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

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratia-md.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to the Drive. Today's episode is a special best of with Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, social scientist, columnist at the Atlantic, and best selling author. I've sat down with Arthur twice in the past few years to talk about how to build a life that's both successful and deeply happy. We pulled the best moments from these two conversations into one focused episode built around four themes. Happiness, what hijacks it, the tools and practices that help, and the courage to live and love well, highlighting the most insightful and actionable takeaway steps from previous episodes. I'm really excited about this one because I've actually recently gone back and started rereading one of Arthur's books, and I've come to realize in rereading it that in just a span of a year and a half or two years, it's so easy to forget some of the nuance. And while I rarely have the time to go back and listen to old podcasts, I love having a mashup like this that actually brings some of the most important aspects from several podcasts into one. So without further delay, please enjoy this best of Brooks episode on the Drive. Arthur, thanks for making the trip to Austin. Although, maybe it's only partially to see me. It's mostly to see you feed on. I love seeing you. It's the best doing this in person. It's great. Last time we did it by Zoom. This is better. Congrats on the book. Thanks. This is not your first second or third rodeo, but I'm sure each time it's a little bit of a what's the world going to think? Oh, yeah. No, no, it's like having a child. I mean, well, you know, child you live with for a super long time and they torture you decade after decade, but a book is something where as you bring it into the world, you go through, you remember Elizabeth Kubla Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist, wrote that famous book about death and dying. And you have to go through five stages. I mean, most of that research has been questioned since then, but it's pretty interesting. You go through bargaining and denial and rage. That's like, as you know, when a book is coming out, writing a book, denial and bargaining and rage, finally, there's acceptance, but you're still nervous for sure. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff I want to talk about with you on this topic, but let's begin with a question, which is what's the difference between happiness, which is what you write about? And happy feelings. Are they the same thing? They're not. And this is a really important misconception. All of my students and most of us actually have, we live in the era of feelings. If you'd talk to my parents or God knows my grandparents about feelings, they would scratch their head. What are you talking about? I mean, talking about your emotions all the time, ephemera, feelings seem so counterproductive. And in point of fact, our grandparents were right. Feelings are not happiness anymore than the smell of what the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. And that's incredibly good news. I mean, a lot of people think that happiness is a feeling. It's quite incorrect. There are many better technical definitions of happiness, but they produce a lot of feelings. They're associated with a lot of emotions, which is limbic system activity, a part of the brain, a 40 million year evolutionary process that developed the limbic system to create emotions. That's signals. Information is what it comes from. If you mistake these feelings for the underlying phenomenon of happiness, you're going to be chasing it all over the place. You'll be chasing ghosts. How I slept last night, what I ate for breakfast, if my spouse yelled at me this morning, that's what's going to determine my happiness. You'll want to be managed as opposed to having any prayer of managing your own happiness. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. It's not feelings. It's hard to differentiate though. Having read this stuff several times, you have to remind yourself when you're in the throes of what I just referred to as negatively valanced feelings, that this is not a statement of my overall state of happiness. Yeah, for sure. And then what's the relationship between unhappiness and happiness? Are they polar images? How do they coexist? Well, for the longest time, if you even go back to the ancient philosophers, there was the idea that happiness and unhappiness exist on the spectrum. So unhappiness would be the lack of happiness. We know a lot better now, given the explosion of neuroscience and the way that emotions are produced, that in fact, you can be happy and unhappy or have happy and unhappy feelings in parallel. So for example, the average person spends about 40% of their time with predominantly positive feelings. It sits in a neutral idol of positivity. Most people do not everybody. About 16 or 17% of the time, the average person has predominantly negative feelings. Something is going on. That's more intense. And part of the reason is because negative emotions get your attention and they're supposed to evolution favors negative emotions. Positive emotions, nice to have. Negative emotions, pay attention because that could cost your life. What are some of those, if you think about this evolution early, and not even going back to millions of years ago, but just going back hundreds of thousands of years ago to the origin of our species as homo sapiens, what do we think are some of the most powerful negative emotions that would drive action? There's basically six fundamental emotions or basic emotions. These are the building blocks of all emotional life that are produced by the limit system of the brain for negative and too positive. The four negative emotions are sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. All four of those have a very strong evolutionary basis. Fear and anger, of course, have to do with threat. They involve the amygdala of the brain. You know, when a car is about to run you over in your pedestrian and a crosswalk, that crosses your visual cortex and is recorded in the occipital lobe of your brain as an enormous predator. That signals to your amygdala to send the signal through the hypothalamus of your brain to your pituitary glands, which signals your adrenal glands above your kidneys to spit out stress hormones. That happens in 74 milliseconds. By that time, your sweating, your heart is pumping. You've jumped out of the way and you've flipped off the driver a combination of fear and anger in response to the enormous predator. Three seconds later, your prefrontal cortex catches up and you say, shouldn't have flipped them off. That's not my values or whatever it happens to be. So that's your limbic system keeping you alive. That's fear and anger. Then, of course, there's disgust, which involves the insular cortex of the brain, also part of the limbic system. That's when you pull something out of the back of your fridge. You forgot about a few weeks ago and you hold it and you're like, oh, that signals don't eat it. And so anything that might carry a pathogen signals that basic negative emotion of disgust to you. Now, it can be misattributed to people. That's what demagogic politicians always do. That's what the media does to us. It tries to reprogram the insular cortex, the insula of the limbic system of the brain so that when somebody disagrees with you politically, you look at them like a cockroach. That's what demagogic leaders and dictators have done for time in memorial so that people will undertake barbaric acts against people in their own countries, leases of war, etc. And then last but not least is sadness. Sadness is also evolved. Sadness is what you feel, largely in the dorsal anterior singular cortex of the brain and other part of the limbic system, that's mental pain usually when you're either socially excluded or you're separated from a loved one. Now, that's something that's evolved because you don't want to be separated from your tribe. You don't want to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. But what happens, for example, in grief, grief is unremediated sadness. And the reason is because your brain is saying, make this separation go away and you can't because other person is permanently gone, aka dead or divorced or whatever it happens to be. And so the grief is just this pulsating activity and the dorsal anterior singular cortex of the brain saying, I must be reunited with that person, but I can't be. And it takes a lot of time, in many cases, for the dorsal anterior singular cortex, to stop registering that sadness that pain. The sadness we feel when a person dies, which would be the ultimate form of separation, right, is a more extreme version of say a social isolation that you might feel like what a kid feels if they go to sit at the cafeteria table and all the other kids get up and walk away. Yeah. And there's interesting studies that actually look at how that registers in the brain. So the brain is so thrifty, as we all know, the neuroscience of this is super interesting. So when you stub your toe, there's actually two processes going. There's sensory pain and affective pain. Sensory pain means you can feel it in the nerve endings and it's very unpleasant. Effective pain is I hate this. And you feel both in physical pain. The affective component involves the same part of the brain, the dorsal anterior singular cortex, when you have something that emotionally bothers you, when you're being excluded. And we know that because there's these interesting studies in an FMI or I'm a shame, they're looking at the part of the brain that's illuminated. They're being subjected to being rejected by somebody else and they can see the part of the brain that's actually illuminated. I guess there is a way to do it, but is there a benefit to the reverse? I love going into cold plunges. So I do it almost every day. And it's insanely uncomfortable. There's not a day that I step into that 42 degree ice bath with jets shooting water around me that I'm like, this doesn't hurt. But it doesn't come with the I hate this because I'm choosing to do it and I think there's value in it. Does the brain treat that differently? How would we think of that as an emotion? What it is is a controlled aversive emotion under your own power. And so for example, if you go to a haunted house on Halloween and get scared, and get scared, you're controlling the fear. If you're on a really radical amusement park ride, it's the same sort of thing. And so what you're doing is you're subjecting yourself to a little bit of the stress hormones and the experience of the aversive emotion. But since it's under your own control, you actually use it in a way that you enjoy. And so people who do extreme sports, this is the same kind of thing that they do. They like to feel a little bit in danger. One of my kids is somebody who likes this. He really likes this a lot. He likes to expose himself to things that actually hurt as long as he's under control. Any evidence that other species do this? No. This is a uniquely human phenomenon. Yeah. For example, there's also no evidence that you can train any other species to appreciate spicy food to ingest capsicin. No other species can be trained to like the feeling of spicy food that hurts your mouth. Only humans can do that. And so this is a really higher order phenomenon where we have aversive emotions. Other animals have aversive emotions. But we actually can dominate them through a process called medic cognition where we experience the emotions not just in the limbic system of the brain, but in the prefrontal cortex. This is where it really gets interesting. This is the human difference is where this comes around. So the dog wants the cookie eats the cookie. Dogs are limbic creatures. Little kids are limbic. When your kids were little or my kids were little and be screaming over something as a piece of rice on their chair, whatever thing that bums them out, you're like, use your words. What you're telling them to do is to experience the emotion in the prefrontal cortex of the brain where they can decide how to react. They can think about what their own emotions are. And when you're doing that, then you can get in the cold plunge and say it hurts so good. And that's what medic cognition brings to you. And also you can say something like, I'm really sad about this. What am I learning? That's how you can be a far more evolved human being by becoming more and more and more medicognitive using the techniques for doing so, which is a lot about what I'm writing about these days. Okay. So what about the two positive? The two positive. And this is actually pretty much all the neuroscientists agree on the four negative, not all the neuroscientists agree on the two positive. Some people believe that surprise is a positive basic emotion. And so there's a lot of different schools of this, but two that pretty much everybody agrees on are joy and interest. And this is useful for us to think about joy's obvious. It's ordinarily when you're reunited with somebody that you love or something good happens pursuant to struggle. The joy you get after you work really hard for something and you get it, that's a basic positive emotion. And that's a reward evolved rewards so that your work hard to find some berries on a bush and you get your caloric needs met for the day. You want to make sure that you get an emotional reward for that. And that's actually stimulating a part of the brain called a ventral straight on which is your reward system. And boom, that feels good. I want to do it again. Do it again. Do it again. Interest is different. Interest is you get intense pleasure. People are listening to the drive, which I do. Why? Because I learned something from it. Why do I care? I mean, it's not like it's going to dramatically change my salary trajectory or my professional success if I'd listen or don't listen to your show. I want to learn because learning is intensely pleasurable. That's really a fascinating phenomenon because that's how people evolve and make progress. And it makes sense that that would be an evolutionary phenomenon. We would favor learning so that people can get ahead and feed themselves and find new sources of food and find new mates and all the things that they do and the way that that's adapted to the current environment is they listen to your show. So it seems to me that both of those could be found in creatures other than us. Certainly joy. I guess learning would be a testable hypothesis presumably with a maze or something like that. Whether the learning is positively valanced, you can teach a worm to learn. A worm will learn. You can teach a worm things. We just don't know whether it's a positive valanced experience because they don't have the kind of brain that will give you emotions as we understand that. I wonder if optogenetics would provide insight into that one day when you could get sort of cellular level resolution of different parts of the brain. I don't know if you're familiar with Karl Deseroth's work. Yeah, for sure. You've had him on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like I addressed. Yeah, that would be an interesting line of inquiry, I suppose. Yeah, for sure. And we know that dogs, for example, have rudimentary emotions. They can mimic human emotions really, really well. But it's almost certainly a limbic phenomena that look metacognitive more than anything else. And one of the things that we do is we selectively breed dogs so that their emotional state more clearly mimics our own. We like that. They make better companions. They do something else supposed to do and they look guilty. They don't feel guilty. That's certainly an illusion. We have a new puppy. I can really relate to this. Yeah, yeah. And there are certain ways that they are quite similar to us. For example, they have there's a lot of research that suggests that they have serotonin balance issues. And if you give a dog a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, it will actually have some of the same effects that can have on people. You can give your dog prozaak and your dog will be less depressed or at least have fewer depressive symptoms in some cases. So there are ways that they are similar to us for sure. Let's define happiness. I don't think I understand what it really is. And given that it's your business effectively, it's what you teach, it's what you write about. It's the thing you think about as much as I think about the longevity component of biology. I'm sure you can ask this question all the time. And I'm sure you've got a 30 second answer. And I'm sure you've got a three hour answer. Take it in any direction you like. I've got a semester long answer, which is the class I teach at the Harvard Business School, which is what is it and how do you get it? The reason for that is that by the time my students reach me, my graduate students at Harvard reach me, a lot of them are realizing that the world's promises are empty, that the money, power, pleasure, and fame that are supposed to bring you undying happiness are false promises. They're a bill of goods. They couldn't be instrumental to getting what you want, but they can't intrinsically give you this satisfaction that you desire. So I start in the first day of class, it's okay guys. I mean, you spent all your elective points getting into the class because they have a competitive system to get these electives and the class fills in like nine seconds. It's happiness after all, who are the free candy kids. And there's hundreds of people on the waiting list for this class. I say, okay, you made a commitment to getting this class. You must know what happiness is as I go right, I called column. What's happiness? They'll say it's that feeling I get on Thanksgiving and you know, yada, yada, yada, feelings feeling that have wrong. Happiness is not a feeling any more than your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. The feeling of happiness is evidence of happiness. Now we measure happiness in all sorts of very complicated and very simple ways. And one of the things that we know is that all of the people who are really happy, who have a lot of happy feelings, but also have a lot of satisfaction in contempt with their lives, they're getting abundance and balance across three dimensions. And so this is the definition of happiness. I'll think about this like if I were to say, Hey Peter, what is the Thanksgiving dinner? You'd say, well, carbohydrates, proteins and fat. You know, you'd say there's the three macro nutrients of all food and you know, we're always trying to get our macros in order. Forget lifespan. Let's talk about health span. And I say, let's take it even farther than happiness span. So let's get our literal macronutrients in order for health span. Let's get our happiness span in order with the macro nutrients of happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose. Those are the three macro nutrients of happiness. If you don't have those things and balance and abundance, you will not report being a happy person. This is different than unhappiness, which is another entire subject, believe it or not happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're different phenomena. So we're just talking about happiness here. To be a truly happy person, you need to enjoy your life and that requires not pleasure. It's pleasure plus elevation is pleasure plus metacognition. You know, Thanksgiving dinner fills your belly and tastes good. That's pleasure, but the experience that you have of consuming the Thanksgiving dinner with other people and having a memory that you can last forever, that's enjoyment. And so it's a much more elevated experience than pleasure. Satisfaction, which is super fleeting and troublesome. And you know, as Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. There's an entire research literature on that that are participated in on the problem with satisfaction, but it's the joy and reward for a job well done and a goal met. You know, that elation from actually meeting a goal. And last but not least, this purpose is meaning in life. I talk an awful lot about the coherence, the significance, the direction, the meaning of meaning. And it gets back to a lot of the great philosophy, but we can also measure it. I have a few diagnostic questions that I ask for the clients who come to me. And they'd lack purpose in their life. The questions I ask are, why were you born? And for what are you willing to die? And if you can't answer one or both of those questions, you have a serious meaning problem. We got to dig in and actually just solve that particular problem. But that's it. I mean, this is a three macro-nutrience. You have like protein carbohydrates and fat of happiness or enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Okay. So let's now talk about these three components of happiness. You wrote about this in strength to strength, but let's go over them again and talk about what each one means. Happiness is not a feeling. We've established that feelings are evidence of happiness. When we look at the happiest people and the way that we do that typically, there's some indirect ways to figure that out. You know, I could ask your wife how happy is Peter and you're not there. And I would get some really probably very accurate information. There's some tests. They're not very good, but I could ask you a series of targeted questions when you're under FMRI. But the really the best way to do it, the most cost-effective and efficient way to do that, is for you to anonymously answer a bunch of questions that are sort of like this. Imagine all the people you know where the happiest person you've ever met, I mean really happy is 10. And the most miserable SOB you've ever met is a one. All things considered at this period of your life, not this moment, this period of your life, all things considered, thinking of those people, what's your number? That turns out to be incredibly accurate. You got to have a large sample because some people answer it no wonky way. And it has to be anonymous because if you answer this in front of jilly, you'll probably lie. They don't tell the truth in front of their spouses, necessarily in front of their friends because they give answers that people want to hear. But if it's really honest and nearby yourself, I'll get extremely effective data from that. Based on these data you find that the happiest people, they have three macro nutrients and balance and abundance. By the way, before we get to those, are those responses normally distributed? Yeah, they are normally distributed, but the mean is not five. Yeah, the mean is more like seven and a half. So there's a biest or the top part of the scale. The reason for the skew is because you feel like it would be better if it were a five. If it were a five, we'd be saying the three is within one centered deviation, there's nothing wrong with being a three. Nobody wants to be a three. Numbers have cultural valence, right? They really do. And so people will kind of, yeah, that's like, you know, being normal happy, that's like seven, eight. And what you find is that most people over the course of their adult lives, early 20s to early 50s, they're between seven and nine. Most people are from seven and nine. Most of the people that I talk to that I work with, especially the executives that I work with one on one who are three's, they're depressed. They're actually suffering from clinical issues. They're behind the line of scrimmage. There's nobody who's like, yeah, I'm pretty normal. I'm like, you know, probably the 40th percentile. That probably makes me a three and a half, 40th percentile is probably a five is the way that that works. They would like to be better and they feel like they're not as good as they should be despite the fact that in the scale that looks like the middle of the scale is not the middle of the scale. So what do you find? The people who are in the upper end, the eights and nines and like my wife nine and a half, I don't get it, but there you go. They tend to be really healthy and healthy means they have balance and abundance across what I often refer to as the happiness is macro nutrients. It's very easy in your audience because everybody knows it's protein carbohydrates and fat and the best diets are those that have all of them in balance and abundance and you have to get your macros and you're not going to have 100% protein. That sounds good for somebody for a week until they become miserable. So the three macro nutrients are enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the three macro nutrients of happiness and none of those by the way is straightforward. Any more than protein, carbohydrates and fat is straightforward. It's like, I'll be fine. I'm going to eat a chicken and a stick of butter and a ho ho and then I'm going to eat that exclusively for the rest of my life and it meets my macros. So I should be fine. No, no, no, it doesn't work that way. You actually have to understand that, understand what each one of those things are, enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning and you have to have strategies to understand why they're so hard to attain and what you need to do exercises to make sure that you can be better and more skillful at attaining each one. So let's start with enjoyment. Enjoinment seems sort of straightforward. I want to enjoy my life. Get a lot of pleasure. That's wrong. Pleasure is limbic. Enjoinment involves the prefrontal cortex. Enjoinment is a much more complex phenomenon than pleasure. Pleasure is a signal from the limbic system that says this thing that you're doing will help you survive usually through coloric needs or pass on your genes through something like sex. So that's what pleasure is really all about is nothing more. It's just like any positive emotion. It sends a signal saying, do more of this. That's not the secret of happiness. That's incredibly evident. It's extremely temporary. And if you pursue pleasure, what you'll be doing is you'll be engaging systems in your brain, the dopamine system, for example, which is the anticipation of reward, the reward being pleasure. You'll hit the lever. Get the cookie. Hit the lever. Get the cookie. It will never last and you'll become an addict. Pleasure seeking. I mean, the hippie phenomenon, the hippie motto of it feels good to do it is life-rooning advice. It's just the dumbest thing ever. If it feels good to do it, you'd never go into the ice bath. I mean, you wouldn't stay married if it feels good to do it all the time. It's just terrible advice. So what do you need for enjoyment? The answer is the source of pleasure adding two things, people and memory. That's where you're engaging your prefrontal cortex. Anna's her bush never runs ads for beer of a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. They never do that, right? A lot of people use the product that way. Why don't they show that? Because that's to pursue pleasure and that's dangerous. That's bad for you. Use of methamphetamine is bad for you. What we're incredibly good at using science today is to take things that give a little bit of pleasure evolutionarily and supercharge them. Natural endorphins that you get that will block pain under normal circumstances. We can supercharge them in a lab and make fentanyl and 100,000 people died last year. That pursuit of that pleasure is utterly ruinous. We look at a random series of events and when it's random, we get payoffs a little bit. We'll seek those events and that gives us a little bit of pleasure. We turn that into slot machines in Vegas and then you're sitting there for and by yourself. You're really, really bad for you. That's the problem. Seeking pleasure alone, not making memory will make you miserable. Usually if something gets you pleasure and you're doing it alone, you're usually doing it wrong. Parography is a problem. It uses the sexual function in a way that leads to addiction and huge problems in people's lives. It's contraindicated. It's not good for especially young people to use that, but that's the same thing as fentanyl in this way. Okay. So what do you do? You make sure you're with people, especially the people you love and you're making memories. That's why NHH's Bush's ads have two dudes or 10 dudes or a family crack and open a bud and drink in it and laughing because in the ad, they want you to associate the beer with happiness, which is enjoyment is the central factor, not the pleasure that the little bit of alcohol will bring you. That's what we need to do. That's the strategy. We're working on a, and maybe by the time this podcast comes out, it'll be out, but we're working on a very, very in-depth newsletter on basically the conflicting data on alcohol, specifically around wine. Why is it that at a biochemical level and certainly looking at the Mendelian randomizations, alcohol is toxic at any dose and it's a monotonically increasing function. So there's no amount of alcohol that is healthy. Yet the epidemiology is pretty significantly in favor of modest drinking over abstinence. And once you even strip out all of the obvious confounders that would lead to that, you're left with the phenomenon you describe, which is if you dig into the data really deeply, it's the Mediterranean drinking pattern that seems to be associated with some benefits at low doses, people in memory, not the alcohol per se. The food and the wine and the people combo that seems to be beneficial, not the vodka and red bull in the dorm issue. Even though it's the same molecule, it's a very different experience. Process sugar is the same thing. You find the people who eat candy one to three times a month on average live a year longer than people who abstain completely from candy. Candy's terrible for you. It rots your teeth, it leads to metabolic syndrome. Eating candy one to three times a day is very different than eating it one to three times a month. And so the whole point is you do something that you enjoy. Something that gives you a little bit of pleasure, which something really sweet does because of our evolution. Something that gives you a little bit of euphoria like alcohol makes you feel good, but you do it with people and you make a memory, unless all your friends are drunk, which is bad. You can get into a unhealthy community that you're doing it in a pretty moderate way. And then it's life enhancing despite the fact that it's a poison. And you can use a little bit of poison in a productive way, but it has to be about enjoyment never about pleasure. Per se. Such an interesting distinction. Man, I'm 59. It took me this long. This is information that I wish I had been able to use when I was in my 20s. It would have saved me a lot of grief. It really would have, because all the time that I wasted with drinking, with just unproductive activity and the way that I've missed opportunities to love and be loved and to have a happier life. This is really, really news that people can use. And this is probably one of the stronger arguments against evolution being in favor of happiness. It's clear that evolution is in favor of pleasure. Pleasure might be one of the most potent fuels that drives the engine of evolution, at least when it comes to reproduction, but certainly other aspects of evolution as well. You're exactly right. But enjoyment is a higher order process. And I guess would not necessarily have the same evolutionary drive, although I suppose being with people obviously also has a strong evolutionary bent. If for no other reason, then we couldn't have survived alone, even through the industrialization of agriculture. No, absolutely right. The problem is the maladaptation that comes with technological progress is that you can strip off the component of enjoyment that is pleasure, and then supercharge it in the lab. That's the problem. The internet makes it possible to do that. Chemistry makes it easy to do that. There are all kinds of ways that we strip out that component of enjoyment, so it's no longer part of the evolved societies that would have been more traditional. So do you think that that's a decent litmus test, Arthur, where the person who's listening to this who loves to smoke says, guys, I enjoy smoking. Like I really enjoy it. And you would push back on that and say, no, you find pleasure in smoking and you find just as much pleasure if you're sitting by yourself doing it, puffing away, getting the physiologic high of the tobacco, but you're not forming new memories. You're not sharing in this with someone else. That's right. My wife smokes two times a year when she's with her sister in Barcelona. She loves her sister. Her sister smokes only after meals only with people maybe once or twice a day, which is by the way too much. She's conflicting evidence on that, but it's suffice it to say that any amount of tobacco and any amount of smoking your lungs is not good for you. My wife smokes twice a year because she's with her sister. My wife's not a smoker. I used to be a smoker. I don't touch it. I don't dare touch it. Not even twice a year is the way that that works out because for me, I got the monkey on my back immediately. And I don't want that thing to come back because I so thoroughly stripped the pleasure from tobacco off from the enjoyment of communally smoking that I can't handle it anymore. Part of that is my math scientist. Part of that is get back to what we talked about earlier in the conversation. Okay. So what is satisfaction then? Again, I mean, people are like, enjoy them. It's complicated. And it's all complicated. That's what the knowledge is so critically important. I mean, that's why happiness is a serious business. Satisfaction is the joy after struggle. That's what satisfaction really is. You struggle for it. You work for it. You got it. It feels awesome. With my students cheat to get an A on my exam, there's no satisfaction. But if they worked really hard, you might say, chump, stupid, Brooks probably gave the same exam last year. Go find Latcher's exam. But if they actually struggle for it and they study for it, they get a ton of satisfaction when they get an A because that's how we're wired. We're wired after you struggle for something a lot. Again, this comes back to the evolutionary psychology, even biology, is that you go looking hard for something and you get it, you want that to be reinforced as a good thing to do. That's why Mother Nature really wants that to happen. And that's why we have that evolutionary imperative. Okay. So that's great. But here's this little twist that Mother Nature throws into it. If you knew that that satisfaction that joy wasn't going to last, you'd think twice before going through the struggle. You'd think twice about the cost benefit analysis. Like if you said yourself, you know, like that watch, it's a nice watch. I don't know what kind of watch that is. That's a sea master or something, right? That's a GMT. It's a nice watch. But if you thought to yourself, it's a pretty expensive watch. I'm going to really, really like it for a week. You'd think twice about it. Trivial example. But there's all kinds of things that we do, that relationship, that conquest, that business plan, that fill in the blanks. I'm not going to enjoy it for very long. So Mother Nature shields you from that truth. You have to have it wear off quickly because you wouldn't be ready for the next thing. If you're a caveman and you're looking for calories and you find berries on a bush after a long hike, that's incredibly satisfying. That gives you a bunch of joy. But if you sat there enjoying them for the next week, you'd be a saber-two tiger's dinner. You have to be ready for the next set of emotions. That's homeostasis. You go back to the baseline, physical baseline, emotional baseline. You always go back. But if you realize that, you won't make the effort in the first place. So Mother Nature tantalizes you with a joy that's going to come after the struggle and then veils the knowledge that you're not going to enjoy it forever. So people actually think, if I move to California, I'm going to be happy for the rest of my life because of the sunshine. I got the data. It's a few months. The taxes are forever. I mean, I see this constantly with people. My students, the reason they think they're going to be happier at 38th and 28th, which is generally not true. Generally, your happiness is lower at 38th than it is at 28th. And lower at 48th than it was at 38th. The reason they don't know that, they get it exactly upside down is because they think that they're going to get things they want and they're going to be satisfied forever with them. When they get married, they'll be permanently happier. Have you been able to quantify the length of satisfaction, the duration of satisfaction when they get admitted to Harvard Business School? There are some studies on that and it shows that the satisfaction that they get is usually a few weeks. So before they even matriculate? Oh, yeah, for sure. So there's interesting studies that ask this question. When you get a bonus at your job, when do you enjoy it the most? When it hits your check or the day you find out? It's a question that the answer is itself. You go home because your boss says, you're the linchpin in this company. What a great job you're doing. 40% bonus. Boom. Dollars. You don't know the dollars, but you go home and open a bottle of champagne with your spouse. I earned it. It's great. Three weeks later, she'll just up in your check and you're like, huh, yeah, good. I can do something with that. But that's not where the real satisfaction happens because of the homeostasis. Now, the the fact that that surprises you at least a deeply suboptimal behavior. If you keep getting surprised again and again and again and again and again, the satisfaction doesn't last. The natural conclusion is that you just needed more. It just wasn't enough. So go get more and more and more and this leads to this chase. What we call it in my business, the hedonic treadmill that a lot of people know that expression at this point. Hedonic means feelings. The treadmill is you're running, running, running, and running to keep, maintain and to get more of certain feelings. And you never figure out that you're on a treadmill and not making progress. The homeostasis is that you catch up immediately. You get ahead by two inches and immediately starts running you backwards. Unless you keep running, running, running, running, then you're going to be going the wrong direction and that's terrifying and terrible. So people not figuring out mother nature's cruel little hoax. They wind up on the hedonic treadmill of more and more and more and more and more and more. But why are we fooled by this? Because mother nature wants us to be fooled. I mean, we're born to be fools when it comes to this satisfaction problem. So this is actually one of the macronutrients where it seems that evolution is fully engaged. Clearly evolution favors pleasure over enjoyment, but evolution is all for satisfaction. All for satisfaction. And all for fooling you into believing, this is the one that's going to be the eternal satisfaction. That is the animal path. Absolutely. But there is a glitch in that matrix that we can exploit if we're willing to stand up to our natural impulses. This is where every philosophical and religious tradition comes in. Because most midlife is suffering, according to the first noble truth of Buddhism. That doesn't mean life has to be suffering. It means life is naturally suffering. What the Buddhists are saying is that left to your devices, you're going to suffer. And the word for suffering in that first noble truth of Buddhism is mistranslated. The word in Sanskrit is dukega. And dukega actually means dissatisfaction. The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is unsatisfying because of the hedonic treadmill, because of homeostasis. And how do you get beyond that? Well, you recognize that the reason for your dissatisfaction, the second truth is attachment. And the third noble truth is that you need to detach. And the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path, which is entirely contrary to nature. The eightfold path is not natural. That's why it's hard. So here's the way to think about it, just in sort of drive listener terms. Mother nature says, satisfaction will come and stay if you have more, more, more. What's your life strategy? More, more money, more power, more pleasure, more admiration, more Instagram followers, more, more. Actually, the right model, a model that better satisfies, that gives you more satisfaction that lasts is halves divided by wants. All the things you have divided by all the things that you want. And this is basically kind of what the eightfold path of Buddhism comes into. This is a baby version. So I apologize to the Buddhists who are listening to us is that you don't need to have more strategy. You need to want less strategy. The eightfold path is a want less strategy. We need to want less. We need to manage our wants in this life. And it's so doing. Then holy mackerel, then satisfaction hangs around, man. That's what the Dalai Lama always says, you shouldn't have what you want. You should want what you have. Really, which is another way of talking about this. And there's all kinds of techniques. There's visualizations. One of the things that I like for doing this is that because I have an arts background, my mother was a painter and I was a musician for many years, professionally. And we have a tendency to think of our lives that we're building, especially the hustlers, the go getters, the strivers who listen to you, that your life is like a beautiful painting and you're the artist with a brush. And that canvas is your life and you're putting a brush strokes on the canvas. The problem is by the time you're 45 and you're a striver that canvas is full, man, it's dense. I defy people that add another brush stroke. You need to use the metaphor that your life is actually a sculpture that you're chipping away, that you are in there, but there's too much stuff stuck to you. You need less, less, less, want less. All right. So the third macronutrient is sense of purpose, meaning. Yeah, meaning. And obviously it extends far beyond quote unquote work. Yeah, for sure. So meaning is the most important because it's the protein. You'll die. Right. You can vary carbs and fat a lot. You can't mess with protein. You can't mess with protein. It's a basic building block and you're in big, big trouble when you become protein deprived because there's no other way to get it. It's not like your carbs are going to transform into proteins. And everybody knows when they don't have a sense of meaning because their life is empty. They're the most miserable when they don't have a sense of meaning. But nobody knows exactly what it is. It's like I need this thing that I know what it is. So philosophers and psychologists, by the way, define meaning is actually a combination of three things. Coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. That's the first part of meaning. I believe that things happen for a particular reason. That doesn't mean my way is the right way. And it might be randomness. My father was a PhD bioesthetician, also very religious. And he used to say that the greatest miracle in the world was randomness. That God built the universe with randomness and regular distributions of events. He thought that miracles were extreme tail events in random distributions and God loved randomness. In other words, this lots and lots of different ways to understand the coherence part. Why things are coherent? The second is purpose, which is direction. Your life has direction. There's a word called the rum line, R-H-U-M line. It's actually a much more common word in Spanish, it's a rumbo. And it's actually part of common parlance. A rumbo means the endpoint toward which your voyage is tending. You're not going to get there and you're going to vary from it, but you have to have a... A North Star. You have to have something that happens to you. You have to have something. Navigationally. And the last is significance. It would matter if I weren't alive. It would matter if I'm not here. So these are the component parts. Now, these are worth thinking about in detail in our lives. But here's the way I have a kind of a diagnostic test to see if somebody has a meaning crisis. And the reason this is useful, it's a two question exam. And if somebody doesn't have real answers, everybody's got PC answers. Answers you give your mom or whatever. But if you don't have real answers to this, the good news is these are the two questions to go looking for answers to in your life. This is your vision quest is to find the answers to these by reading, by experiencing, by meditating, by spending time by yourself, by praying, by asking people's advice, by therapy. I don't know. Do your thing. Question number one is why are you alive? Why are you alive? You got to have an answer. It's not my answer. Your answer. A real answer. Question number two is for what are you willing to die today? Now, you flunk this quiz by saying, Oh, no, that's how you flunk the quiz. But then the adventure actually begins after you flunk the quiz, because like I'm going to figure that out. I'm going to go find those answers. I'm going to read. I'm going to consider I'm going to do all the things that you do metacognitively to find the answer to the questions. Let's think about that for a second. There are probably a lot of people who cannot answer one, who can answer two, or who can answer one, but can't answer two. I'm alive because some biological process, etc., etc. But number two is, I don't know what I'm willing to die for. Let's clarify that. Are you asking one through the lens of biology? It depends on how you answer it and what actually gives you meaning. The way to answer the first question, why are you alive? A spiritual person or a religious person would have a divine response to the first question. An atheist would respond to the first question in terms of biology. And they would really understand that biological answer could give you a tremendous sense of meaning and a sense of place in the universe. Although it's interesting because as someone who leans far more towards the agnostic atheicide, I spend most of my time coming to grips with mortality, which is a very difficult thing to come to grips with. Which is the second question. But I come to grips with that by addressing your third point around sense of purpose, which is my insignificance. So in other words, it's only through accepting my complete and utter insignificance that I can have some semblance of peace with my finitude and my eventual and relatively quick demise. This is one of the reasons that transcendence is one of the happiness practices, the practice of transcendence, whether it's secular or religious transcendence, it's really important because it makes you small. It makes you small. You stand in awe of a sunset. You stand in awe of seeing somebody committing an unbelievably selfless act. It makes you actually feel smaller, which gives you peace through a sense of perspective. That's a very common phenomenon. One of the people who works in my area, Dacker Keltner at UC Berkeley, he has a book called AWE that talks about the neuro-cognitive processes involved when you're experiencing awe and why it gives you such deep peace. And it's really all about what you're talking about. You got to get small. Like Steve Martin used to say in the 70s, get small. If you can find ways to get small, you're going to be a lot better off, for sure. But how do we reconcile that with the need to have significance through your sense of purpose? Well, the key is at the same time you realize that you matter, but at the same time it's okay that the universe will be just fine if you die. They seem like conflicting phenomena, but they're actually weirdly compatible. I think that they're weirdly compatible. These ideas, these balance between the two, it matters that I exist here. And things will be just fine. You think about this when you get married for the first time. You say, you love me. And if I'm gone, you'll be okay. It's this sense of peace. That balance between those two things turns out to be the trick. I've never been able to find that. I guess practice makes perfect. I haven't found it either for sure. But the way to think about this and the way to find the answers to the questions is really interesting. And I've worked on this with my kids. I have adult kids. My kids are a little older than yours. My 23 year old. He's a piece of work, man. As soon as Carlos, he likes you. He's human performance machine. He's a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps. 204, 4% body fat, 6 foot 5. He's all about it. He needs the information that you're providing, obviously. So he didn't have the answers to that because many adolescents don't and young adults don't. But he found the answers to that as he did something that was truly difficult going through marine basic training and then infantry training battalion and then doing the end doc as he's an operator in the Marines now in the scout sniper platoon. Stuff's no joke. It's hard. And you ask him the question now, why are you alive? Who'd simply say, because God may be to serve? That is both the how and the why of the first question. And the second question, for what are you willing to die? Very simple. For my faith, for my family, for my fellow Marines, from the United States of America, and for our allies. These are very solid answers. These are not the right answers for somebody listening, or you, or me necessarily. But they are answers that he actually believes. And that's what gives him his sense of meaning is the content of those two answers. And finding what we really do think about those things, what really is persuasive to us is a philosophical and for some, a theological journey really worth taking. In this next section, Arthur explains the traps that hijack our happiness. We spoke about the four idols. What is it? Money, power, pleasure, fame. Fame is really a funny one though, because most people listening to us are like, I don't want to be famous. Yeah, but you want to be admired by others and you want to have some prestige. And that's localized fame. That's to be known and admired by the right people as exactly the same phenomenon philosophically and psychologically. So let's explore those a little bit more. Is it necessarily the case that we are hardwired to have preferences along that spectrum? Well, I suspect it's both nurture and nature. I can imagine that the circumstances by which you grow up would heavily influence that. But how much of that do you think is sort of hardwired versus developed as a result of circumstances? So there's a lot of research on that. And most of the philosophy would suggest that even the evolutionary psychologists would suggest that we're hardwired to be looking for money, power, pleasure, and fame because that makes us most, that gives us fitness in the mating market. Who gets mates? Somebody who's got a bigger cave, more flints, more animal skins, more buffalo jerky piled up in the corner. And it is actually known by more troglodites than troglodites that he or she knows. This gives you mating fitness. And so the results is this would become an imperative. It would become a hardwired imperative. And then you have all kinds of evidence of this. You actually find that when people are kind of at their base nature, when they're being distracted, they will go for these particular rewards over much more intrinsic, more satisfying rewards, how you do with love. They will go for these types of rewards all day long. We see this in our consumer patterns. We even see some of the really interesting neuroscience research talks about how it will illuminate our brains, how it will stimulate the most dopamine. The most dopamine comes from these not very satisfying rewards, but nonetheless the ones that we're supposed to go for. Now here's the key thing to keep in mind. Mother Nature wants you to pass on your genes. Mother Nature wants Peter a T to have like a hundred kits. But of course you don't want that. You want three and you want to have a lifelong partnership with one wife. And that means that you can't live the hippie motto of if it feels good. Do it. That is the motto of useful idiots. By the way, there's other stupid models. Like if it feels terrible, treat it and make it go away because suffering is really important in a full life too. It turns out. But the key thing to keep in mind is that Mother Nature, she doesn't care if you're happy. She doesn't care. That's not Mother Nature. If we don't select on happiness, we select on biological fitness to mate to pass on our genes. And so the result is if you follow if it feels good, do it, you're going to be chasing a whole lot of very fleeting rewards for what you think is enduring satisfaction. And you're going to have your hedonic treadmill speeding and a terrifying velocity. And you won't even know how to get off it. You need to get in charge of your own life is the bond line. You wrote something that I want to say it's been in the last couple of months in the Atlantic about happiness and success. And noting that the happiest people weren't necessarily the most successful. If I'm remembering that correctly, I think you wrote this in maybe April, you might have been June, but then it looked at some data that suggested actually a little bit of sacrifice in happiness led to greater success. Am I remembering that sort of correctly? Yeah, that's right. And part of the reason is because people who are tremendously successful in worldly terms, when I'm talking about success, we can define it in different ways, right? Having a lifelong marriage in where you're in love with your spouse, that's unbelievably successful. Believing like you have found spiritual transcendence, that's unbelievably successful. Living for the good of other people, tremendously successful. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about worldly success, money, power, fame, the admiration of other people. So that these particular metrics of success, people who are remarkably successful along those worldly metrics, they're making cost-benefit calculations systematically that are not in their own happiness favor, typically. They're making sacrifices to their own happiness for some reason. And this is one of the things that I've looked at in my own research. Why? Why? Why? Why? I was talking to a woman. One of the things that I do is a social scientist. I'm not just cranking data. I go out and talk to the humans, which I find is a really beneficial thing to do. And I was interviewing this unbelievably successful woman on Wall Street. I mean, billionaire, business, or epic success after success, and very well known. And she was confessing to me that she missing decisions that people were doubting it, that at the same time that she and her husband were just kind of roommates, that she had a cordial relationship with her adult kids, that she was starting to get bad blood work back for her doctor. She thinks that she was probably drinking too much. She couldn't sleep right. And the whole thing, she said, what you do is say, you don't need a nerd from Harvard to tell you what to do. You told me, you're a billionaire. Step back to your company, take a souvenir in it, go on to the board, whatever, get to know your husband. Reist double relationship with your kids. Start to take care of your drinking problem, become a client of Peter Atilla. I don't know. You know what I'm talking about here. I say, why don't you do these things? She thought about it. She thought, I guess I'd prefer to be special than happy. And I thought, she, that is the hallmark of addiction. You know, I used to be a musician. I've met a lot of addicts. I've met a lot of alcoholics in my life. And they will confess that before they got clean and sober, that they preferred to be high than happy. They all said that. They knew that they'd be happier when they were finally beyond this thing. But let's just get high one more time. Just the feel of that pipe on my lips one more time, just the burning of the alcohol in my throat. One more time, just the, what a William Burrow's call the the red, the blood in the hypodermic needle before you actually put down the plunger. And it gives incredible pleasure to people. And they say, just one more time, just one more time. And that's what that lady was saying to me. That's a success addiction. I'm that is absolutely implicated in the dopamine system. And that is like any other behavioral addiction that a lot of very worldly successful people fall prey to a lot of people listening to us. And I'm glad they're listening to us right now because they want an edge. But you got to ask yourself Arthur has to ask himself and Peter has to ask himself and all the people listening to them have to ask themselves, is this a pathology that I'm actually feeding by actually trying to get this edge? And I hope it's not and I hope it's not for me. But I know a lot of people where it is we talk about workaholism. There's a lot of literature on workaholism. Workaholism is an ancillary addiction to success addiction. You know, people work really, really hard. The payoff, the cookie that you get, the dopamine is just driving you to is the promotion is the raise is the dollar is the compliment is the adulation on social media. That's where the real addiction is coming in. And those are the people that are going to be sacrificing their own happiest decisions for these success metrics. Do we have a sense of this is an unanswerable question. So I'll rephrase it in kind of a more thorough. I was like, what would the world look like today if no one was pursuing being special over being happy? What year would we be living in? Would it be 1842 right now? Really getting at is how much of the modern marvels of this world do we owe to the backs of people who sacrificed their own happiness for the innovation that allows us to be doing what we're doing right now? It's such a smart question. And I consider this myself for me to say, you and I should break our success addiction. Therefore, the world would be better if nobody had a success addiction. Is the fallacy of composition. You know, it's to basically say, since I get home faster if I go 100 miles an hour on the freeway, it would be better if everybody drove 100 miles an hour on the freeway. Now you live in Texas, you're like, yeah, actually, that would be better. But anyway, but that is really, really relevant because what you find is that many of the greatest innovators, composers, creative intellects, these were people that absolutely sacrificed their happiness that were deeply, deeply unhappy. Look, there's a huge literature that shows the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is stimulated in depressives in a way that makes them highly creative. I mean, we actually have good brain science at this point that shows the people who are suffering from mood disorders, they tend to be disproportionately creative and they do a lot. Van Gogh was not the outlier. It turns out there's a lot of weird people in Silicon Valley that have a lot of pretty untreated maladies. And they're doing a lot. Now you might say in Silicon Valley, the Hoverman River La Harm for society as well. But the point is that it is true that the world has been propelled by a lot of unusual people with unusual goals. And so I don't know if I were to divine how I would create the universe. I don't know how I would designate people in society. I don't know whether I would make people sacrifice their happiness for the greater good of the whole. I'm just not sure whether there's a kind of a success martyred on this going on here. My two cents having none of the data and none of the insights that you do is that we are probably a lot better off for people who have made enormous sacrifices. And I'm not just talking about like what we think about in Silicon Valley. I mean, I'm talking about Newton and Gauss and Euler and the great physicist, the great mathematicians. I feel like these people made untold sacrifices in terms of the pain that they endured as a result of their genius. I think that's actually right. But there's one thing that I want to emphasize, which is that the misery is not inevitable. You can actually, and this is the one of the reasons I've done my work. I'm not asking people to not be successful. I'm not asking people to be not ambitious to not work hard. I'm asking them to dominate it such that you're not playing to your most innate drives so that you can be successful and happy. And that's a small quadrant of the happy unhappy, successful, unsuccessful, the successful and happy, really, really successful and really, really happy. It's a preschool group of people, but it's not not populated. I mean, I'm right in my book about the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived who died surrounded by the people who loved him and who revered him. And the reason is because he got on his second curve. He dedicated his work to other people. He didn't say, forget it. I'm not going to write any more music. He said, I'm going to write music. And I'm just going to detach myself from the ego of having this enormous audience of people who will say that I'm the greatest composer ever. And I'm going to do it for humanity and for the glorify God and to refresh the soul of other people. And if it's really successful in commercial terms, it is. And if it isn't, that's okay too. In other words, be really ambitious, but detach yourself from the world, the idols and think about how you can use your success in service of other people. And that's the hack. That's the workaround. That's actually the glitch and the success on happiness matrix is when you become other focused, you can be a success machine and also happy. I agree with all of that. I was going to actually make a slightly different point, which was just because that's what got us here today as a civilization doesn't speak to the individual choice that we all have. I'll give you an example in my world is my thinking on cancer screening for an individual is based solely on the individual. If I were in charge of creating a cancer screening program for everyone in the country or in the world, it's a totally different question because the former is really all about individual risk, individual cost and what the reward potentially is when you start to talk about that at a societal trade-off level, it's a much more complicated problem. Now you have to look at quality adjusted life years and all these other metrics and you have to balance a budget to basically do this. And so my takeaway from this is that just because everything we said is probably true, it doesn't mean that anyone individual doesn't have the potential to make a choice to live in less misery or to be happier. Absolutely. And part of it is I believe you don't even have to sacrifice the success, but you do have to go against your worldly urges in a very big way, not against your worldly urge for success, but against your worldly urge to pursue the success for a particularly idolatrous reason. And that's a really big distinction as it turns out. Now this is the point that's made by philosophers and theologians forever that when you do things in service of others to lift other people up to bring up a people together, then you can become unbelievably successful. You can become the Dalai Lama. You can become Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa. You can do Alba Schweitzer. One of the all those people haven't common. They were world famous, but they were doing this in the service of their fellow women and men. And that was the key distinction that allowed them to wiggle their way into the both happy and successful patterns. Here are there's tools and practices he recommends for moving past the traps. Here's the exercise I give my students. They will hear that the way for them to be successful is through the visualization and manifestation that comes from having a bucket list. Right? The bucket list. On your birthday, you list all your ambitions and all your desires and your cravings. And you imagine yourself getting all these things. You visualize yourself getting these things. That's a good way to blow up the denominator of your satisfaction equation and feel like a complete loser. You need a reverse bucket list where you make a list of all of your worldly attachments and you cross them out. Not that you won't get them, but that now they're not limbic. Now they're in your prefrontal cortex. Now that you can actually manage those cravings in an entirely different way, this absolutely works. I do this on my birthday every year now. So give me an example. This last year on my birthday, I thought, what are my attachments that are holding me down? And I realized it was a lot of my political opinions. Tick-Not-Hon, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who started the plum village community of Western Buddhists. He said that the greatest source of misery and attachment for most people is their opinions. We're so attached to our opinions. It's like we're hoarding our gold. And if you get between me and my opinions, you're stupid, evil, I'm a cancel, you're whatever dumb thing that we're doing today. And I thought to myself, my political opinions are too strong. I'm too attached to them. So I wrote down about half of my political opinions. I still have them, but I crossed them out, which negated their importance, their moral importance in my life. I mean, I need fewer opinions because I need more friends. It's really what it comes down to. And I'm way lighter. I'm way freer. But tell me, is the act of acknowledging the opinions, the exercise, crossing them out, the exercise? And how does that translate? I mean, we sit here today on the heels of a tragedy that took place very recently, a terrorist attack. And it's a very dividing event politically. It's hard for me to say, even though I'm not a political person, I don't talk about my political views publicly. I have very strong views. And as a result of that, I'm prone to be very judgmental of those who hold opposing views, especially the stronger my view. So there's certain views where I'm like all about nuance. And then there's some views where I'm like, nope, this is black and why. How would that exercise help in this situation? This gets back to medical cognition. Medical cognition, once again, is not being limbic, but rather experiencing emotions and emotional phenomena in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where you can make conscious executive decisions, is letting your CEO do it as opposed to the kids do it. And so what you do is when you have an opinion, a strong volatile political opinion, which is not just terrorism is bad. It's that anybody who disagrees with me about this particular situation is a moron. That's what goes on the list. And what you do is you cross that out, not because you don't think that, but because you're willing to consider that. You're willing to let your CEO think about that as opposed to sort of axiomatically assuming that that it's no longer a limbic opinion where you see something on TV and you get a sense of revulsion, where your insular cortex engages because you have a sense of disgust on the contrary. Do you think that that's a better strategy than my strategy, which is to tune all of that out, is to basically say, I'm going to do something that feels cowardly, which is I'm not going to engage in any of this by reading any of it, by watching any of it, by participating. I'm going to focus on what I do best. I'm going to do my job and not become a spectator. There's a lot to that because you should specialize in what you can do well. You should focus on the things you can control as opposed to the things you can't. So these are two different phenomena. You could argue my strategy is a dangerous strategy from a societal perspective, because then if everybody took that approach, nobody would do anything. Absolutely. You would have any collective action. Everybody would be ignorant for sure. But what you're trying to do is protect yourself from your limbic system. When you block out information, this is basically, I don't like the news, so I'm going to cancel the newspaper. I'm no longer going to get the news from the newspaper. You shouldn't be afraid of information, and that's all your limbic system is delivering to you is information. You should learn how to use information. So ideally, you don't have to do that. But ideally, what you do is you met a cognitively, you process the information, make decisions on how to use the information. Sometimes that's not efficient. Sometimes that's suboptimal, because you don't have time to do it. I have found that I use a combination of the two techniques. I was a president of a think tank in Washington, D.C., for almost 11 years. So I was man, I was sadly in the know. I was so aware all the time of everything everybody was saying and doing, and I knew it was going on. I knew if there was going to be a budget resolution, I could tell it was going on with a farm bill, the whole deal. Now I know a lot less. The reason is I rationed my access to news. I read total of 15 to 30 minutes of news per day all at once. I need more bandwidth for my work. And I don't want it to intrude on my work, but I'm not afraid of my limbic system. I'm not afraid of what this information will actually do to me because I'm working metacognitively to make sure that when I do have this information, I can process it in executive ways as opposed to childlike ways. It's no longer ghosts in the machine. I have a repertoire of ways I can deal with it. I can choose my reactions to my emotions. I can use substitute emotions. I can act as if I had different emotions and I can disregard my emotions, but all of that is on purpose. And those are the fruits of metacognition. What do you do with your knowledge base? So as a mad scientist, what are the tools you use from that to manage yourself, which is kind of a recurring theme here? We keep coming back to it, and I want to come back to it more formally to talk about metacognition, but just briefly maybe one of the most important things that you think about as a mad scientist to regulate your own emotions, and to presumably keep the balance more on the positive versus negative valence. For the longest time, I mean, the reason I've done this research, Peter, is because I need it. This is me, search. It's really what it is. And I know you do too. I mean, you do this work because you want to live a long time and have a high quality of life in our community of health and wellness and fitness and longevity. And we're all doing the best we can for our own lives and then sharing with other people. And this is absolutely the case with me. If you're a mad scientist and you don't self-manage, you're going to be all over the place. You're going to be a big mess. You're going to have difficult relationships. A lot of the time you're going to be miserable. And it's avoidable. It's actually unconstructive not to self-manage, but self-management is not one weird trick because they like to say on the internet. There's no hacks. It's really all about mental habits. It starts with the knowledge of the science. It goes into specific practices. And then a lot of it has to do with teaching other people. As you know, the best way for you to live better is to teach other people how to live better. If you want to be healthy, start a health podcast or something and make sure you've got good science on your side. So when it comes to mad science, the mad scientist profile that's hard to manage otherwise, the mistake the people get into is they try to stay on the positive side. That's a logical thing to do. My polar disorder, we find that the biggest problem that they have is staying on their meds because they like the manic and they don't like the depression, but they can't time it. And so you actually have to stabilize your mood so that you're not seeking the highs and trying to avoid the lows. And by the way, I'm not saying that every mad scientist has bipolar disorder. I'm just saying that they tend to have mania. They tend to have this kind of a hypermanic, as you know, John Gardner talks about the hypermanic edge. And this one most mad scientist have a little bit of this way. They tend to make pretty good entrepreneurs like you, but they fall prey to a lot of mood issues that are pretty avoidable at the pro level of self-management in a mad scientist category is to not seek the highs because the highs don't help you that much. What you actually need to be is a full person not writing the wave of your emotions. You need to manage your emotions and never let them manage you. And that gets into the whole topic you're talking about, which is metacognition. That is to experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex as opposed to living according to your limbic system. Never be managed by your limbic system. Your limbic system is nothing more than the factory for your emotions. That's really what it's doing. And if you're basically taking raw factory materials and trying to live according to them as opposed to assembling them, making them into a set of experiences, learning from them, growing from them, you're not fully alive. You're subject to something. You're subject to a crazy machine all the time. And so that's a lot of what I write about is actually how do you experience emotions more fully in the prefrontal cortex of your brain? What are the techniques for doing so? And when you're doing that, what is the repertoire of reactions and responses that you can bring to a highly volatile emotional state? Are there any folks where, for example, the poet, where you actually push them to be more in that limbic system or is it the same for everyone? Because the poet, of course, is the one who's disproportionately down. These are the great artists. So poets, there's interesting research that parallel to this that doesn't use the same panace test, but it's pretty provocative nonetheless. The people who have a tendency toward depression, not bipolar, but depression, they tend to be more creative. They're ruminators. And they also tend to be romantics. And you know, this falls a pattern. You've met people like this that have this pattern of romantic, creative, depressive, poetic people. Really interesting neuroscience research suggests that there's a part of the brain that's especially active for these people. It's called a ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. And this is the part of the brain that you use a lot when you're ruminating on something, which depressive people do. They think about the thing, they think about the thing. This is also what's going on when you're in love with somebody. You can't stop thinking, you're ruminating on another person. This is the same thing that's going on when you're working on a business plan or writing a symphony or actually writing a poem. So that's what they're really good at, but also what they're really bad at. They can't stop thinking about things, which is good for them and really bad for them. The strength is their weakness. And Peter, this is the same thing across all the profiles. Your strength is your weakness. Your weakness is your strength. Learn to manage it, wired to the strengths, remediate the weaknesses, and complete yourself. So I encourage everybody to be more medicognitive, everybody. So that you're a poet, you can be really, really poetic, but I won't ruin your life. Do we think that, and this is tangential and maybe not relevant, but do we think that the most extreme form of greatness that we've seen, the most genius type of phenomenon that we've seen as a species always come from extremes in these categories? It's almost certainly not true. It's sort of a character of what we think to be true. Yeah, for sure. And part of the reason is because those are the spectacular cases. You see somebody who's unbelievably good at something and who's weird, you focus on their weirdness. There are tons of people who are extremely accomplished and not that weird. You don't have to be weird. I mean, it's the kind of thing where it's like, yeah, I guess to be a great entrepreneur, you have to be the kind of person that Walter Isaacson wants to write a biography about it. If Walter Isaacson is writing your biography, get help. There are tons of people, very successful entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, just people who excel, who have decent relationships and who are able to self-moderate and who don't abuse drugs and alcohol. Now, a lot of them do, and part of the reason is because they have certain personality characteristics that go relatively unremediated and we have people who are highly limbic. They tend to be successful in spite of their messy mental hygiene, not because of their messy mental hygiene. It's even better if you've got some of these characteristics and you're really creative and really hardworking and really driven and you manage it. That's even better. So as individuals now thinking about some of those things, I just based on my own personal experience would agree that social media usually does not produce a feeling that is a positive one. It's usually a negative one. If we're going to put on our metacognitive hats and self-manage, if we think of ourselves as capable to self-manage through difficulty as opposed to saying, look, we're all going to move to India. We're going to take up amongst traditions. They sit our lessons or something, right? Again, most of us don't have that luxury and we still want to coexist in this world. What are the steps we want to take to minimize the damage of these things and at the same time, sort of try to find this semblance of happiness? So that's the reason I do my work. It's precisely because greater happiness, not perfect happiness, that's not the goal. It's not even desirable. People say, I want to be happy. Now, you know, pure happiness that would mean the eradication of your negative feelings that you'd be dead. That would be the eradication of negative experiences you wouldn't learn and grow. Well, also I would argue we would get back to the same problem with satisfaction, wouldn't we? For sure. I mean, it's impossible to begin with. The point is that happiness is not a destination. It's a direction and we want to get happier. Oprah Winfrey calls it happy-earness. That's the goal. It's a good neologism to actually get the point across. To do that, you need information. That's why I teach about the science of happiness because it's a super interesting body of knowledge. I write about it every week because it's fascinating. People like to learn about it. Do the work to change your habits and then you need to share with other people so it becomes permanent in your consciousness. That's really what it's all about. Everybody can do that. I'm dedicated to making an entire generation of happiness, officianados, and teachers. That's what I want. I want a movement of people saying, my hobby is learning about happiness and in my job, I'm my happiness teacher. Whatever your job is, whether you're managing a family or managing a company or just trying to manage yourself, is what I talk about. To do that, you have to know the facts on this. There's certain things you need to protect yourself from and there's certain things you need to do. You need aversion and you need approach. There's certain things you need to approach. You need to take seriously your spiritual life. You need to take it seriously. Let's talk about that for the non-religious person. Most people listening to us are not religious. By the way, I think most people would look at someone like you and be a bit confused because on the one hand, you're a scientist, you're a serious intellectual guy and yet you describe yourself as having a very strong religious faith. You don't have a hard time talking about things that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago and millions of years ago. In other words, you don't have a difficult time reconciling science and faith. No, not at all. Part of the reason for that is because faith and reason have to coexist in the same way that understanding a Picasso painting and understanding Picasso of a man are utterly reconcilable but not the same thing. The painters and the painting are not in conflict with each other. They're both important things to understand. But there are many religious people who take a very literal view of, say, the Bible and would say, well, the earth is 6,000 years old or whatever. They need to study more science. They're taking things too literally. They're taking things not just too literally. They're not understanding that there's an intellectual bifurcation between the concept of the creation, the myth of how that actually creation takes place, which is the literalness that you're talking about, and then the evidence, the awe-inspiring evidence of the creation itself. One of the reasons I'm religious is because of science. Every time I learn something new, I'm like, thank you. What a wonderful gift. It doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong. It doesn't freak me out that I might be wrong about the science. It doesn't also freak me out that I might be wrong about the religion. I don't think so, but maybe that's okay. That's absolutely okay. So if a person listen to this, says, my view has always been those who have a religious view are more fortunate. And I especially think that in terms of dealing with death, I think it's much easier to process death if you believe that there is a life after death. There's meaning in a different dimension. Right. Whereas if you really only think about this through the lens of biochemistry, it's a blank screen. Well, that's because if you only think of it in terms of biochemistry, death is a what question, which is in a spiritual dimension, death becomes a why question. And those are different inner-rogatives that have different philosophical and emotional content. Now, there's this area in between of spirituality, which is not religion. If I were going to lump myself into a category, it would probably be around the idea that I find enormous pleasure in nature. That is the closest, I suppose, I get to religion. That's a transcendent experience. And that's really what we're talking about. It's why I live here, like you said, where I live. I live in the middle of nowhere. It's so beautiful. And it's why I have to be outside every single day. Yep. Yep. I get it. And that's very common, by the way. A lot of people get transcendence from nature. So what does a person do who lives in a very busy urban center where they are surrounded by a wall of concrete all day, every day? Well, if that turns out to be destructive for your transcendence, is that a reason to move? Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. For some people, not everybody. I know some people don't want to leave Manhattan. And part of the reason is because they get their transcendent from other dimensions of life. Maybe they are religious, maybe they are traditional religious, maybe they are serious meditators, maybe they become completely awestruck from music or human genius. Again, it really gets back to transcending your littleness, transcending that and that transcendent experience. What it does is it gives you the same benefit as a religious journey. So basically what you're saying is, they get same happiness benefit. Yeah, we need to talk about something much broader than religion in a formal sense. And awe can be the religious belief. It could be an obsession or an appreciation of great music or art or meditation can be the place where you tap transcendence. Yeah, absolutely. Now, it's also very convenient to not vent your own physics on this. And so the Catholic Church is really, really good for me. And one of the things also is not what I feel. It's what I've decided to do. This is an important thing to understand about transcendence. You don't feel transcendence all the time. You decide to experience transcendence and put yourself in the circumstances to experience awe. I'm sure you go outside and there's a lot on your mind. You've got a very busy and hectic and stressful life. And you don't feel it. You don't feel it every single day. Look, I got to mass every day. I don't feel it every day. I wake up in atheists a lot. And why do you do that? I do that because it was part of the protocol for living the life that I want to live. I mean, I get up at 445 like you. I work out for an hour, body. I go to mass, soul. Then I work. That's when my creativity is highest. Now, of course, I'm also, you notice, I'm optimizing my dopamine. I'm sucking as much dopamine into my prefrontal cortex, which gives me creativity and focus for the three hours that I need to write. And that's a good motivation to do so. But I also want to optimize both body and soul at the very beginning of the day. So I'm centered on the things that really matter to me. Notwithstanding how I feel, I wake up at 445 in the morning. I'm like, back day. I don't want to do back day. I don't want to leg day. I don't want to do that. But I do it. I do it. It's the discipline of the will that in and of itself is so important. Then I go to mass. I don't want to do it a lot of days. I don't want to do it. But that's not the point. Do you think that there is a deficit of that as well of that idea? So, for example, you alluded to marriage earlier and anybody who's listening to this who's married, especially who's been married for many, many years, they'll acknowledge that so much of the almost perverse joy of marriage is that you make a lot of sacrifices for another person and you find yourself putting someone else ahead of yourself. For me, that's a very hard thing to do. I'm just so hardwired to be such a selfish guy that it's really a wonderful practice to do something where I know, I'm going to make my wife's coffee today because she would do the same for me. Well, part of that is that you have discovered and not enough people have that love is not a feeling either. Happy is not a feeling, but love isn't either. Love is a commitment. And more than the King one time, he gave this very beautiful sermon on the most transgressive passage in the Christian Bible, which is Matthew 544, love your enemies. And he says, Jesus says, today I give you a new teaching. You have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends. I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He says, Jesus doesn't say to like your enemies because that's a sentimental thing. The like is to feel. The love is to decide. This is what's going on between you and your wife. The satisfaction, the disciplining of your own will comes from the decision to love her. That's the magic. That's the magic in marriage. That's the magic in friendship. That's the magic that you can have in relationship with your kids. Look, if it were all about your feelings, hell, I'd be divorced. God knows my wife would bail on me. I'm just a pain being around me. She decides every day to love me. Thomas Aquinas, based on Aristotle, Aristotle talked really compellingly about love and friendship. Aquinas in 1265 raised the sumothiologic guy's magisterial contribution to philosophy. I mean, he introduced, he reintroduced Aristotle to the west. Everybody was a platenist, telequinist. He defined love as to will the good of the other as other. When you're making your wife that cup of coffee, notwithstanding your feelings, you're willing her good for her, not you. That discipline of the will to love another person like that, that decision to do so is completely transformative. That's transcendent to the day-to-day experience. The animal path is, I don't like to make coffee, I don't feel like it. The divine path is to love her, is to will her good as her. That's the human distinction. That's organized life. So it really seems that that's almost a theme here of happiness, that happiness is much more about deliberate decision-making, deliberate choices as opposed to reactive feelings, which that's obviously the extent to which we've discussed it. I think I like this thing that Oprah said, not happiness, but happiness. Happy-er-ness. Yeah. The thing I like the most that she said was, let's write a book, but totally she said, let's spread this idea to a bunch of other people. And like, I've been listening to your show for a long time. This is the salient theme. Take charge, man. Take charge. Don't leave your health up to what feels good right now. Take charge of it. I mean, you're the boss. The startup is you. You're the entrepreneur. The guy in charge of the enterprise, you're the CEO. Treat it as such. The CEO doesn't do what feels good all the time. The CEO does what's right, notwithstanding her his feelings. And that's the secret happiness, is treating your life like a startup. Your philosophy of health and longevity is my philosophy of happiness, because it's all one thing. You know, when you talk about better, happier years, or health span, I'm talking about happy span. That's what it comes down to. And you're just not going to do it by doing what feels good in the moment. You're not going to discipline the will sufficiently to be able to make the decisions that lead you on this divine path that can give you this thing that you actually see. Is it perfect? No. Can you learn and grow and have progress all throughout the journey? Absolutely. Absolutely. So finally, how would you think about the biomarkers of happiness? If we think about my world, we have so many biomarkers. It's one of the things that makes our job relatively straightforward. We have blood-based biomarkers. We have biomarkers of performance, your VO2 max strength. We can look at body composition, all of these things. If someone comes to you and you were the doctor in this sense, they want to obviously first have some sort of assessment of happiness, and then they want to be able to track their progress. Is that a silly idea here because it's so self-evident? No. It's not a silly idea at all. I thought about it so much. And I've had dozens of entrepreneurs want to engineer the idea and appize it. The class, Harvard, you got to be able to turn into some sort of a product in the way that you would do that is by having relatively complicated but measurable phenomena that you could look at and get better at. And that's a proxy marker for the underlying construct, which is happiness. Here's the problem with that. Here's the fundamental problem. It's a different species of challenge. We talked about this one time before. There's two types of problems in human life. There's complicated problems and complex problems. And for those who didn't actually listen to the last time that we did our show, you showed it together. The complicated problems are really, really tricky and take a lot of computational horsepower and learning. But once you solve them, you can replicate the solution with effortless ease forever. You can do the biomarkers. Complex problems are incredibly easy to understand but impossible to solve. Impossible to solve. There are too many permutations of what can actually happen. So you're like Formula One racing. And so I'm going to set up this unbelievable. I'm going to take a bunch of Unix machines and I'm going to wire them together and I'm going to be 250,000 lines of code. And I'm going to simulate every F1 race for the rest of the year. You're an idiot. Why? Because F1 is complex. That's why it's interesting and you want to watch it. That's why it's so exciting to watch a Formula One race because it's complex. I know what winning looks like you crossed the finish line before the other guys is the simplest thing in the world. But a million different things can happen. A quadrillion things can actually happen. That's the fun of it. All of life's joys are complex problems. Most of the solutions that we get from technology and science are complicated solutions. The biggest problems that we have right now have to do with the fact that we want to solve our complex problems like love. And we're trying to do it with complicated solutions like Instagram. A complicated solution to a complex problem will always leave you cold and make you worse off. Basically, I'm going to get rid of all the Formula One races because it's dangerous. I'm going to have nothing more than computer simulations of it. It's like that's the worst thing I've ever heard. That's the dumbest thing I've actually ever heard. So that's the key thing for us to understand. And that's the reason I can't appize this. Happiness is a complex and adaptive human phenomenon. And you can only get it by living it and working on it and making progress and failing. Just like your marriage. I just described your marriage. In that sense, at least I get feedback in my marriage because when I screw up and I apologize, I see that my wife forgives me. When I make a mistake, I feel the lenience and the love. When I need the help, the help is there. So indirectly, I'm getting really good feedback. And conversely, if a person was to take an honest assessment of their marriage and realize like we're two ships passing and we don't fight, but we don't have anything in common, if they were thoughtful enough, they'd recognize things are not well. So they'd have a barometer there. Do you think that using others as a mirror is the best way to get the true barometer of happiness? Or do we rely on our own internal assessment? We wind up with our own internal assessment, but it's not good enough to have that be one single metric. How happy am I? We have three so far today in the conversation, levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning we can know whether or not we have those things from the basis of the science that we've talked about and the ways that we can get better at and practice it. The techniques for getting more of those things are your family friends and satisfying work. I break it down even further by the way. I don't try to make it complicated, it's still complex, but I have a spreadsheet that I keep on my own happiness that the micronutrients behind the macronutrients, dozens of dimensions, and I'm rating myself, I wait those things according to my experience of how they feed into the macronutrients, and then I have scores on those dimensions and I want to make progress every year. I do it on my birthday and half birthday, my half birthday is coming up in November, November 21st, my half birthday, and I'm going to fill out my spreadsheet and say, I'm not on pace to get the progress that I had in my strategic plan for my happiness for next May, when my birthday comes round again. One of the things I need to actually touch up. So what am I doing? I'm kind of doing a curve fit to the complex problem, trying to solve with a little bit of a complicated solution. I give all those dimensions to my students, and I say, look, do the reading, do the work. I've read 10,000 articles about this so you don't have to, but I do try to break it down a little bit so that I can have a multi-dimensional problem. One of the things that we know with complex problems is the more multi-dimensionally you make it, the more likely you are to get better solutions. The worst thing that you can do is like, how do I feel today? You're not going to make progress under those circumstances. What are some of the micronutrients that go into this for you? It'll be the warmth of my marriage, the relationship with my kids, how well things are going with respect to their value. I'm trying to create with my career, the stability that I have in my friendships, the degree to which I feel like I'm properly philanthropic, the interest I'm taking in my professional life, the closeness that I have with certain intimits in my life, the extent to which I'm avoiding or finding conflict in my work relationships, all these things go into my spreadsheet. Because I know that they really matter across these three dimensions. The extent to which I'm enjoying my life of the course of each day, do these particular ratings, and then I put them together with a weighted sum across them, and I've messed with a weighted sum, and I've messed with it, and I've experimented with it, until I said, yep, that seems about right. That seems about right with respect to what I'm experiencing at this point in my life. So you make it a multi-dimensional problem. This is a huge value of social science. I talked about imperfect linear models where you take big problems and make them into a bunch of little tiny problems, and that curve fits the complex thing you're trying to solve. You evaluate that twice a year, and therefore you can't have it be dependent on the technical noise of the day or the week. You're trying to answer these questions through the lens of the last half of the year. Yeah, and if I'm having like a big conflict with my wife on my birthday, I don't do it that day. Yeah, I don't do it that way, because I don't want the noise. It's what it comes down to. And if something really, really great happens to me, the book is doing great. I don't answer that day either, because I don't want my neurochemistry to be affecting it unduly. Although at this point in my life, I've been doing it for 25 years. I'm pretty cold and calculating. I think that would be a reasonable app to start with. Could be. Could be. Yeah, and that's very different than the biomarkers, for sure, because I don't actually know what you would look at. What are the biomarkers? I want to make sure I don't have a problem with my cortisol. I want to make sure that my hormones are balanced. I want to make sure that my adrenal system is not. Oh, yeah, yeah. But when I'm in biomarkers, I'm talking about... Yeah, no, no, no, yeah. When I went biomarkers, I didn't mean blood-based biomarkers. I mean anything that is either subjective or objectively measurable that would serve as a proxy for a dashboard of your happiness health. And in fact, I have that. It's imperfect. It's imperfect. Any plans to share that to make that something that others can use besides your students? It sounds like they have access to this. I should do that. I actually should do that. That would be an interesting thing. Well, the last thing I think that's very powerful and worth talking about, and I'm curious if you think this is something valuable for everyone or just a subset of people is less self. Yeah. The what? Take away the mirrors. Yeah. Yeah. I found that to be a very interesting discussion. Yeah. Because you even talked about that literally. Some people will literally minimize the view of themself in a mirror. And then of course, you talk about broader versions of that such as social media and things like that. Do you think everybody would benefit from this? William James talked about the ice cell versus the me self. You must have both. When you're looking in the mirror, you're two people. You're the looker and the looker. And you need both because you need to be able to look to understand what's going on around you, but you need to have a reflection of yourself to understand who you are. I need to see, but I need to be seen by me so I can understand my context. I can understand my place in the world. If you don't do that, you'll get run over by a car if you don't have the ice self or you'll have somebody kill you because you've offended them repeatedly because you don't understand the me self is the way that this works out. The problem is in our society, it's all me self, no, I self. Most people are not observing the world very much at all. They're being observed and they're observing themselves. They're trying to be observed in their observing themselves. So social media is a classic case of this. Checking your notifications is nothing more than a me self obsession. What are they saying about me? What kind of impact am I having out of the people? I get it. Why we do it. We're evolved to one understand where we are in the hierarchy. Social comparison, even envy are evolved phenomena because it helps keep us alive and make progress. But it's misery when it takes over and when technology super charges our ability to be in the me self state. There are moments when you can be really confused about the ice self and the me self. One time I was really thinking deeply about something and I was kind of obsessed with my daughter and I were in the car and I put gas in my car and I filled up the car with gas. Took off from the gas station. I was kind of lost in thought. And about a block later, I heard this weird ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, like what's going on? Somebody's dragging a muffler and then I'm like looking for somebody's dragging a muffler around me and then I noticed that cars are honking at me and pointing at me and I'm like what the hell? So I stopped the car turns out I hadn't pulled the hose out of the car out of the pump and I was dragging it. I pulled it out of the pump and I was dragging the gas pump down the road. And I had to go back to the gas station. I found out how happy they are when you do that, which is not. And how expensive it is when you have to replace part of a gas pump. I mean, it was pretty bad. But the whole point was I was the ice self and the me self all at once and it was this weird, disequilibrating experience. One of the ways to get much happier is to be more in the ice self unless than the me self state is to minimize the reflection is to think a lot less of what other people are thinking and to observe yourself a lot less. And there are different ways to do that. So in the book I talk about this guy I work with pretty closely who he was a fitness influencer and a fitness model. I mean, imagine that. I mean, you're living by your abs. What a way to live. If you're seeing lower abs and you're an adult, that means you're never eating anything you like ever and you're not getting enough enjoyment of your life. Right. And he was miserable for 10 years. He didn't eat what he liked. He always had headaches. He didn't feel good. He didn't have normal relationships. And so he decided he had to make a change in his life. He wasn't living. So he literally got rid of every mirror in his apartment and showered in the dark for a year. So he couldn't see his own abs and his life completely changed just on the basis of getting rid of those mirrors. When people are miserable in my classes, I say take off number one, take the notifications off your social media, turn off the notifications. So you're not getting notifications. Don't look at your mentions under any circumstances. Don't pay attention to that. And then actually literally start getting rid of some of your mirrors, your literal mirrors. And what you'll do is you'll get into more of a state of looking outward. And the more you look outward, the happier you'll be. The better off your life will be when you're walking around going, man, that's amazing. You know what's not amazing? Me. Indeed. Are there what surprised you the most when you set out to write this? You're writing a book on a topic that you've studied for decades. You've been writing column after column after column weekly in the Atlantic. You've written other books that touch on similar themes. But I have to believe that there's something that you believe today that you absolutely didn't before or vice versa. Yeah. I mean, I've changed my opinion about a lot of different things as science has gotten clear and my knowledge has gotten deeper. A lot of things that I would have thought and I could come up with a lot of little examples. Here's the biggie. My paradigm has been shifted. I have been studying happiness for a long time. I wrote my first book on happiness in 2008. But it was kind of like a book on astronomy. It was observing happiness from a distance. Who are the happy people? Who are the unhappy people? It never really occurred to me that with the science I could change my own life. Then I'm not a fundamentally happy person. Mad scientists struggle. They just do because negative affect it gets your attention so much more strongly than positive affect does. If you're high positive and high negative, you're going to feel on balance pretty negative a lot. So I was thought to myself, happiness is a really interesting thing, but it's not my lot. It isn't my lot. I went through years and years and years like that. When I came back and started the new happiness projects writing my column in the books that I've written in the past couple of years, I said, all right, let's see if that's true. I can't move the stars as an astronomer, but maybe I can use the social science and the neuroscience in ways where I can, with the knowledge, change my habits and get happier. I kind of doubted it. I sort of thought I couldn't and I did. I actually did. I changed my life. I'm usually eight to nine weeks out on my column in the Atlantic because I'm trying the things that I'm suggesting. I'm a lab rat. I know you do this too. You're not going to suggest something to your clients that you don't feel comfortable with, even as a human being. This is what I'm doing too. I'm taking constant updates. I take the tests with my students on positive and negative affect and life satisfaction. My well-being has risen by 60% in the past four years, 60%. I mean, it was a pretty low base. It was a bad denominator, but it's been dramatic and I didn't actually trust. I didn't actually believe, but it's actually true. Anybody can do this. It's a great message, Arthur, because you haven't wrapped your identity up in being the happiest guy. If you did, you'd feel like a hypocrite all day long, right? You'd feel like any moment you didn't have that warm, fuzzy happy feeling, you'd be like, oh my God, how am I the guy that wrote the book on happiness? Yeah. And for the more I'd be faking it all the time. Be faking it. My wife would be, aren't you supposed to be happy all the time? And somebody sees me kind of grouchy in the airport and be like, that's very disillusioning. Yeah. Well, it's funny. When people see me eat a donut, they're like, what? And I go, hey, read the book, man. I know. I didn't say don't eat a donut. I said don't eat ten a day. Yeah. Arthur, thanks so much for making time. I know your time's tight here in Austin, so I'm glad we had a chance to sit down today. Thank you, Peter. Thanks for listening to the best of Brooks on the drive. To listen back to the full conversations with Arthur, head to episode 226 and 280. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive. Head over to PeterAtiaMD.com forward slash show notes. If you want to dig deeper into this episode, you can also find me on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, all with the handle PeterAtiaMD. You can also leave us a review on Apple podcasts or whatever podcast player you use. 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