transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Hello, my friends. Today, my guest is Dr. Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor, social scientist, best-selling author, and one of the world's leading voices on the science of happiness, meaning, and human flourishing. Dr. Brooks has spent decades studying what makes life not just successful but truly fulfilling. His work bridges psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and lived experience, offering a practical framework for understanding happiness in a way that's both deeply scientific, but also deeply human. So, it was honestly an incredible privilege to sit down, not just to interview him, but to learn from him. This episode is an in-depth discussion on happiness, meaning, emotional well-being, and the habits that help us build richer, more connected lives. Dr. Brooks and I discuss why happiness is not simply a feeling, but a composite built from what he calls the three core macronutrients, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We discuss the crucial distinction between pleasure and enjoyment, and why social connection, memory, and awareness transform fleeting pleasure into something deeper and more lasting. We also talk about why struggle is essential to satisfaction, and how doing hard things, whether in work, relationships, or even just physical training can be a major source of fulfillment. We discuss how ambitious people often can fall into the striver's curse, and the hedonic treadmill chasing achievement, status, validation without finding lasting satisfaction. We also talk about how to avoid this trap. We discuss the four major false idols that can quietly distort our lives, including money, power, pleasure, and admiration, and how to recognize which one may be driving your behavior, and what to do to change it. We discuss how a simple gratitude practice can counter resentment, reorient attention, and measurably increase happiness over time. We talk about why modern technology and constant phone use may be interfering with our attention, and our ability to experience boredom, reflection, meaning, and even love. And we discuss some best practices to take breaks from our digital habits. Dr. Brooks' framework for different emotional profiles and why some people may need to focus less on becoming happier, and more on becoming less unhappy, and how this will have a great impact on our happiness. We also talk about practical ways to strengthen marriage, friendship, purpose, service, and love, and why these bonds become some of the most important predictors of happiness across the lifespan. We discuss how happiness and social connection is one of the best predictors of longevity, and so much more. Before we dive into this podcast, a few quick announcements. The Found My Fitness podcast is community supported by listeners like you. No ads, no supplements, no sponsorships. This ensures the scientific integrity of the information I share remains uncompromised and free from external influence. If you value the unbiased, high-quality health information I provide in this podcast and all the information I share across all of my platforms, please consider becoming a FoundMyFitness premium member. Your membership directly supports my podcast, my newsletter, YouTube channel, and the comprehensive and authoritative topic pages featured on my website. And as a premium member, you'll receive cool exclusive perks. So one, the Aliquot podcast. This is a private podcast for members only. We have over 140 episodes on anything and everything related to health and protocols to reach your maximum potential. We also have monthly live and recorded Q&A sessions where I answer your most pressing questions, whatever they may be, but usually about the science of longevity. I also send you science digest emails every other week. 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Last week, I sent out an email newsletter on how to achieve your peak span. So lifespan is about extending your life. Health span is about extending the number of years you live disease free. Peak span is trying to remain at 90% of your peak for various domains. So we bring you the cutting edge science and the protocols to achieve your best. Please pause and sign up for my email newsletter today at foundmyfitness.com/newsletter, N E W S L E T T E R. Again, that's foundmyfitness.com/newsletter. All right. And now on to this amazing, amazing episode with Dr. Arthur Brooks. Hi, everyone. I'm sitting here with Dr. Arthur Brooks, who is a professor at Harvard. He's a social scientist who studies the science of happiness. He's got a couple of New York Time bestselling books from strength to strength. Build the life you want. He's got a new one coming out that is called The Meaning of Life.

Speaker 2:
[06:00] The Meaning of Your Life.

Speaker 1:
[06:01] The Meaning of Your Life. I am so, so, so excited to be sitting here having this conversation with Dr. Brooks. And I know all you all are going to love this episode. I mean, I was just telling Arthur, just doing the background research that I do, I learned so much. I started applying, I started already applying things to my life on date night. I was like just rattling off all this stuff to my husband. I mean, I'm so excited to have this conversation.

Speaker 2:
[06:27] Thank you. I've been a long time listener, first time participant in the show. I love your show. It's just great information based on science. It's right in my wheelhouse and so many other millions of Americans. Thank you for what you're doing.

Speaker 1:
[06:37] Oh, thank you. Let's jumpstart this show.

Speaker 2:
[06:41] Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1:
[06:42] And if you would have asked me this three weeks ago, what is happiness?

Speaker 2:
[06:50] Right, what would you have said?

Speaker 1:
[06:51] I would have said happiness is, well, I think I would have based it more on how you feel, feeling good.

Speaker 2:
[06:58] Something like, I can't put it into words, but I know when I feel it.

Speaker 1:
[07:01] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[07:02] Yeah, yeah, I know when I feel it. Or it's how I feel when I'm with my husband, when I'm with my son. It's how I feel when I'm in the zone and doing what I love. That, that, that's happiness, right?

Speaker 1:
[07:13] Totally.

Speaker 2:
[07:13] And that's the, that's evidence of happiness. That's the smell of the turkey, not the turkey. You know, Thanksgiving dinner, you know what's going on. You're going to mom's house and you open the door like, yeah, it's time for Thanksgiving dinner, but that's not the dinner. That's the evidence of the dinner. And that's how feelings of happiness work. They're evidence of the actual phenomenon. And if you want to get happier, you need to know what it is. In the same way that you need to know what Thanksgiving dinner is, if you want to make one and eat one. Now, for a lot of people, that means the dishes or the ingredients, but for you and me, it means macros. It means protein, carbohydrates, and fat. That's Thanksgiving dinner. That's why people think we're unsentimental people, right? In the science community. But the truth of the matter is that's how happiness works as well. There's macronutrients to it. There's component parts. There's elements to it. And to get happier, you need to know what they are. You need the definition, and you need to understand how the science works, as well as change habits in your life, along each one of the three macronutrient elements of human happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three skills. Those are the three elements, and you need them in balance and abundance, like your protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And that's where I'm going to start my class. We're recording on a Friday. Monday is my first lecture at the Harvard Business School to my MBA students, and we're going to start with enjoyment. Then we're going to talk about satisfaction. Then the biggie, biggie is meaning. That's what my new book is about.

Speaker 1:
[08:37] Well, let's start with enjoyment and, you know, chasing enjoyment. Are you chasing that momentary pleasure?

Speaker 2:
[08:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[08:46] What is enjoyment?

Speaker 2:
[08:47] So a lot of people who watch this show, they have a good foundation in science. And your background leads you to, I mean, you understand this stuff. You're the best at explaining this. So this, the understanding of enjoyment and distinguishing it from pleasure takes us back to this old neuroscience explanation of the human brain, the triune brain. Remember the old triune brain during Cosmos in the 80s and 90s with that show with Carl Sagan. He talked about the stars and space. But sometimes he would talk about the dark matter between our ears. And then he would talk about the mysteries of the human brain. He always relied on Paul McClain, the famous neuroscientist from the 60s and 70s, his concept of the triune brain. That is the organization of the human brain in three parts based on evolution. The oldest part of the brain is the reptilian brain, the brain stem, the cerebellum, the spinal cord. That set of structures has been around for 40 million years. We share it with snakes and lizards, et cetera. That does all of the stuff below your level of awareness and all the automatic things. That's gathering data. Right now, Rhonda's reptilian brain, it's like the lights, the air temperature. I'm talking to Arthur, but you're not thinking about those things, but you're getting the data. Those data are going to the second part of your brain, which is newer, which is the limbic system, also known as the paleo-mammalian brain. That's between two and 40 million years old. It predates homo sapiens, and we have in common with all the mammals. And that takes the data from the Ritalian brain, and it translates it into emotions. So this is a big mistake that my students and everybody makes is feelings. I want good feelings. I don't want so many bad feelings. Wrong. There's no such thing as bad feelings. There's positive and negative emotions, and all they are are signals. They're signals that your brain has ascertained either a threat or an opportunity that you should either avoid or approach. Negative emotions are supposed to be uncomfortable. They're supposed to be aversive so that you avoid things that might hurt you. Fear, anger, disgust and sadness, those are the four negative emotions, and they alert you to the four big threats out there. Things being abandoned by your kin, being eaten by a tiger, being poisoned by a bad chicken breast, whatever it happens to be, these elicit these negative emotions. Positive emotions do the reverse. Mates, calories, that's the reason you get these positive emotions. Then that emotional information goes to the new part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, the bumper of tissue behind your forehead, that's 30% of your brain by weight, the supercomputer, that's the C-suite, that's the executive center of your brain, where you take the emotions and if you're doing it right, and you're a self-managing individual and a grown up and mature, you say, oh, Rhonda's feeling a little bit anxious today, a little bit sad today. I wonder why that is, and you think about it, and you act the way that you decide to act and the basis of that information. Okay, now, enjoyment is a prefrontal cortex phenomenon. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. Pleasure happens to you. Pleasure is happening automatically when you touch certain levers, you know, the ventral tegmental area, the ventral striatum, part of the limbic system. And if you tap that over and over and over and over again, if your goal in life is to pursue pleasure, you're not going to arrive at happiness. You're going to wind up in rehab, basically, because that's the secret to getting addicted to stuff. But if you add people and memory, it will be a prefrontal cortex experience where you manage your pleasures, they don't manage you, and then become permanent, and that's part of happiness. So the bottom line, there's stuff that everybody has their thing, whether it's junk food or gambling or, you know, drinking beer, whatever it happens to be. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong, is what it comes down to. Solitary experiences of things that bring pleasure and could be addictive, which most things can be, usually leads to pleasure, not to enjoyment. And that's the rule.

Speaker 1:
[12:47] What about the things that lead to pleasure that you're doing solitary or by yourself that require effort and a little bit of, you know, getting through hardship? So for example, like exercise, going for a run. I, it brings me pleasure. I love doing it alone, like going for a long run. But I'm also not just instantly achieving it. I have to like put in the work.

Speaker 2:
[13:11] Yeah. So that's general. That's not addictive, not addictive in the same way. It's not actually stimulating the neurochemistry in the same way. It's also working in the second macronutrient of happiness, which is satisfaction, not enjoyment. There's enjoyment involved and there's even pleasure involved. But really when we talk about achieving great things, whether with your work or with your exercise or whatever you're trying to do to be excellent, satisfaction is really what you're seeking. Which is achieving something with struggle. Only humans want to struggle. I mean, everybody watching this show, I mean, it's like they understand struggle, right? It's like, you know, it's like, how do you find your fitness? You find your fitness by going and looking for it and doing stuff. It's not like you're finding your fitness is like stumbling across a genie's lantern on the beach. That's not how that's not your point in the show. Your point is learn about all this stuff and go do things, go do hard things. That struggle is super important. If you want to have satisfaction in your life, that second pillar, do hard things and struggle and learn how to struggle and that's the point. That satisfaction that you get from that, that gives your life a sense of sweetness to it. That's a weird thing. Only homo sapiens want to struggle. You have little kids, so you know. How many kids do you have?

Speaker 1:
[14:27] Just one.

Speaker 2:
[14:27] Just one. How old?

Speaker 1:
[14:28] Eight. Eight.

Speaker 2:
[14:29] Okay, perfect. Junior, right? I mean, he's your son, right?

Speaker 1:
[14:33] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:34] You're bringing him home from Little League. He plays sports?

Speaker 1:
[14:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:37] Yeah, okay. Of course, he plays sports. And you drive by the Dairy Queen, right? And here in Southern California, and it's like 4.30 in the afternoon. It's like, mommy, let's stop for ice cream. And you're like, it's 4.30. And he says, so? You say, it's almost dinner time. She's like, so? Because he's smart. And you say, you'll spoil your dinner. And he doesn't understand. So who cares? And then you lie to him because you're a scientist and you're all about fitness and health and diet. And you'll say, it's not healthy ice cream instead of a healthy dinner. Really what you want him to learn is that he's not going to, he's not going to appreciate his dinner. He's not going to enjoy his dinner. If he's not hungry, you want him to his little prefrontal cortex to wire in this conclusion that good things come to those who wait, that I'm really going to enjoy my dinner only when I'm hungry. See, if you were honest, you'd say, I want you to suffer. It doesn't sound good, but it's literally true because then he'll learn that lesson. And that's what we're learning all the time, all the time, all the time. The most successful people. Now, there's a danger to this, which is that the strivers that are watching us, the successful people, all they learn to do is suffer. Right? It's like the old marshmallow experiment, where if you pass on the marshmallow, you get two marshmallows. They pass on all the marshmallows to get more marshmallows and never eat any marshmallows. That's a lot of lives, actually.

Speaker 1:
[15:56] Well, I definitely want to get into your striver's curse and all that, but before I want to jump back to the enjoyment, because an interesting question that comes up is these unhappy things that cause unhappiness. I mean, this stuff happens in our lives. I don't know that some people think because those things happen to them, that they can't be happy, but that's not necessarily true.

Speaker 2:
[16:21] Yeah, that's wrong. Back in the 60s, which I don't really remember, and you weren't born, the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. I remember my dad hearing that, he's like, that's the end of America. You know, he was kind of right. But that was a misguided way of understanding life because that was all about the pleasure lever. That's the reason that, you know, the drug culture, the hippie culture led to so much hardship, it's because it was unbridled pleasure as opposed to the pursuit of enjoyment, which is a more human, a more disciplined kind of thing. The problem today is exactly the opposite, where we tell a lot of young people, if it feels bad, you got to make it stop. There's this eliminationist view. And so, for example, I mean, life has a lot of sadness and anxiety in it. We all face sadness and anxiety. If you go to campus counseling and you say, I'm sad and anxious, they'll say, that's a problem. We got to treat that. I understand liability. I hang out on a campus. But the truth of the matter is, in my university, if you're studying at Harvard and you're not sad and anxious, you need therapy. It's a hard thing that you're doing. Look, if you don't have a lot of trouble, you're not digging in. You're not digging in in life. And so you need to understand that it can be obstructive, it can be dysregulated. Of course, it can become a medical problem, to be sure. But the idea that you can't be happy because of unhappiness is completely wrong. On the contrary, you can't be happy unless you're unhappy. You need unhappiness because the road to it passes through a life that's fully alive. And the limbic system creates positive and negative emotionality in different structures for different reasons. You wouldn't want to get rid of a whole set of emotions and leave yourself in danger just because you want another set of emotions. You want the whole menu in front of you in this particular way. You just need to manage your negative and fire up the positive. And that's what the science helps you do.

Speaker 1:
[18:17] And so when it comes to, you know, tacking this like pleasure things or, you know, to get the enjoyment, we need to bring to have it with a person, to have an experience with someone else not doing it by ourselves. I mean, is that is there like some practical tips people can do to kind of like train themselves to engage in that kind of behavior?

Speaker 2:
[18:39] Yeah, is to start looking at the it's funny because the brain, certain things don't give you pleasure. You give yourself pleasure. You understand your brain is a pleasure factory by getting really, really good at certain things. So some people just don't like sweets. I don't understand it. I'm crazy about sweets. I'm just eating nothing but sweets. I mean, I just, I love sugar, right? And I understand that my brain is incredibly good. My dopamine pathways are just highly skilled at giving me a sense of pleasure on the basis of that. Other people, it's like, I don't get it. You know, I do a lot of talks in Vegas for different things. I'm on the road all the time giving speeches. And I see people at four o'clock in the morning pulling the lever on the one-arm band. I'm like, dude, that is so boring and sad. All that means is I don't get any pleasure from that because my brain doesn't work that particular way. So we all have that thing. Now, again, there are lots of things that you can do that are not addictive at all, like walking in the woods or saying your prayers. Great. Alone, great. And solitude is beautiful. It's not isolation. Isolation and solitude are two different phenomena. And so having solitude, where there is something that you truly love, that's great by yourself. But the things that can be addictive, even internet use, even eating, they're best accompanied by other people. And that's how the brain was evolved. We still have the Pleistocene brain from 250,000 years ago. And almost all the time when people ask, why do we do fill in the blank weird thing, there's evolutionary biology and psychology that will explain it from the habituation to the Pleistocene. When Homo sapiens lived in small bands of 30 to 50 individuals that were kin related and hierarchical, why are we envious if somebody has more than we do? Because we want to rise in a little 30 to 50 person hierarchy. Why are we so afraid of offending somebody? Because if you get kicked out of the tribe, you're going to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. All of the things that we do in mating and friendship and envy, all of this stuff is kind of related to that. And this is a good example of it. We're habituated, for example, to eat around a campfire, looking at each other. And we get tremendous pleasure from that. We get oxytocin from that. We get dopamine from actually doing that. And it's very comforting to us.

Speaker 1:
[20:57] What about people that now we do have these phones and we do have, there's a lot of pleasure, particularly certain types of people. In fact, I'd say a lot of people nowadays get rewarded by scrolling social media or the news, whatever it is that they love to do on their phones. And if they are at a dinner or they're in some sort of setting with their friends or family, you oftentimes will see that they have their phones out and they're not really engaging as they normally would, perhaps if it was like 15 years ago, whatever. And we didn't have these phones there. Like, what are they missing out on? And what can they do to realize what they're missing out on? Like, we all have, we all know these people. They're probably, could be us, could be our family members.

Speaker 2:
[21:47] Absolutely. Left to your devices. I mean, you live online. I mean, the show is online and you're like, I wonder how the episode Arthur is doing. Your husband's like, honey, hello, right? And that's a normal thing that actually happens to us. There's a bunch of different reasons that we get addicted to devices and misuse our devices. And that's a lot of what I'm writing about in this new book is actually how it changes our brain. It literally changes the way that we use our brain in such a way that we can't actually ascertain the meaning of our lives. There's a use of the brain that helps you understand the meaning of your life. And you're not using your brain that way when you're using technology. It's a real problem that we're using our brains literally wrong.

Speaker 1:
[22:26] Okay, so when we get into the third macronutrient, we'll talk about that.

Speaker 2:
[22:30] We're definitely gonna talk about that.

Speaker 1:
[22:31] Awesome, I wanna hear about this. Okay, let's talk about satisfaction too.

Speaker 2:
[22:33] But generally, just on the side of how we use the devices wrong, how young people use the devices wrong, we're using it because it gives us a little reward, a dopamine reward, wondering if there's mail or notifications or whatever it happens to be. And that just, the algorithms have been designed to actually stimulate the dopamine pathways in the human brain. So the locus coeruleus has a little spritz in there. And it's weird because you know there's nothing on text that you care about, you know, there's nothing on social media that somebody's doing that is of even minor importance. But you think about that when you're waiting at a stoplight and you pull out your phone, right? That's the number one reason. The second reason is distraction from other things you don't want to think about. It's a distraction machine, which is related to the third reason, which is boredom avoidance. We hate boredom, but boredom is unbelievably important for the human brain. We're made to be bored. When we become bored, in other words, when we put people into the FMRI and you say, think about nothing, you can't do it, you immediately, your mind just starts wandering and the default mode network of the brain becomes active, which is important for you to understand. The third macronutrient we'll talk about in a minute, which is meaning. And so therefore, when you're distracting yourself to not be bored, because boredom is uncomfortable, but Mother Nature doesn't care if you don't like it. Mother Nature does all kinds of things that we don't like. We were just never able to avoid it. Now we are. So the same way that we need pain for lots and lots of things, we created analgesics that escalated in power to the point we're able literally to get rid of all of the pain, and 100,000 people died of drug overdoses last year as a result. Homo sapiens were incredibly ingenious at getting rid of little problems and creating massive problems. And that's what smartphones do. Today is to get rid of boredom because we don't like it. Dan Gilbert's experiments at Harvard on boredom, he shows that when people have to sit in a room and do nothing with nothing to do, except the option of pushing a button on a key fob to self-administer a painful electric shock, that 25% of women choose to shock themselves rather than being bored, and two-thirds of the dudes shock themselves painfully rather than being bored for just 15 minutes. He had an experiment, one guy shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. He was a sick and twisted freak and got thrown out of the experiment. But you get my point that we hate boredom. So we want the little dopamine bump. We want to distract ourselves from things we don't want to be thinking about right now because life is complicated, and we don't want to be bored. And those three things together mean that you're missing your life because it's Christmas morning and you're going.

Speaker 1:
[25:15] So that's a problem. Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[25:16] Big problem.

Speaker 1:
[25:17] And then thinking about kids growing up with it, like they're not even, at least I have like a baseline, like I remember.

Speaker 2:
[25:24] Yeah, we remember the before times.

Speaker 1:
[25:26] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the satisfaction is the big one.

Speaker 2:
[25:32] That's a big one. And it's weird because it actually leads to a problem we haven't even discussed, which is you can't keep it. You want it. It's so sweet. And this is a striver show.

Speaker 1:
[25:44] It's transient.

Speaker 2:
[25:45] This is a striver show. I mean, this is like, this is not a slacker show. This is a striver show. There's lots of slacker shows. This isn't one of them. You know, FoundMyFitness is not for, it's like, yeah, I don't know, I'm gonna chill at the beach. No, this is for, people watching this are hardcore. The problem that they have is called the striver's curse. And the striver's curse is when you work for that thing and you work for that thing and you work for that thing, because Mother Nature is telling you, if you get it, Rhonda, if you get it, it's gonna be so nice forever, you're gonna enjoy it. And then you get it, you're like, huh. Most Olympic athletes who win a medal have a clinical depression in the wake of winning an Olympic medal, like so weird. And there's a reason for it. We're wired for progress. Progress brings tons and tons of of just absolute enjoyment and satisfaction. It's wonderful to make progress. We're designed for progress. And so we incorrectly answered or believe that when we get to the goal toward our progress of the, you know, we get to Hispaniola with the ship, that, and then we'll have that ebullience, that joy forever. But that's not how the limbic system is supposed to work. That's a lie. And then when it's kind of, huh, it's okay. It's okay. We're like, life is meaningless. Life has no satisfaction. Life isn't good. And so you say, I guess a billion dollars wasn't enough. I guess I needed another billion dollars. I guess I needed another Academy Award. I guess I needed another person praising me and admiring me. I guess I need another person who says she loves me. I need a new mate, whatever it happens to be. And that's the hedonic treadmill. More, more, more, more, more, more.

Speaker 1:
[27:27] The goalpost keeps moving and you get this diminishing satisfaction.

Speaker 2:
[27:32] That's why you need some metaphysics to solve that.

Speaker 1:
[27:34] I was going to say, how do you break out of that? How do you break out of that?

Speaker 2:
[27:37] Yeah. You break out of that by understanding that the brain, human brain, gives us options beyond our animal impulses. My dog, Chucho, is a good boy. He can't break out of that. He can't break out of that cycle, right? He doesn't even know he's in the cycle, as a matter of fact, right? And so it's all animal impulses. His prefrontal cortex is wafer thin. It's like a tiny, tiny little thing. Mine is 30% of my brain by weight. And it gives me the option of animal impulses, run, run, run, run, run, another billion, another metal, another, you know, three pounds lost on the scale, or my moral aspirations. I can stand up to mother nature and say, no, no, I'm out, I'm out. And the way to do that is to realize that satisfaction that lasts is not about having more. It's about wanting less. That's how it works. Your satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by what you want, have is divided by wants. Don't always work the numerator, because you'll work yourself to death. You'll become a workaholic, success addicted, self-objectifying creature of the world. You'll ruin your relationships and be frustrated. You need just as much to manage your wants. Because when you manage the denominator, when your wants go down, your satisfaction rises and stays high.

Speaker 1:
[28:57] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:58] That's what we need.

Speaker 1:
[28:59] Okay, so you've spoken about these four sort of false, I don't know, idols.

Speaker 2:
[29:05] Idols, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:06] That people kind of substitute and think will bring them, maybe they are the wants.

Speaker 2:
[29:11] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:11] They will bring them the happiness. Yeah. I absolutely have fought, at least two of them for sure, for me. But can you talk a little bit about these four idols?

Speaker 2:
[29:23] Yeah, the four idols.

Speaker 1:
[29:23] Yeah, and why do people think they will bring them happiness?

Speaker 2:
[29:27] Yeah, I know. I mean, all of the really interesting ideas in behavioral science and neuroscience, they all kind of come from the old philosophers, it turns out, right? I mean, there's nothing new under the sun. And Aristotle was talking about what beguiles humankind. And the greatest Aristotelian thinker of the more modern times, which is still not that modern, was Thomas Aquinas. You know, Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologia in 1265, this magisterial text bringing platonic and especially Aristotelian ideas to more modern audiences. And he was an unbelievably good behavioral scientist, also a great saint. You know, I'm a Catholic, and so I love Thomas Aquinas. He's the best. But what he talked about was the idols that distract us from what we truly want. And so, you know, as a religious person, I, you know, and Aquinas said, but you want God. Even if you can't quite put your finger on it, you want God, you want the permanent truth, the real thing, the ultimate numinosity, the end and the end of all things. That's what you want. You want it. But man, it's inconvenient. There's a lot of rules, man. There's a lot of one-sided conversations. You don't really know if it's out there. And so you look at things that seem to have kind of a divine nature. Those are the idols on earth that will attract you. And he said there's four, and this is unbelievably good science because it turns out that these are the buckets that people still fall into. He just knew, right? We have surveys and data and experiments to find what he was talking about in 1265. So there goes my whole PhD. Anyway, they are money, resources, power, which is influence, not evil, it's just influence on other people. People do what you want. Pleasure, which we already talked about. And pleasure, by the way, is not just feeling good. It's also comfort, like the comfy covers, instead of going to the gym, or security, which is checking your stock portfolio every day. Same thing. And a lot of people are like, ah, I don't care about pleasure. Let's see how rich I am today. Uh-uh, that's the same thing. It's working the same circuits. And the last is honor. And that's an ancient way of saying fame, right? Fame, admiration, prestige, that it's like wanting to be liked and accepted by the right people.

Speaker 1:
[31:41] Yeah, bring it on.

Speaker 2:
[31:42] I mean, you and I are academics, fundamentally. And so, you know, it's not just like any idiot. It's people who know, right? It's what it comes down to. But there's also the admiration of strangers, which has all sorts of neurochemical benefits that we get that go back to our Pleistocene brains, that we really want that, makes you insane. So those are the big four, money, power, pleasure and fame, fundamentally. Everybody is most beguiled by one. And when they know what their weakness is, they have pure strength. Because if you know your weakness, you can actually fight against it, avoid a bunch of errors and understand what you most regret. That's why this is really important. So I have a game with my MBA students called What's My Idol? You wanna play? Yeah. All right, let's find out Rhonda's Idol. And you probably know.

Speaker 1:
[32:27] I have two, I think.

Speaker 2:
[32:28] Yeah, but we'll find out which one is bigger.

Speaker 1:
[32:30] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[32:31] All right, okay. The way to do this, and as you know, in the way that we do our work is when you're trying to select something is better to eliminate, that gives you a truer understanding. Eliminating things that it's not always gives you more focus on what it is. So of the four, we're going to look at which one you'd get rid of first, which doesn't mean you don't have it. It just means you go to the population meme. So for example, if you say, I don't care about money, that doesn't mean you're poor. It just means you're the average American, which is pretty great by world standards, but it sucks to the striver. It's like being the average is the worst, right? That's like torture if it's your idol. Okay. So that's how it works. So you have money, power, pleasure, fame. Which one do you get rid of first?

Speaker 1:
[33:13] Pleasure.

Speaker 2:
[33:14] And why?

Speaker 1:
[33:16] I think because I'm a striver.

Speaker 2:
[33:19] You're not a stereotype?

Speaker 1:
[33:21] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:22] You're not, you're up at dawn, before dawn.

Speaker 1:
[33:25] I mean, I like to work. I like to, yeah, I like to get that. I mean, I guess the satisfaction.

Speaker 2:
[33:32] Yeah. Now watch your distraction, because your distraction can be a form of pleasure. If you're distracting yourself from things that are uncomfortable, that means you have a comfort idol. And so a lot of strivers actually do fall into it. I'm not saying that that's the case, but that's something that's actually kind of keep your eye on. And I believe it because you've been super successful doing all kinds of, I mean, you got your, your academic work is impeccable. Your show is successful. You're super fit, all that stuff. Your wife, your mom, you're doing it all. I believe it. I believe, what are you sacrificing? Feeling good. Okay. Because it's not important to you. Good. Got it. What's next?

Speaker 1:
[34:13] Probably, oh, it's hard. That's a hard one because.

Speaker 2:
[34:17] Yeah, because all of them are nice.

Speaker 1:
[34:19] Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2:
[34:20] We all like all of them. There's a reason they're idols.

Speaker 1:
[34:21] Well, also I think maybe the fame is the path to influence and money.

Speaker 2:
[34:29] Yeah, could be, could be, but I'm talking intrinsic desire for each one of these things, as opposed to an instrumental desire for it.

Speaker 1:
[34:39] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[34:39] So, which of these things is your intrinsic thing that it feels like if you got there, you'd be really happy, even though you know it won't, you're smart. Yeah. But that thing that like, no idea, which is the next one that you don't care about you get rid of, you think, if you had to, because we have to, we're eliminating.

Speaker 1:
[34:57] Fame.

Speaker 2:
[34:58] Yeah, and fame means, you know, people admiring you and stopping you in the airport, or, you know, the right academics going, I just, your work is so great, because you're still publishing academic journal articles from time to time. I mean, you're doing that work. I mean, you're doing that, that, I mean, that serious stuff, and you're doing it for a reason. You want to, you want to end.

Speaker 1:
[35:14] It's so hard. Influence and fame are like, you know, because I also want to influence people.

Speaker 2:
[35:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:20] I really do.

Speaker 2:
[35:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I believe it that you're actually not egotistically driven. I believe it that you're not egotistically driven.

Speaker 1:
[35:28] It's like you said, it's a pathway to get.

Speaker 2:
[35:29] Yeah, and I see that because I know your public profile and your public profile isn't like internet influencer par excellence, where more clicks, more clicks, more clicks from strangers. And so I believe it. I actually believe it. And so that's good. But now it gets difficult because now what we're talking about is money and influence, money and influence on other people. By the way, this is not bad. There's many beautiful good things you can do with money. I'm a free enterprise guy. And I believe in a free economy where people can, I just love living in a free society where successful people can make a bunch of money and create jobs and opportunity and growth and philanthropy. I love it. I'm so happy to be in that kind of environment. I'm so grateful for it. But I also recognize that when it's an idol, it can control you like anything else. So which one, if you had to get rid of one of them and only one was left, which one would you get rid of? Influencing others?

Speaker 1:
[36:28] Money.

Speaker 2:
[36:30] Money. Did you grow up with money?

Speaker 1:
[36:32] No.

Speaker 2:
[36:32] Did you grow up with no money? Just middle class?

Speaker 1:
[36:35] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:35] Did you grow up poor?

Speaker 1:
[36:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:37] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[36:38] I grew up poor, but I was in the best private schools because I got in.

Speaker 2:
[36:46] And you had good parents.

Speaker 1:
[36:47] And I had good parents.

Speaker 2:
[36:49] Yeah. Intact family?

Speaker 1:
[36:50] I had financial, no, not the whole time. Yeah. But they saved friends. We'd still had family vacations together to keep the unit together.

Speaker 2:
[36:59] Mom and dad went on vacation together when they were divorced?

Speaker 1:
[37:02] Yeah. At least for a few years. Until my dad married my step-mom.

Speaker 2:
[37:07] Yeah. And you have a good relationship with her too?

Speaker 1:
[37:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[37:09] So you had good parents who cared about you. Were they educated people?

Speaker 1:
[37:14] My mom got her education a little bit later in life, but not really. No, my dad is a blue collar worker.

Speaker 2:
[37:21] And a hard worker.

Speaker 1:
[37:22] Hard worker, for sure. Work a lot.

Speaker 2:
[37:24] Good man.

Speaker 1:
[37:25] Good man.

Speaker 2:
[37:26] Yeah. Good man. Imperfect, because we all are. It's like, his marriage didn't work out. But that's life is how that works. So people have different backgrounds around that. And some people who have the money idol, they generally come from two different camps, real poverty or real wealth. And real poverty turns into a money idol because you're afraid of going back there. And real wealth becomes a money idol because that's how you understand yourself. And you don't want to become alienated from your sense of self. So the people who are least likely to have it are just kind of right in the middle, sort of indistinct, like, eh, got it sometimes. But everybody's different. But what this really defines, of course, is what will, which is not, there's nothing bad about influence. On the contrary, you use your influence to great good. You've influenced me and it's made me better. But if it runs you, if that influence becomes an intrinsic motivation for you, that's the thing that will lead you when you're not guarding against it, to change the way that you relate to the people you most care about in your life, your husband, your son. You'll cut corners, not ethically. It will cut corners in the things that actually mean more to you than that. And that's what absolutely always leads to regret. It always leads to regret, you know, that those are resume virtues.

Speaker 1:
[38:42] You'll miss soccer games, you'll miss, you'll work. You'll work because you want to get that influence.

Speaker 2:
[38:47] That's right. And those are resume virtues, not eulogy virtues. My friend David Brooks writes about this, about resume versus eulogy virtues. You know, resume virtues are the things you would not want people to say at your funeral. He had five million miles on United. You know, that's not what you'll want to say. Which it, and that's the danger, is what it comes down to. That also tells me something probably about your childhood, which everybody's childhood is, I mean, I'm not, you know, of the trauma school like that, but we're path dependent for a lot of things. You're probably a super good student growing up, right? Great student. You're probably really good in sports. And you probably got a lot of attention from adults when you did things that were really amazing.

Speaker 1:
[39:35] I got a lot of attention. Yeah. I was like a superstar on Jump Rope Teen, on theater, in commercial, like, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[39:41] You're in commercials.

Speaker 1:
[39:42] I was in commercials. Yeah. I was like, you know, I was getting, I was getting that fame.

Speaker 2:
[39:48] Yeah. Well, you were getting noticed for things that were, you know, for your ability, for your looks, whatever it happened to be, right? That wires a kid's brain to not, to misunderstand love. Love is a grace, it's a free gift freely given. It's not something you can earn. You can't, literally can't earn anybody's love. You can't even earn your own love. You can't earn God's love. You can't earn love. But when you're a little kid and you get attention and affection from grownups because of what you do, that will teach you, you will synoptically wire the idea that love can be earned. And then you grow up trying to earn people's love by doing amazing things. That usually manifests in either power or fame. That generally speaking, it manifests in either the fame idol or the power idol. And by the way, me too. Me too. I was the best classical musician among all the kids growing up. I had really good grades and all that, but that was not my thing. I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player from when I was eight years old. All I wanted to do was to play the French horn. I was better than everybody at it. And I had this like from grownups all the time. And the result of it was that it was the same thing. And I grew up as just super success addicted, meaning that when you win, you get that bump. You get winning, winning, winning, winning, succeeding, getting noticed, whatever it happens to be. That's when I got my parents' attention. That's when I got my teachers' attention. And the result of it is that now I'm 61 years old and I'm still chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing. And it has everything to do with the fact that deep down, my great fear is if I stop, no one will love me.

Speaker 1:
[41:30] We're just little kids, right?

Speaker 2:
[41:32] We're just little kids. But that's power. That's power. I mean, just that power has helped my marriage a lot. That's helped my relationship with my adult kids and now grandkids a lot, actually. That's why it really, really matters to know what our idols are.

Speaker 1:
[41:49] And let's say, you know, if you know what your idol is, and then you can like think about that and actively try not to, I mean, like what sort of exercises, like, you know, can you do to kind of like, is it the reverse bucket list, right? Am I not going to, are you going to put them, maybe you can talk about them.

Speaker 2:
[42:06] Yeah, the reverse bucket list is just the obvious. The bucket list is an incredibly deleterious way to set up your life because it's basically to say, when I achieve these worldly things, then I will be happy. And this is what I'm going to do this year. And all it does is make you more attached. It's like anti-Buddhism is kind of what it winds up. And so I have a reverse bucket list, which is to name my attachments and my ambitions and cravings and desires, which I'm not ashamed of. They're all, none of them are like shameful or gross, but I don't want to be managed by my desires. I want to manage my desires. And so I write them down and cross them out and say, easy come, easy go. This year, I want to do this and this and this. Easy come, easy go. I am a human being. I am a child of God. I am a husband to my wife. I am a grandfather. I'm all these things I really care about. And maybe those worldly things will happen and maybe they won't, and I'm going to be just fine. No, I'm going to be better than fine. That's how the reverse bucket list actually works. And it's, I'm free. I'm free for the first time. That's one of the exercises that helps you with your idols. The second is you got to have a buddy on this. I recommend a spouse, say, hold me to this. This is my weakness. You know my weakness, right? And the problem is when your spouse actually is co-dependent in your idolatry. I mean, if you have, if you're a, if you're a fame idol and your spouse, you know, gives you admiration only when you're getting the admiration of other people, that's a bad situation. But that's not the situation with my wife. On the contrary, you know, my idol is honor. Absolutely, absolutely all day long. It's so dumb. It's so ridiculous and laughable. And my wife's like, you're doing that thing. You're doing that thing. It's like, you want somebody to be, to think you're, think you're smart. You're just trying to do something for the approbation of strangers. Be here now, man. She understands me. And that kind of accountability is really, really important for being a full person.

Speaker 1:
[43:58] What about, you know, and this is all coming back to being able to obviously manage your mood as well, you know, and it's something that I've, I've read, you know, from you is this gratitude list where, and I, and I haven't really done it like written. I haven't, but I'm thinking about it now where it's like, you know, what are you thankful for? And how, if you can think about what you're thankful for, maybe that helps temper that wanting of one of your idols or, or even the social comparison, you know, which we can talk about.

Speaker 2:
[44:34] Yeah, the envy.

Speaker 1:
[44:35] The envy. And, you know, for me, it's like, you know, I know people that have just in youth, like young adults just got cancer and are dead, you know? So health is a big one to be grateful for. And I have others, obviously my family, my son, my husband, the love we have, like, oh my gosh, I'm so, I'm just blessed in so many ways, you know? And I have so much to be grateful for. And I don't think about it enough. I'm constantly thinking about what I don't have and how I wanna get it, you know? And it's toxic.

Speaker 2:
[45:09] Yeah, but that's why we're successful as a species, is because of ingratitude. It's because we don't have enough. That's why we strive. When you think about it, and again, we will talk about how to be more grateful, but let's recognize that this is a perfect example of how evolutionary biology has made us successful as a species and miserable, because Mother Nature doesn't care. So we are made to be resentful, ungrateful, suspicious, hostile creatures. That, you know, there's literally more space in the brain, more tissue devoted in the limbic system to negative emotions than to positive emotions. Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions keep you alive. You know, that snap of the twig behind you while you're walking across the savanna, you know, your brain does not automatically say, I bet that's a good friend here to say hello. You take off running. And then it's like, oh, it's just my friend. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. We are made to be resentful to get more, more, more, more, because that actually allows us to advance as a species and pass on our genes. And the result of that is that left to our devices, we're unbelievably ungrateful all the time. And just the ingratitude, I mean, the grinding ingratitude. It's like, I literally said, I found myself saying the other day, you know, first-classing United Airlines has really gone downhill. It's so absurd, right? And that's me. I mean, I'm just, and this is what I teach. This is my stuff. And I still do that. That's our tendency, which means you have to override it. And the way the override it is by being conscious of it. Once again, you can do animal impulses, you can do moral aspirations, you choose, but you got to do the work. I mean, you can sit on the couch and eat Haagen-Dazs and binge Netflix, or you can get up and do leg day. I mean, you choose. Moral aspiration is leg day is what, and so everybody watching FoundMyFitness, they understand that, right? But the same thing is true for every part of your life. There's a leg day analog to everything that goes on in our lives and gratitude, the gratitude listing procedure, any of the exercises that I recommend about gratitude, that's what it is. It's getting up off the couch of resentment and going into the gym of blessings, which is hard to do and it's not natural. So the way I ask my students to do it is to override their tendencies by writing a list of the five things you're most grateful for, Sunday afternoon. And I don't care how stupid it is. I mean, right now, you know, I'm kind of grateful for Rhonda. The Seahawks are doing really well. I grew up in Seattle. I love the, I just, I'm not a big, but you know, I can't change my heart. I want the Seahawks to win the Super Bowl. And I was really grateful last weekend. I saw that. That's so awesome. That's great. So stupid. I got it. But I'm going to put it on my gratitude list. And I'm grateful for, and big things too. I'm grateful for my faith. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Five things. Now each day during the week, take just a couple of minutes and focus on each one of these things before you go to bed, before you go to bed. And I have a whole nighttime protocol of things that we can actually do for better happiness hygiene, as well as better sleep and proper functioning, the pineal gland and all the stuff that we talk about in our business. And then every Sunday, update it. On average, the average person after 10 weeks will be 12% happier. That's just overriding your tendencies is what it comes down to. It's so beautiful that we're not subjugated to our animal impulses. I just love that about life.

Speaker 1:
[48:41] This is great for adults. How do you teach that to children?

Speaker 2:
[48:44] Well, the way to do that is to actually model it. It's the model. Everything, all that matters is what you do. It really doesn't matter what you say. So people ask me all the time, traditionally religious people say, get out in the world today. Everybody's wandering away from the faith. What do I do to keep my kids in the faith? And I say, it doesn't matter what you say. Don't harangue your kids. There's this old saying, don't talk to your kids about God. Talk to God about your kids, right? But the way to keep, and this is a very well empirically verified truth about religious faith, but it makes the broader point. Have them see you practice the faith because that's what they will model. That's what they see. This is the wiring is established. If you don't want your kids to scream square words out of the window of the car in traffic in Southern California, don't do that. If you don't want your kids to be drunk, don't be a drunk for God's sake. And if you want to raise them in the faith, then practice the faith assiduously, seriously, with your heart, with your whole heart. And the data say they absolutely will. I mean, not 100%, but that's the only thing that really raises the odds materially. So if you want your kids to be more grateful, be more grateful. If you want your kids to be less ungrateful about the beautiful life that they have, be less ungrateful. Don't see them have you grousing and complaining and just being kind of grumpy all the time. And one of the ways that you do that is by talking to them at dinner about the things that you're grateful for. Don't bug them about what they're grateful for. Is it, you know what I'm grateful for today? I'm so grateful that we have this time together. You know, I'm so great. Look at the sunset. I mean, in Southern California, like we live here in December, January, and it's actually really easy to be grateful for the sunset out here when you're not here all the time, because you don't habituate to it. That's how you do it.

Speaker 1:
[50:35] I love this. And then I think also maybe bringing them, pulling them in to the Sunday, you know, writing down and just like, maybe they don't have to do it. You don't have to force them to do it, but they can see you do it. And you know, again-

Speaker 2:
[50:46] Put it on the fridge, yours on the fridge.

Speaker 1:
[50:48] Yeah, we just, we're actually, my husband just ordered this like really nice digital board for like, you know, schedules and like phrases and things we want to put on. And so that's a great idea.

Speaker 2:
[50:59] Things to really to remember for sure. And they see mom is practicing, she does that thing. Mom does that thing.

Speaker 1:
[51:04] Right.

Speaker 2:
[51:05] And mom is happier after she does that thing.

Speaker 1:
[51:08] I want to, you brought up something about like, you know, how humans are wired to kind of be ungrateful, to be like, I mean, competitive to, you know, we've got this, like, this is the survival, this is how we're surviving and getting better. How does that relate to like people's emotional baselines and like understanding, because obviously, you know, there are, there's more of the anxious phenotype, there's more of the positive, like my late mentor Bruce Ames, I mean, he was rose-colored glasses, everything was positive. He was like, oh, just like-

Speaker 2:
[51:39] Unbelievably annoying.

Speaker 1:
[51:40] Just like, how are you like this, you know, but also very successful. So how does like understanding your emotional baseline come into helping you manage your emotions?

Speaker 2:
[51:50] Yeah, that's such a smart question, because we don't all have the same, obviously the same emotional baseline, and we beat ourselves up if we're naturally grumpy people. But it turns out that there's a lot of research on the natural functioning of the limbic system and how it affects our personalities. There's a great test called the Positive Affect Negative Affect Sequence, PANAS, and people can take it online or they can actually go to my website, because I have a thing called the Happiness Scale, and it will look at your natural affect profile. There's four affect profiles that will divide up positive and negative intensity of emotion, that we naturally fall into, and all of us fall into one of these quadrants, as it turns out. The reason is because the functioning of the limbic system is different between different people. It's not because you had a crummy childhood, most of it is genetic. Most of this stuff is between 40 and 80 percent genetic, and we know this from identical twins separated at birth. Those identical twin studies they did at University of Minnesota for all those years. Then we want to be in charge of everything, we're not. So much is genetic, but you got to know it so you can manage your genetics with good habits. This research, it talks about positive emotionality and negative emotionality, positive and negative affect, which is just the fancy way of talking about this intensity of emotions that we have. You can be above average on both, below average on both, or above average on one and below average on the other. Those are the four quadrants. If you're above average on positive and negative, that's the mad scientist profile. That means you feel things super deeply. It's everything is great or terrible. And, you know, it's, you know, most CEOs and entrepreneurs are the mad scientist profile. You might be one. You're either this or the next one.

Speaker 1:
[53:38] Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out. I need to take the test.

Speaker 2:
[53:41] So you've got high positive emotionality, but I don't know about your high negative emotionality because I haven't seen you on your, you know, on like when you first wake up in the morning or how you, you know.

Speaker 1:
[53:50] I can judge things. I can want it to be a certain way.

Speaker 2:
[53:54] You're obviously very meticulous about detail, but I don't know about the intensity of your negative emotions as you do so. So that's what I have to see. We can take the test and we can actually find this out. That's a great profile for leadership. That's a great profile for, you know, just being completely alive in the world, but it can be unbearable to your partner. You know, it's not that easy to be married to a mad scientist. I, you know, my wife reminded me of that this very morning, as a matter of fact. It's like, you're just exhausting me. What people want is high positive and low negative, which doesn't mean you don't have any bad feelings. It just means the intensity of negative emotions is lower. That's the cheerleader profile. That might be you. I don't know. And then, and so-

Speaker 1:
[54:36] That's Bruce. That's Bruce.

Speaker 2:
[54:38] Bruce Ames, yeah. So the cheerleader profile is one who is quite a Boolean, but takes in stride the negative, with real philosophy takes the negative, right? Things are, they tend to be pretty optimistic and very hopeful, which are different. I mean, hope is a virtue. Optimism is a prediction. And they don't always make the best CEOs because they're not very good at receiving or giving negative feedback. And so your worst boss was probably, was probably a cheerleader. And they come into your office and they say, Rhonda, you're the lynchpin of this whole company. And you're like, it's great. And you're calling your husband. I realize you haven't had a job like that. Neither have I. And then you hear them saying the same thing to the lazy moron in the next office. It's like, wait a second. I thought I was special. And that's bad leadership. The other two are low, low. These are low affect people, which means that they're, that's the judge profile. A lot of surgeons, you and I have known a lot of surgeons. Surgeons are like this, right? Fighter pilots are like this. These are people who are low affect, like whatever, bring it on. You don't want somebody to cut you open and go, oh my God, that's not what you want. You want somebody like, I can take that out. Can do it, done it 50 times. I can do it at 50 first. And the judge is somebody who's not emotionally super high affect when they sexually see things, seeing strong things. And the worst one for people, but good for society is high negative, low positive. That's the poet. These are people who feel very strongly negative emotions, fear, anger, disgust, especially sadness. And they feel positive emotions at a very low simmer. These people tend to be very creative. And part of that is this interesting research on the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that's involved in rumination. So people who have clinical depression, high activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. And when there's more serotonin in the synapse, you find that what it does is it lowers the activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. A lot of the stuff is so black boxed that it's contested in neuroscience like everything else. But it's interesting because that's the same thing that you find with people who are creative. A lot of VLPFC activity with low serotonin in the synapse is the same thing when people are falling in love. When they fall in love, there's a big dip in serotonin. It looks like clinical depression, as a matter of fact, and the reason is you want lots of activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex because they're bonding to each other. They're doing stupid things like sending 50 texts in an hour that are humiliating and ridiculous, because their brain is working like a deeply clinically depressed person as they bond to the other person. That's why poets are depressive, creative, and romantic. It's all the same thing. And that's why we need them, but they suffer. They suffer more depression. They suffer more anxiety than the rest of us. But that means that we need to love them more, because we need them in our society.

Speaker 1:
[57:40] Okay, so understanding your emotional baseline, how does that help you manage your mood?

Speaker 2:
[57:45] Because when you know your emotional baseline, you know that this is your natural proclivity, and you can actually take steps. So for me, as a mad scientist, my problem, generally speaking, is not insufficient happiness. It's excessive unhappiness. So all of my protocols, my science-based protocols for self-management, are dedicated to managing my high negative affect levels. That's especially acute from when I wake up in the morning until noon.

Speaker 1:
[58:13] That's especially the case. I think that must be, this is me.

Speaker 2:
[58:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah, so you wake up.

Speaker 1:
[58:16] But I have to take the test.

Speaker 2:
[58:17] And then after that, when your day wears on, then you're like, okay, I can dig it. It's actually better. And so, and that's actually neurochemically very common, is what we actually find. And so the result of that is, when you know your affect profile, you know which levers to push. Managing happiness and managing unhappiness are not the same thing. So I'll give you an example. When I talk to somebody and I say, you go to the gym, you can't tell just by looking. And they're like, yeah, you know, yeah, but I'm inconsistent. What anybody tells me that does not have high negative effect. The reason is because going to the gym is one of the best ways to manage negative affect. And people who don't have high negative affect, they go to the gym and is like, I don't feel better. I know I got slightly better biceps, but I don't feel better. You go to the gym because you feel better, but you don't know. So people will say, oh, it makes me so happy to work out. No, it doesn't. It makes you less unhappy to work out. That's what it is. And it's a healthy way to do it. The unhealthy ways to manage your negative affect are drugs and alcohol and workaholism, or scrolling social media, distracting yourself. The healthy ways to do it are developing your spiritual life and or working out, picking up heavy things and running around.

Speaker 1:
[59:31] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[59:31] That's an important thing to understand. So almost everybody who's like a super gym rat, like you and me, high negative affect.

Speaker 1:
[59:40] So that's great exercise. And that's what I was going to get to. I mean, that's one of the best ways to manage the unhappiness you're right. The reason I exercise is for my brain. I have to do it for my mood too. Oh yeah. Just making sure that I'm not seeing more negative.

Speaker 2:
[59:57] Do you work out first thing in the morning?

Speaker 1:
[59:59] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[59:59] Yeah. That's a classic thing for high negative affect people. Because is it the first thing you do?

Speaker 1:
[60:04] Yeah, it's the first thing I do. What time? Usually it depends, 8, 8.30.

Speaker 2:
[60:10] Because you have a little kid.

Speaker 1:
[60:11] Because I have to do the school, like all that. I wake up and have to get him ready and all that.

Speaker 2:
[60:15] What about 10 years ago? Were you awake, were you still working out when the sun was going?

Speaker 1:
[60:19] I would go before, I would work out before I went into the lab.

Speaker 2:
[60:23] Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[60:23] And I started doing the sauna before I went into lab because it was the only way I could deal with going into the lab.

Speaker 2:
[60:27] Yeah, I got it. I got it. No, I get it. So you were probably waking up at 4.30 in those days and working out from five to six or something?

Speaker 1:
[60:33] No, because I was going to the lab at 10.

Speaker 2:
[60:35] Oh, I get it. Okay, it depends on the lab. Your results may differ. Yeah, it really does. But you do, and I have very, very strong protocols that are science based and dedicated to lowering negative affect and increasing productivity and creativity. So, yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And it's all designed to actually do so. What I ingest, when I ingest it, what I actually do. So I get up real early and there's a lot of research on how the brain works. There's an ancient Vedic science literature on something called the Brahma Mahurta. I spend a lot of time in India. I go to India every year. And I study with a lot of both scientists and spiritual teachers. I'm a Catholic, but I do that anyway, because it's really, really good stuff. And they've always talked about the Brahma Mahurta, which in Sanskrit means the creator's time. It's an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. A Mahurta is 48 minutes long in ancient Vedic physics. That's arbitrary from a scientific point of view. But there is a lot of research that shows that if you get up before dawn and you're conscious and awake while the sun is rising and has strong neurochemical immune, you know, I've seen the literature on this. You're more productive, you're more effective, you're more creative, you're more focused, and you're happier is the way that that works. And Huberman talks about this stuff a lot too, about, you know, the sunrise, the sunrise. So that's what I practice. And 430 is my time. I usually work out from 445 to 545 every morning. And I'm a seven day a week guy, which means that I have to be really careful to not screw up my joints. And I want to be working out when I'm in my 80s, which is a long, you know, a couple of decades from now. And that means I have to really structure this thing in a very, very good way to do that. And a lot of it is zone two cardio, sometimes zone three, HIIT training, et cetera. But it's also a lot of resistance training too. And also I'm able to stay healthy and not touch my hormones, which is really good. It's a nice side effect of that. But that manages my negative affect from the very first moment. The second thing that I do is, that's the physical fitness. The second is my metaphysical fitness, which is the second technique for managing negative affect. But it's also really personally important to me. I go to mass every day. I go to church every day, because I'm a Catholic. It's the most important thing in my life. Now I also work, I've studied the Vipassana meditation, and stoic philosophy. Everybody's got to find their thing. Something that they actually practice, which is a form of transcendence. To transcend yourself, to actually be focused on things greater than yourself every single day. So I go to mass from 6.30 to 7.00 every day. And when I'm at home, it's with my wife. And when I'm on the road, it's by myself. Because the great thing about the Catholic Church is like Starbucks. It's a very high quality, uniform product. It's pretty easy to find, right? So for me, that's great. That really works. Then, and I haven't ingested anything except, you know, electrolytes and with some creatine monohydrate, 10 grams. Because I don't want that. Just, you know, that second five grams is really good for your brain, et cetera, et cetera. That research is unbelievably strong at this point. I've heard you talk about it and it's just really great. So I'm not ingesting anything until I get back. And then I actually self-administer psychostimulant. That's when I actually use my caffeine. And I like caffeine and I've been drinking it since I grew up in Seattle. And so I'm a, you know, I drink a lot of dark roast Starbucks, you know, the more they burn it, the better I like it. And I'll drink 350 milligrams of caffeine and I'll get that in a bowlless right after I get back and before I eat anything. But that's two and a half hours after I've gotten up at this point. Because of all that stuff about adenosine clearing and et cetera. So that's contested, but works for me. I don't get the crash in the afternoon. And then only then I eat and I get about 60 grams of protein in my first meal of the day, which is really good. Greek yogurt has a lot of tryptophan in it. And that will actually hold you. And when I do that, when I get to work, I get three and a half hours of concentrated creative work, which you don't get otherwise. You're not gonna get, I can't write for three and a half hours unless I set my day up in a particular way. And I'm not unbearable to live with because my negative affect has been managed. That's my five part protocol.

Speaker 1:
[64:51] Oh, love it. And I'm gonna, I wanna get into some of like a lot of different aspects of that, like the transcendence as well. But I think we need to talk about the third macronutrient, which is meaning, meaning, purpose.

Speaker 2:
[65:06] The meaning of life, yeah. That's the biggie, you know? And that sounds like, you know, what even is that? That's a New Yorker cartoon, you know, a guy sitting at the mouth of a cave in the Himalayas, which I've done. And it is big until you actually realize that there's a big literature in the world of social psychology that breaks down how people experience meaning and thus what it is. Meaning, the meaning of life is the answer to three questions. So if you want to look for the meaning of life, look for the answer to three questions. This is just a decomposition technique. Big problems are just a bunch of little problems. Here are the three questions. Why do things happen the way they do in life? That's coherence. You need an answer to that. And your answer doesn't have to be my answer. I mean, my answer is profoundly religious and also super scientific, because I'm a, I was gonna say I'm a Christian scientist. That's a thing. That's not what I mean. I'm a scientific Christian, you know, whatever. Some people answer that in different ways. You know, when people are going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, that's a cry for coherence because they don't have a sense of meaning and they're not happy. That's what it says. So if you have a relative who's going berserk on conspiracies, don't yell at them and throw data at them. Provide a better way to find coherence as an act of love, because that's the need that they're trying to meet. The second question is why I'm doing what I'm doing. I mean, am I going in circles? A lot of people don't know. It's like I get up and I go to work, and I turn on the Zoom screen. It's like a boat that's kind of just going around and around. You're not getting any place. Remember, we're made for progress. We're not made to arrive at a goal, we're made to make progress toward a goal. Arrival is tricky. Like we talked about before, the Olympic athletes, or 30% of people, depending on the study you're looking at, that go on a super strong diet, they get to their goal and develop an eating disorder because they want more progress. And the goal for hitting your goal weight, or the reward for hitting your goal weight, is never getting to eat what you like again for the rest of your life. It's so depressing. So it's like, no, I want the scale to keep going down. And then they develop these eating disorders, these bad things, because we're made toward progress. That's purpose. Why am I doing what I'm doing? That's the sense of purpose. That's goals. That's direction. And the last is significance, which is why does my life matter and to whom? And that's the love problem. The significance is the love problem. And so what you need is an explanation for the universe. You need goals and direction, and you need love. And those things together are the ingredients. Those are the macros of meaning is how it, and that's this new book about actually how do you find that. And I guess more importantly, why we're not, because that's the crisis of our time. The crisis of our time is not an enjoyment problem, although the strivers watching us probably have an enjoyment crisis. That's the big problem for strivers. They don't enjoy their lives, right? They got tons of satisfaction, but meaning is the crisis for adults under 30. That we see today. The number one predictor of clinical depression and generalized anxiety today is saying, my life feels meaningless. My life feels like a simulation. My life feels empty. That's why I wrote this new book, is because I wanted to figure out what's going wrong. Where do you have to go to find meaning? And how do you have to live differently? And that's what it comes down to.

Speaker 1:
[68:36] So people can ask themselves these questions.

Speaker 2:
[68:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[68:40] And that's a start.

Speaker 2:
[68:41] It's a start.

Speaker 1:
[68:42] What else can we do?

Speaker 2:
[68:42] Well, you gotta get rid of the barrier to it. And the big barrier to it is, this is where the science really kicks in. So there's this whole body of neuroscience that's very hot right now on hemispheric lateralization. That's the work of Ian the Gilchrist at Oxford, who's really, for my money, this is the most visionary guy working on both the psychiatry side and the neuroscience side. And hemispheric lateralization is an old idea that just says the two sides of the brain do different things. And when I was a kid in the 70s, we all was like, yeah, mom's an artsy right brain person and dad is an analytic left brain guy. Because my dad was a PhD biostatistician and my mother was a painter. And so that's the two sides. My parents together made a whole brain. It's kind of how it worked. That's out of style, because you don't just have an analysis side and art side. What you have, however, because it's come back with this guy's work, is a why side and a how side, right? And the why side of your brain asks the big questions of life. And the left side of your brain figures out actually what to do because of the why. You got to have coherence, purpose and significance. And then you go out and do the things that actually matter. So if you're saying, you know, if you're saying like, why do things happen in the world? Because this is what God wants and God loves me. This is part of significance. And I want to serve his creation. If that's if you're a traditional religious person, then you're going to go live in a particular way. And how do you figure out how to live? Left hemisphere of the brain. All the technical problems and tasks, left hemisphere stuff, there's a problem. Our culture today, especially for people under 30, who don't remember the before times like you and me, it's all left brain. It's a technologized, engineered world. The tip of the spear is life online, life in the matrix. That's all left hemisphere. That's the reason that life feels bereft of meaning. Because not only can you not find it, you're not even asking the questions. You're not using your brain the way it was supposed to. You're never bored. You're never having a bowl session late at night in the dorm, asking, you know, why things, well, you know, is there a god? Those are big meaning questions. There's no mystery. You only ask questions that ChatGPT can answer. If AI can answer your question, it's not a meaning question. It's not a right brain question. It's a left brain question. Ask it a meaning question, like... And by the way, here's the test. If there's a meaning crisis, two question test, why am I alive? For what would I die?

Speaker 1:
[71:11] Right.

Speaker 2:
[71:11] And ChatGPT will give you nonsense. It'll kiss up to you saying, oh, it's such a smart question, Rhonda. You know, that's it. You're asking the questions that Plato and Aristotle, it's like, oh, I'm like Plato and Aristotle. It gives you nothing. It gives you nothing. And the reason is cause you can't answer it. You can only live with it. I'll ask you a meaning question right now. Why do you love your husband?

Speaker 1:
[71:34] He makes me feel loved and like always, no matter what, no matter what, no matter who I am, safe. And he, I look up to him. He's the most honest person that I've ever met. And, and it's, it's nice to have that person that you admire. And I want to be like that.

Speaker 2:
[72:03] It's by the way, I can tell you right now, you have a successful marriage and you will. The reason is because in the human species, females in a successful pair bond mating relationship require adoration and males require admiration. And that's biological. He would fight a tiger for you. You just told me that. You feel safe. You feel loved. He would fight a tiger with his hands for you and only you. And you admire him because metaphorically or really, he brings the biggest gazelles into the cave that anybody could ever bring in. And he's so big and strong and he takes care of the family. And that's kind of what we want. These are the elements of, because we all need respect. We all need to be loved. But these are differences in the pair bond made, in the pair bond mating between females and males. And you just told me right now, you just told me you're going to have, you're going to be married to him for the rest of your life. That's what you told me. No, no, I mean, it's like he'll be gazing into your eyes as he takes his dying breath. That's what it's going to be because you got the formula. You cracked the code is what it comes down to, which is beautiful. I mean, it's going to change. It'll be challenges, but that's beautiful. But the whole point is when I asked you that, you didn't have a crisp answer. And the reason is because the language centers in your brain are in the left hemisphere. And I asked you a right hemisphere question. So any one of those particular things, I feel valued. Well, your third grade teacher made you feel valued. I felt safe. Well, your dad made you feel safe. Any one of those things could be applied to another person because language defies meaning. Meaning is felt. It's lived. I mean, I've been married 34 years and I can't solve my marriage like an analytical problem. I can only live my marriage, which is why I love it. I don't know if we're going to have a big argument tonight. My wife's from Spain, so probably. Right? I mean, that's why it's beautiful. That's why it's good. And if you're spending all of your time online in The Matrix, which by the way, that movie was about an artificial intelligence which subjugated humanity and kept them pacified to use their human energy, that's the reality now. If you're in The Matrix all day long, you're sitting on the left side of your brain and you're not even considering questions of meaning and your life is going to be bereft of the things that really matter. That's why you're depressed.

Speaker 1:
[74:32] If you were to give advice to different age groups on finding whatever meaning of life. So young adults, like younger than 30, middle age. I mean, that's where I am. And then older adults.

Speaker 2:
[74:43] Younger as you are.

Speaker 1:
[74:45] Where, like, would that advice change?

Speaker 2:
[74:49] Yeah. Yeah, it does. It does. It really does because the habits actually depend on where you are in your life, the relationships that you actually have. So I wrote the meaning of your life fundamentally for my 28 year old graduate students is because they're really struggling with it an awful lot. They don't remember the before times and they actually aren't living in an old fashioned way at all. So my kids grew up with the stuff as mother's milk and they're super old fashioned. I mean, my kids look at me and they think I'm some sort of freaked out hippie or something. They're like, two of my three kids are military. Two of my three kids got married in their early 20s and nine months after their wedding started having children. I mean, all three of my kids are traditionally religious. They read newspapers. It's like living with a bunch of old people, which is they live in my house. I mean, one of the families, we have an intergenerational household at their request because they want to live like the old days. So they take this stuff really seriously when we talk about it, but that's very unusual. That's very transgressive, as a matter of fact. Most young people today are not doing living according to the old ways that people naturally lived in when they had their brain working hemispherically in a balanced way. If you're online all the time, there's a bunch of things that I can actually predict about life. Number one, you're not asking the big questions. You're asking the trivial questions, the technical questions. Number one, actually before that, you're spending too much time on the line. You're spending too much time looking at screens, up to 12 hours a day, you're in the matrix. But then the things that you're missing are these big questions. The second thing is I almost always find real struggle with romantic love. The whole thing you talked about, the beautiful thing you talked about about your husband, they'll be like, what's she talking about? I want it, but I don't know what it is. And I've certainly never had it, right? And the reason is because you can't get there until you are making an antenna to the divine between the right hemisphere of your brain and the right hemisphere of his brain. That's how it works. You communicate with him hemispherically on the right. You understand each other at a deep level of emotional, not spiritual connection. You can't do it if it's just like swipe right, zip, zip, zip, knowing each other on social media, spending all day looking at screens, because your brains won't fuse. That's what one flesh means is right brains.

Speaker 1:
[77:09] Well, getting rid of the screens or cutting down them really helps a lot.

Speaker 2:
[77:12] It helps a lot, a lot. There's a lot of science behind this. There's a lot of science behind this. It doesn't mean throwing your phone in the ocean. What it means is you need proper protocols in your life. You need discipline in your life. The best way to do it is no phone in the first hour of the day, no phone in the last hour of the day and no phone during meals. Just that, then a bunch of phone-free zones, classroom, bedroom. You should never have your phone in the bedroom. I mean, everybody knows that, but people use it as the alarm clock, et cetera, et cetera. I can use my phone as an alarm clock now, but not look at it because I'm so trained in that particular way. Then tech fasts is really important. I recommend three to five days a year where you actually don't have it. Just that, and you'll change your relationship to the devices and your brain will be working differently. If you want to go super hardcore, change your screen to black and white, that'll change how you relate to it. The neurochemistry actually will change in the way that you use it. Start communicating on purpose differently with your friends. Start actually using the phone as opposed to texting more, et cetera. There's a bunch of things.

Speaker 1:
[78:17] Like an old school phone.

Speaker 2:
[78:17] Yeah, like an old school phone basically. Yeah, exactly, like crazy, right? It's like, yeah, you can actually have a real time conversation, but with 10 numbers. Like, how? New technology? Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1:
[78:26] Call them now.

Speaker 2:
[78:26] I know, because culture has changed. Culture has accommodated itself to the left brain world of the way that we use technology. But this book has the whole set of protocols on actually how to get it.

Speaker 1:
[78:36] And then on top of that, asking those questions.

Speaker 2:
[78:39] Right, ask the questions and then falling in love. Then there's the whole thing about actually, how do you find calling in life? How do you find holy vocation in life? And that's really about how you find service. You know, what you're doing to actually serve other people, as opposed to how I can serve myself. And that's an ancient idea that actually accentuates the activity in the right side of the brain, as opposed to the left side of the brain. You're egotistical on the left more than you are on the right, actually, because you seek transcendence, which is another important thing, is looking for spiritual reality as people understand it, is looking for ways that actually serve and love, including people they don't even know. That's right brain all day long. That'll just like, that'll wire you. I prescribe volunteer work to people for that particular reason, to love and be loved in ways beyond just the, you know, the technological world that we live in. I recommend beauty. There's three kinds of beauty that people need to self-administer. It's not like beauty of somebody that might become your mate. That's different. That exercises different parts of the brain. It's three kinds of beauty. Artistic beauty, natural beauty, moral beauty. Those are very right brain experiences. And it's so interesting in the literature today that shows that young people just have less beauty in their lives. All across the board. I mean, there's a pretty interesting work that talks about how, for example, natural beauty, the average child under 12 spends four to seven minutes a day in nature. Huge problem. Four to seven hours a day behind the screen. Four to seven minutes in nature. That's upside down, obviously. And so natural beauty, boy, it has a big neurocognitive impact. Artistic beauty is just missing when you're looking at things on the screen all the day. Because you actually don't get any three-dimensionality to things, but you actually can't get any depth to anything in any other way as well. You find that music today, and this is pretty interesting. I don't want to be just like an old fogie and say, in my day, music was more beautiful. But music is objectively less melodic than it's been in the past, which actually affects us neurophysiologically. Is the tunefulness, the beauty that we actually see, and then moral beauty. There's just less moral beauty that we see. When you witness an act of moral beauty in the part of somebody else, it's so interesting. The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, you ever heard that name? He wrote a book called Something Beautiful for God, where he kind of discovered for the whole world, Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And he heard about this Albanian nun, who's like four foot 10, living on the streets of Calcutta and just serving the poorest of the poor, serving the poorest of the poor. So he goes to me, he's a complete hardened atheist, and he meets her and he becomes Catholic. And he says, this story, it wasn't because of the theology, it was because of the moral beauty that he saw in Mother Teresa and her sisters. And what they were doing, I mean, scooping people up, it's like, and he made it into a book and as people would read it, and they're just weeping as they read the book, or they would see it and he made it into a documentary in the BBC. And people would just buy the millions. And it's like, I don't know, I don't know. When you see somebody serving somebody else, when you will see beauty, when you allow somebody to serve you, in just pure love and pure charity, it gives you what the psychologist Rhett Diesner calls moral elevation. And it has its biology, man. I mean, we're wired for this. We're wired for the altruism that actually comes from doing beautiful things and experiencing that kind of moral beauty. And this is really important. And the last, the hardest one of all, you want to open up your right brain, you got to suffer. And you have to understand suffering. And so I have a whole chapter in this book about how to suffer. It's called Never Waste Your Suffering. And that's really countercultural today.

Speaker 1:
[82:29] Okay. This is so much to unpack here. I mean, going, you know, going to the, into the service part too, like serving others. And I mean, it seems like that, I've heard you talk about becoming a really important factor, particularly as you're in maybe later midlife, perhaps going to even, or just midlife. I mean, basically you're not in your peak in terms of your productivity. You know, you're not able to, you're not the best French horn player, right? I mean, like you peak and then like, you can't, you can't be the best because I mean, biology does happen and you do get older and you're different types of intelligence that are changing. But like if you are, you're serving others, you still have that purpose too. Am I understanding that right? Where, you know, and I'm thinking about this as I was again, reading up on a lot of your stuff and you've written your books. I was trying to apply this to my life and thinking, you know, like what I do with this podcast, you know, you can look at it through a variety of lenses. You could say, well, this is your job. You make money doing this. This is like, or, you know, you realize that, I mean, I get so much feedback on helping people like change their lives. They've like whatever little change, it's made a big difference in their life and it's a service and you feel good. You're like, I'm actually improving people's lives. I'm improving my own life, improving my family, my family's that are listening, you know, family and friends that actually listen to the podcast. And so that in itself almost kind of fills that service bucket in a way for me. It's gray, right? Cause it's also, it is like my job, but like, I mean, I get paid to do this, but I mean, I'm getting paid and also from the people. Right, of course. People are just like saying, hey, keep doing this, right? So I'd love, you know, like for you to kind of elaborate more on like how can, you don't have to go out and be Mother Teresa is what I'm saying, right? Like you can find service through a variety of different mechanisms that are easier than you think.

Speaker 2:
[84:35] Yeah, that's the sense of calling. Sense of calling is your work is a vocation. It's what you're meant to do. And a lot of young people ask me that, I don't know what I'm meant to do. And the reason is because you've been sitting on the left side of your brain on the smartest thing for you to do. You went to college and they said, you know, you should really study some STEM thing. You know, that's a really smart thing. It was like, but I'm, I love art, right? And I get it. I'm a practical person too. And I've got kids too. And if they're like, yeah, dad, I'm gonna study post-modern puppetry at Princeton. I guess I'm trying to do all alliteration here, but it's a, I'd be like, ah, you thought about the implications of that? You know, I'm a dad too, I get it. But the whole, but the truth of the matter is that we're meant to do different things. I believe that we have a vocation and our vocations have, it's so beautiful because we're different and the diversity of what we love and what we're able to do. And when we're able to do what we're really good at, this is kind of the concept of Ikigai, which you've heard about. It's like what I'm good at, what the world needs, what I'm paid to do, and what I love to do. So what I love to do, what I'm good at, what the world pays me to do, and what the world needs. And the concentricity, the Venn diagram of those things, that's your vocation. And finding that is this unbelievably fun adventure in life. I'm actually trying to find that, but you can't do that when you're just sitting on the left side of your brain, Googling the jobs that are gonna pay the most in 12 years. You're not gonna actually get that. Now, there's one thing that's really important for people to keep in mind, and you just said it. You get a sense of calling and a sense of service, a sense of love toward the world through the way that you earn your daily bread. That's exactly how it's supposed to be done. You know, the idea that because you make money would somehow be at odds with serving, no, that's never been the case. You know, in the Bible, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve before they get before all the bad business with the snake and the apple and all the unpleasantness, they're working the garden. They're working the garden and they're in bliss with God while they're working the garden because that's what they're supposed to do. That's their calling. You, with this podcast, are working the garden before the fall and that's what we're looking for. That's what people actually need and a lot of people, they struggle to actually find that, but a big part of that is because they're not living with this as what can I do that I love, the world needs. They're willing to pay me for it. That serves, well, and I'm really good at it. You know, they're not thinking about it in a holistic way and when you can find it, it's an incredible blessing. But as they say, the kids, they say these days, you gotta do the work.

Speaker 1:
[87:18] And you said that, you know, hardship, like, you know, suffering is also a really important ingredient in this. You know, not everyone has had, I mean, everyone suffers to some degree. We all have things in our life. But like, the big events, you know, like a loss of a loved one, like a really close loved one, right, would be one that comes to mind. Can people create these types of suffering, like is going out and lifting heavy a type of suffering? Like how can people who haven't really yet, maybe they're younger, they haven't really experienced that great type of suffering experience it?

Speaker 2:
[87:54] So suffering, when you use it productively, creates a tremendous sense of meaning in life. And we see this from the whole literature on post-traumatic growth, where people who do have really hard experiences, they get cancer, they lose somebody, they, God forbid, they lose a child, which is the most traumatic thing they can, I mean, you can imagine, it's almost happened to us a couple of times. And it's just the brush with that. But people who experience that, in more than 90% of the cases, they experience post-traumatic growth. There's transitions that people have that are really, really painful in life. Bruce Feiler does this work called Life is in the Transitions. It's really nice. And he talks about the fact that every 18 months, you're gonna have a pretty substantial transition. Most of them will not be of your own design, that they'll be induced. And so you don't like it because you didn't choose it. Every five years is what he calls a lifequake, which is like, you really don't want that. But it's gonna happen on average every five years. And it's always a big surprise. It's like, what, how is this happening? It's cause that's life, right? How you understand that is really, really important for whether or not it's gonna bring you meaning or not. Whether or not you're gonna get post-traumatic growth if it's actually traumatic. And here's the way to understand it. And here's how to do it. Here's the formula, cause we like formulas, all right? You know what I mean? They gave us PhDs for having formulas. So suffering is not the same thing as pain. Pain is a neurophysiological reality and it happens to you. Pain is both sensory and affective. Sensory means involving the nerve endings and inflammation. And affective means that it's affecting part of the limbic system that says, I don't like it. So you burn your hand on a stove and the sensory pain where the nerve endings are indicating that there's a problem, Ouch! Immediately leads to the affective part where the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the limbic system says, I hated that, right? So, Ouch! and I hate it are the two parts of pain. Now, when you have mental pain, it's only the second part. So if somebody rejects you, you know, if somebody says, your work is stupid, you're a hack, your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is going to go into overdrive because you don't like that. You don't want to be, you don't want to be rejected. You don't want to be rejected in this particular way because that that's your ancient brain saying I'm going to get thrown out of my tribe and I'm going to walk the savanna and get hunted down by cheetah or something like that. And it's weird how it's developed, how it's adapted to the modern, to modern life, misadapted, I should say. Okay, so that being the case, this pain is going to happen. You don't have to go looking for it. It'll find you and every five years, it's going to be really bad, maybe catastrophic as far as it seems to you. Suffering is your struggle when that happens. Pain is the experience, suffering is the struggle. The ancient Buddhist formula for understanding the relationship between suffering and pain, which is very valid, scientifically valid in the way that we think about it as Westerners, suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance. Pain times resistance to pain. Now, everybody who watches us is going to the gym and they understand that. You don't go to the gym because it feels good. You go to the gym because it feels bad. I mean, I don't care who you are. I mean, I was in there this morning. Today was a pull day and it was a pull day. And I was, man, it hurt. That's the point. And how am I actually not suffering even though I'm in pain? Because my resistance is low. I went in there on purpose and I subjected myself to it. You know you're doing well in life when your pain is high, but your suffering is low. Now, most people don't know how to do this when it's not the gym. Most people don't know how to do this when life is throwing something at you, when life is making you go to the gym. It's interesting because if it's not of our own volition, it's like, you know those old mouse studies where mice are subjected to exercise? And so they're made to run on a treadmill and their cortisol levels are unbelievably high and they die and then they actually put the same wheels out in the field and field mice just find the wheels and run on them and they live longer. I've probably heard you talk about these studies, right?

Speaker 1:
[92:05] I don't think I've talked about them, but I'm from the stress studies.

Speaker 2:
[92:07] Yeah, it's involuntary versus voluntary stress. Turn all stress into voluntary stress through non-resistance and it'll make you stronger and better. If something bad is happening in your life, then bring it on, bring it on. Just like the gym, you know, somebody rejected you, your beloved, I thought I was going to marry her. And she turns out she loves somebody else. That's the gym. That's the emotional gym. Your dorsal and cingulate cortex is going crazy. You're like, I invited that. I invite this. And that's your resistance actually falling and your suffering will actually fall paradoxically, even while your pain is high. And that's where you will actually learn and grow and find your meaning.

Speaker 1:
[92:48] So you really just have to change that mindset.

Speaker 2:
[92:51] And it's hard to do. It's hard to do because once again, you're making a choice that's not a natural choice. You know, left to your devices, your brain will be like, dorsal and cingulate cortex, that means that you're going to walk the frozen tundra. So you better avoid this, but you know it's not true.

Speaker 1:
[93:09] Right.

Speaker 2:
[93:09] So you have to make a decision.

Speaker 1:
[93:10] I think that people that do go to the gym and do intentionally engage in that type of pain and suffering, but then they feel better. They get stronger. I think that you are probably somehow working that part of your brain, because for me, I do really heavy lifting first thing in the morning. And guess what? The other stuff that's thrown at me isn't as hard. It's really not as hard, truly. It was probably one of the biggest shocks to me because I've always been more of an endurance, sort of junkie. I like to run.

Speaker 2:
[93:44] You did long distance stuff, right?

Speaker 1:
[93:48] And then I started getting really serious about weight training a couple of years ago. And it's a different kind of outch, you know? It's a different kind of hard.

Speaker 2:
[93:56] Women don't often do that, actually.

Speaker 1:
[93:59] No.

Speaker 2:
[93:59] Right?

Speaker 1:
[94:00] Don't. And there's definitely, there's a lot of fear. It's like there's a psychological barrier I have to get over when I'm like cleaning heavy weight. I mean, it's scary to me. It's not like as natural as like running. And like I said, that hard, that mental hardship that I have to get through. Now, I do have a coach and that helps somewhat, but only somewhat. Like I did definitely like, I'm like, I don't want to do this. You're making go heavier. She'll like sneak the way. You can have an accident. Yeah. And, and, and it's like I said, I think that for people listening, it does help to, you know, voluntarily engage in that kind of struggle because it will help you deal with the stuff that does get thrown at you.

Speaker 2:
[94:42] Sure, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[94:43] I love that mindset change where you're like bringing on, like, I can like, this, this is, I'm gonna do this.

Speaker 2:
[94:49] Don't kick out the pain, lower the resistance. Cause remember, the formula is, you want to be thinking about your suffering, not about your pain. And you have to work the right lever so your suffering goes down. And you can temporarily, I mean, you can take more and more analgesics or sit on the couch all day long. But let me tell you, if you're actually trying to avoid emotional suffering by never dating, that's a huge problem as opposed to, you want to be a real entrepreneur with your life? Give your heart away. See how that feels. Lower your resistance to risk. Lower your resistance to rejection. That's what a life entrepreneur actually does.

Speaker 1:
[95:26] Right. I mean, you're definitely, you're gonna fail.

Speaker 2:
[95:29] You're gonna have pain.

Speaker 1:
[95:29] You're gonna have pain. It's gonna happen whether or not you take the risk or not. You're right. So you might as well get better at it too.

Speaker 2:
[95:36] That's right. That's right. And this is, once again, this is metaphysical fitness is what we're talking about.

Speaker 1:
[95:41] Is that what you would call like being an observer of like your emotions as well, when you're like, instead of you're like, instead of you, it's happening to you. Imagine it's happening to someone else and like how- Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[95:54] That's one technique for lowering resistance for sure. That's called metacognition where you're observing, you're thinking about thinking, you're observing your emotions, you're getting space. You're saying to yourself, I'm not my emotions. My emotions are a physiological experience that I'm having and that's because that's the way my brain is wired. This is really, really helpful when you're having extremely aversive emotions to say, that's not me. That's something that's actually happening neurochemically to me right now. That's space that you put in. There's a lot of techniques for doing that. And that's a resistance lowering set of experiences and techniques. So for example, journaling does that really, really well. When people find that when they write about their feelings, that their feelings don't feel so intense, the reason is because you can't actually, you can't write with your limbic system. You have to write with your prefrontal cortex. You want to move the experience of your emotions to the executive centers of your brain. Prayer is great for this. Prayer is a petition. Vipassana meditation, you know, insight meditation. What am I feeling right now? Let's actually think about that a little bit. For some people, certain kinds of therapy actually really helpful for that. But all of us have these techniques at our disposal if we actually want to self-manage. And, you know, in this life, if you're not self-managing, what are you doing? I mean, it's like the most important management you'll ever do is of yourself is what it comes down to. And this is how we actually learn and grow.

Speaker 1:
[97:19] Right. So the prayer, like for people that are religious, you know, the prayer part, like having daily prayer, you know, whether it's morning or evening.

Speaker 2:
[97:27] Yeah, it's called conversation with God for a lot of people. It's like, you know, I was like, you know, it's funny because there's this three part structure for very traditional Christians for prayer or four part structure depending on it. It's like the first part is part one, you're awesome. You know, part two, thanks. Part three, sorry. Part four, can I have some help here? It's kind of those four parts is glorification and worship. It is gratitude, it's a contrition and it's asking is what it comes down to. But all of that is hugely metacognitive because what you've done is explored all of those things in the murky depths of your limbic system and made them conscious. And that's to be fully alive.

Speaker 1:
[98:17] I've found that praying alone in my head versus like praying with a family member or someone else, like praying together out loud, there's something about praying together that makes me feel really good versus praying by myself. It's a little different.

Speaker 2:
[98:37] Oh yeah, that's called joint metacognition actually. And that's super powerful because you're wiring together the right hemispheres of your brain. The big threat to most family life, to most marriages, for example, is not abuse or abandonment or disloyalty. Those things are real for sure. It's just cooling. It's just, you know, it's torpor. It's time. It's like drifting apart, right? And so there's things that you can actually do to bring a marriage back together again. And there's sort of like four things that you see in the literature that really, really, really work. And what it does is it fuses your right hemispheres. Again, refuses them. Number one is eye contact. And when you're looking at your husband's eyes, that's actually more important to you than him, because women get three times as much oxytocin as men, because you're taking care of a baby. And when your son was a little boy or with a little tiny baby and he was nursing, you know, he'd be staring up at your eyes and it'd be like, the Fourth of July inside your head. That's oxytocin, right? Oxytocin production is the bonding and love connection that you have with a baby. And women have three times as much, men plenty. And it's really, really important. But eye contact is critical for that. And so one of the things I tell guys is if you want to have a, you want to re reheat your marriage, you want the marriage microwave is, is, is actually when you're talking to her, you're looking at her in the eyes because guys are always like this and they're kind of talking and it's fine and all that. And she's like, I don't feel connected. I don't know why. And then he starts like, okay, whenever we're talking, we're looking in the eyes. She's like, I just feel better because there's more oxytocin. Two is always be touching, touch, touch, touch, touch. That's actually more important for men. More touch, more touch, more touch. You're sitting next to him, watching on the couch, watching TV, touch, right? And when you're, when you're walking, always holding hands, right? Always touching, always just ABT, always be touching. Number three is having more fun.

Speaker 1:
[100:32] Wait, explain why touching because it's so true. I noticed that for my husband. Touching is way more important.

Speaker 2:
[100:38] Oh yeah, for sure. If you're walking down the street with him and you hook your arm inside his, like, you know that thing, he's like seven feet tall. And part of the, there's a lot of, you know, sort of contested theories about actually how this works, but for sure there's more oxytocin, but there's more vasopressin, which is defense and strength is the whole thing. And so guys need that more than they understand. It's just casual, it's not sexual touch. It's just touch. It's just actual physical contact that they actually need. It will change your brains, especially his, is what we actually see. It's super critical and women kind of forget that when they cool. When men are cooling, they're looking at you less, and when women are cooling, they're touching you less. That's sort of the typical finding that we see, right? So ABT, ABT, ABT. And so number one is dudes, number two is ladies, right? Number three is fun. Now, a lot of couples when they're cooling, they kind of just rehearse grievances again and again and again. And if they go to couple's therapy, a lot of that is like, okay, well, he said this thing and she did this and et cetera, et cetera. You can cover a multitude of sins, actually make them go away by reducing the significance of the problems, by covering them in happiness, right? And so the negative emotionality can be really drowned in positive emotionality that you're having jointly. And part of that is that thing that's really fun, that we really, really like doing. And it's like, you've noticed this, that when you're having a kind of a squabble, when you're irritated and then something happens, like somebody that you like, some third person knocks on the door and pretty soon, you're all laughing and you're realizing you're not annoyed with each other anymore. That's a perfect case of this. You got to do that, go ride your bikes, go walk on the beach, watch a movie that you both like, whatever it happens to be, but find something that's fun. And number four is praying together. And this gets back to what you're talking about. Praying together, for people who are really, really, really not religious, meditating together, or reading actually to each other, actually does much the same thing. Reading to each other is just, it's almost narcotic for people who love each other. It's actually, as you know, the sound of your voice, if you're actually reading something to them, the Psalms, poetry, whatever it happens to be, it's just so good. And part of the reason is because the way that it actually, the activity in the brain that it elicits when you're hearing the voice of somebody doing something like that, the person that you actually love. So joint prayer is really, really, really powerful. And I recommend that religious couples, I know Catholic couples have been married for 50 years and they don't pray in front of each other because it's so intimate to pray in front of somebody. It's so intimate. It's like, it's really embarrassing at first because it's like looking into the sun. It's like, I don't want you to see, I don't, I can't, it's bad for me. It's like, it's going to burn my retinas or something, which also looking into each other's eyes after a long time can hurt like that too. It can be really heartbreaking in its way. But doing that, boy, oh boy, when I talk to couples that are engaged, I say, it's like, you know what the most intimate thing is? Not that prayer.

Speaker 1:
[103:46] Right. And I love how you, I mean, even for someone that's not religious, perhaps you're not, you know, atheist, maybe you're just, you don't know, you're agnostic, right? Like, you can still pray together. Like, you can, like, you can, sometimes you can pray together just to, like, and then, you know, talk about, like, what, you know, what you're wanting to be better, or what you're looking forward to, or, you know? So it's like, it's, there are ways, it doesn't have to be, sometimes when the people hear the word meditation, it's like, it's gotta be alone, it's gotta be-

Speaker 2:
[104:19] It's gotta be centered in the whole thing, a single point meditation, getting kind of spaced out or so. I got nothing against meditation. I've been meditating for years and years and years. But that's, you know, when jointly meditating on something with different kinds of techniques, you're sharing something metaphysical, sharing metaphysics of it. This is why reading is a really good way to do it. But I like reading poetry, you know, reading Psalms, reading poetry to each other, because it's unusual, it's not what you ordinarily do. And so therefore, it makes your brain and his brain work in a different way.

Speaker 1:
[104:52] Since we're on this social relationships, I mean, I think, you know, the romantic love, first of all, you're talking about younger people who have a hard time even finding a mate. I mean, that's a whole problem. And there's a lot of loneliness in these people. Huge problem. Yeah. But then there's also, like, you know, keeping that romantic relationship going. And I think that we kind of talked a little bit about that date nights for one, like finding those fun things. I mean, I love that's part three.

Speaker 2:
[105:20] That's fun.

Speaker 1:
[105:21] It really is. It really is important. But yeah, I mean, can you kind of just across the lifespan, maybe navigate like how, you know, the social challenges people are going to be challenged with and how they can kind of navigate that at different stages?

Speaker 2:
[105:36] Yeah. I mean, people, obviously, you're a lot less likely to be dating at 60 than you are at 20. I mean, that's the case. Although that's not necessarily the case anymore. I mean, there are fewer and fewer 20-year-olds dating and more and more 60-year-olds who are dating. And part of the reason is because of this phenomenon of gray divorce, which is divorce after 25 years, which is exploding, actually. That's one of the things that we see in no small part because couples who are highly, highly, highly online, they cool to each other because their right hemispheres are not fusing in the ways that we're talking about. They don't know. And I talked to a lot of couples my age about one, two, three, four, what we just talked about here. A lot of young people, 20-year-olds are not dating at all because they're actually in a technological milieu where it's hard. Dating apps are responsible for 62 percent right now of long-term relationships that we find today. But it's actually really hard using these technologies to find people that you're deeply attracted to. The main reason for that, by the way, is because these technologies, which are getting better and I'm not against them, I'm not against technology per se at all, and I think the dating apps are going to be really good, but they've tended to reward compatibility as opposed to complementarity. We bond deeply to somebody who completes us, not who copies us. So you want somebody who is enough like you, same religion maybe, same basic values, but not just like you because that's dating yourself and man, that's not hot, right? It's narcissism, but it's not hotness is what it comes down to. You want somebody who really makes you bigger and better and somebody who makes you complete in its own way. And so that's one of the things that's actually setting people back. It's very hard to meet people outside of technology. Today is what we find.

Speaker 1:
[107:24] Right, well, I mean, because that's how people are meeting each other. And so what do these young 20-somethings do?

Speaker 2:
[107:30] What do they need to do actually is that actually it's finding better ways to meet people IRL. And generally speaking, that means around mutual interests, finding people who are different than you around mutual interests. And so I recommend to young people all the time, they'll say, well, I'm not religious. I say, I don't care. I don't just practice, just do a thing. And for example, they'll say that they're, you know, raised Jewish or something, but they don't feel, they're not religious at all. I say, there's one temple in town where the young single people go. I don't know where you live, but it's true. Figure out where it is and just go with an open mind because you're trying to fill your heart in all sorts of different ways, potentially. If that's not your thing, it's like join a running club. I don't run, I don't care. You're gonna join a running club because you want to meet people around something that's actually good and healthy. I want to join a book club, whatever it happens to be, around something interesting because mutual interest is really, really, really critical. Aristotle talked about the perfect friendship, which is not transactional. The perfect friendship is usually based around a third thing that we both love. Now, that's why couples, their mutual third love is, generally speaking, kids, right? It's that thing. But that's not enough. That's why they need something else that they truly love, which is why the most successful couples also have a metaphysical love. They have a divine love together. That's long-term stability because you're going to walk into the future shoulder to shoulder for the rest of your lives is actually how that's developed. So I tell young people, there's something besides that. The second thing I tell young people, if they're actually trying to meet the person, is everybody who knows you really well and loves you is on notice that that's what you want. Because in the old days, the people who really love you, the people that they set you up with are enough like you but not too much. That's what the matchmaker was really good at. Now, it doesn't mean that's going to be perfect. It's also the case that bad behavior is a lot less common when it's a mutual friend. You're not going to get ghosted by somebody who's going to be in the bad graces of the person who recommended you to them. And so having people on lookout for the person, and that's not normal these days, but those are the techniques, those are the old school techniques that people actually need that are most likely to lead to permanent love relationships today.

Speaker 1:
[109:55] Yeah, I think even just relationships, the friendships are even, that's a struggle, for actually, I would say each young people, I mean, young people, we have a lot of social media, like groups gathering together, they're going out and doing dinners, or going to the clubs or whatever, and they're just, they go because they don't want to miss out, right, for missing out, for missing out. And then, how deep are those relationships? So a common theme I'm hearing, that people and experiences are very important for happiness, extremely important for happiness. But the relationships aren't just these sort of shallow, you know, relationships that you have to put work into them, right?

Speaker 2:
[110:38] Yeah, they take work.

Speaker 1:
[110:38] They take work.

Speaker 2:
[110:39] Yeah, real friendships, and it's, by the way, people, all grown up people with successful careers, they can be super lonely too, because they've atrophied all their real relationships. They might be in a cold marriage, but they have only deal friends and no real friends. Real and deal are different. We all actually know that. Real friends require work.

Speaker 1:
[111:01] Right, so how would, like, first of all, let's say someone did atrophy their friends. Maybe they haven't put in the work, and they're feeling it, right? They're feeling lonely. They're not feeling connected. Maybe they don't have a spouse, or maybe they lost their spouse. How do they rekindle that? What kind of work do you have to put in?

Speaker 2:
[111:19] Yeah, you need to, generally speaking, the best way to do this is to reconnect with people from the past, and find people that you really connect to. So, when I was starting to do this work, I realized, you know, I was, and I've been working my, you know, busting my pick forever, you know? And in the middle of my academic career, I left to run a company, and I was the CEO of this big think tank in Washington, DC for 11 years, and that was 80 hours a week for 11 years. And my kids grew up during that period. I didn't, I worked that 14th hour before the first hour with my kids. I missed a lot of the growing up. It was a, cause I'm a striver, and I've chosen to be special rather than happy a whole lot in my life. I've made that mistake a whole lot of times. And I did a lot of soul searching on the basis of it. One of the reasons that I do dedicate my work exclusively to the Science of Happiness today is cause I want it, Rhonda, I want it. I want it, and I know that it doesn't come easy to me. I'm not talented at this stuff. I gotta do the work myself is what it comes down to. One of the areas of my life where I was weakest was friendship. I mean, I just, I didn't do the work. I was working all the time. It takes work to have real friends. By the way, that means useless. It doesn't mean useful. Useful friends are deal friends. Real friends are, even if they weren't useful in any other way, if they're really, really useless, you just love them, right? You're not compensated in any worldly way from these people. You love them. And for strivers, it's like, I don't got time. I don't have time for that. And I realized that it had been me. And so, I rekindled relationships in the past, and I started dedicating real time to it. And now, I meet people. And when I make a connection with somebody my age, somebody younger, somebody older, I do more work on it. I set time aside. I cold call my friends. I text a lot. I have a friend I made two years ago when I was, I guess, 59. I love the guy. I love the guy. We just actually hung out as couples up in Camarillo. Just last weekend and for no reason, for no reason at all. He needs nothing for me. I need nothing from him, but he's great. I just wouldn't have done that 10 years ago.

Speaker 1:
[113:28] This is great because also men struggle with keeping relationships, friendships. They rely a lot on their friends.

Speaker 2:
[113:35] Dudes aren't good at this.

Speaker 1:
[113:35] No. How important is it for them to really try and like you said, find the real friends, maybe just maybe one or two, whatever, to like and try to connect with them and schedule things, whether it's coffee or a little getaway.

Speaker 2:
[113:53] Yeah. Women are better at this in no small part because women naturally have more developed right hemispheres of the brain. Women are more generally adroit at love. They're better at love. They're better at mystery and meaning than men are. Men have generally more developed left hemispheres of their brain, which is why little boys like trains. How does that work? Right. And it's funny because I have only grandsons. I have four grandsons at this point. Man, you have construction equipment out there. That's going to be, that's what they look at as a construction equipment. And that's very hemispherically lateralized. A lot of that is like the work of Simon Baron Cohen. Have you ever heard of Simon Baron Cohen? It sounds like Sacha Baron Cohen is his first cousin. Oh, yeah, actually, he's the most distinguished social psychologist in the world on autism. He teaches at Cambridge. He does really, really important work on this. And his work touches on hemispheric lateralization, the hyperdevelopment of the left hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with autism. It's just one of the reasons it's more prevalent in little boys than it is in little girls, not exclusively so, but it sort of explains a lot of actually what we see. So the result is that as we grow up, women don't tend to get worse at friendship. On the contrary, they tend to get better at friendship as they get older. I mean, your results may vary because you work all the time, right? And men tend to get worse at it as they get older, because they're not in the milieu, because they don't have their moms having play dates with other little boys, and they're not in college where they're in a dorm with other dudes, and they're not on sports teams anymore. And pretty soon, there's a statistic I see all the time. I can never source it, so who knows? But 60% of 60-year-old men, their best friend is their wife. Whereas 30% of their wives, their best friend is their husband, which is this heartbreaking statistic of unrequited friendship in its way. And that's because, and that explains, by the way, why women do so well when they're widowed and men do so poorly, because the men are, when their wives die, often are just profoundly alone. They're just, they're cordial with their adult kids at best. They don't have any real friends. They don't have any interests really that they've developed and their work stops. And then, and then their wife dies? Their only friend dies? It's like Robinson Caruso on a desert island, but without, without Friday.

Speaker 1:
[116:18] Right. I mean, and also like, if you're, if you're relying on your wife, on your spouse for everything, because that's like your only real deep relationship. I mean, that's a lot. It's a lot on her.

Speaker 2:
[116:30] Oh my gosh, when you retire?

Speaker 1:
[116:32] I mean, yeah. I mean, when you retire, I mean, it just, imagine, like it's-

Speaker 2:
[116:37] I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch. Stop following me around the house.

Speaker 1:
[116:44] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[116:44] Totally, I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot. I mean, I sort of specialize in helping guys retire at this stage in life, because I've written a lot about how to be successful as you get older. And by successful, I mean, happier, better, having a more full life. And guys just don't know how to do that. So I talk about what does leisure mean? How do you do leisure? How do you do friendship? And how to develop relationships? How to develop a spiritual relationship when you never had one, when you're 65 years old for the first time? And it's like preschool for a lot of these guys.

Speaker 1:
[117:15] And what do you do for your friendship? Do you just call up an old friend that you did, that you were close to at one point? Just call them up and start talking? Is that a start?

Speaker 2:
[117:25] Kind of, and it sort of works with dudes. They're like, man, I've been thinking about you too. That's great. It's like, what are you up to these days? And just basically rekindle the friendship, which is, it sounds like it's weird and awkward, but it kind of isn't, as a matter of fact. And so I've helped groups of guys in their 60s start hanging out again with their college buddies. And it's such a relief for all of them, but somebody actually needs to take the initiative. And inevitably they were all lonely. You know, this is funny. There's this movement. This is like the most European thing ever. In Great Britain, there's this thing called the Men's Sheds Movement. Have you heard of this?

Speaker 1:
[117:59] No.

Speaker 2:
[117:59] Where they're, of course the government is building these, like, craft sheds in these neighborhoods for retired guys to go build bird houses and stuff. And their wives will drop them off. Because they're bored and they don't have any friends and they got nothing to do. And so these old men will be in there doing crafts. And this is sponsored by the government to get rid of loneliness, right?

Speaker 1:
[118:21] That's a great idea.

Speaker 2:
[118:22] It is just, it's, but it's so dystopian that the government is building sheds because of loneliness, right?

Speaker 1:
[118:27] The government's doing it, but like the fact that, but this is what people should be doing. They should be going-

Speaker 2:
[118:32] Their wives are setting them up on play dates like they're four years old. I know, I know, but the whole point is if we don't manage ourselves, we're gonna get in trouble.

Speaker 1:
[118:42] Yeah. Right. Okay, so we've covered a lot.

Speaker 2:
[118:46] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[118:47] What are we missing?

Speaker 2:
[118:49] What indeed? We've covered transcendence, we've covered love, we covered friendship, the definition of happiness. We've talked about meaning. I don't know what else are, what else do we need to talk about? We've talked about morning protocols. We've talked about actually how to use science on all this stuff.

Speaker 1:
[119:05] So if a person comes to you and says, I'm unhappy, I am not happy.

Speaker 2:
[119:10] Right.

Speaker 1:
[119:11] You would tell them that they could learn to be happy.

Speaker 2:
[119:14] Absolutely. And here's basically how it works. And to begin with, most people don't know if they have an unhappiness problem or a happiness problem. And so I have a battery of tests. I have this happiness scale that I take them through to see whether or not happiness or unhappiness is your bigger problem. Right. Because it's a different treatment. You know, the diagnosis actually suggests that the treatment would be different. So people who are deeply, deeply unhappy have a different course of treatment than people who are not, who have low happiness. And if people have low happiness, I'm going to talk to them about their faith and family and friendships and finding meaning in their work.

Speaker 1:
[119:47] And people who are deeply, deeply unhappy, I'm going to try to figure out what actually the problem is with that instead of protocols that will naturally lower their unhappiness to a tolerable level with or without, you know, a medical professional is actually how this how this This would all work, so that's an important thing to actually keep in mind. But the whole point, the reason that this is a science and it's really valuable and worthwhile, very much relates to what you're doing in your work, which is that science empowers you. Knowledge is actual power if, and only if, you turn this into habits, if you turn this into the way that you're living your life. And then the most important thing actually occurs, if you wanna make it permanent, you gotta share it. So, this is an algorithm for improving anything about your knowledge. And I remember this, because my dad, who is a statistician and a math professor lifelong, I watched him one time giving an advanced calculus lecture. And I was in my 20s, so I was old enough to admire my dad. And he was giving this hour and a half lecture, very sophisticated advanced calculus with no notes. And man, he was killing it. It was unbelievable. It was like watching a virtuoso violinist in his prime. And afterward I'm like, dad, how did you do that? That was amazing. How did you do that? And he said, well, I understand it. I practiced it. And now I'm sharing it. That's what I do. It's the full algorithm. And he was happy while he was doing it. You will learn language or golf. If you understand golf, you play a lot of golf and you explain golf, right? Your secret to holding yourself accountable to all the stuff you're talking about in the show is understanding the science, living it in your life and talking about it with others. The secret to getting happier is understanding the science that psychology is biology, living in a different way and actually sharing it with other people. My class at Harvard is called Leadership and Happiness because I'm trying to make happiness teachers, which is the secret to making happy people.

Speaker 2:
[121:53] A lot of people seek out pharmacological treatments, maybe because their unhappiness.

Speaker 1:
[122:01] Almost always. I mean, there's sort of two things. People do try to get happier pharmacologically, but that's like smoking dope and hanging out at the beach mostly. And that's sort of the pleasure lever and I don't recommend that. And part of the reason I don't recommend that is that all euphoric substances are neurotoxic. That's the rule, which means, okay, you don't have a glass of wine, you have to decide. I don't drive the safest car either. I don't drive the unsafest car, but we all cut corners and we all have to make cost-benefit decisions in our lives. But I avoid euphoric substances because of the neurotoxicity that is inherent in these types of things. Plus, I know that pleasure isn't going to lead to happiness. It's enjoyment, which is why you wouldn't drink a whole bottle of wine by yourself. Anyway, substances on the happiness side are less frequent and as dubious. I question whether or not people are actually trying to do it to get happier. People use substances all the time, licit and illicit substances to try to lower their unhappiness. In certain cases, it can be really effective. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, for example, are really good for keeping more serotonin in the synapse, which is associated with less activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, aka less rumination. If you can actually increase the dopamine in people's brains, you're going to get less anhedonia, which is the inability to feel pleasure. If you can actually keep more norepinephrine in the synapse, you're going to get less psychomotor retardation, which is a characteristic of clinical depression. I get it. I get the biology on how all this works, and it can be really, really effective. But it's going to be way less effective than it should be if you're not self-managing, if you're not on top of all of these things. And for a huge part of the population, the self-management per se really is the secret. That's one of the things that they find typically in the treatment of clinical depression is that chemistry plus cognitive behavioral therapy has like eight times the effect of chemistry by itself, of changing your neurochemistry by itself. And so a lot of what I'm talking about here are both the unhappiness and the happiness side is incredibly powerful if you do one, two, three. This is not self-improvement, which just gives you an epiphany that burns off. It's learn the science. The science is not inaccessible. It's not, I mean, most of the people that watch your show are not scientists, they're not scientific background like me. They're mostly people who just want to live better and they get to understand it. Second, change your habits, change your habits, live differently. Third, share it, pass it on. You know, talk about it with your family. I promise everybody watching us right now.

Speaker 2:
[124:46] That gives you that meaning, purpose too.

Speaker 1:
[124:48] Oh yeah. And it's also awesome because if you start talking with the science of happiness, everybody wants to have dinner with you. Everybody wants to have you at the dinner table because everybody's interested in it.

Speaker 2:
[124:59] Everybody wants to be happy.

Speaker 1:
[125:00] Everybody wants to be happier.

Speaker 2:
[125:02] You know, and this pharmacological treatment that people do seek out, and I just posted a study yesterday on this new study, a new meta-analysis of multiple studies came out, randomized trials, comparing exercise, running exercise, to standard of care treatments, whether that be cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, traditional psychotherapy, including CBT, also SSRIs, and exercise was as good as either of those at improving depressive symptoms. This is multiple studies. It was obviously better than placebo or no treatment. Of course, exercise is something you have to want to do. You have to put in effort. And some people, they can't even get to that point because they are so-

Speaker 1:
[125:48] They're so paralyzed.

Speaker 2:
[125:49] They're so paralyzed by their unhappiness or whatever it is, you know.

Speaker 1:
[125:53] Especially if they have a real, real nephicin in norepinephrine and they have this psychomotor retardation, it's keeping them effectively paralyzed.

Speaker 2:
[126:00] Right.

Speaker 1:
[126:01] Right. And so getting out of that first and then actually getting into a routine, super important, but you're right. I mean, that literature is dramatic.

Speaker 2:
[126:09] It's dramatic. But adding that in to, like, I mean, the habits that you're talking about are so important. Like I mentioned, you know, just educating myself on these. And I love how you speak about it. And, you know, you've got two wonderful books, one on the way coming, the meeting of your life. You've got a podcast that you do. I mean, you know, so just me learning from you, I was so excited because I could immediately see where I needed to apply these things. I love to learn the lie. I love, it's very motivating for me when I understand something. It makes sense. I have to do this, right? Like that's, and there's a lot of people like that. I think people don't even realize that they're like that because they maybe just haven't learned the lie. They haven't learned the science of it. They haven't had someone explain it to them in a way they could understand. Whatever, they haven't found where to consume it. There's a lot of reasons why they may not have gotten.

Speaker 1:
[127:02] Which is why the modern era with YouTube and Spotify and all of these platforms that we have is so wonderful. You can just learn and learn and learn and learn. You gotta have some judgment about what you're learning.

Speaker 2:
[127:15] Right, I mean, that's the double-edged sword of having all this information at our fingertips.

Speaker 1:
[127:19] No gatekeepers. That's actually one of the reasons that you gotta be careful that you're watching and listening to people who have some credibility and what they're talking about, which is not necessarily people who've suffered through PhDs like you and me, but it does require that you have some basic judgment about who you're listening to, for sure. But it's wonderful, it's great. Did you enjoy your PhD?

Speaker 2:
[127:42] I did. I mean, to some degree, I enjoyed my postdoc more than my PhD only because I liked the topic. I was more passionate. My PhD, I was diving deep on... I mean, I like nutrition, I like micronutrients, and I was diving deep on this protein that helps cells not die.

Speaker 1:
[128:01] This is because you were doing experiments, biochemistry.

Speaker 2:
[128:03] Yeah, biochemistry. I was going deep. You have to do some of that deep diving, you have to understand mechanisms. That's part of what your PhD is about, just going really deep.

Speaker 1:
[128:14] They got to haze you too.

Speaker 2:
[128:16] They do. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[128:17] Make sure you're miserable enough.

Speaker 2:
[128:19] That's why exercise in sauna before going to the lab was very important to me because it was very challenging. Especially if you're someone that already puts a lot of pressure on yourself and then you have this other whole committee and all the-

Speaker 1:
[128:33] Yeah. But you're learning a lot. And actually one of the things that people, they ask about is should I get a PhD? And the main, you could have gotten a PhD in almost anything and you'd be the kind of thinker that you are today because the reps in pure thinking are something you never get. It's a super interesting literature that shows that when you do something, this is the 10,000 hours or something theory of just the reps on something makes you really, really good at it. And most people never spend very much time thinking, just knocking your head against problems. And so you could have gotten a PhD in puppetry and you'd be a really good linear thinker because you would have spent four or five years just basically thinking all the time. That's the number one benefit of actually getting a doctorate as far as I'm concerned. You've got the time and space to just organize thought inside your brain in a way that nobody ever taught you to do because they don't teach you that in college. They don't teach you. God knows they don't teach you that in high school.

Speaker 2:
[129:29] That's super interesting. Never thought about it that way. How important is it, as you're getting your midlife, and then you're gonna eventually transition into older adults, how important is it to continue thinking and learning new things, novel experiences? I mean, I know how important that is for, novel experiences itself helps with BDNF. Obviously exercise does too, but neuroplasticity. How important is that for transitioning into the next stage?

Speaker 1:
[130:02] Well, I mean, that's a great question. And actually the answer to that comes from studies on people who wind up happy and healthy. So there's that, you've heard of the Harvard study of adult development, the grant study. That's following the same cohort 85 years now. Starting in the late 30s, people who were in their sophomore year at Harvard, which is not a representative sample. It was all like, you know, white men above average income. But then it was matched up with a sample of men who were lower, you know, economically lower class. They didn't actually have even high school degrees largely. And then it expanded to their spouses, and then it expanded to their kids. And so now it's representative of the population, and it's been following them. And it says, what did they do if they were going to wind up in the quadrant that's both happy and healthy when they're old? So there's a crystal ball, right? And it turns out that they all, the almost all of the people in that quadrant, there's a lot of people were unhealthy, a lot of people were unhappy, but the ones who were happy and well did seven things, okay? Seven things. Now, some of them are obvious, diet, exercise, smoking and drinking. And that would be substances today. They're very moderate on substances. None of them were addicts, or if they had trouble with it, they quit, right? Smoking, it's like, duh. I mean, any duh, I mean, right? I mean, I used to smoke on it because I was a musician in my 20s. And I knew in my 20s, it was so stupid. It was so stupid. I quit when I was 26 years old. I still think about it every day. I do. I love nicotine. You know, I got addicted when I was 13 and I quit when I was 26. And it was a relationship for me, right? But the whole point is no, because lifelong smokers have a seven in 10 chance of dying of a smoking related illness. And that's an unhappy way to go. That is an, you're not going to be healthy and you're not going to be happy dying of emphysema. That's just the case. And then it's, and then exercise and diet. And that means a really, basically a normal diet is what it comes down to, a healthy diet and exercise. Actually, interestingly, there's that sort of curvilinear effect where you don't exercise at all, you're not happy and well. And if you're an exercise maniac, you're actually will do some mechanical ill to your body, but actually you're probably not happy and there's a lot of compensation that's going on because that's how a lot of former alcoholics, for example, they become exercise addicted and they're transferring, they're kind of dry drunk.

Speaker 2:
[132:26] Sick, quitter bias.

Speaker 1:
[132:27] Yeah, it's a problem, it's a rational problem. So it's just normal and walking a lot, staying active, okay, that stuff is obvious. Then there's the three that are not the obvious ones. Number one is continuing to learn. And people who are lifelong learners, they're healthier and they are happier. That's usually a lot of reading, but it's just curiosity is how that comes about, which is really, really important. That's, I mean, just this lifelong learning is a critical part of it. The second is learning to-

Speaker 2:
[132:55] Wait, can I ask why you think that is? I mean, obviously, if you're naturally curious, you're going to want to learn. And so maybe there's a little bit of a reverse causation there, but like, do you think it has to do with neuroplasticity? Being able to adapt, okay.

Speaker 1:
[133:09] I think it is. I do think, because once again, I'm very strongly in the view that psychology is biology. I mean, there's just, I mean, I believe that there are things that are suprabiological as well. I believe that there is a metaphysics. I don't believe that everything is related to the brain. I think that the mind goes and the soul will go beyond that, to be sure. But most, almost everything that we talk about in psychology, you have to understand the biology to really get it. I think neuroplasticity is the key. People who have a lot of very, very active, have a life of the mind and are highly neuroplastic, they're just happier and healthier. And by the way, even if they have a whole lot of degradation, neurocognitive degradation, physically, they do better. If you're learning a lot, your brain can hollow out practically, and you're still gonna have enough of the connections synaptically in your brain that you're gonna be able to function for a much, much, much longer time.

Speaker 2:
[134:04] Do you think part of that has to do with like the fact that changes will continue to happen in your life, and because you have that neuroplasticity, you're gonna not gonna be so low, but you can adapt.

Speaker 1:
[134:17] You can adapt. You can adapt to it. And by the way, when you're doing that, when you have a lot of neuroplasticity, life is just more interesting, because when you start learning, you start seeing that everything is an opportunity for you to learn and grow. Life is just not boring. And once again, a boring life is not that great. Boredom is important, but the right kind of boredom. And side note on this, it's really quite interesting to note that the misunderstanding of boredom today is leading to this meta boredom. So you're the great-grandpa Patrick never came home and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today, right? No, because his brain was working the way it was supposed to work with both hemispheres. But he was pretty bored in his job. He wasn't listening to podcasts. He wasn't scrolling reels. He was behind the mule. And in moment to moment, his life was boring. But at the end of the day, at the end of his life, he didn't say, I had a boring life, because his life wasn't boring in the meta sense. Young people today are never bored moment to moment, but their life is grindingly boring. It's just so ironic that we don't understand boredom in this particular way, to be sure. Somebody who's interested in things, interested in real things, interested in life itself is not going to be bored and they're going to be happier. And for all sorts of biological reasons, they're going to be healthier as well.

Speaker 2:
[135:42] I don't want to forget about the Harvard study and the two other-

Speaker 1:
[135:44] There's two more, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[135:45] But that's so fascinating because like the younger people that are constantly scrolling and you're not ever bored. And it's true, you're never bored.

Speaker 1:
[135:52] But your life's so boring.

Speaker 2:
[135:53] Is that because they're not seeking out these experiences with people? These, I mean, the purpose, they're not, it's all, everything that we've talked about, is that, is it essentially what it comes down to?

Speaker 1:
[136:02] Because your life's a simulation.

Speaker 2:
[136:04] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[136:04] A simulation, a simulated life is a boring life. A real life is an interesting life. And you're living in a simulation. If you're, you're, you're, you're dating online, you're dating, you're swiping. If your life is, if your work is on the Zoom screen, if the first thing you look at is your phone to check your messages. If your social life is largely on social media, if you're gaming to get your sense of accomplishment, that's not, that's, that is the plot of The Matrix. It's so boring.

Speaker 2:
[136:31] But it's even more than that too, Arthur, right? Because then you've got this social comparison, constantly comparing yourself. And there's always going to be someone smarter than you, better looking than you, richer than you, more powerful than you, always.

Speaker 1:
[136:42] So you're belittled.

Speaker 2:
[136:42] And you are just constantly belittling. Like I personally, I use social media for my business. I don't actually consume it. And it's probably to my, it's, I should be consuming more of it because it would help me get more perspective on like what's going on in some cases. But honestly, I don't like social media. I don't like how it makes me feel.

Speaker 1:
[137:03] Defensively, it's good for you not to do that. There's all kinds of things that you could do to be good for your business. All kinds of things that you could do. You could be on the road three times as much as you actually are. That'd probably be good for your business, but it'd be bad for your life.

Speaker 2:
[137:16] What do you tell people, like, you know, young people or anyone, like, I'm in midlife and I'm subject to this social comparison. You know, what do you tell people, like, to help them deal with that, not keep comparing yourself? Like, how do you break out of that vicious cycle?

Speaker 1:
[137:34] It depends. The way to do that is not necessarily to get off of all social media because that's an unreasonable thing to do, is to curate the experience in a way that's life-affirming as opposed to life diminishing. And so, the two things that people should actually be doing with social media are learning and laughing, you know? And connecting with other people, to be sure. Like, you know, my kids are not interested in social media very much at all. But like my oldest son, he's on Facebook, like Facebook. What is he like, your 71-year-old Aunt Marge? And the reason is because all of his Catholic buddies are on Facebook and they know what they're gonna do. It's like, oh, they're going down to the harbor and we're gonna have a cookout. That's how he learns, actually using social media to connect, but when you're just entertaining yourself on social media, you should be learning and laughing. You should be following accounts that teach you something that's life-affirming about science, about books, about art, about whatever it happens to be that you're interested in, and the stuff that you actually find funny. And those two things, that's the two things to do. Don't follow some celebrity who has the life that you always wanted, because you just feel crummy about yourself. And you gotta, I mean, don't do things that make you feel lousy is what it comes down to, and take positive measures on purpose, and people can do that.

Speaker 2:
[138:49] I mean, even with young adults, realizing that you're looking at the highlights of everyone's life, that's not real life, right? I mean, everyone's looking their best. They got the filters, they're, you know.

Speaker 1:
[139:00] It's a lie.

Speaker 2:
[139:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[139:01] And the funny thing about it is there's a couple of papers that shows that even if we know it's a lie, we still believe the lie. And even if we're participating in a lie by, nobody puts on social media, it's like, my wife just yelled at me again, brutal. Nobody puts that on social media. My kid just flunked math for the fourth time. Nobody puts that on there. And so you know you're curating a version of your life, that's not an accurate version of your life. And you know that you're consuming a curated version of other people's lives as well, but you still believe it. You still believe it. And so don't subject yourself to it by actually setting up boundaries on it. Also, I recommend to people have certain limits, half an hour a day of social media across all platforms, and do it on purpose in one or two boluses of consumption of social media.

Speaker 2:
[139:51] And do you think they should just go to the profiles that they're going to learn something rather than letting the algorithm feed it to them?

Speaker 1:
[139:56] If you're going to do half an hour in the morning of social media, and it's a certain half hour that you set aside, you're not going to waste your time. You're not going to scroll away your hours. You're going to go here, I'm going to go here, I'm going to go see the Seahawks score, I'm going to go see the da-da-da-da-da-da, right? Because you want to learn something. It's actually enriching to you.

Speaker 2:
[140:12] Okay, let's go back to the Harvard section.

Speaker 1:
[140:13] Yeah, I got two more.

Speaker 2:
[140:14] Two more.

Speaker 1:
[140:14] Is you need your technique for dealing with life's problems. You got to get good at it. You need skill at dealing with life's problems. And if you don't get good at it, you're going to be bad when things actually crop up. And so maybe you're good at therapy, maybe you're good at prayer, maybe you're good at meditation, maybe you're really good at journaling, but all the happy and well people have their way to deal with it and they're highly skilled in doing it.

Speaker 2:
[140:38] How do they measure that? Just they measure all those parameters that you have.

Speaker 1:
[140:41] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like, what do you do when you're upset? And people have very strong answers on how they do it. How long have you been doing that? They dig into it. So Bob Waldinger, Robert Waldinger, has he been on your show?

Speaker 2:
[140:52] I'm in touch with him.

Speaker 1:
[140:53] He's great, here at The Good Life, and he actually gets lectures from me at Harvard sometimes. He's phenomenal. And he can tell you actually how they measure that one, which is really interesting. And the last but not least is the biggie, which is love. People who have the best lives, who are happy and well and they're older, they have a strong marriage and or close friendships.

Speaker 2:
[141:10] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[141:10] That's it. There's no substitute for love. Happiness is love, full stop.

Speaker 2:
[141:13] What about love with like your children?

Speaker 1:
[141:15] Yeah. I mean, that's good, except that what they find is that the two kinds of relationships that are most correlated with happiness and wellness is marriage and, and or friends. You don't have to be married and not everybody's marriage works out, but isolation from other people that are not just your children.

Speaker 2:
[141:31] Is that because your children like eventually leave?

Speaker 1:
[141:33] They leave.

Speaker 2:
[141:33] And like life changes.

Speaker 1:
[141:35] Yeah, they leave. And you know, they have a different kind of love for you. It's an asymmetric relationship. You know, you love your kids more than they love you. That's just the way it is. I mean, I believe that my kids love me and I live with my kids. And I tell people I live with my 27 year old son. They're like, oh, I'm sorry. I say with his wife and kids. And they're like, oh, that's great. You know, and we made an intentional decision to have all the family in one area. As a matter of fact, we all moved to Northern Virginia in a huge house where three generations now live and the others are right up the street. The only one that's left is my daughter who's active duty in the Marines and she'll have a duty station in Hawaii for the next few years. But she'll be back at the end because we're doing that on purpose. It's really, really, really important. But it's also important that everybody realize that the love relationships most correlated with happiness and wellness later in life are close personal friendships and or a strong marriage.

Speaker 2:
[142:30] Yeah. So that's also really important because, you know, I do know some families and mothers that really have put, it's easy to neglect your spouse when you're trying to put everything into raising the best child. And what happens is when you neglect, when you let that atrophy and the kids leave, it's like, what's my purpose?

Speaker 1:
[142:52] Well, you've gone from real friends to deal friends in your marriage. When it's only about the kids and raising the kids and all that, that is a third love to be sure. But then you're just with each other. It's just transactional. Did you take the kids to school today? Did you make their lunches? Did you call the teacher? And you got nothing in common. And then they move out. And that's weird when they move out. I mean, it's because my youngest is 22 now. And so it's been a long time that we've had an empty nest. And our friends who have nothing in common except raising the kids, then they'll look at each other and blink, blink. It's like, who are you? They don't have anything in common. And then the thing they had in common dissipates. And that's really dangerous.

Speaker 2:
[143:31] For sure. My husband and I, I mean, we do day and night. We try to do it once a week. We love to work out together, but we also, I started, I instigated us learning to play tennis together. I've been learning to play tennis for a little over a year now. But I feel like I wanted something like a leisure time for us to do together when we're older. Lifting weights and stuff, we do like doing that as well. But-

Speaker 1:
[143:56] A game is better. Yeah, there's something about games. We actually do that, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[144:00] We're able to play each other, play doubles and so. And I think there's just another thing I wanted to jump into before we wrap this up, which is, you know, people that are, I think you wrote about it in your From Strength to Strength book, right? Where you're, there's like these four sort of, I don't know, outline principles that people can follow to kind of make that last part of their life fulfilling. And like, be happy, right? Was it, you make the jump, there was jump, was it service? You help me out here.

Speaker 1:
[144:34] I can't remember which one's actually listed at the end of that book.

Speaker 2:
[144:37] Okay, jump, serve, worship, connect. Oh yeah. And, you know, I know I still have a ways before this, you know, before I'm really there, but not that long. It's going fast.

Speaker 1:
[144:49] It goes super fast.

Speaker 2:
[144:50] And you know, things like realizing, and we touch on this when you're not in your peak anymore, and like how, like how you can still be happy, because like trying to relive those glory days will make you unhappy.

Speaker 1:
[145:02] It'll make you nuts, actually. Yeah. Trying to actually live in the past and extend what was good for you at one particular time forward is a real problem. And so the first one that I do talk about from strength to strength, which is a book about how to design the second half of your life and being prepared for that in the first half of your life is actually jumping, is recognizing that the past is in the past and you need to proactively build a different future for yourself. People who are trying to keep the party going, they're always, they always wind up being really frustrated. And the reason I say jump is, you know, this metaphor that, you know, the ground is changing under you. Jump to the next thing. Be proactive about it is really, really important. And even by the way, when you feel like you're losing something, that's the most fertile period. And we know that from the whole literature on liminality, liminal spaces in life, or when there's unwelcome change. Unwelcome change is inevitably where you have your greatest creativity and where there's the most generativity in your life, but you bridle against it and you try, you reject it and you don't want, you don't want it to occur. Change is going to occur. The choice is whether or not you're going to learn and grow. That's your choice. You're going to learn and grow and while change occurs so that you profit from it, or you're going to not profit from it, but it's going to happen anyway.

Speaker 2:
[146:28] Right.

Speaker 1:
[146:29] It's similar to the whole concept of suffering. The second part is serving other people. We've talked about that, and that's really important because you will grow as a person, but only when you dedicate yourself to others. That's not what Mother Nature wants. Mother Nature wants you to live in the psychodrama. Me, me, me, my job, my car, my money, my fun, my job, my me, me. It's so boring. And yet, I mean, last night, I was the star in every one of my dreams. It's just so tedious. And when we go against that basic nature of being the star of the psychodrama, then we can actually transcend ourselves, see something from 30,000 feet, see what the possibilities of the future might be, and actually build a happier tomorrow than what we see today. The whole idea of worshiping, we've talked about before, but everybody worships something. Everybody does. And most people actually worship themselves because they're effectively the center of their own universe, whether they believe in God or not is what it comes down to. But transcending and standing in awe, whether it's a traditional kind of worship or not, is critically important for actually building a better future. And last but not least is love, is the connections that we actually make. And the connections are not going to make themselves. They just aren't. And if you're not in the business of connecting with other people, you're going to get lonelier and lonelier as you get older. And people actually move on with their own lives and you wind up isolated. Now, I'm not talking about not having aloneness, not having solitude, because solitude is a beautiful thing. Just read, you know, Henry David Thoreau's Walden. He talks about solitude and how lovely that is. But isolation is a different kettle of fish. And you have to take matters into your own hands of working on the relationships that you care about the most. You have to serve those relationships and take the time to build them, to be as healthy as they possibly can. And those are the ingredients that actually are most correlated with people proactively building lives that they actually want going forward in the future. And I had to change my own life too, by the way. I had to make different decisions as well. I mean, at one point I quit my job as a CEO because I wasn't doing with my life what I needed to do. I mean, I started the whole project of looking at the second half of life because I realized I was on the wrong track. I had the experience of overhearing one of the most famous men in the world telling his wife he might as well be dead. It was extraordinary. I didn't even know it was a famous guy. I just heard this old man behind me on an airplane telling his wife, like, nobody remembers me and I might as well be dead. And I'm thinking, oh, it's just like some high school teacher who got retired involuntarily. And I turned around at the end of the flight and it was literally one of the most famous men in the world, rich and famous guy. And because he felt like he had been forgotten and he was trying, he wanted the glory of the things that had actually happened in the past. I was like, man, I do not want to be telling my wife Esther this. When I'm in my 80s, I got to make some changes. And so I did. And each one of the phases of change in my life has occurred because I got to crack the code. I'm responsible to do that. Part of the reason I teach happiness is because I want to live, I want to be held accountable to these particular ideas. But that's the idea of these four parts of living better, is all science based and what I'm trying to do in my own life.

Speaker 2:
[149:54] Yeah. It's so good, Arthur. I mean, thank you so much for everything you do.

Speaker 1:
[150:00] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[150:01] I mean, I'm just-

Speaker 1:
[150:02] Likewise. Likewise. You're really helping me an awful lot. I'm always excited when on Apple Podcasts, I see there's a new FoundMyFitness. I just wish it were every week. I understand why you're not doing it every week.

Speaker 2:
[150:14] Yeah. Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[150:15] Because you go deep and it's about quality.

Speaker 2:
[150:18] Yeah. It's about quality and it's also about balance for my life. Yep.

Speaker 1:
[150:21] Super important.

Speaker 2:
[150:22] And I just, it is super important. I want to be happy too, like everyone else.

Speaker 1:
[150:25] You deserve to be happy and you need to be happy actually because the authenticity that comes into helping people build better lives requires that you actually be living what you're talking about.

Speaker 2:
[150:36] Yeah. And now, I feel like I have so much more, I have tools now that I didn't have just a few weeks ago before I started reading a lot of your work and stuff. And it's just like, it's helped me. It's helped me. I'm excited. I'm really excited about it. Already applying things, like I said, and telling people about dwelling on their mortality more. I mean, it actually is really important. It sounds morbid, but it really does help you put the things that are important into perspective. And that really is something that, and it also helps with dealing with that anxiety, the fear of death, like realizing that life is finite, like you're not going to live forever.

Speaker 1:
[151:17] Yeah, for sure. There's a reason that it did memento mori, the reason that the Stoics were actually are contemplating a human skull or something. But the whole point is that you don't have to be morbid about it, but yeah, life is finite and just be alive now.

Speaker 2:
[151:30] Every minute matters. It makes you realize, you're like every minute, like you don't want to waste your time, you know? You just like, cause it goes and every minute matters. So anyways, with that said, there are so many places people can read your books, you can tell them about all your books through a new one coming out, your podcast, you're on social media, YouTube channel. Let's hear it.

Speaker 1:
[151:53] So my website is arthurbrooks.com, which is, you know, everybody's got a website, that's their name, arthurbrooks.com, just like it sounds. And that's where you can find my columns and newsletters. And I have a weekly newsletter on the science of happiness. It's completely free. Oh, I'm signing up. I'm signing up. Yeah, and it's super fun because I can actually, you know, goof around and show pictures of my grandkids or whatever, but also real advice on what the latest science is saying. I have a column every week in the free press called The Pursuit of Happiness appropriately. I have a book that's coming out March 31st, which is The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. That's with Penguin Random House, and that will be every place on March 31st. I'm really excited about that. I've been working on that book for five years, as a matter of fact, because I've been trying to crack the code on the neurobiology of emptiness. You know, why do we feel this way that we do? My podcast is Office Hours. It's just, you know, kind of like it sounds, because it's a lot of my work. You know, it's talking about my work. Most of the time, I'm just talking about some, you know, area of the science of happiness. Occasionally, I have guests, but not always. It's not very long. It's only 45 minutes. It's not like the conversation we're having here. And then I'm on social media, which is where I'm, you know, cutting up and slicing and dicing little things. I've got a great team of people that are trying to live the mission. And my personal mission is to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.

Speaker 2:
[153:16] Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I look forward to our next conversation because we're going to talk about some more interesting stuff. I can't wait either.

Speaker 1:
[153:24] Thank you, Rhonda, for what you're doing. You're making me happier and healthier. And I get to do it in person with you. That's so great.

Speaker 2:
[153:30] Likewise. I feel the same, really, truly. I'm so excited. Me too. A big thank you to Dr. Arthur Brooks for coming on the show and educating us on the science of happiness, but also helping us learn how to be happier. And thank you all for joining me today for this fascinating conversation with Dr. Brooks. This episode was a bit unique and it goes far beyond the usual conversation about happiness as a fleeting emotion. Instead, it really offers practical advice and a framework for understanding how enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning work together and how our habits, our relationships, technology use, our ambitions, and even our struggles can either support or even erode our well-being. For those of you who want to think more deeply about how to live with greater purpose, stronger relationships and a healthier emotional life, this is truly a conversation worth returning to. And lastly, as a reminder, if you value my podcast, if you value these deep dives into science and appreciate the content that remains free of sponsorship bias, please, please consider supporting this podcast by becoming a FoundMyFitness Premium member. Your support makes conversations like these possible and allows me to continue delivering rigorous, unbiased, authoritative information directly to you. You also get some amazing membership perks. So you get the special members-only podcast called The Aliquot. We have over 140 episodes. They're awesome podcasts. I get great praise about them. You also get access to a monthly live and recorded Q&A with me. You can submit your questions. I answer them and they're recorded. They're live. You can attend them live. You can also just listen to the rerun of that. Whatever it is that works for your schedule, they're great. And also we send out a special science digest twice a month to your inbox. This is really covering all the latest cutting edge science on health, nutrition, brain health, everything that you need to know to improve your longevity status. You can join and support my work at foundmyfitness.com/premium. Again, that's foundmyfitness.com/p-r-e-m-i-u-mpremium. And if you haven't yet, make sure you're subscribed to my weekly email newsletter. It is really the go-to resource for practical, actionable, evidence-based insights into health, longevity, nutrition, brain aging. We are the first to bring you the most cutting edge breakthroughs and we don't shy away from controversies. So please, please sign up for that email newsletter. It is really, really good. I run into people everywhere on the streets and they tell me they love the email newsletter. So if you're not signed up, you are certainly missing out. Please pause, go do that right now. foundmyfitness.com/newslettern-e-w-s-l-e-t-t-e-rnewsletter. Thank you so much again for listening and I will talk to you soon.