I imagine.

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

00:57:27.520 they were able to do.

00:57:28.120 But that's actually not the best example.

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.

00:57:36.640 That is the ultimate enterprise.

00:57:39.300 A family, a marriage, babies, that's an enterprise.

00:57:43.640 That's a way bigger deal than Apple Computer.

00:57:46.340 That's a way bigger deal.

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,

00:57:52.760 which is problematic.

00:57:53.880 But that's risk in the enterprise of life.

00:57:57.100 And I talk to my students about this all the time.

00:57:58.980 I say, you want to be an entrepreneur?

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

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01:01:07.720 See how your gold can stop costing you money

01:01:10.000 and start earning you more gold.

01:01:11.820 That's monetary-metals.com slash trigonometry.

01:01:15.900 And metaphorically speaking,

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.

01:01:25.880 I think metaphorically it's interesting 0.88

01:01:28.300 because when Neo leaves The Matrix, life is shitty.

01:01:32.840 Yeah, but it's life. 0.69

01:01:34.940 But it's life.

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.

01:01:45.520 No.

01:01:45.920 But it's meaningful.

01:01:46.940 And it's not just the risk.

01:01:48.860 It's actually saying, I want the suffering.

01:01:51.700 Yeah.

01:01:52.140 I want it.

01:01:53.040 Bring it on.

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.

01:01:59.680 The glory of God is a person fully alive.

01:02:02.220 What's a person fully alive?

01:02:03.200 That's a person in pain.

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,

01:03:01.360 and then you understood who you were

01:03:03.260 because you survived

01:03:04.500 and you understood something

01:03:06.280 through your suffering,

01:03:07.160 that's critically, critically important.

01:03:09.260 And there's no suffering in the matrix.

01:03:12.040 I mean, we need to,

01:03:13.240 I make my students say,

01:03:14.540 my suffering is sacred.

01:03:16.440 And they have this little mantra

01:03:17.540 that I give them to wake up each morning,

01:03:20.080 whether they're on their knees or not,

01:03:21.760 and to say, I'm truly grateful

01:03:22.980 for the things that are going to happen this day.

01:03:25.380 You know, the psalm,

01:03:26.480 this is the day that the Lord has made.

01:03:27.980 I will rejoice and be glad in it.

01:03:29.240 But I will also rejoice and be glad in the suffering I'm going to face this day,

01:03:33.640 in the setbacks I'm going to face this day.

01:03:35.440 Bring it on.

01:03:36.920 That's a life fully alive.

01:03:38.960 Yeah.

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.

01:03:47.660 And there's something to that, isn't there?

01:03:50.060 There's something to that.

01:03:50.920 People are not afraid of breaking up because of the pain it's going to bring,

01:03:54.380 but because they're afraid of the pain per se.

01:03:57.500 I mean, I didn't say that right.

01:03:59.680 You know, pain isn't a problem.

01:04:01.820 Our fear of pain is the problem.

01:04:04.900 And by the way, we're evolved for that.

01:04:07.100 I mean, social pain and rejection,

01:04:08.920 it actually implicates a little part of the limbic system

01:04:11.940 called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex,

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

01:04:20.940 or someone that we love.

01:04:22.460 Because if we didn't, you know,

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.

01:05:51.000 It is.

01:05:51.580 Well, actually, what's inevitable is pain.

01:05:54.500 So suffering equals pain times resistance to pain.

01:05:59.020 So that's sort of the right formula.

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.

01:06:11.460 It's processed in one part of the cortex.

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.

01:06:45.440 That's how Tylenol works.

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.

01:06:55.900 So it's important to keep that in mind.

01:06:57.560 So that's pain.

01:06:58.560 And pain is super important.

01:07:01.380 It's how you learn.

01:07:02.760 It's how you learn not to do things, et cetera.

01:07:05.840 And it's inevitable.

01:07:07.340 But when you multiply it by resistance, then you understand that suffering is not inevitable.

01:07:11.780 And that's how meaning comes into the picture.

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,

01:08:43.540 is really the first noble truth of Buddhism.

01:08:44.880 It comes from attachment.

01:08:46.400 Attachment is a form of resistance

01:08:48.100 to not getting what you want.

01:08:51.660 The second noble truth of Buddhism

01:08:52.960 is the attachment per se,

01:08:55.740 is that explanation.

01:08:56.700 The third noble truth of Buddhism

01:08:57.820 is that the solution is detachment,

01:09:00.260 non-resistance.

01:09:01.720 And the way to get that

01:09:02.460 is the fourth noble truth of Buddhism,

01:09:03.960 which is where it gets complicated,

01:09:05.440 the Eightfold Path.

01:09:07.460 So it's like, yes, yes, yes.

01:09:08.980 And then you get the Eightfold Path

01:09:09.860 and you're like, that's a lot of work.

01:09:12.360 What is that?

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,

01:11:09.600 I have a problematic, loudmouth employee

01:11:12.480 who's lighting me up on the Slack channel, 0.96

01:11:15.040 I'll fire them. 0.80

01:11:16.220 I'm getting rid of pain. 0.96

01:11:17.360 I'm not going to have non-resistance to that

01:11:18.800 because it's not right for me to practice non-resistance

01:11:22.220 in the lives of other people, right?

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.

01:11:29.840 But if you only think there's one lever,

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.

01:13:46.520 I mean, we have a negativity bias.

01:13:48.600 Homo sapiens have a negativity bias.

01:13:51.200 You know, you don't want to be focusing

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

01:13:59.420 sneaking up behind you.

01:14:00.500 You need to be focused on the saber-tooth tiger,

01:14:02.620 not on the good things, bad things.

01:14:04.940 You know, if you're sitting at a party

01:14:07.580 and somebody's smiling sweetly at you

01:14:09.400 from across the room, that's nice.

01:14:11.020 But if somebody's frowning angrily at you, take note.

01:14:14.620 That might be a big problem

01:14:15.620 once you get outside on the street.

01:14:17.180 And so we do.

01:14:18.420 We notice all the terrible things

01:14:19.820 that are happening to us,

01:14:20.680 and that's amplified in the environment of grief.

01:14:24.620 So what do we do?

01:14:25.520 We have to manually turn up the part

01:14:27.720 that's less natural,

01:14:29.100 which is positive affect about naturally good things.

01:14:32.440 And it's funny how we do this.

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

01:14:37.880 In 1999, our oldest was one,

01:14:41.000 and he fell out of a third-story window.

01:14:42.940 And it was horrible.

01:14:44.040 It was horrible.

01:14:44.620 And he was going to die.

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.

01:15:24.100 And Satan says, you know your boy, Job?

01:15:27.620 I bet I can get him.

01:15:28.960 And God says, no, you can't.

01:15:31.000 He says, watch. 1.00

01:15:32.220 And so he goes and kills all Job's kids 0.99

01:15:34.380 and he takes all his animals 0.99

01:15:36.300 and he takes everything away from Job.

01:15:39.020 You know what Job says?

01:15:40.220 Before the whole story starts, he said,

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

01:18:56.620 to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount.

01:19:00.560 It's completely risk-free, so check it out today.

01:19:22.520 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - July 11, 2026

Why Crazy Activism is Taking Over the West — Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

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